Facebook

Facebook is something that I'm sure everyone has heard of by now. I had received a few invitations to join and eventually gave in just to see what it was all about. Of course I am now hooked. It is actually pretty cool. They put a bunch of extra crap in there like different applications you can add to your page (i.e. Pirates, movie ratings, zombies, horoscopes, fortune cookies, pets, etc.) which is really pretty useless. The cool part is how many people are actually using it. I have found people I haven't seen in 16 years. That, to me, it pretty amazing. I guess the downside would be that people can also find you, whether you want them to or not. I find it very convenient for sharing photos. It is very easy to upload and add comments to pictures. They also have this option where you can select a region containing someones face and name it and if they are on Facebook too you can link it to their profile. I guess the messaging part is basically just like email. You have an inbox where you get messages but you can also post messages on other people's (or your own) "wall". All of the people who are in that profiles "Friends" list can then see that message. Nice for getting a public message out to all your friends (not that you can't do that with email too). To me it seems a little more personal then email. Maybe it's because it feels more like real-time then email because of the way the message board is setup. All in all, to me, it seems like a great way to make the world a little smaller.

Excited to Move

We finally get to move. It's so very exciting, nerve racking, scary, and exhausting. There is so much to do. I can hardly believe it has been almost 6 years already since the last time I moved. How time flies by.

Kaiser

Since it seems like I will be sufferring a lack of inspiration for an indefinite period of time, I have started a Kaiser game. I need to practice figuring out logic and stuff anyway. This time, to try to get the logic somewhat correct for the computer players, I am writing tests for things I need the code to be able to do and then writing the code to do it. I know this is how you are supposed to code anyway but the City Builder project ended up with the majority of the code in a controller and could not be easily tested (not that that's an excuse, but since it was just for me I kinda slacked). This time I'm trying to keep the code isolated in a class and independent of variables in the controller. That will make it easier to write tests and it will make it easier to change the interface without losing all the code if I should need/want to later. I'm kinda trying to concentrate on getting the code I need to make it functional first and then I can concentrate on the user interface. See if I can't get some good enough graphics to appeal to some of the more seasoned players.

Searching for Inspiration

I wrote a game. It's like monopoly. It was fun. And good practice for work since it was in the same language as what we use to write our product. Plus, it was fun. I was going to rewrite it in something that would allow online play but as I thought about it more, it probably wasn't going to happen anyway for many various reasons. So now I want to do something new. The problem is what to do. I've been reading 'chris crawford on game design' and the last bit is all about games he has developed and how he went about the logic and stuff. He has a lot of good ideas about how to design the gameplay first and the interface later and that kind of thing. So now I know a better way to go about designing a game I just don't have a game to design.

Where do you find a good idea? I don't even care if it's a new idea or not, I just want a good idea. I was thinking Kaiser because that's something that I want to play and can't find, but it's kinda a boring idea. I suppose it would keep me occupied for a while anyway. That would be a cool game online, but when you only have dial-up, it's hard to develop and maintain an online game. Plus you have to find a place to host it and get a domain name and all that crap.

Are games like stories? Do you write what you know? Obviously everything I know has already been done otherwise I wouldn't know it. Plus, I'm not a 3D graphics expert or video expert or anything like the designers who create todays computer and console games so anything I know is way out of my league anyway. I could take an existing idea and make it into something in my league like I did with the monopoly idea but then no one would want to play it, like the monopoly game.

I guess that's why I write trucking and accounting software and not games. Don't need a lot of creativity to figure out what gl accounts to use or how many reference fields to have on an order.

Tablets

So I got a tablet from work and it is awsome. I don't know why more people wouldn't be using these. The one I got came with a pen and a mouse. The pen is so cool. And so easy to use once you get used to it. You would think that would be the more logical move from paper to computer. I find it more comfortable to use. I also really like that you plug the tablet in and everything is powered off it. There are absolutely no batteries to replace. It's also nice that you can still have your regular mouse plugged in, especially if there are other people using the computer who might not be so thrilled about the tablet.

I have tried it out a bit doing some minor photo editing (removing red eye and cleaning up scratches and fuzzy spots) and it works really well. I like the preasure sensitivity feature.

GIMP is Grrrrrreeeaaatt!

I've been using GIMP for a while now but I never really read anything on how it works. I just sort of played around until I figured out what I was trying to do. I've always wanted to learn more about it because I know it can do a million amazing things it you just learn how. So I started reading a How To book on it. I'm only through the chapter on drawing (I think it's the third) and I'm pretty sure I've already warn out "ohhhh that's how you do that". The project at the end of the chapter is drawing a 3-D tree in a box. It's pretty cool. I've never been much of a drawer, but my tree actually looks pretty good. I was really surprised how easy it was. I think that things like that and even the selecting would be a lot easier with a tablet. I've always wanted to try one but I don't know anyone who owns one and I'm much too poor to purchase one. Some day I guess. I also learned how to remove red-eye from photos. It works pretty good if you can get the selectiong right. Although, I will tell you this now, it does not work on pictures of cats!

We're on our way, from misery to happiness today...

We have now switched all of our customers over to continuous updates. It was a little rocky but I think that things are starting to settle down now (I hope anyway). I'm not sure what the customers think of it. Probably split. Sort of like the feeling in the office about it. Seems pretty good to me. Especially with the critical changes we've been making lately. Instead of having to tell the customers they have to wait 3 months for something that is already done, we can say that they'll have it Friday morning.

Well that went quick!

Christmas is over for another year. One of the best gifts I got this year is moving all of our customers over to continuous updates. No more huge headaches every three months. No more telling the customer that they will have to wait for their changes. No more merging fixes in. Yeah! Of course, this sort of thing will have it's own challenges but hopefully they won't be too terrible. We already have a beta group running like this and they seem to be doing well. We will be moving another group over tonight. It should be interesting.

Everyone Loves Documentation...

And if you believe that, do I have a car to sell you! I recently had the wonderful pleasure of printing a binding a manual. The whole point of software is to save paper and then they need a manual printed out because they can't read it on the screen. They need to be able to hold something in their hands, and write on it and mark it all up with little notes to themselves.

All of our documentation is saved in HTML files. There is a lot of stuff in there that does not need to be printed (certain links and notes). All the images need to be resized to fit on 8x11'' paper. Page breaks need to be set up correctly. So on and so on.

The first issue was trying to get the HTML files to export out of our software with all the correct style sheet stuff. We had some export code but I seemed to need something more specific for the job so I ended up writing some new code. This handled stuff like getting rid of the screen style sheets and using the print style sheets for everything, ignoring pages that were tagged to hide, and evaluating calls to standard code. Good.

So then I had one huge HTML file that was formatted pretty much the way I wanted it to print. Now I wanted to add a table of contents. For the life of me I could not get the HTML file, exactly the way it was, into a text document to add a table of contents. The images would resize, I would lose the page breaks, and things that were supposed to be hidden would start showing up. So, fine, I would just have to add something to my new manual exporter to add a list of the contents at the beginning if wanted. So I whipped up some code to run recursively through the pages that were to be include in the document being exported and to add them all to an unordered list with gradually shrinking font size. That turned out pretty good. No page numbers but the order of how things appear in the document is there so you can find the section and the general area the documentation you are looking for is in. There, all I have to do now is print it.

Of course, three seconds after I finished printing it out it was already out of date. Not to mention that printing it out took a good couple hours. Of course I started it one night before leaving the office only to come in the next morning and of course find the printer out of paper. So then I had the pleasure of making enemies of anyone trying to use the printer the next morning and of sifting through hundreds of pages of help looking for someone's one page task report. So, after all that is done, I hear "That was supposed to be in color". DOH!! Well I'm not reprinting it all now. This will have to do and I will make sure to do the next one in color. Since I already printed the whole manual in black and white that I would make sure to do the covers for each module in color. So I print them out on some nice card stock and get the wholes all punched out for binding and I hear "You didn't laminate those?". Ugh!! Nope, I didn't laminate them. I'll remember that for next time. Honest! Then to binding. Heaven forbid the binding machine should take a break and just work with me long enough to get this done. I end up binding them all by hand (which is just fine because it was probably quicker then trying to figure out that stupid machine. Hmmm...I sound like a user!). You would think that having to write documentation is bad enough as it is, but then you have to print and bind it.

I don't know how to make the process any less painful. I guess the next time I have to do it all the code will already be written (great, the fun part will already be done). I used the export method I wrote to generate a PDF file for each module so that when the next customer wants a manual done I can just tell someone else where to get the PDF files and they can do all the printing and laminating and binding and then I won't have to worry about remembering to do it right. Which is good, because there are so many other things to worry about the documentation being in color.

The Aftermath of Friday the 13th

Well, I was right. It was definitely interesting. I was involved in a car accident and we ended up sinking in 10 feet of freezing cold ice water. Amazingly we escaped relatively unscathed. I was in shock for most of the weekend. It still feels like some crazy bad dream or something that only happens on TV or in the movies. This isn't supposed to happen to normal people. So now our car is gone and we are left cleaning up the mess left behind. Dealing with insurance and moving from borrowed vehicle to borrowed vehicle while we wait for our settlement. We also have the pleasure of having to tell our terrifying story over and over to everyone who asks what happened. And then we get to hear over and over again how lucky we are to be alive and how close we came to death and one small thing could have happened and we would have been toast. Now this only reinforces the terrible feeling we already have about what has happened. So I have basically been trying to tell everyone the story so that it's all over with and I won't have to do it any more. It's actually going pretty well. The first couple times I was pretty shaky but now it's not so bad. All I have to do now is figure out how to make the small things that used to be so important feel important again. It's funny how something like that can make everything look so different. All of a sudden I feel like I have no time left and so much to do. I haven't hardly even taken a break at work since for fear I will leave things unfinished. My favorite TV shows don't seem so vital to see. I hardly ever feel like eating any more. Sleeping is most difficult. I'm sure this is only a temporary state of shock and stress but it still makes life more difficult at a time when it sucks pretty hard already. I guess you just suck it up and hope you take away something good from the whole experience. And like everyone tells us, I guess we get to go car shopping now. Woohoo! Unfortunately I think that car shopping is one of those things that are fun if you choose them and painful if forced to.

Friday the 13th

Tomorrow is Friday the 13th and with the way things have been going, tomorrow should be interesting. But at least it's still a Friday.

When it snows...

It storms! Like things weren't bad enough already. We totally hooched our last round of updates. It was pretty bad. So now everyone is really tense and grouchy. I thought it was bad before. Everyone is disappointed and getting a little down about the whole thing I think. Not a whole lot has gone right this time around. It would be nice to see something go smoothly. It's getting to the point where it seems like no matter what we do, something is going to explode. And that always leads to grouchy, paranoid behaviour (sometimes good, sometimes bad).

Well, maybe tomorrow will be better. Eventually it has got to get better, right? I guess if it doesn't, we'll all be out of jobs soon! And then it won't really matter anymore.

Is it Friday yet?

We are at the beginning of a release and things are a little tense. Stupid bugs that never should have made it out to the customers are appearing much to often for anyones comfort. At least the updates are going smoothly. It's everything after that that is making everyone sooo irritable. And I don't know how to fix it. It happens every release. We try so hard (pair programming, writing tests, manual testing, etc.) to keep bugs from getting out but they always seem to and when you go to fix them it's always "Well didn't you test this?" or "Did anyone review this?" or "How could we be so silly?". And, of course, everyone is on edge already so everything sounds/feels like an attack and that just makes everything worse.

So why are we like this? There isn't really anything anyone can do about the errors that get out to the customers. Once they are out, the only thing we can do is fix them. But, it's like, everyone feels like there should have been something more someone else could have done to make sure that it did not get out in the first place, and sometimes there is. If they had only tested that one more scenario or entered the data in this certain way, they would have discovered the bug. If the process was simpler or the tests were better we would not have had the problem in the first place. Unfortunately, you can say this till you are blue in the face and those sneaky little bugs will still find a way to get through to your customers. As long as they aren't huge, database destroying, data eating bugs, then it is unfortunate, but it is not the end of the world so why treat it that way. It's no one's fault (or perhaps it is everyone's fault if we are considering ourselves a team), it's just something that happens and in this business, you had better get used to it because it will continue to happen forever no matter how many tests or how simple the process.

So how do you get around this attitude that is adopted every time release season is upon us? I don't know. Do we really want to? Maybe we just care too much about trying to make a good product for our users that we are upset when it has problems (even if they are small and only one person out of a thousand noticed). Or maybe it's just frustration from going through the same process over and over and nothing ever really getting any better (except the type/size of errors that are getting through). I guess all we can really do is suck it up and try to tolerate each other as much as possible until all the updates are done. Then we can relax again and get ready for the next round.

In An Amazing Turn Of Events...

The wedding went well. It was a tonne of work, but once the ceremony started, everything was amazing. You would be suprised how quickly you forget how much everything cost when you are being driven around in a limo. Nothing beats an evening of drinking and dancing and limos with your closest friends and some amazing new acquaintances that will hopefully become freinds. Despite all the blisters and sore muscles that I will now have to suffer through, I can not think of a single thing in the world I would have rather been doing.

Then along came "City Builder"...

"City Builder" is the name I gave my monopoly ripoff game. I was working on it last night. I added the ability to sell properties and started making the graphics prettier. I was actually feeling pretty good about it. I even started a game as a real player and played for a few minutes. And everything is all nice and right in the world until someone says, "Well, why don't you make it do this" or "Why did you use that color?" or "You should make it look like this.". Not that they mean anything by it. They are just making a suggestion on how to make it better, which is a good thing because that is how things get better. But often I still feel the need to justify what is already there because the stuff that is already there took a lot of work. I guess you don't realize how much work something requires unless it is you that has to do it.

And it isn't like I think it is done. I know there is a lot of work I can and will do to it. It's just right now, I have something that is functional and basically does all it really needs to. I know that it is missing all the "frills", but that doesn't mean that I'm not proud of the fact that I actually wrote a functional game. You always have to start with the basics, but there is nothing wrong with the basics. Sometimes it would just be nice for someone to look at the basics and be like "Wow! That is amazing! Great work!". And I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who would appreciate that because this does not just apply to programming. And I'm sure, just like me, they realize that this will probably never happen because there are so many cool things out there with all sorts of "frills" and extras that the basics just isn't amazing any more. If it was 30 years ago, maybe, but not today.

So what does that all mean? I guess, if you want something to be amazing (including yourself) you have to work harder and longer and do more then ever before (not that this means adding all sorts of extras, because often times, the simpler and easier, the better but then the graphics have to be outstanding!) and put up with a million and a half "Well why don't you..." suggestions and actually consider most of them.

And this all seems so confusing because half of the documentation on how to make your software better for the users says that you need to keep it simple and easy to use and straight forward. Which is kind of the opposite of what I hear about my game. So maybe it is different for games then it is for application software. I guess that would make sense (are there books on how to write good games?). When people are working they want software that does exactly what they want, when they want it and nothing more. But when people are playing, they want to be able to do whatever they want and more. They want to drive off road and go into buildings and shoot the good guys and they want it all to look amazing and run quickly. I guess with the level that games are at now (like the one's they want you to pay $60 for), no one is really interested in something that doesn't deliver everything and more then what they can get from somewhere else. Why have a hotdog when you can have Lobster?

Hmmmm... at this rate this will be "The Urban Babble"!

And then there was rain...

It's raining. It is supposed to rain for the next 5 days or so. I suppose then it will begin to snow. It definitely feels like summer is over. I'm supposed to be a bridesmaid in an outdoor wedding this weekend too. I had to pay for the dress and then I had to pay to get it altered. I had to buy new shoes and get my hair cut and various other things. And now the weather is going to ruin it all.

Anyway, back to the third party software problem. Now one person is saying that everything is good to go and another is saying that it isn't. You would think that they could talk to each other and get their stories straight before dealing with us. Oh well. I'm just going to go on the assumption that everything is fine and take it from there.

I've been working for this software company for a few years now and everyone is always saying to me that I could get a job anywhere now that I have some experience, but I don't think that is completely true. Sure, I have experience, but only really with one language. I'd still have to start all over learning another language if I went anywhere. It's even worse because we use our own language. So I have come to the conclusion that I should start experimenting with some new languages (not that I'm planning on leaving my current job, it's just nice to learn and be prepared). So I started with a project in the language I know first. I started writing a Monopoly rip-off game. When I have it more or less running I will attempt to rewrite it using Ruby on Rails (at least that's the plan). I've seen a little bit of Ruby on Rails and it seems like an interesting approach. The Ajax stuff look handy too. At least it should be fun and interesting. It's always easier to learn a language when you are learning it to do something you want to be working on, rather then something you have to be working on.

There was only darkness...

I work for a software company as a programmer. We use our own language called Suneido. It's kinda nice using your own language because whenever you need something new, you just add it. Of course, that is also it's downfall, whenever you need something new, you have to add it. We do a lot of interfacing with third party software. Usually it's not too bad, but this last company keeps changing their file specifications without letting us know. So then customers start calling us because their files aren't working any more and then we find out that something has changed. Seems like kind of a silly way to find bugs. And no one there seems to have any answers as to why this is happening. They just say "Your file did not work because this field is too long. Please shorten it". And then we're like "Okay, thanks for letting us know before the change happened so we didn't have to piss off a bunch of our customers and waste a bunch of their time and our own." Is it really too much to ask for a simple email saying "hey, we are changing this effective tomorrow". Then everyone could be happy and live in peace.

In the beginning...

This is the first blog I have ever attempted to run. It was suggested that this is a good way to improve and practice writing skills. I guess we will see if it works. I guess it all depends on how much I can think up to write about.