May 11th, 2008 by adam
A few years ago I wrote a web-service that would automatically create JNLP files, making it much easier to deploy java applications. They’re just XML files, but they have some very odd syntactical quirks and can be a pain in the ass to get working correctly. This post has an early alpha version that works as a downloadable application you can run from your desktop.
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April 9th, 2008 by adam
(the new casual games portal from Jagex, the people behind Runescape)
- good game/website integration, very smooth
- very basic game design - most games seem to ahve never been playtested, or designed by very novice game-designers. Most simply aren’t fun, and need just a few basic tweaks.
- control systems mostly awful, bouncing and snapping and with unnecessary lag.
- No ability to see your achievements! Achievements rock, but they don’t seem to understand the main point of them - showing them off.
- artwork and sound are extremely polished.
Summary:
- a very highly-polished (graphics, sound) attempt to clone Pogo, but without fully understanding how and why it works so well, and ultimately coming tragically short. Go play Kongregate instead - its much more of a mixed bag, but the overall experience is much, much more satisfying.
(Notes from several weeks ago, accidentally clicked save instead of publish at the time)
February 21st, 2008 by adam
Summary
Speaker: Shannon Posniewski, Cryptic
I was expecting something shockingly naive and/or stupid from the title of the session. The first thing the speaker said was that the title was completely wrong, so I ran with that. With that out of the way, the talk was fine, although small things kept coming out during the talk that were hard to believe or worrying claims.
So it was going OK, until … right at the end, just before the Q&A, and partly during the Q&A, the speaker dropped some serious shockers:
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August 14th, 2007 by admin
Someone brute-forced their way into the server last week, my fault for not disabling all logins to the server.
Normally, this isn’t a problem, as the default firewall setup I always use prevents any remote logins except from known-good hosts. However, this server was accidentally provided with partially missing firewall code by the hosting company, and so I couldn’t run my firewall without first upgrading the kernel. And I’d been “too busy to get around to” doing that…
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August 14th, 2007 by admin
Sorry, the entire blog is temporarily offline whilst I re-install the server. Will be restoring from backup imminently.
Adam
July 8th, 2007 by adam
oh, the excitement.
oh, the drama!
Another First Post from Adam…
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