Just don’t use it, whatever you do.

It’s hopelessly buggy, it is the worst possible git client you could use.

And … for the third time, it just corrupted a git repository. This time I know it wasn’t user-error, it was just SmartGit.

Totally unforgivable.

EDIT: no results on shopping sites, no results on Amazon … until someone told me to search for “keyboard 5000″ or “keyboard 6000″ – and suddenly appears this thing of awesome beauty: small, light, and Bluetooth!

I can’t find them. All I can find is a MONSTROUS thing from Microsoft that weighs a tonne. Nothing from the other manufacturers (!). And the MS one sadly is no use with a laptop :(.

A standard keyboard is very bad for your wrists. At the small end of the scale: discomfort, cramp, and bad posture. At the nasty end: RSI, long-term back/neck damage, tendonitis, etc.

So why is it that you can no longer buy the so called “natural” keyboards? They’re split down the centre, and/or curved, so that your wrists are at a normal angle that reduces strain and improves posture.

In Brighton, the shops I tried (from major high-street chains down to specialist independent computer shops) that sell 5-10 different keyboards each … claimed they had never even heard of / seen such a thing, and several salespeople suggested they’re a figment of my imagination! Yikes.

I’ve still got a couple of these keyboards, but I always bought PS2 ones, sometimes buying 2nd hand (when Microsoft stopped manufacturing them) so that I’d have an extra USB socket free.

Now I’ve got laptops with USB slots, but no PS2 … argh!

Walk gently upon this earth
For we are but passing through
In our eyes the pains of life
And in our hearts true love

But all it is to be
Is covered in a signal phrase:
The meeting in ice and fire
Of what we are and what others request

Take this branch and run
Every breath one with haste
So that at the end you might say
“I have no regrets…”

I’ve long felt this intuitively to be true, but the weight of opinion and accepted “evidence” has made the idea laughable: Copyright has no social benefit.

So this article in Spiegel Online is fascinating:

No Copyright Law – The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion?

(I’ve been in hospital recently, just catching up now on old posts, but I see other outlets such as Wired have finally caught-on to this too – I haven’t read their take on this yet)

It appears to be mostly centered on a contrast between two similarly advanced nations, England and Germany, which had radically different copyright laws at the time.

“In Great Britain, people were dependent on the medieval method of hearsay for the dissemination of this useful, modern knowledge”, whereas “The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research”.

…and so we see a key part of modern research and academia, the concept of publishing your work: born from the *abscence* of Copyright.

This post shows how to fix one of the biggest time-wasting aspects of Xcode: the default project. Every time you start writing a new app, you first typically waste 15-30 minutes “un-****ing” Apple’s defaults. The defaults are terrible.

e.g. they are effectively unusable with Apple’s own SVN integration (Apple clearly doesn’t use SVN internally), unless you are the only person working on your project (“no teams allowed”). But the good news is … most of this can be fixed!
Continue reading →

…I’m really.Sorry, just very very busy right.now!

Welcoming some new people to Red.Glasses (my iPhone development / agency company), and lots of projects all happening at once.

Given how many people I see out of work, I’m delighted to.be bucking the trend, but until.our new people get.up.to.speed, its a bit too much, and I’m looking forward to things calming down a bit.

PS: typos due to the nexus one and its broken touch sensor and badly designed keyboard. Don’t have time to get to a PC to.post: )

Oh dear. Did someone ignore their “please renew your domain” warnings?

(Third and final Thunderbird post (promise!))

I had an idea; maybe if I deleted TB, then restarted it, and forced it to go offline first, THEN configured folders, THEN allowed it to connect, it might. just. work.

Of course, doing so discovered some obvious bugs in TB. Sigh. I got it mostly working in the end, after some false starts. So, if this is something you want to try, here’s how to do it:

1. Start TB, and give it your account details.

You want it to look like this (see note above; if you don’t do this correctly, you’ll get different settings, with no SSL/TLS)

2. QUICKLY go to offline mode (next step) or … unplug your internet cable – this may be easier

Why on *earth* do you have to do this?

Well … there’s a major bug in TB. If you do NOT create an account *the first time the app launches*, then you can never create a Gmail account. The code that configures email accounts *will not run* after that first launch.

Really, I’m serious: try it. It will – if you’re lucky – try to configure your gmail account with all encryption turned off, thereby sharing your emails with everyone on the network. Nothing you can do will make it accept SSL/TLS. Even typing the port number manually, it fails to work.

BUT … if you allow it to configure the account on first-run, it will correctly setup everything as SSL/TLS

3. Go to offline mode

4. Go to Synchronization settings (from the same menu – File menu)

Click the ADVANCED button (it’s not advanced, it’s basic, but this is a hangover from the Mozilla Mail days, when the GUI for configuring the app was poorly arranged)

5. De-select the folders that Thunderbird should never have pre-selected in the first place

NB: this is language dependent! Google “kindly” names some of these folders depending on your regional language. Great idea, unfortunately it makes config / instructions a bit more tricky.

In the UK (this is different in USA!), the folders you must untick are:

• Bin
• Trash
• [Google Mail]
• [Google Mail]Bin

Like this:

and this:

6. Are you finished ? No, you aren’t; There’s some “magic” folders left…

On the left, under Inbox, there are a couple of magic folders that don’t appear in the synch list – but will synch automatically, and kill your disk space. One of them in particular: “All Mail” (that is: every single email that Gmail has for you, ever, anywhere. All unsorted)

You have to right-click, and go to the 3rd tab, and deselect the checkbox, to make this safe:

You MUST also do a difficult one – the Trash folder.

Thunderbird will *not allow you* to deselect this one, but you have to expand it, and inside find the “Bin” and “Trash” folders, and manually deselect them as with “All Mail”.

NB: in the attached screenshot, I hadn’t realised this was needed, so you can see it’s downloaded my whole Trash folder from the server. Ugh.

NB: yes, in theory you have *already* deselected those folders. But with Gmail you can easily end up with two copies of the folders, both with the same name, but in different subfolders. Depends which clients you’ve used with Gmail in the past (ironically, in my case, they exist because I ran an earlier version of Thunderbird, where the Gmail integration wasn’t so good).

(you may also want to do the same for Sent Mail and Spam – depending on personal preference / need)

7. Finally (finally!) you can de-enable Work Offline, from the File menu

Now what?

Well, nothing happens. Because Thunderbird is “magic!”.

If you wait long enough, and you’re lucky, it will magically start to synch.

If you don’t like waiting, staring at a computer, you can force it to download – go to the File menu, and from the Offline submenu, select Download now.

HOWEVER once again there are issues: this will work outside the normal Activity Window system, so your download will be in the foreground, and doesn’t even appear as an “Activity”. Sigh. So, you might want to try waiting for the “magic” to happen instead, and hope you get lucky.

(in theory, it should be a 10 minute wait at most, but earlier versions of TB 3 used to have severe problems with this, sometimes never synching at all)

Summary

This is still imperfect. Thunderbird insists on “indexing” all 5,000 of my Sent Mail contents – although at least it’s no longer trying to download them all locally. It also insists on “indexing” the contents of things like “All Mail”, which is completely incorrect.

But I can find no way to remove the annoying “All Mail” folder, and if you ever click on it accidentally, then BAM! the expensive processing starts. The best you can do is use the little buttons at the top left hand side to switch mode to ”

Oh – and you aren’t allowed to stop it. The Activity Manager is missing a feature (which is already in bug reports from last year – I remember seeing people ask for it) : a “click to cancel” button for each activity.

Hopefully, though, so long as you remember to avoid clicking on those magic folders, you can at least make TB work normally…

Ditto for all the folders we chose not to download locally … and, ditto, I can’t find a way to remove them from the list, so there’s no way to stop myself from accidentally clicking one.

There are a few other things you should do too, to make up for the incorrect GMail setup. For instance, you should go to Thunderbird settings, and DISABLE the “save copy of messages in Sent folder”, because GMail will automatically do that on the server side anyway.

PS: … ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

I was just about to press the post button, when I noticed something horrific.

TB just started downloading the 5,000 emails in a “Bin” folder … somewhere … despite my very clear instructions not to.

This is a buggy load of crap. Try the workarounds listed in this post – see if they work for you. But, ultimately “Don’t use it” is my advice.

It’s a REALLY short review (but bear with me on this): they wouldn’t allow me to play.

That came as a major shock. I didn’t set out to write about EE, I just wanted to have a look for myself, but this changed my mind. I’m probably not the target audience anyway, so take this with salt, but IMHO it raises some interesting points.

Alpha is the new closed-beta; closed beta is the new beta; beta is the new launch

The game is officially in Beta, I believe. Is that an excuse for what follows?

IMHO and IME: No. Within the context of “MMO’s”, and especially in the context of the web (look at the various Google products that are technically still in beta), you can no longer hide behind that as you once could.

I did experience a few small parts of the EE experience along the way, so here they are:

1. You are not allowed to play the game straight-off; you are required to provide personal info etc before even being shown a screenshot of the game, let alone running the game itself
2. Copy/Paste is disabled in the registration form. It works for the “name” field, but not for the email and password fields.
3. My main email address is on a domain name that “Email provider is not supported, try another email address.”

(in desperation, I tried bugmenot.com, but unfortunately Sparkplay has already deleted the only account on there)

For any mainstream PC MMO you’d call this a bizarre over-reaction on my part (most of them would already have taken my credit-card number, so few people will stop to quibble about email address issues). But this isn’t one of those games…

“Finally, a real MMO for your browser”

(that’s the Earth Eternal tagline)

O, RLY?

Let’s get this straight. 15 years after the web became popular, you’re telling me that “the browser-experience” is:

1. It’s Windows-only (!!!) [BTW: despite *already knowing* that I'm running a Mac, they take your personal info *before* telling you this]
2. I’m not allowed to try the product before I use it
3. I’m not allowed to use an email address of my choice, I have to use one that the website-ownser “approves” of
4. The website-owner specifically writes code to disable basic features of my web browser

In a world of Kongregate – where I can play several MMO’s *right now*, on any computer, some of them with no signup – you’ve got to be kidding me.

I’ve known Matt for years, and I’ve watched with interest the trajectory of Achaea / IRE / Sparkplay. It’s been an interesting journey, from the years of declaring that 3D graphics were great but unnecessary for commercial viability (with his own Achaea the poster-child), to today’s VC-funded 3D MMO.

There’s an irony there, especially if you dig out Matt’s frequent public statements on 3D games in the past – but in context it all makes sense. I mention it pre-emptively, so I can knock it down :). Yes, Matt said such things – but at the time he also actively proved that you could make a living off non-3D games. He showed that with controlled budgets, intelligent business models, and controlled scope … it worked. It was small revenues, small profits, but it was profitable. Many of the lessons that he shared have been picked up over the years and re-used by 3D games in the race to drive down their own costs, and adopt more competitive business models.

So … I don’t care about the change in stance (hey, the world has changed a lot in that time), but … I do care that someone who taught so many people how to avoid the high-barrier-to-entry business models manages to shut me out of playing his first graphical MMO.

Compare and contrast…

I’ve already mentioned Kongregate. The vast majority of games there require no login, including some small (but grind-tastic) MMOs. The most recent substantial MMO to appear on there *does* require that you already have a Kong account, sadly. (Although, incidentally, if you install the Kong Facebook app, it silently creates an invisible account + logs you in, so it’s possible you’d play that MMO without ever knowingly creating an account)

I suspect that Sherwood still doesn’t require reg – when I used to play, it certainly didn’t, and IIRC from conversations with Gene, this was something he actively chose to retain. Ironically, I couldn’t double-check this: Adobe’s current installer for Shockwave has a chunk of badly written code that attempts to shutdown “all web browsers” before it will run – even if I’m only installing in one of the browsers.

So … EE may be a great game … and it may be launchable from within a browser … but it’s still fighting the browser as much as complementing it.

I was too busy to post at the time, but Apple recently approved an update to my first ever iPhone app [iTunes Store link].

I’m using this app as a personal experiment in designing educational and learning games. Unfortunately, this update took something like 4 months to get through submission (rejected twice, first time for a missing “cancel” button, second time for using private APIs) … so it’s been hugely delayed.

Last year, I spent a lot of time investigating a new idea for a startup that would make online games used solely for education. This is a clone of one of the demo games we made as part of the investor presentation.

The “experimental” part is that I’ve been trying out different variations on the social and online aspects. Most of that is missing in the current version – to get it through submission, I ended up ripping out most of it.

But now that it’s been accepted, I’ll be updating it a lot more, gradually adding features back in (e.g. Facebook integration, which I originally had working a month before Facebook Connect went live).

By the way … For the record, although the app is a paid one, and I’ve made a bunch of apps since, I’ve never earned a penny from this first one – it’s never hit the minimum threshold of payments (approx $250) before Apple actually pays you.

If I seem a little distracted …

2 weeks ago, I started a small blog called App Rejections. Here’s the traffic graph for the first two weeks. The tallest peak over towards the right is 25,000 unique visitors hitting the site:

It could have been worse; being a die-hard pessimist when it comes to server management, I’d left the webserver “throttled” to a fraction of max connections. The jumps in traffic when I selectively removed that throttling suggest that overall perhaps 10% of visitors couldn’t get through (as high as 35% at peak times).
Continue reading →

This week, Google decided to once more actively break Gmail. It’s getting to the point where even Hotmail may provide a considerably better service (even bearing in mind the horrors of Microsoft Passport!).

EDIT: Within a few hours of writing this, my gmail has reverted to normal behaviour. I *was* getting the HTML reply for all emails, now I’m getting it for none. I had wondered whether it was context specific – but now I’m getting normal emails even when replying to HTML ones, so apparently not.

GOOGLE IS WATCHING YOU!

I’ve no idea why this is, but here’s a tongue-in-cheek suggestion: Google *really really wants* to be evil. But they’ve made so much news out of their company motto that they don’t believe they can get away with that.

So, instead, they just act passive-aggressive.
Continue reading →

EDIT:
– unplugging everything, rebooting, then plugging back in seems to have re-instated the other users’ settings. Yay! Although … this seems very fragile / lucky / random, so I fear it might break again next time I reboot…

Even if you create an entirely separate user-account for them, with their own settings … if they happen to setup their keyboard differently, then:

1. It permanently alters the keyboard settings, and there is no “reset”, nor “choose a different setup” button
2. It also overwrites the keyboard settings for all other users of the computer, whether they want it or not
3. It doesn’t even require admin privs – the user is just allowed to overwrite everyone else’s profile without question (including admin profiles)

Sigh. Yet again, a classic example: Apple has no idea how to make software. Someone at Apple *deliberately* broke this (they chose to remove the setup button after it was first setup), so that not only is the software buggy, but there’s nothing the user can do to fix it :(.

EDIT: googling suggests that the two ways to fix this are 1) mess with a lot of low-level config that will probably lock you out of your keyboard entirely, or 2) format your Mac and re-install from scratch. Hilarious. I’ll try the local Apple store, but from previous experience their “Genius” staff don’t seem to know much beyond the obvious, so I’m not hopeful. Sigh.

Info correct and checked: Summer 2009.

Scroll down for detailed reviews/explanations of each venue. If you know of others, feel free to add a comment at the bottom of this page. Please use the same format (One line with: name/type/secure/rating/sockets, then your own text review). I’ll try to visit them myself, and add my own reviews to the main article when I get time.

Venues

Note: each place is listed with 5 pieces of info:
– Name of venue
– Type of venue (restaurant, pub, cafe, etc)
– Is their Wifi encrypted? (see this article for why/how this matters)
– Rating (1 = terrible, 5 = perfect)
– Tables that have Electric sockets (either single or double), for recharging your laptop – how many in the venue?

• The Florist – Pub – Secure 5/5 (E:3)
• The Eddy – Pub – Secure 4/5 (E: 2)
• Regency Tavern – Pub – Secure 4/5 (E: 1)
• Earth and Stars – Pub – Insecure 4/5 (E: 2)
• Hampton Arms – Pub – Insecure 3/5 (E:?)
• Windmill – Pub – secure – 3/5 (E: some)
• The Tin Drum – Restaurant/Pub – Insecure 3/5 (E: 2)
• The Duke of Wellington – Pub – Secure 3/5 (E: 3)
• Prince of Wales – Pub – Insecure 2/5 (E:?)
• Cafe 37 – Internet Cafe – Secure 1/5 (E: 0)
• Cafe Nero – Cafe – Secure 1/5 (E: ?)
• Cafe Nia – Restaurant – Secure 1/5 (E: 1 – pay!)

And, the odd one out:

• Taylor St Barista – Cafe – None 0/5 (E:0)

(read on for details + map links)
Continue reading →

Moderator: Joe Ludwig (JL)
Patricio Jutard (PJ), Three Melons
Chris Dyl (CD), Turbine
Rick Lambright (RL), Gazillion
Mitch Ferguson (MF), Carbine

Summary

A lot of nice little anecdotes about MMO middleware experiences – but it would have been nicer to have had a lot more detail on them (not easy to do in panel format).

The panellists briefly touched upon several few sacred cows – such as “Is it absolutely essential to have the full source code to exernally-licensed middleware?” (which I’m glad to hear being questioned – with server middleware especially the developers are hopelessly underqualified to understand huge chunks of source, even at a debugging level (e.g. the many cases where the devs simply cant practically debug distributed-system source)). There are good reasons for having source (and the other sacred cows) but more questioning and more critical thinking from developers about what they *really* need and especially what they’re going to *do* with it would be good for everyone, I think.

Any mistakes understandings and misattributions etc my own fault. My personal comments in [square brackets]

Talk

If you were going to make a new engine/MMO today, what middleware would you use?

PJ: we focussed on web based games when we started. We decided to use Unity, no royalty sharing made it a very attractive pricing model.

CD: hypothetically … I’d make substantial use of middleware, although we didn’t really at Turbine because it wasn’t there when we started.

RL: we look at what’s going to be unique about the game design we’re starting, and then look for middleware that matches well with the uniqueness of the individual game, whatever gets us a good chunk of the way towards that.

MF: we’ve decided each time to just do it ourselves.

How do you deal with the risk of using middleware code that’s never been used in a shipped MMO, that you’re the first major user of / the other major users haven’t shipped yet?

PJ: make sure you have the source code (although we couldn’t afford the more-expensive source-code license for Unity), make sure you have good support and responsiveness from vendor Tech Support.

CD: make sure the vendor is committed to the vertical business space, that your success is part of their core product strategy

JL: being first shipping user can get you a big price discount from the vendor

RL: with BigWorld we don’t have all the source. You have a limited number of engineers who’ll be skilled enough to do anything meaningful with that source anyway, and they could quit, leaving you in trouble. We have a commitment that if something exceptional comes up then we have the *possibility* of the vendor giving us source access temporarily, with their engineers physically present at all times, but we hope not to need that.

MF: any middleware that includes game design / game-logic elements is highest risk. I’ve had low-risk pieces of middleware fail, but that’s quite easy to workaround because it’s got relatively little effect on the overall project. I don’t want to name vendors in particular examples, because it’s not necesssarily their fault.

JL: we used SpeedTree for a couple of years, but eventually didn’t ship with it, because it couldn’t integrate with our art pipeline. Not a bug in that, just unfortunate accident of how it works and how we worked.

CD: we had the same problem with ST.

CD: the two scariest middlewares we used at Turbine were having Physics, and Kynapse for path-planning. Do we de-stabilise our live servers by integrating this cutting edge middleware new version in? As an MMO operator you really want to be able to keep an old version in situ for a long time – maybe a lot longer than the middleware vendor actually wants you to have it there.

[ADAM: that's an extremely interesting problem...]

We had a big problem with a middleware engine where the provider just went out of business. We got some support from our publisher there to work through it, but what do you do about that?

CD: source code escrow is a good thing, for the absolute disaster scenario. But it’s really no different from other catastrophic business risks. Make sure you have one (more than one) person who’s been over the source in detail with the vendor at least once, so understands it well enough to pick up if they vanish, etc.

RL: escrow is mandatory, including all the required libraries, correct verisons etc.

[ADAM: nb: same speaker who doesnt have full source for some aspects of BigWorld]

JL: we didn’t escrow Alchemy, too naive to realise we should, but we got someone to send it to us as they were going out of business. Just getting it to build was a huge problem, we found.

[ADAM: our industry is still cursed by the fact that almost no-one has a great build system in place :) ]

MF: with Renderware we had source for the main thing, but there were dev tools that we had no source for, and so we couldn’t fix bugs in the tools, it was a nightmare. Very fine Modularity of your middleware – which doesn’t really exist yet – would be a real saver in this area. A hyper-modular middlware, I think that would make the risk much lower. Then if the company did go out of business, you could replace those building-blocks one at a time. I think that modularity is very important, or as close as you can get.

[ADAM: ha. I fought hard at the tech level to keep exactly that as one of the top 3 features of our server middleware back in 2002, but unfortunately back then (my naivety in assuming developers understood more than they did) no game developer had anywhere near enough understanding of the problems to realise how valuable that was. Ultimately, it was a waste of money for us as a company, because no customer understood it enough to place the value on it that would pay for how much it was costing us to achieve and maintain it. I'm not convinced that's changed enough to make it profitable enough for MMO providers - even if developers now see the theoretical value, I don't think they are able to really afford it]

Audience: Given how heavy the sales process is … is there a role for open source (OSS) in this?

MF: I think OSS is actually necessary for our industry to remain profitable, to reduce the cost of development. If I say bad things about middleware it’s not because I want it to fail (I really want it to succeed, I think it’s critical for us), but because I’m so disappointed with the current state of it.

RL: how many games have Python in them? Well, that’s an example of OSS that’s now heavily in use. We have an enormous amount of OSS we use inside the backend systems / servers.

What are the packages are you using for service side?

CD: we use a 3rd party billing system, that I wouldn’t actually recommend. We chose it many years ago, and it isn’t really right for what we do now.

(audience): there’s big advnatages to using external billing provider, e.g. benefit of having someone else as the merchant of record, isn’t there.

[ADAM: personally, I think that's short-sighted, because in many ways the last thing in the world you want to have happen, as a service provider, is be disengaged from the customer's wallet. Never let someone else come between "you" and "your customer's money"; they can handle it, facilitate it, but not take over the CRM]

What about internal middleware? A lot of companies form Core Technology teams, creating a culture of making MW for internal use, re-use in other titles, etc

CD: D&D and LoTRO have the exact same codebase on the platform level because of our internal middleware. We ported the LoTRO DirectX 10 layer as a full working initial Dx10 directly into D&D, without changing it.

RL: the question comes down to whether you have a very specific target for what you’re doing. If you try to make one engine for all your games, and/or all your studios (if you’re multi-studio) then that’s a route to huge difficulties and disasters. At the same time I’ve seen companies that have huge in-house expertise in their internal wide-use engine and are able to churn out new games easily. But I think it’s a really really difficult problem to solve that way.

CD: we can have a full game prototype from zero to running in 3 months because we have all this internal re-usable code. For a relatively low investment we can build a small portion of a world to try out new game concepts.

[ADAM: I'm guessing the caveats there are simple that the content-cretion costs are of course still directly proportional to how much you want to show - hence "build a SMALL portion" etc]

MF: It was painful sometimes when the company was going down that they weren’t helping on the games themselves directly, but when Perpetual folded, the core tech group, the reusable code, was the one part that they managed to sell off. Clearly it has a lot of value, even if it’s painful getting there.

PJ: I think it makes sense to have one team on gameplay and building things, and one focussed on technology, because it’s different expertise for the staff to have.

What about MMO Middleware on consoles? Will midleware bring MMOs to consoles finally?

CD: it’s absolutely helped the transition, you’ll see stuff very soon where it’s facilitated console MMOs.

RL: stuff that’s provided to you multi-platform is a huge win from using middleware.

Questions from Audience

Q: sounds from what you’ve said here today like the state of the middleware industry today is fragile and embryonic?

MF: I agree. I think it’s a difficult industry. Business model is tough, it’s sales heavy, hard to get your cash in when people go under -

JL: – that’s what happened with Intrinsic, they had agreements with lots of companies paying a small amount each month towards the license fee, and when a few of those went out of business, the sudden cashflow damage killed Intrinsic

Q: what are your experiences with the multi-platform engines?

RJ: we tried most/all of the flash stuff. We’ve found Unity to provide the most-productive pipeline, fast and easy to prototype with, works nicely with our dev methodology (scrum).

RL: the more MMO development you do, the more you realise it’s all about the tools. The content-creation tools etc become more important, ultimately, than the engine itself.

CD: the cost of developing an MMO is never the technology, four or five times that cost is the cost of the content-generation. So the more efficient your tools are, the quicker you can get final game-content being made, that’s key.

Q: (from MF) does middleware “help” or “hurt” innovation?

MF: I feel it could hurt quite a lot. e.g. Some years ago, I could not find any middleware that would support instances, so we couldn’t use it.

CD: agreed. I think something monolothic like BigWorld could be particularly limiting, but the piecemeal approach of lots of little parts, increased productivity, actually I think helps innovation because it helps on your dev-resource costs a lot.

Q: are any of your perspectives on middleware non-technology centric, it’s been very tech-centric so far? I’ve seen a lot of recurring frustration with middleware. What kind of heuristics do you use to establish whether middleware is the right choice?

RL: you should never take a fully-staffed team and then dump in middleware on them. The two should be built hand-in-hand; middleware changes your hiring needs, and vice versa.

CD: Tech is always both an enabler and a limiter.

Q: as a vendor looking-in … we see particular teams (art vs code vs design) a lot more vocal than others, and the decision to use/not-use it gets skewed.

RL: the purchase decision is often lead by the lead client engineer, server stuff gets ignored, which is clearly wrong.

What’s in it?

Nobody knows – Apple didn’t bother with release notes for this 1.75GB monster. Allegedly, there aren’t even release notes inside the download itself.

What apps will it break?

Nobody knows – Apple didn’t allow developers to test it before they put it live.

What does Apple have to say about it?

I don’t know – the official developer site has zero coverage other than the download link itself and a short note to say it is “mandatory” and that it might break your phone if wrongly installed.

More to come once I’ve got it working…

If you’re still muddling along with Outlook, or suffering under the curse of some hopeless rubbish like Apple’s OS X Mail, salvation may well be on the horizon… ThunderBird version 3 is now in beta (and looks like it will be the first version of TB that will be usable as a general email client; IME the previous releases never really worked properly). Try it out!
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Lots of people are using Yahoo’s Upcoming more and more these days, going by the invites I get (many have switched from using Facebook to using Upcoming recently). But it completely sucks for arranging anything in a foreign country, or where people will be attending from foreign locations. Common examples:

• Any meeting, event, or party at an international conference; many attendees will be flying in a day or so beforehand
• Conference calls with people in more than one timezone; conference calls tend to be with multi-timezone, otherwise you’d just have a face-to-face meeting

I’ve tried lots of things, and although Outlook 2003 and beyond have some moderately handy tools for this (you can view “2 timezones simultaneously”, although IIRC *only* 2, sigh), 99% of the time I need something web-based that anyone/everyone can use. And today I found this piece of awesomeness:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/advmeeting.html

…which produces things like this:

(I would insert an image here, but unfortunately – despite the claims of the Debian maintainer of WordPress – Debian WordPress still can’t do file uploads, and WordPress’s authors haven’t fixed their extremely poor approach to file uploads. Sigh)

Mozilla just released Alpha3 of Thunderbird version 3; my advice: don’t bother.
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(Monetization options for Virtual Worlds)

VWFE 2008 (Virtual Worlds Forum Europe) got cancelled because the venue was taken away by the Police, so the organizers arranged an emergency Unconference for today instead. I decided – with only five minutes of prep (this is an Unconference…) – to do a session on “ways to monetize virtual worlds”.

I ran this session, so I took very few notes, sorry.

So … if you weren’t at the session, you probably missed most of the good bits :P.
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