Month: November 2010

Categories
marketing and PR

“Will you sell advertising space on your blog?”

(since I’m getting more and more requests for this lately, usualy from “regular readers”. Sigh. Do PR drones really believe the rest of the world is so stupid and gullible?)

No. I run Google Ads for research reasons (it’s a live site where I can fiddle with it, try out the new features, etc), but the blog is a net loss, and I’m happy with that.

“We’d like to write a guest-post for your blog, we think your readers will really love it?”

No.

Before you write paragraphs of BS about how you are a “regular reader”, get off your ass and see how many times there’s been a “guest post” on this blog.

It’s *MY* blog. About my professional, technology, business, and career interests. It is not a newspaper or magazine.

But hey – if you want to rent me, the going rate is $2000 a day. So that “guest post” is going to cost you $750,000 a year (approximately).

I’m not unreasonable: I’ll give you a discount after the first year :)

Categories
amusing games industry recruiting

Career dead-ends

How long do you want to be an Assistant Product Manager?

Assistant Product Manager 4 Life

Job Summary
Reference IS0012
Location Horseferry Road
Hours 37 per week
Closing Date 03 December 2010 at Midnight

DEPARTMENT DESCRIPTION

* Channel 4 Online is responsible for creating and managing Channel 4 multiplatform experiences on the Web, Mobile and next-generation connected-devices such as YouView.
* The department comprises three main functional teams: Production, Product Management, and Multiplatform Commissioning.

(there’s also a new Commissioning Editor role up for grabs at Channel 4, which is perhaps more appealing to readers here ;))

Categories
education

Death of the UK University – not a moment too soon

Adrian just wrote an excellent article for the Telegraph, on the role of physical Universities, and the extent to which they’re rapidly becoming irrelevant, eclipsed by low-fi educational resource on the internet.

QFT, a few hilights that fit *entirely* with my own experiences, both as an undergraduate, and as a tutor for undergraduates:

  1. modern lecturers are merely “talking textbooks”
  2. we act as if a non-teaching degree miraculously makes you “a brilliant teacher”
  3. most universities only give each student a few hours a week of face-time

and, personally … although I have a Computer Science degree from Cambridge University, and although the syllabus was great, and the faculty highly skilled, I credit a lot of my degree to:

the University of Hawaii

…because their lecture slides were of a universally higher quality than the sum total of Cambridge University’s slides+lecturer+tutors.

That’s shameful, on Cambridge’s part, but it also underlines Adrian’s points: I graduated almost ten years ago, and the writing was already on the wall.

Disruption is already here

The beautiful (terrifying) thing about disruptive businesses is that – for the incumbents – they are invisible and seemingly irrelevant until it’s too late. And then, suddenly, the disguise is thrown off, and the incumbents are put out of business in a matter of months.

Universities that had coasted for decades (or centuries) on a patherically weak teaching structure are now facing real disruptive business, including competitors that don’t even *need* revenue. Nowadays, I think many Universities are soon to find they’re already too late to turn around their own laziness and buck-passing. The (hidden) revolution has already begun…

Categories
amusing iphone

Mobile signatures: a new artform?

As Tom puts it:

“Spelling curtesy of Iphone”
“Periods everywhere? Sorry, this email was composed on Google’s Nexus One”

Mobile signatures: a new artform…?

Other good ones out there – any favourites?

(the less imaginative, literal one above is mine, I think. Now in hiding, since I’m back on iPhone for the next few months)

Categories
iphone

Perennial problems of launching an iPhone app…

We launched an app this week that’s been exhaustively tested:

  • 2G, 3G, 3G S, 4
  • iPod 2/3, iPod 4
  • OS 3.1, 3.1.3, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2
  • 10+ different human testers
  • Apple’s own testing (App-review process)

…and yet we’re getting 1-star reviews on the app store, citing “this app crashes on startup”.

Meanwhile, according to Apple:

“No crashes for this app”

It’s always possible that someone’s writing shill reports, but I find that very unlikely. I find it far more likely that there’s some bug somewhere that’s affecting a narrow range of existing users.

Yet there’s literally no way for us to uncover this. Apple still provides no means for a developer to contact users. You are forbidden from sending replies or messages to the people who review your app.

Those people are assuming (we know, because they say this in their review!) that we know about the crash and can do something about it – we can’t. We cannot do *anything* until one of these people contacts us and gives us some crash info. Or allows their phone to upload crash reports to Apple.

Sigh.

Categories
computer games design games design games industry massively multiplayer

A little game called Minecraft…

I’m an idiot. It only just occured to me today to wonder how common a name “Markus Persson” actually is.

My first reaction on playing with Minecraft was: “Ah, this (much success, this quickly, with this style of game) is what the WurmOnline guys would have loved to achieve, I think”. Oh, the irony. Not that I expect the WO guys are unhappy with what they’ve achieved – WO is an achievement in and of itself, and continues to evolve in beauty and depth – but it’s too slow / too little to become a mainstream success. It’s a technical and personal success, not a business success. Unlike MC.

Now that I know it’s the *same* Markus – Wurm’s Markus_Persson from JavaGaming.org, and the author of Minecraft – I’m revisiting that first impression. Incidentally, in checking out this authorship, I saw I still have the 2nd highest post count on JGO (!), despite almost 5 years of personal absence. Wow. I really did talk a *lot* of crap, I guess ;)…

Simplicity…

There are two things in MC that jumped out at me early on. The first one was pure simplicity. This game/world is bursting with a sense that someone has ended up with nothing left to take away.

Art

The art has a nice style in and of itself. This is something I’ve often talked about with other veterans of making cheap games … mostly, that means indie developers (many of the folks from JGO, for instance – especially look at the 4k Java games contest, and look at the frequent winners such as Kev), but it also includes folks from the big-budget games industry, like Thomas Bidaux and Ken Malcolm. And, of course, Matt Mihaly, whose Earth Eternal started out explicitly using an art-style to keep production costs low.

It’s a trick. It’s the avoidance of the uncanny-valley. Make your art look deliberately cheap, instead of accidentally, and you can achieve the same level of pleasure in your audience as if you’d built photo-realistic graphics. As far as I recall, it’s even been tested (in movies and visual art) and found to be literally true.

Interaction

Here’s one key point where Wurm fell down … there was a vast amount to do, but it was damned hard to know WTF you could do, how, when, why, where.

And at this point, I’m going to pull out and dust off Runescape, circa 2001. Back when it was a few thousand players, and was already taking off, but long before it became famous. RS has changed plenty over the years, and has finessed their interface, but it started off with Andrew’s unrelenting insistence that the UI must have “no menus”. Everything had to be achievable with the LMB or the RMB. There were already examples of places where the interface was crippled and made complex because 3 (or 4) buttons were needed … and eventually Andrew relented and allowed for RMB to be a menu, with LMB being the “most likely option from that menu”.

The point being that if he’d not clung so hard to that desire for ultra simplicity in the GUI, then he’d probably have ended up with a series of rich menus – or more likely a many-button interface. Sure, it had to be modified as the game grew, but IMHO it was one of the greatest attractions to RS, and helped enormously with RS’s growth and success among the school-age market (where RS thrived).

Now back to MC. In MC, your actions are very narrowly limited. Indeed, they reminded me a lot of early RS. Everything relies upon context. In MC’s case, the compromise with game-richness comes in the form of the crafting interface. Here you have to step beyond the LMB/RMB setup, the “purely contextual” actionset, and move to a new UI element. It’s new, it’s extra UI, but … it’s still brutally simple, and yet (so far) proving more than adequate to the enormous demands of variety in MC.

… and logic

This is the second one that struck me, and it took a bit longer, a bit more playing around (and watching other players in their more advanced worlds), for me to spot.

Wurm Online was always one of the richest “physical universe simulators”: there was a huge amount of physical laws implemented and underlying everything you saw on-screen. This is not a good path for a developer to take: it’s a steep slope into exponentially large CPU and content-production costs … and even worse in terms of balancing and game-design.

Oh, you think that a world with “full physics” has no content production cost? Ha! How much time do you think it takes to implement each of the laws of physics? Even with a rigid-body physics engine to start from? May seem like there’s not many of them around, but just try coding it…

But many of WO’s laws were barely noticed by the majority of the players, while others were smack in their faces a large amount of the time. MC very nearly appeared to cherry-pick only the “frequently significant” laws, and focus on those. MC’s world is breaktaking in it’s depth, and yet if you analyse it closely, you quickly notice it’s lacking some very basic essentials of a world-simulator.

And, back to the irony, I felt that last point made MC feel very much like a direct sequel (in spirit) to Wurm Online: a “lessons learned … and acted upon” when it came down to the most addictive and engaging (and unique) part of WO. And yet I was still too dumb to connect the names together. Doh!

Categories
international

Google location tracking + gmail lawsuit

Google’s settled the Buzz privacy lawsuit; OK, but not that interesting.

What’s interesting is that I received this email from Google, even though I’m a UK user of gmail (if this is TL;DR then just focus on the final paragraph):

Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year.

Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case.

The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users’ concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.

Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011. This email is a summary of the settlement, and more detailed information and instructions approved by the court, including instructions about how to opt out, object, or comment, are available at http://www.BuzzClassAction.com.

——————————————————————–
This mandatory announcement was sent to all Gmail users in the United States as part of a legal settlement and was authorized by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

I’m a gmail user, but Google has clearly marked my account as UK-based.

I know this because my From address is “@googlemail.com” – due to a trademark lawsuit that Google lost a few years back in the UK, where a different firm holds the “gmail” trademark.

So … Google “knows” I’m UK based, yet I received this USA-targetted email. Coincidentally, I was physically in the USA when the email was sent.

I have all Google’s location-seeking stuff explicitly disabled, so is it co-incidence that Google sent me this? A mistake?

Or are they actively tracking the incoming IP addresses of every gmail user, and tracking their current country of origin that way, updating each time you check email?

Categories
iphone Web 0.1

InformationWeek attempts iPhone website; Fails

As an iPhone developer, I often encounter companies that try to save a lot of money by making a mobile website and then claiming (to their partners / customers / advertisers) that it’s an iPhone app. In some cases, I believe this is a good idea – they don’t have the content/presence/depth to support a full app, and a mobile website works equally poorly across all devices.

Then, occasionally, you find a company that tries to be *really* cheapskate, and specifically targets iPhone with their mobile website. This generally goes horribly wrong, and costs substantial development effort.

For instance, Information Week:

That popup is part of the website, not part of the app, and this is being viewed in bog-standard Safari on iPhone.

Someone has carefully hard-coded the webpage to:

  1. Detect iPhone as the client
  2. Draw a dialog box that assumes a specific version of Safari browser
  3. Draw a pointer to where they “know” the + button is in Safari
  4. Detect whether the + button is pressed
  5. Respond to clicking the X button in top right

…but it’s not a native app, and here’s the key thing: it doesn’t work.

The box positions perfectly, and no doubt the devleopment team (internal? external? how much did IW pay for this?) were able to demonstrate it appearing to work correctly to their stakeholders.

But, sadly, the mobile website is (apparently) incapable of detecting the X button correctly: that dialog box cannot be dismissed. It stays forever. It disappears for only the briefest of moments, then comes back again.

In the process, not only does it obliterate 30% of the screen space, but it also causes the browser to slow down for half a second while it does all the (slow) javascript calculations to position the “clever” popup box in the right place.

(a native app, of course, would be using a compiled language, and would run the same code 100x-1000x faster; the user would see no delay)

Net effect?

The user is so pissed off they’ll go out of their way to STOP visiting the Information Week website. IW loses money.

And, the irony: if IW had spent no money at all they would have been better off. The iPhone renders rich websites perfectly, certainly better than any custom iPhone skins I’ve seen. Sadly, a large number of web designers persist in trying to “prove” they are just as good as iPhone designers by making these custom skins. I’m not sure why, but it comes across as desperate and despairing, and a little pathetic. Good web designers are good at web design; good iphone designers are good at iPhone design; what’s the problem?

Categories
entrepreneurship games industry networking

Ubisoft wounds games-tech industry

Ubisoft just bought Qazal – one of the last providers of networking tech for games. Congrats to the Qazal folks; although the price isn’t mentioned, I’d imagine a lot of them have picked up a nice windfall from this.

The problem

Two problems: one immediate, anti-competitive, affecting games using this tech; the other long-term, and damaging for the *entire* games industry.

Your competitor owns your tech

Simple. Ubisoft is a large publisher, big enough that whoever is publishing *your* game probably competes directly with them.

Even if you don’t use Qazal yet, if you’re a developer you now have the problem that Ubisoft has an extra stick to beat you into submission when you’re looking for a publisher for your next game:

“Yes, this publishing deal screws you over, and you get 50% less royalty than with our competitors. But you want to use Qazal, don’t you? Well, unless you accept this 1-sided deal, we’ll make sure you either can’t use Qazal, or we’ll quietly – unofficially – make sure you get terrible support, screwed over, etc”

NB: Qazal guys have made it clear they won’t stand for this. Unfortunately, Criterion guys said much the same thing when EA bought them. Turns out that guys with sticks can protest all they want, but the guys with machine guns tend to win the argument.

“You’ve killed us all”

Remember when the Swine Flu started, govts panicked that this virulent disease – started no-one quite knew where – might become a pandemic? Maybe just one chance interaction between pig and man that would bring down mankind. Maybe …

Over the past few years, there’s been a series of aggressive, destructive, anti-competitive acquisitions of games-middleware companies.

It seems *likely* that the Ubisoft/Qazal purchase will be more of the same – no matter what they say. It may prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Already, development teams – or, more accurately, the people that run them – are actively avoiding using middleware. The common refrain is “we’ve been so badly burned by Renderware/Demonware/[insert here] that we now have an exec-level policy that we must not use middleware unless it’s from a company that has practically zero chance of being purchased by our major competitor”.

In the short term, EA and Activision got to laugh at everyone else and dance and sing and claim their brilliance.

But already there are lots of smart industry people who have avoided founding new middleware companies (and I suspect there are plenty that started but died) because of this: too many of their desired customers are refusing to buy, on principle.

It may take 5+ years for the full impact to be felt, but I’m confident it will be felt.

To be clear: we’re not talking about things like Unreal3 here, we’re talking about focussed technology solutions to game-development problems. The dominant players of the industry bemoan the escalating costs of production, but the great innovations in cost – cheap, effective, nimble tech – have traditionally come from small middleware startups. Not from monolithic tech spinouts like U3.

What’s in it for Ubi?

No matter the protestations of innocence, AFAICS there’s a problem of mis-aligned interests.

Ubi will materially suffer *not at all* if Qazal is no longer licensed – the revenue (so far as I can see) is relatively tiny, and it’s non-core to their business. Unless they want to become a “tech selling company”, they will never care much about it. They won’t even care that much about the lost “shared R&D costs” they’ll just be happy to have the smart people in-house.

However, Ubi now has an enormous sword of damocles they can use both to bully and to materially harm their competitors: at any moment, they can turn off the tap.

You can write the cleverest contract in the world, to protect your project, and yet STILL Ubi may screw you over. The team leads may not notice – protected by said contract – but the TDs will (wasted investment of time and research/training with Q).

And the CTO will be livid (because the lead time to build up an internal expertise is measured in years – and they’ll have to start from scratch just to persuade the Finance division to let them have the money, which could take a year or more on its own).

Categories
server admin

WordPress note: Curl != Curl

Gah. The world of PHP modules is a horrid mess. And sites going OAuth-compulsory are highlighting of late just how much so…

I just had a plugin fail, with no error message, even though I had it all installed correctly, and all pre-requisites.

After much messing about (much wasted time), it turns out that this plugin needs:

  1. libcurl (which is not the same as curl)
  2. php5-libcurl (which is not the same as libcurl)

So … when a WP module claims it needs “curl”, it could mean any of three things. I knew about the first two, but not the third. Even if it says it needs “libcurl” that’s still not specific enough.

In this case, the WP module embedded a 3rd-party OAuth module that used “the other libcurl” – so it needed *both* of them. Ha!

Categories
fixing your desktop

Phone numbers, and making iPhones and Androids switch networks

Short note for anyone with my cell number: I’ve finally got my new number working in an iPhone, so within the next day or so I should be running both UK numbers again (my old UK number has been phone-less for about 8 months now).

It’s been a long journey, and a small accident, to get to that point. This might help someone else moving an iPhone from O2 / AT&T / etc to a new network.

Or trying to get a T-Mobile SIM to work on a modern Sony Ericsson phone (maybe other Android phones too).

From iPhone to Google Nexus One

I run a small iPhone/Android dev company. At the start of this year, we didn’t do Android, but I planned to do so by summer 2010.

It’s part of our ethos to avoid client work with a platform until we know the platform well ourselves. So, as well as writing some Android apps (e.g. the shoot-em-up I blogged about earlier this year), I switched from my iPhone to a new Nexus One as my personal phone. The plan was to use it daily for a month or two and get to understand the platform.

We’ve got a lot of phones, and for testing purposes (and for client meetings) they all need data plans. Paying a contract for each would cost us thousands of dollars a year if we’re not careful. So, instead, we use 3’s £5/month 1-month contract, which gives you 1gb data, free incoming calls, and expensvie (£0.55/minute) outgoing calls.

Randomly, the number I got for the Nexus One was palindromic – much easier to remember than my own number – so I didn’t bother switching SIMs.

O2 iPhone refuses 3 SIM

After a couple of months, frustrated with the legion of critical bugs on the Nexus phone (and on Android itself), I tried to switch back to iPhone.

Ah. Hmm. Well.

My iPhone was a (legitimately) unlocked 3G. i.e. I’d had it more than 12-months, and (as per the carrier policy) they’d remotely removed the carrier lock (this costs £15 if I remember correctly – cheeky bastards).

But it wouldn’t accept the 3 SIM. Just came up with variations on “No SIM” and “No Service”.

The O2 SIM was noticeably thicker than the 3 SIM, so I wondered if it was a seating problem, physically. Vigorous squeezing of the phone got rid of the “missing SIM” messages permanently – but still no service.

All the following failed to work:

  1. soft reboot
  2. hard reboot (hold power button, then slide to confirm)
  3. re-sync
  4. run battery to dead, recharge, power-up

Xperia X10 Mini – the (almost) perfect phone

This Summer, the manufacturers went wild with new Android phones. So, a few months ago, we got a broad range of new handsets to cover the different hardware profiles (many of which hadn’t previously existed in meaningful numbers “on the street”).

I saw the X10 mini, and fell in love. Despite being made by Sony “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” Ericsson, this is (almost) the phone I’ve been waiting 15 years for. It’s tiny, fits very easily in the hand/pocket, and has every feature of a modern smartphone (even includes an FM tuner). Plus a speaker that produces great sound quality, despite it being a phone. You can get it in two versions – with or without pop-out hardware keyboard.

(obviously, it’s from Sony, so they fucked up the software. If they’d done *nothing*, the phone would have been better, but they spent time and money replacing the OS apps which work with Sony apps that don’t work. Fortunately, this is Android, so you can download “real” software from the Market. A minor annoyance, you’re stuck with the icons for the Sony crap – the only way to remove them is to jailbreak the phone. Yet again, Sony reduces their own sales because they don’t have the courage to tell their own software teams “sorry, your output isn’t good enough”)

Switched the 3 SIM, and … perfect. Worked first time. Just the iPhone being a PITA, then.

AT&T refuses to serve foreigners

So, fast forward to last week. I was in New York for the UK Digital Mission. Last time I was in USA, about 6 months ago, I walked into an AT&T store and bought a pre-pay 3G SIM for my phone. Worked fine. I had to lie about my phone(s) – I’d read on the internet that AT&T would ask “is this for an iPhone?” and if you said yes, they would refuse to *allow* you to buy it – even if you then promised to stick it in a non-iPhone instead.

This time, AT&T new york stores just flatly refused. Maybe they don’t sell pre-pay any more – I don’t know, I couldn’t be bothered with this “lie to the retail store to get them to sell you their product” game any more. I’d spotted a T-Mobile store just round the block, so I went there instead.

…so, on to T-Mobile USA. Ah, but: T-Mobile + Android = FAIL

The T-Mobile SIM wouldn’t work in the iPhone (no surprise, given the previous problem)

The T-Mobile SIM wouldn’t work in the Sony Ericsson phone either. Hmm. Now, that’s odd.

The store reps followed their usual practice – re-configure settings, switch to GSM mode (cheap SIM), switch airplane mode off and on again. Nothing.

Eventually, after 15 minutes of me and the store reps trying everything we could think of, I did a hard reboot of the Android phone (explicit power-off, and restart – takes a couple of minutes to come back on). Voila! Instant re-acquisition of the network.

Amazingly, if I took the SIM out, and popped it back in again (not even powering off phone, or putting in a different SIM), it *permanently* lost the T-Mobile network again … not coming back until I did a hard reboot again.

Finally, OS 4 “fixes” the iPhone

I got home from NYC. New desktop, new iTunes install, plugged in the iPhone to do some compatibility testing for one of our client apps.

I get the popup messages from Apple telling me there’s a new OS download available for this phone, do I want it installed? or just downloaded? or ignored?

Obviously, it would be catastrophically bad if I installed the OS download – although Apple publically pretends they support old OS versions, they privately *deliberately* prevent developers from doing this. If you upgrade an old phone OS, you can’t go back (unless you jailbreak the phone, which causes other problems in your QA process).

But I figured I might as well accept the OS download, so it’s on this desktop for later install.

Apple software: world’s worst user-interface design

If you select “download but don’t install”, it then asks if you want to check-for-new-and-install … or not.

Actually, although it’s the same dialogue it uses for “check-for-new-and-install”, the text is supposed to read:

At Apple, we were too lazy to update our scripts. This dialogue is literally useless. Please hit the “Check” button, or else I will cancel your previous action.

…I’ve been through this game a few times before, and I know the secrets now. Although it *has already done* the check, you have to tell it to check again. Or else it (silently) cancels the download.

And here’s where it gets weird…

Coincidentally, I had the 3 SIM sitting in the phone. I’d put it there for safe keeping while I was in USA, since I now had the T-Mobile SIM in the Android phone.

As soon as itunes started downloading the new iOS build (which takes a while), the iPhone switched to “first time install” mode.

i.e. the lock-screen disappeared, replaced by a picture of a USB cable, and the text “Emergency only” flashing up in different languages (spanish, french, etc).

…meanwhile, iTunes popped up a message “updating carrier settings”.

Oh, Rly?

Ya Rly – 5 seconds later, I had carrier signal. My old 3G iPhone is now working perfectly with 3.

So, apparently, *merely downloading* a new iOS version causes iTunes to do the carrier updates it it supposed to do automatically on sync.

My guess is that it actually did a firmware update of the phone, without telling me. If so, this is a mildly evil thing for Apple to do, since it fundamentally alters the hardware. It’s only a guess – specific per-carrier “fixes” are a standard part of firmware updates, and IIRC you can’t do one without the other on iPhone – but given the dialogues are already self-evidently the wrong ones, I’d not be too surprised.

(incidentally, why are the dialogues wrong? Basically … Apple doesn’t care about software quality. This comes up time and time again with iTunes, iWork, and OS X: the hardware may be great, but the software contains basic bugs that even a junior QA person would spot immediately)

Categories
amusing recruiting

Writing a good LinkedIn Recommendation

http://www.danceswithferrets.org/meeblog/?p=662

“In addition to introducing new practices and processes to our office that transformed our day-to-day operations, Dean introduced me to Dogging!”

FWIW … I’d be a *lot* more likely to hire someone with that on their resume/profile than I would someone with “Dean is professional and valuable member of the team and I hope he does well in future”. For multiple reasons, but first and foremost: both are equally untrue, but one of them shows a sense of humour, and the other assumes the reader is stupid enough to be suckered by blind lies.