“I was in charge of scaling Dropbox … from roughly 4,000 to 40,000,000 users. … Here are some suggestions on scaling” The first section is a WTF – the guy advocates deliberately over-taxing your servers, without a good explanation. I’ve got some guesses at why they did it – but […]
Yearly Archives: 2012
83 posts
Matteo Pericoli spent 3 years drawing central London from the Thames. His artwork is a 30-foot-long tapestry (that you can buy as a fold-out book). There’s an exhibition just opened today with the original artwork at Ealing Gallery. What’s amazing is when you see it up close just how tiny […]
The most popular hit for “unity gitignore” is a post on the official Unity forums that was written by someone who doesn’t seem to fully understand how git works. Which was a little disappointing. Before you commit anything to git, you MUST go into Unity’s menus and enable the “metadata” […]
Tim Sweeney, Epic Games (owners of Unreal Engine, and deelopers of AAA games on 360/PS3/iOS): “The most profitable game we’ve ever made, in terms of man years invested versus revenue, is actually Infinity Blade. It’s more profitable than Gears of War.” Touch Arcade has some terrible analysis (don’t listen to […]
Snakes on a Cartesian Plane Interesting because: Each snake has to be unlocked by in-game activities that are (sometimes) related to the snake itself Every snake changes the gameplay in a way that’s always related to the snake itself (with a small piece of text hinting at – or directly […]
Much time has passed, and the guilty are probably not reading this blog any more, so I figured I’d go ahead and post this one without fear of upsetting them… Adam’s Hints to Recruitment Agents #72: “if you need an expert, urgently (e.g. within 1 week) … there are some […]
Wow, Pearson has some strange ideas about commerce! To buy this popular textbook as an ebook, you have two choices, both conveniently linked from the front page of the author’s website: Go to Amazon. Buy it, in any country / price you want. Get it immediately. (unless this is your […]
In the games industry – especially in the UK – big employers have spent the past 10 years claiming there is a “skills gap” – that not enough people are being “trained by universities” (which shows how stupid the speakers were; Universities don’t do training, and most never will – […]
So far this week, from Unity3d, I’ve received: A “personal” email asking me to respond if I want to know more about Unity4. When I replied, I got an auto-responder saying “I’m away for two weeks and will not be responding to email”; which reminded me this account manager had […]
In a follow-up to yesterday’s post (3 Internet is the worst broadband provider in UK), today some sites have started working – but now google.com is inaccessible too. (incidentally … these sites can be pinged – just no web. Which makes me suspect it’s some fool at 3 who’s misconfigured […]
Just Sayin’. (for past 20 hours, 3 has had no connectivity to 95% of all internet sites, including – intermittently – Google.co.uk. (*). Impossible to get anything done. And for the past 4 months, the service has been running at 1/50th of the normal speed. They don’t care – multiple […]
Beware – latest version of Google Docs has the Gmail bug whereby emails (documents) randomly disappear and become completely inaccessible (this happens a few times a year with Gmail’s IMAP client). With Gmail, you can use the web interface to get around it and see the actual email – but […]
I’m periodically re-trying GitHub’s GUI client, just in case it becomes stable enough for anyone to use on a real project. Today, with the latest version: every time I start the app, it immediately hard-crashes. The app is literally unusable – it won’t run at all. At least with the […]
Firefox … ah, how we love watching you make terrible usability decisions, and then force them upon your users! FF now has this ridiculous page – WHICH YOU CANNOT DISABLE in Firefox settings: Fixing it Since it’s not supported as an user-configurable option, you have to open the magic low-level […]
StackOverflow.com now blocks anyone running Firefox 3.x (probably not deliberate – just someone wrote some bad code and didn’t test it?). But it’s interesting that sites that decide to go anti-HTML and pro-AJAX/JS can so easily break their whole site, just from some errant JS code. (it appears to be […]
Toribash is, simply, awesome. You need no knowledge, you work in bullet-time, deciding which limbs to bend or stiffen, and see a second-by-second preview of what each change would do. String them together, build jaw-dropping martial arts attacks. The build quality’s poor (no docs, no installer, poor handling for savefiles, […]
I haven’t shipped anything with Unity; last time I used it was early in 2.x, and it was painful enough that I never used it in a live project. I’ve re-eval’d every 6 months or so. Now I’m onto Unity 3.5, and using it in several real projects that are […]
Who at Google even thought this sounded like a good idea? 1994 phoned: they want their GeoCities school of web design back. (I’ve had to switch to non-javascript Gmail because the latest “forced update” of Gmail has some JS bugs in it that make it run very slow, lose emails, […]