Yearly Archives: 2012
83 posts
I’ve posted a few times over the years the … disappointing … state of LinkedIn’s engineering. But this takes the biscuit: it appears they were storing deliberately insecure passwords, and someone leaked the list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309 (that page has links + info on how to check if your own password is […]
http://gigaom.com/europe/makie-future-doll-toy-funding/ “We’re making toys using game data and 3D printing,” explains Alice Taylor, Makielab co-founder and CEO. “We call ourselves a smart toy company, and for us that means there’s a digital side to it by default.” The company slogan is “the action doll you design”, and here’s the concept […]
To anyone in the games industry, this should be a cause for weeping and decrying the Godless universe: http://www.thechaosengine.com/forum/ (I’m guessing it’s just Network Solutions being typically crap and screwing-up the domain renewal)
Noticed something new tonight… Started watching YouTube video Hit “Pause” because Google’s Flash code is dismal (crashes frequently, since the update from approx a week ago) and works badly on slow connections; you have to let it pre-load a big chunk YouTube response: the video stops, and an advert starts […]
…but they decided that only people with a Credit Card registered in USA or Canda are allowed to use it (even though it’s free). So. I’m going to repay that smack-in-the-face by not linking to it, nor naming it. Autodesk marketing: #FAIL.
How about this one: http://sainsburys.jobs/vacancy/details/35959/games-buyer-at-london A “buyer” for Sainsburys: you get to influence the titles stocked by one of the UK’s biggest retailers. I’ve never – ever! – met a games-buyer before, but I know quite a few buyers for more mainstream areas (clothing, fashion, etc), and so long as […]
(back to playing RotMG again) 1. the Oryx assault: make it more inclusive, more multi-player Background: sooner or later, players learn that it is impossible to gain anything from the (compulsory) assault except level-ups. The assult is grouped into 3 separate squads of players, each of which have their own […]
I’ve played many hundreds – probably over a thousand – games on Kongregate alone, now. On top of all the thousands I’ve played on console, PC, flash, handheld, mobile, etc. I feel pretty confident in analysing game mechanics, and success/fail reasons for given game-designs, based off my extensive experience. I […]
I can’t find this. NASA’s web presence (in their defence, they have a **** tonne of data) is damn hard to navigate for simple queries (i.e. anything that’s not highly-specific, PhD material). I’ve found the “12 months of the year blue marble” dataset that gives you: Earth, without clouds. And […]
Something like 90% of game developers NEVER get a royalty for their games, and almost as many never get a bonus. But for the handful that work on titles where the studio negotiated a good deal (modulo the Publisher’s legal team using legal chicanery to make all royalties work out […]
When you “upgrade” to Lion, be aware that Apple will silently wipe your “auto install / update” settings, and start aggressively downloading every update it can find for every Apple app you use. In my case, this was gigabytes of data – I really don’t care (and don’t want) “upgrades” […]
UPDATE: this technique didn’t work. I’m still trying to find something that does. One friend suggested hard-coding the address of all Adobe websites into your “hosts” file, and blocking them. This would prevent you from visiting Adobe’s sites – but would prevent the evil Adobe Updater trojan from downloading – […]
One of the peculiar distinctions of Jack Vance’s writing is that he vomits obscure words onto the page as if he’d just eaten a dictionary that severely disagreed with him. Sometimes he seems to be parodying his characters – but other times he happily does it for himself. To be […]
I feel sorry for Toshiba; they make good products, but their marketing seems to belong to a much smaller, poorer company. Take this advert, from April 2012, when Apple is already far along with shifting their whole laptop lineup to “ultra thin” MacBook airs (rumour suggests the non-thin models will […]
Hume just posted his Lessons Learned from the warmup for Ludum Dare 23 (48 hours to write a game from scratch – starts this weekend!) – and his positive experience using an Entity System. In his epic comment (sparked by a different Adam – not me, honest), is this gem: […]
This is from 4 years ago, courtesy of Steve Yegge. I just came across it by accident, it’s wonderfully well written, but one bit caught my attention in particular: “First, you can’t tell interviewers what’s important. Not at any company. Not unless they’re specifically asking you for advice.” Wait – […]
… It removes one of the most valuable features of OS X for laptop owners: OS x lion WILL NOT recharge a plugged-in iPhone when the lid is closed (after 10 seconds of pretending to charge – just long enough to fool you – Apple cuts the power) At conferences, […]
No link provided, but should be easy to find the studio email HR address: “Hi All, I’m looking for a QA person to join us at Zoe Mode. I need someone with experience as I need QA for multiple titles of different genres. A sense of rhythm will help. Please […]
Almost a year after Apple’s disastrous “force consumers to download Lion, instead of installing from DVD”, apparently it still doesn’t work. It’s hard to recommend OS X to anyone after this experience. UPDATE 2: Apple’s “download a file from the internet” code is so bad it’s causing the MacBook to […]