Mr. .NET

or…what I’ve been spending my weekends and early morning hours working on.

If you’ve read many of the early posts on this blog you’d see that I’m an avid gamer, and that I like to write code for various things however the one combination that hasn’t appeared much has been writing my own games.  This is mainly due to the fact that I don’t have many ideas that are realistic for me to implement.

Enter Windy Garden, the first game I’ve written since my days on the TI-85.  The premise is simple; a bunch of seeds are floating around on the screen and your objective is to plant them by nudging them with a chain reaction of blooms created by tapping on the screen.  You need to have good timing and strategic placement though; as the blooms only last for a short period of time.

Inspired by a similar game on Facebook titled Chain Reaction, I felt the concepts in this game were simple enough to implement for my first foray into Objective-C and iPhone programming.

The screenshots below show my current progress on the app, using graphics that were all hand-made so they don’t look the best.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that in the end.

Currently the core part of the game has been implemented, but there are still a few tasks that remain including scoring, game over, etc.  And I have a couple tricks up my sleeve yet as well.  Look forward to future posts which will discuss how I went about writing the game and what I learned as I went along.

In high school, I used to be a voracious reader, going through books fairly frequently.  However, once I went to college and after I moved to my own apartment my reading dropped.  Lately, I’ve been wanting to get back to reading like I used to.  Not only for the enjoyment but because I felt like I was missing something.

Now that I actually have furniture in my apartment I also have a comfy place to read.  I almost bought a Kindle in October or November, but held off.  Would I really use it enough to justify spending $350?  Then in late January several of the people I follow on twitter kept mentioning the announcement/release of an updated Kindle.  I bit the bullet then, and placed my preorder for a Kindle hoping I would automatically get upgraded to the new one if it was announced.  Two days later it was publicly announced and I received an email confirming that I had been upgraded.

Fast forward to a week ago.  My Kindle arrived!  I was immediately impressed with the device.  You can probably find unboxing photos on various gadget sites.  The day before I purchased a few books and they synced to it shortly after I turned the device on.

Coming back to now, I’ve read three books on the Kindle; not counting the user’s guide or the thank you letter from Jeff Bezos.  Bad Astronomy by Dr. Phil Plait, Ur by Stephen King, and A Briefer History of Time by Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Leonard Mlodinow.  If anyone loves to read, I would definately recommend getting one.

Not technology focused, but I’ve been rocking out to All That Remains for a couple days now.  I’m very fond of the melodic-rock/metal sound these guys have (and have previously rocked out to Avenged Sevenfold for the same reason).

As with most of my musical discoveries the past few years, I first heard them on Sirius XM Radio.

So far I’ve only purchased their latest album, Overcome; but if this sound is on their previous albums I’m sure I’ll be picking them up too.

Yeah, a little late to the game on the whole project Euler thing.  A group of us at the office got together last night to go over some of the problems and it was quite fun.

Pilgrim wrote up his thoughts already.

I look forward to next week’s session.

Last July when we released Data Dynamics Reports the company rewarded the team with Apple TVs. Unfortunately not everyone on the team could use them; but I was able to use mine. I used it every now and again to play music on my tv so i could use my speakers for other things and it was great to watch all of the TV series I purchased from the iTunes store.

But the one thing I never did was watch movies on it. The price just wasn’t attractive enough for me. I can stand $2 for a TV episode especially when I can get it before the series comes out on DVD and for the same or lower price; but to pay DVD prices for something i could almost definately find cheaper at wal-mart didn’t seem right. So that functionality went unused. A few times I thought about getting a movie just so I could test the feature out; but never found anything.

Fast forward to Steve Job’s keynote in January where he announced the Apple TV 2 functionality and the addition of movie rentals. And existing Apple TV users would be able to download a software upgrade to boot. After iTunes 7.6 was released, I rented a movie I hadn’t seen in ages but remember fondly, Big Trouble in Little China. The only problem was that the software update was no where to be found, so BTLC sat unwatched on my hard drive for almost a month.

With less than 2 days left before my rental expires they released the software update. Due to bad road conditions I didn’t go into the office today; and minutes after I got the update installed I began watching the movie. I didn’t hit me until now; but I haven’t noticed the quality issues that I noticed on movie rentals from Amazon through TiVo2Go. Later I’ll try an HD rental and see how that is.

The update did break some functionality I prefered, when I bring up the My TV Shows interface I see all of my shows grouped together, where-as before I chose the show to watch and then the episode. When BTLC is over I’ll see if I can reclaim that functionality.

Update: I must not have been paying attention or it remembered the last show I watched before the upgrade because the TV Show functionality is there, I just had to tell it to go back in order to see it.

And it’s even better now…The shows are numbered from XX down to 1.  Oddly I don’t recall the numbers being there when I was on the episode screen before, did it just not update until I reloaded the listing?  Anywho, the update gets a thumbs-up from me.

Also available on iTunes, enjoy!

Phil has posted his experience with Pirates of the Burning Sea during the private beta.  I keep looking back to this game thinking the concept is great, but I haven’t had a chance to play it much.  During the stress test I managed to play it for about an hour before the server crashed and I was never able to get back on it.  Seeing Phil’s thoughts on it I might give it a few months to work out some of the issues before I pick it up.

While reading my gaming feeds last night I came across an odd turn of events. These articles came out in the opposite order; but you can see the quandary clearer if you go in this order:

40GB’s loss of backwards compatibility explained

SCEE managing director Ray Maguire said Sony will use the money it dedicated towards backwards compatibility to invest in new games or to perhaps lower prices so more gamers can afford to buy a PS3.

Sony considers selling manufacturing facilities to Toshiba

The second time in less than a month, Sony is supposedly considering selling its chip manufacturing plants to rival electronics company Toshiba. According to a report by Reuters, “Sony was in negotiations with Toshiba to sell its manufacturing facilities in Nagasaki, also in western Japan, for advanced microchips including the Cell microprocessor.” The Cell processor is a vital part of the PS3 architecture and is one of the costliest and most powerful aspects of the system.

So Sony is going to drop backwards compatibility because it costs too much. And they are supposedly looking to sell a chip manufacturing plant that makes the Cell processor to a rival so they can pay not only the manufacturing cost but an additional profit margin to Toshiba?

Of course there could be other advantages to the sale, consolidating Cell processor manufacturing to other facilities. The factory was losing money, so make the profitability someone else’s problem. But the juxtaposition of those two articles makes one wonder what else Sony is thinking, or not thinking as the case may be.

I think that the lack of backwards compatibility may cause less systems to sell. I picked up my PS3 in July when they announced the price drop. Since I’ve had it I’ve played, maybe, 10-12 hours worth of PS3 games…that could be really stretching it though. On the other hand I’ve played numerous hours of PS2 games on it, I played God of War all the way through (~10 hours), gotten through to Midea being stolen in DQ8 (~14 hours?), almost finished the prologue to Kingdom Hearts 2 (~6 hours). And thats just what I can remember.

As requested I’ve uploaded a few pictures of my iPod to my picasa site; linked below as well.

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I had a welcome package waiting for me when I go to work this morning. My 16GB iPod touch arrived. Drop shipped from China to arriving this morning only took 3 days.

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