Gamehappy go bye bye

Well, I took GameHappy down.

First, I had set up a trial account at TypePad for the site to get a feel for TypePad’s features. It’s a great system, but I get pretty much the same stuff from WordPress for free.

Second, the traffic just wasn’t there. I got an initial spurt of traffic at launch and it climbed well for a few days, then started to dwindle despite me trying valiantly to make at least 3 posts a night.

Finally, I found more and more that all I was doing was rehashing other people’s articles and publishing links to their sites. There really isn’t much that hasn’t already been said on a far more timely basis on any one of a million other games blogs that I was adding to the conversation. So, I shot it in the head.

GameHappy is alive!

CodeHappy was always meant to be a place where I could write about code and geeky stuff, and judging by the comments I’ve seen from friends on their websites I do indeed talk geeky stuff here. The issue at hand though is that Izea takes a huge amount of time and energy. When I get home I often don’t want to talk about code. I’m getting old, since that I used to code my brains out at every opportunity.

One thing I do want to talk about though is games. i started in this industry in games, writing code for the C64 and some of the early publishers that actually helped make what we today call the Games industry. Games are my first love. I actually used to run a blog, before blogs were called blogs, called Dapad. It got a lot of traffic and since I was writing about games in magazines in my spare time I had access to a lot of information that, I think, made the site pretty darn good.

So, I decided to kind of resurrect the idea this evening. I’ve started up a new blog over on typepad called GameHappy. On it I’m going to cover news I find neat, new products, some mini reviews and generally all things game related. The difference though between GameHappy and the mass of other gaming blogs out there is, simply, me!

I’m an old-school gamer. I saw the industry born and grow. I’m not easily swayed by gratuitous violence and sexual content, snazzy graphics or anything like that. I want to know what games are good, playable, and really engage you. I want to know about the people and the technology behind the games. I want to know about the industry as a whole, the companies in it and who’s doing what with who and why. And that’s the focus of GameHappy. Hope you like it.

Vista Service Pack 1 Pre-requisites

It just occurred to me how silly Windows update is. I mean, it must start at the very bottom and work up, identifying oldest updates that apply to a machine first and installing them, then the next, then the next and so on.

I think if I had designed it I’d probably have given Windows Update 2 lists to check - one with all the sundry annoying patches for this and that, and one master roll-up fix list. It just seems to me that with the recent release of Service Pack 1 that would have been an ideal opportunity to roll up the very many fixes and patches into a single download that could do everything, instead of making users wait approx 5 hours installing pre-requisites before they can finally get to downloading Service Pack 1 (which no doubt there are another 200 patches for after it’s installed anyway)

Many a happy (not) hour with Vista and VS2008

I’m off work for the rest of this week as I have friends visiting from England. It’s going to be blast! One of the many treats of living in Orlando is doing the tourist thing when visitors come a-knocking, but this is the first time a friend (as opposed to family) have come over, so I’m really looking forward to it.

Today I’m at home, pottering about tidying up and generally getting the place ready for a guest. When all the chores were done the bug to re-install Vista took over me (I had an issue last night getting a WPF application I”m working on to debug onXP) and so off I set.

Vista installed without a hitch as usual. Contrary to many of the scaremongering reports out there I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem getting Vista installed on something, even during the many betas. The problem I did get though (and am still having) is actually installed Visual Studio 2008 Professional. It just won’t go, crapping out every time the installer tries to put .NET framework 3.5 on my machine. The only thing that’s struck me so far as a possible reason is the mass of Vista updates my machine seems quite happy to quietly download and queue up for install. I wonder if the fact that they are sitting on the machine, waiting to get installed, puts the installation engine into a “do not install anything else yet” kind of mode.

I’m downloading the last few updates now (I think I’m up to about 200 updates so far), and then I’ll set about Service Pack 1. Hopefully after that Visual Studio 2008 will install.

Do you ever find when your machine is out of commission that you get these sudden intense urges to play a game, or pretty much do anything on the machine that’s currently out of commission and just find yourself getting angry at yourself that you can’t? No? Just me then I guess.

SocialSpark is now live

SocialSpark, the application that’s been eating up large chunks of my life for the past 9 months is now officially live.

SocialSpark is the worlds first ever social media marketing network. It provides more ways for bloggers to make cash from their blogging, a vast array of deep analytics tools for bloggers and advertisers alike and a number of key firsts that I’m very proud of. With Buzz TRacking for example, you can track brand name usage across the blogosphere, and ultimately perception of a brand, over time. With our demographics offering Bloggers at last have a great set of analytics tools that will show them not only views and unique traffic on a blog, but also the demographic make up of that traffic (male/female, age range etc) - beat that Google Analytics.

Oh, and did I mention it’s also a pretty neat and freakin awesome social network too The social aspects of the site are great for drawing attention to blogs you may not have come across before, but also serve as a powerful tool for advertisers to hand pick groups of bloggers they want to advertise with. FRom the blogging side, the social aspects also provide an invaluable feedback mechanism that the blogging community can use to let advertisers know what they need.

I’m biased, but I love it. Sign up. Sign up now!

Gear Happy!

We’ve been putting our new site, socialspark through its paces in an Alpha Test lately. Unlike PayPerPost, socialspark is a completely open, transparent system that addresses all our opponents criticisms. socialspark adds required nofollow on all links in sponsored posts, and also brings to the table a full and incredibly powerful set of analytics tools, fantastic campaign management for advertisers, and new options for bloggers including sponsorships (a more traditional form of web advertising, but done really elegantly), and sparks.

Sparks are free opportunities, a way to encourage a conversation in the blogosphere and the post you’re reading now is really the result of a spark. Anyone can create a spark asking bloggers to write about anything (within reason), and anyone can ‘take’ a spark and add to the ongoing conversation.

One of the sparks in our test was to tell the world the gear you use to blog. Technology obsessed as I am, that subject instantly jumped out at me and I had to join the game.

When I joined Izea a couple of years back, I completely switched from PC’s to Macs and loved it. Recently though I felt a yearning to go back to Windows. It has a toolset I’m more familiar with, more variety of applications to get things done, and of course I can game more on a PC than I can on a Mac. More to the point, our investors and many of the financial peeps involved with the company spend their entire days locked inside Excel spreadsheets, and PC’s are just better at working with Excel.

So, today my kit consists of a single computer for everything (work, games, writing, blogging, surfing - you name it). I exclusively use a Sager NP5793 monster of a notebook. It’s loaded to the brim with memory, disk space and state of the art Penryn processors, plus a GeForce 8800GTX graphics card that smokes any desktop I have access to (although, of course, I know there are plenty of desktops out there that could smoke me right back).

For connectivity, most of the time I rely on the notebook’s built in wireless card, but when I always carry a USB cable with me for those times where wireless connectivity is just not available. In those times I simply plug the cable into my Blackberry and go online at near broadband speeds that way.

In terms of cameras, I don’t carry a camera too much these days, and recently my oldest decided to drop my pocket camera and wreck it, leaving me completely digital camera less. You never realize just how much you use a digital camera, rely on it even, until you no longer have one, so a few weeks back I bit the bullet and replaced my broken shutterbox with a very cool Nikon D40 SLR - and it rocks.

I guess the only other gadgets that may interest you lot are the input devices I use. I have carpal tunnel problems, the result of typing on bad keyboards and using crappy mice since I was 11 years old (27 years ago). Now, when I’m sat at a desk at the office or at home, I use Microsoft ergonomic keyboards and Logitech trackballs. At work I use a Logitech Trackman Wheel, while at home I use a Logitech Cordless Trackman Optical (it’s a sturdier trackball, and much better for gaming).

So, that’s my gear.

PS. Some muppets out there have attacked the company in the past for spending (which, if you spent any time here at all, you’d know is just insane - this is one of the most frugal companies I’ve ever worked at), so I just want to point out that every single piece of kit above was bought and paid for by me, and I returned my company laptop for someone else to use, saving the company even more money. So take that Arrington.

Creative demonstrates complete lack of vision, punishes fan

Creative, makers of the ubiquitous Soundblaster line of video cards recently demonstrated an outstanding lack of vision.

Hacker (in the good, loves to create stuff sense) Daniel Kawakami, pissed off that his awesome Soundblaster card just didn’t work right in Windows Vista, took it upon himself to rectify the situation. On his own time, purely for the love of hackery and technology, he ripped apart the standard drivers for the Soundblaster card, found out what wasn’t working right, fixed them and released them. Thanks to Daniel’s passion, Creative Soundblaster users everywhere would be able to at last make full use of their hardware under MIcroosft’s newest operating system.

So, what did Creative do? Did they stand back and applaud Daniel? Did they squeal with delight that they’d found someone so passionate about their own products that he had done what their entire engineering department had not managed to get around to? Did they offer the guy a job? Nope. Instead, they went on the forums where Daniel released his work, and then publicly berated him and threatened him.

Nice job Creative - way to go protecting your assets and patents. Great job preventing the people that spent their hard earned cash on your piles of silicon crap from actually being able to use them.

(…from a story found on Engadget)

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Tags: CreativeSoundblaster Drivers Vista Hacked

Google Code Search to the rescue!

You know, for all their world dominating sins, Google actually have some pretty neat services out there for developers.

I need to write a library this evening to hammer the heck out of Amazon’s Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS), and I’m doing it in Python. Trevor claims to have some code that will do part of what I need, but I wanted to do some exploring on my own in the first instance.

A quick Google for Python AWIS didn’t really reveal anything too helpful, so I guess no-ones taken the time yet to write an AWIS egg for Python. That got me to thinking that perhaps the I’ll write one when things at work calm down and release it under the soon to be revealed Izea Open Source Project (IzOP).

So, with my simple web searches failing I turned to the first of Google’s neato developer resources code.google.

Code.google is a free and open project repository, along the same lines as Sourceforge. It’s an altruistic move on Google’s part to provide the growing landscape of open source developers with a place online to host and share their code. In fact, it’s the same repository that Google themselves use to store their own open source projects for all to see. There’s a ton of stuff in there from fairly trivial libraries to access Facebook’s SocialGraph API to high profile projects such as EA’s in game YouTube uploader for Spore.

Alas, I didn’t find anything useful for working with AWIS there. So, I turned to ;Google CodeSearch;.

Just as Google provide a somewhat dubious tool to delve into book contents and return results, CodeSearch indexes any block of code it can find on the net and exposes it. It’s a search engine for coders Searching for AWIS in codesearch gave me almost exactly what I wanted as the very first search result so I’m very happy.

Now, I know that codesearch and code.google have been with us for quite some time, but all the same I thought it might be useful to some to remind the world of their existence.  

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Tags: GoogleCodeSearch code.google

Some people don’t deserve children.

I don’t normally do the self righteous, save the world, protect the kiddies types of blog posts, but I shall make an exception here.

I just stumbled on a disturbing piece on Engadget. Picture this. A kid, who I don’t think gets much of what he wants really, was completely blown away on Christmas day when he unwrapped one gift and found it to be an XBOX 360. From the video (click the link above), he looked totally and completely stunned. Eagerly he unwraps the rest of the gift, then opens the box only to find winter clothes. His parents and family then start to laugh hysterically while the poor kid really doesn’t know what to do. All the while of course, some caring family member videos the whole event, even going so far as to say “look at the camera when you cry”.

Eventually, utterly dejected and completely humiliated by the continuing guffaws of his family the kid (who did a great job trying to contain himself so far) just breaks down in tears.

What a completely heartless and mean practical joke to play on a child! If a gift like an XBOX is such as a huge deal for a child that he’d be totally awestruck to get one, don’t go and play a mean joke implying that you did. That’s just completely and utterly despicable.

The good news is that Microsoft, having seen the video, stepped up and gave the kid a free machine. Good for Microsoft. Shame shame shame shame on thoughtless practical jokes all for the purpose of capturing ‘funny’ video for YouTube.

Full story here.

Happy Birthday Commodore 64, and Macintosh!

I feel old. Very old. A few weeks back I read a story celebrating 25 years of the Commodore 64. That dull beige little box with a processor speed of 1Mhz represented a turning point for me, the point at which a 13 year old Pete went from gamer to programmer. I had spent the entire summer studying Assembler relentlessly and after much persuading I managed to convince my Dad to buy me a copy of Machine Lightning, the then state of the art in disk based assemblers for Commodore’s baby.

I often look back on those times with a gnawing sense of loss. They were heady days. Almost every month I’d learn of someone pushing a computer to unprecedented new levels and then try to figure out how to do the same myself. It was a time when more than 4 channels of sound from a piece of music on a computer was a breakthrough. I remember the first time I ran up a game with a kicking Rob Hubbard soundtrack, hooking my computer up to my cheap ass stereo to get the music as loud as possible. In hindsight it sounded utter crap, and my Dad let me know that every time I tried to push the volume knob beyond 10. To me though it was incredible, a technological breakthrough, something to be celebrated!

I remember breaking the hardware limit of 8 simultaneous sprites on screen at once, by writing interrupt code that was tied to the actual horizontal position of the screen refresh. It was an optical illusion in many ways, since the little machine really could only display 8 sprites and all we were doing at the time was redisplaying those 8 sprites as the screen refreshed from top to bottom. The very idea that a machine was fast enough to actually figure out where the refresh was happening many times a second and then do something in response was surreal.

The Commodore 64 really marked the birth of the gaming industry as it exists today. There had been numerous home computers and games consoles both before and after that little box, but it was the Commodore, Sinclair/Timex and Apple II that really caused an industry to explode. Gone were the days of scouring classified ads in the back of nerdy computer monthlies for games - now you could actually go into a store and buy one. 9.99 as I recall, for a tape that more often than not I’d have to return because my crappy tape player wouldn’t load the game.

That little machine is the reason I’m here today, sitting on my couch banging out words to post in my blog. Without it I don’t know what I’d be doing with my life right now (but it would probably be something healthier, I’d weigh a little less and I’d probably have a few more friends). Everything I see around me today I know I have because of the time I spent with the Commodore 64.

Today is another anniversary in tech as well. Today, 24 years ago, Apple released the Macintosh. Of course we didn’t have an “Internet” in 1984 and so it would be some considerable time later before I’d get to see the infamous 1984 commercial, or Steve’s legendary launch keynote. I do remember reading about the machine though, probably in PC World magazine, and I do vividly remember going to a monthly computer club meeting and being in awe of some guy that actually showed up with one. I couldn’t get anywhere near it to use it, but what I saw left me breathless. Windows, icons, a mouse. It was like a video game, but for being productive. And the graphics! Hi-Resolution graphics for a user interface, graphics that even rivaled the stuff we were doing in games, and this wasn’t a game at all.

It’s funny – I spent a few minutes yesterday arguing semantics with a young programmer about why Ruby was not compiled, and what the difference between an interpreter and a compiler is. It struck me that there’s a whole generation that will never know the thrill of the discoveries we made back in the 80’s, a whole generation of programmers that don’t know Assembler, and who have never actually measured out the clock cycles of a machine against their lines of code to try to squeeze in some routine in a finite micro second of time between screen refreshes. I think I started to feel really old when I realized that, and today’s anniversary of the Mac, this year’s anniversary of the CBM 64 just serve to reinforce the feeling.

Still, I wouldn’t have it anyway. There’s no way I would want to have missed the thrill of being part of a revolution.