Wednesday, February 20, 2008

On my way to the Game Developers Conference...

Yes, it's that time of year again. The GCD is in full effect in San Francisco and I'll be leaving in a few short hours to rub elbows (hopefully just elbows) with the best and brightest in the video game industry.

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"Got plans," you ask?

Why yes I do. I'm hoping to meet the peeps from Qube and get a demo of their Q Middleware solution...

Q is a new middleware for games and other real-time 3D applications, the result of everything we've learned through our history, creating Reality Lab at RenderMorphics, and Direct3D at Microsoft, working with game developers and hardware vendors whilst integrating real-time 3D into the world's biggest selling operating system.

I also met the ScaleForm GFX crew last year, hopefully they have a Indie solution for me this year.

Last, but not least, I was really impressed with the TorqueX system from GarageGames and that coupled with the XBox 360 content creation account I expect to see some great stuff at the Independent Games Festival this year running native on 360s.

If Hollywood was a Person...

Wacky stuff going on in the on-line comics space. The "Funny Pages" might be the canary in the coal mine of what will eventually happen to TV/Music and radio.

Click around Subnormality and you can find a wealth of free (and paid) content that's as good (if not better) than the crap in your local paper.

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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Added ShareThis to the Site

I met a few of the principles from ShareThis at my work yesterday and decided to add their tool to my personal blog, just to try it out.

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It's the green button below...

UPDATE: It looks like I messed something up that's keeping it from working with IE. I'll take a look at fixing it later this evening.

UPDATE: Working again. Looks like I had a case of RTFM.

Friday, February 08, 2008

UPDATE: Interesting Password Generator

You probably don't know, but I'm a password junkie. I have well over 100 sites that have user names and passwords.

To stay secure, I try to different passwords for each site I visit. That way if someone discovers my password on one site (like the OC fansite message board) they can’t use it on another site (like the Desparate Housewives fansite message board.)

So, I try to use a combination of a single password (awesomesauce) with the site that I’m on (ebay) into a new password (ebayawesomesauce). You can imagine how complicated that gets on hundreds of websites and how easy it would be to crack that code if you saw a few passwords.

Here comes the SuperGenPass to the rescue. It will generate new passwords based on the domain of the site you are using in conjunction with a “master password” encrypted to the point where no one can see the master password in the first place.

Confused yet? Check it out and keep your identity safe(r).

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Stupid Stat: 5 Big MMORPGs Have More People than Poland

When you total the subscriber bases of 5 of the largest  MMORPGs they hit a whopping 45,000,000+ users. As of 2002, the total population of Poland was 36,983,720.

Want proof? Here's a chart :) **

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I picked these five pretty much at random to show a mix of free, paid, US and Asian. Numbers are rounded and are probably made up by the companies themselves.

** Of course, finding these numbers isn't easy. Here's the sources for each of these numbers. Ragnarok Online, GameSpot Article. World of Warcraft, Blizzard Press Release. Lineage I + II, MMOCharts.com. Gaia Online, GigaGames.com Article. RuneScape, MMOCharts.com.

Take that, Bob.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Windows Live Writer gives Blogger a GUI

Check out Windows Live Writer--a free download from Micro$oft. It gives you a great WYSIWYG editor for your blog even if it's hosted by Google.

Download and installation took quite a while for such a small program, but configuring it for my blog took no time at all. It even grabbed a sample post from my site to allow me see in real-time what my post will look like. I've made major updates to the templates Blogger gives you and I'm self-hosting so that's no small feat.

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Small centered text? Check.

It also gives you drag and drop image support (see above). I'm planning to step up up posting on the myriad (yep, spell check works) of blogs I've started and abandoned, so this should keep me engaged for a while.

I totally found this on Timmy's TechToolBlog so blame him if it destroy's your system.