DarqByte

So I’ve kinda wanted to develop applications for the iPhone, but it’s so saturated… I don’t know Objective-C and there are already tons of applications for the iPhone and shitloads of awesome developers for it.

Enter the Palm Pre. It’s built on webOS, which uses HTML, CSS and Javascript to get the job done. This is great for me, since I’ve been a web developer for quite some time.

I’ve just applied to the beta program to develop for the Palm Pre. I’ve got a couple of ideas I want to try, so hopefully they’ll admit me to the program. I’m also curious to see if they’re handing out development-model Pres to work with. That would be cool too, I’d like that.

Let’s hope I get in the program and develop that killer app that’ll make me rich. Haha!

I’m having trouble figuring out what to talk about today for my blog post. There’s not a whole lot on my mind right now that I feel like posting about.

I already talked about Watchmen… And it’s sticking with me. Sometimes media will stick with me after I’ve “consumed” it, be it movies, books, music or video games. When I say sticking with me, I mean it kind-of takes up a temporary residence in my memory. Spoiler Alert Like the scene in Gears of War 2 where Dom finds his wife and basically has to kill her because she’s been broken by torture, that stuck with me for about a day End Spoiler Alert. So Watchmen has stuck with me for a bunch of reasons, be it the story, the romance between two characters… Even the graphic novel stuck with me.

I can’t talk yet about the photo shoot that Laura and I did last night for Project: FH – March 2009. Although you can preview it a little with this post on her blog. The final result of that shoot will be awesome.

I did see No Country For Old Men the other day on my XBox 360 via Netflix. It was a good movie, but the ending wasn’t quite what I was looking for. But oh well, it’s a Cohen brothers’ movie.

Let’s see, what to talk about… I think I’m going to get a wireless bridge for the entertainment center downstairs, that way I can network all of the devices there to our wireless network. Our wireless router sits upstairs and I’m not running cable all the way down to network, so a bridge will suffice. Want to get coach lights and bar lights for the house sometime soon… Blu-Ray player and home theater PC eventually…

I wouldn’t mind getting Street Fighter IV either, as well as The Lost and the Damned expansion for GTA IV. I’ve chewed through a good deal of my Christmas video game haul thusly:

1. Beat Fallout 3
2. Guitar Hero: World Tour play continues on
3. I’m done with Need for Speed Undercover
4. Not done with Dead Space, but it’s intermittent when I play for various reasons (creepiness indeed!)
5. Defeated Gears of War 2 campaign and have moved on to online play (Horde mode FTW)

I’ve got some other XBox Live Arcade games I’m in the middle of a bit too:

1. Braid, I’m a few worlds in on this one
2. Portal, I want to start doing some of the challenges

Well, there’s a recap for you.

Oh, and I tried to make an artistic look at my Zoolander photo from Project: FH – February 2009. I couldn’t make one work very well, there’s too much detail that needs to be kept from the original photo to make it work. Sorry Katie & Sarah!

So Steven pointed out to me today that Apple’s released Safari 4 in beta. Supposedly, it’s faster than Google Chrome in terms of rendering speed and Javascript execution speed. Chrome, when it was released, was leap years ahead of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox in terms of speed. It didn’t have the overall polish the other two did, but nonetheless it was a good browser.

I use Google Chrome for limited tasks at work, but that’s about it. I prefer Firefox because it supports extensions, even if Chrome is superior to it in terms of speed. But Safari 4 beats Chrome, even if it is by a small margin. And they’ve got nifty iPod-like features on it like a Cover Flow.

All of this got me to thinking about how Javascript is very important to web development these days. In the early days, Javascript was more a toy than anything else. Something to make some neat effects happen on websites, but since the speed of JS execution in the browser was slow, nobody ever really used it.

Then came Web 2.0 and all its Ajaxy goodness. Utilizing a model where Javascript would send a request to a server for a small piece of data to update an already-displayed page, it made websites more interactive and lower on bandwidth usage since small chunks of data could be used to modify a page.

In all of this, however, was the fact that browsers were still pretty slow and low-tech on Javascript. Sure, Javascript was needed greatly to facilitate Web 2.0, but nobody had ever put much into making it work very well and fast in a browser. Enter Google Chrome.

So that’s the back-story. Web 2.0 is in our lives now and Javascript execution speeds keep shrinking. Web 2.0 really is about making websites seem like they are rich clients on a desktop. For those who aren’t quite sure what I’m saying, think of it this way: GMail. Google’s GMail product is a pretty good example of a website that acts a lot like a program that you download and install to your computer. But it’s all through a browser. That’s Web 2.0.

See back a long time ago, we didn’t have desktop computers. Computing was all done in these massive mainframes because computers were ginormous back then. You couldn’t fit a computer on your desk at all. So the only way to interface with the mainframe was by using a terminal. A terminal was basically a screen, keyboard and mouse connected to a system that basically went to the mainframe for everything. No real computing power, just remote access to the big guy.

Then desktops started appearing and we all moved into a model where the computing work was done on individual machines at our desks. Good times, no?

Well, Web 2.0 is taking us back, a little. It’s more like the old days than the new, because the usage of Ajax calls and faster Javascript execution really plays into the whole idea of “Fire up your browser and use apps on the web.” Theoretically, we could end up with all major applications being Web 2.0-style websites that all you need to have to use them is a browser like Safari or Chrome. No need to download or install any software. I mean, aside from neat little add-ons, are you required to download anything for GMail? No.

I just find it interesting that the old ways of computing, where you’d have one huge massive powerhouse computer with terminals attached, would make its way into modern society, where you’ve got browser’s making small requests to a server for application interaction.

I don’t think it’ll get extreme, but the cycle was very interesting to me.

So I’ve got another irritated video games post to write, in-part as a followup to my post about a certain missions in NFS being difficult. I should also mention Jenner Cauton’s F9 blog, where he rants and raves about video games on a semi-daily basis. There are some good ones in there.

So last night I played some Mario Kart Wii and some more Need For Speed: Undercover. All-in-all, tons of fun, especially MKW. That game is pretty fun and I’m looking forward to unlocking most of the stuff so when party-goers come over we can choose from anything in the game to play.

But today is a day for ranting about video game AI, especially these two racing games. Let’s start with MKW.

Mario Kart has, and probably always will be, a really fun game because it can help level the playing field. The game does a really good job in keeping all of the racers in the game provided that the racers aren’t falling off the track every two seconds. This is good for competitive reasons and to keep the players interested in the game, but it’s not good for people that are truly dominating the game, especially when said player is playing alone.

Whatever do I mean? Well, for example, last night I was dominating the computer AI racers. Just annihilating them. Consistently in first , finished most of the races in first place too. But not all of them.

The items in MKW can really level the playing field. Racers in the back of the pack, by percentage, have a high rate of getting items that can really tip the balance of the race. Turning into Bullet Bill, for example, can get you ahead of half of the pack. Getting the blue shell will annihilate the race leader for a decent amount of time, allowing others to catch up. Red shells are homing shells, etc.

Well, a few times last night I experienced stretches where the computer AI players were throwing the book at me. There was one time in particular that I was surprised I even ended up in first. I had red shells and blue shells galore connecting with me, yet I still ended up in first by about 4-5 seconds. Imagine if I hadn’t had an inordinately large amount of items hit me. Another race I had about a half-lap lead on the AI going into the last lap. I ended 4th and did not totally fuck up during the race.

Overcompensating AI is irritating at times, especially if it can have a drastic impact in the game, much like MKW. But it’s not too bad there because MKW levels the field. It’s easy to get crushed but make a comeback because the very devices that can bring you down from first can put you back there.

Now, NFS is another story… NFS does have some balancing features in the AI, and it’s usually features designed to keep the AI racers somewhat competitive. The game is really pretty easy, but there are times when it’s overboard on how obviously it’s trying to keep the race close or get you into second place.

One thing I’ve noticed about the game is its placement of traffic. Oftentimes, you can see traffic coming up ahead and adjust accordingly. Although the faster you go, the tougher this is, especially around curves and hills… And hills are bitches to get through.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been worried about what’s coming up over the hill. And I can’t tell you how many of those times there was a car waiting for me to smack it dead center because I just absolutely could not see it coming. Or around a bend, for that matter.

And the problem with this? The computer AI acts too well in these situations. Obviously, the AI knows the car is there.  But does the AI take into account that a real driver wouldn’t be able to see the obstacle on the other side? No. Aside from the random factor the game throws in to simulate mistakes, AI racers almost always miss obstacles around curves or over hills.

This wouldn’t be so much of a problem, much like MKW, if mistakes such as these weren’t so crippling. If you’re trying to achieve Domination status for a race, you can’t really make many mistakes. And mistakes like this can absolutely kill your chances for winning certain race types, such as the one where the winning racer is the one that puts 1000 feet between themselves and their singular opponent.

On a side note, I’ve also noticed in NFS that opponent AI is really good at not spinning out. Too good. Countless times have I had encounters with AI racers, hitting from all sides and angles and different formations, and the only car to spin out, should one of us spin out, is me. Irritating.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the blog post title. Firkin is indeed not a word. But I’m making it one. See, the word frickin’ is a “clean” version for the word fucking. I’m taking it one step further, transposing and making it sound more fun, by using firkin. It reads as “fur-kin.” Have fun with that one!

Alright, so recently I got on Twitter. All of my trillions of readers should know this, as I keep my Twitter feed running here on my blog as well.

In any case, I’ve begun following different celebrities, such as LeVar Burton and Wil Wheaton. I’ve also started following people whom I’m not sure if they can be considered celebrities, such as Libe Goad and Trixie 360. It’s gotten me to thinking about my level of excitement when they Tweet and, after I reply to something they’ve said, when they actually reply to me or reference something I’ve said publicly.

It’s semi-exciting for me when Wil Wheaton, for example, completely destroys my suggestion that Van Halen’s OU812 album is better than some other album out there, or when Trixie replies back to me in a discussion on music (see previous post, haha).

I think the reason for this is because Twitter is very social, and a lot of people get excited about the idea of being social with celebrities. Not only that, but social in a medium that makes the “average person” feel on the same level as a celebrity.

I mean, celebrities all eat and sleep like the rest of us, but we never get excited about that parallel. We don’t get excited about celebrities’ MySpace pages because we know they’re probably not the one doing the actual updates. But Twitter is different.

LeVar Burton, for example, is very active on Twitter and is a big proponent of other celebrities starting to use it. The fact that he uses it all the time probably makes people feel like they’re on a more personal level with him because in Twitter, they’re more like equals than anywhere else, be it financially, social status, etc.

So I’m just going to continue being happy that Trixie thinks I’m cool enough to reply to once in awhile, and that Wil Wheaton totally annihilated one of my opinions. lol

Ok, so remember my post recently about certain things in video games being too hard? I posted it two days ago.

Well, last night, before I started watching the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels eventually lose to the San Diego State Aztecs, I decided to load up Need For Speed: Undercover again and play a bit. I played some of the races and farted around randomly. Then I decided, just for shits and giggles, to try that one job again.

Hm… Now that’s interesting… One try and I defeat it… All while barely taking any damage to the car…

Well, I can tell you the one thing I did differently than the other times was I actively seeked out racebreakers, which are points in the city that you race in that can be activated in some manner to cause roadblocks and disable police cruisers. You usually activate them by smashing into one part connected to them, such as a weak beam for an overpass.

So maybe it wasn’t quite as hard as I thought it was… It was still damn irritating when I couldn’t beat it though.

Just wanted to play around with a new plugin I installed here on my blog for code syntax highlighting! Yes, the geek in me comes forth today.

< ?
echo "Hello World!";
?>

Haha. I’m hilarious.

Retro video games almost always had enormously difficult levels in them. Take the original Donkey Kong, for example. Even the early levels in that game were tough. You had to be insanely awesome to reach even, say, the 10th level.

When video games started becoming mainstream, they started getting a little easier. If you’re trying to appeal to a wide audience, then that wide audience needs to eventually be able to beat the game. That isn’t to say the game should be a cakewalk, but it certainly shouldn’t put up a brick wall so tough that only Jonathan Wendel can defeat it.

So since I’ve defeated Fallout 3′s main quest, I’ve been sprinkling in other games. I’ve been mostly playing Dead Space, which is awesome by the way. But I’ve also been playing some Need For Speed: Undercover and Guitar Hero: World Tour.

Tonight I was playing NFS. It’s a fun game, even if it’s not totally deep and whatnot. In the game, you’ll occasionally get “jobs” from another local racer. Basically, the job is to steal a specific car and drop it off at a chop shop. A bit like GTA, actually.

The police force in the game is pretty effective. You can’t lose them easily and at the higher levels, they’re a downright, well, force to be dealt with. If you end up getting the helicopter following you, good luck, because you’ll never lose it. You have to outlast it.

So all this step for, I know you’re expecting it — a car theft while being followed by the top-tier police force with a helicopter. And let’s not stop there, ohh no — you can’t total the car either. If it sustains too much damage, theft over.

I’ve done a couple other thefts in the game so far and they’re really not that bad. One of them had the same mechanics, save for swapping out the helicopter for a timer that you had to beat in getting to the chop shop without police presence.

But this one is, so far, ludicrous. I’m always up for a challenge in the games I play, but this is just too far. The story won’t progress unless you complete the jobs. You can’t unlock better cars and parts without completing the jobs. And here I am, relatively early on in the game, presented with such a big challenge that after about 45-60 minutes of trying, I have to stop and write an irked blog post about it.

Some people lately have been lamenting that games have indeed gotten easier as time has gone on. In some of them, all you really have to do is play long enough to beat it. But basically blocking, let’s say 60%+ of a game’s story because of a ridiculously difficult “job?” Come on. This is stupid. The last thing EA needs is for me to feel ripped off because here’s this $60 game that I can’t play anywhere near all of because of some stupidly difficult challenge early on.

See… Think about it this way. If the difficult challenge is for you to solve some puzzle or something of that nature, that’s ok. At the very least, you could look up the solution online. If the difficult challenge is to perform a set of actions in particular order with good timing or whatnot, that’s alright too. But when the challenge is, say, losing a really good police force AI with a helicopter while not totalling a car… Stupid hard.

EA didn’t play the balancing act well on this one. If I get held up on this one spot too long, I’ll feel really ripped off and may not play the game again, or any other future NFS game…

I don’t normally write about technical things on my blog, but I’ve got to here.

If you venture over to Laura’s blog, at least at the time I’m posting this, you’ll find all of her uploaded photos missing. Why?

I’m using Subversion for source control on my server. It allows me to keep all of the files for all of the websites on the server archived, so that if I ever need to go back to a previous version or get those files easily on another computer, there you go.

Well, Subversion’s got a set of commands for adding new files, deleting files and committing what you want to do:

• svn add <file|folder>
• svn del <file|folder>
• svn commit

Basically, you use add to schedule adding a file or folder to source control. You use del to schedule deleting a file or folder to source control. You use commit to actually execute the scheduled commands to the server.

So it’s obvious I did a del, right? Well… Sort-of. I did svn add on Laura’s uploads/ directory to add the directory to source control. I was then going to have it ignore any uploaded files because I don’t want those in source control.

Well, add is a recursive command, meaning, any files and folders within uploads/ would be scheduled to be added too. This wasn’t the behavior I wanted, and forgot to add a flag to the add command to only work on that one directory and not those underneath it.

So I performed an svn del because I wanted to remove the scheduled addition of all of those files to source control. Only problem is, it actually removed those files from the local filesystem too. So thus, all of Laura’s uploads were lost. Again, I forgot a flag. The flag I forgot this time was to leave all of the local files in place and only schedule the removal on the server.

So… What’s the problem? The problem is, Subversion is built around not losing things. If I had committed the add before running the del, then I could have at least gotten the files back out of an older revision and then done some work afterwords to fix things.

The problem here was the default behavior. My problem was, I was trying to add files that were not in Subversion control, but performed a del before committing those files. The default behavior was to remove them from the local filesystem, but the problem with that is, they weren’t in Subversion control! They were only scheduled to be added!

That’s an awful, awful default behavior. Sure, I really fucked it up, but the default behavior for an add->del combo without a commit should be to just remove the scheduled add and leave the local files alone.

Poor Laura’s going to have to re-upload all of her files now. D’oh! I owe her now.

So while Laura’s got her 365-Day Project going on, I figured I should do the same. You know, take a picture once a day and post it online. Little did I know that my wonderful wife would refuse to alternate which days each of us got the DSLR camera we have. It’s more her camera than mine, but nonetheless… I got locked out.

I briefly toyed with the idea of a 365-Day iPhone Project, but then decided I didn’t want to have to constantly connect my iPhone to my home laptop to do it.

Well, the other day I got TwitterFon on my iPhone. It’s a nice little Twitter client that has built-in support for replies, direct messages, searching, etc. And when I was writing a Tweet on it, I noticed an icon for a photo… Lo-and-behold, my savior!

It integrates with TwitPic, a picture hosting service for the purposes of putting short URLs to pictures into your Tweets. The thought occurred to me: I could use TwitterFon to get my iPhone photos into my Tweets! Granted, it’s not posting the photos on my blog or Facebook, but in my Tweets!

All I needed was a way to tag my Tweets that are in this project as such, and the nice convention of #<keyword> helped. Basically, I put #iphonephoto in all of my iPhone Photo A Day Tweets to tag them, which makes them searchable in Twitter.

I’ve already posted two, which you can see here. If you’re on Twitter, start following me, I’m rfludwick. All you need to do is keep up with #iphonephoto and you’re good. And I highly suggest participating if you’re on Twitter and have an iPhone. It can be random posts, anything really!