May 2012
5 posts
Netflix: Disgruntled customers rejoining service →
Not surprised.
Day 1 User Reviews of Diablo 3: An Example of... →
Look at all the user reviews of Diablo 3 - most of them are negative. Why? Is it because the game sucks?
Not at all! It’s because people can’t log in to their battle.net accounts to authenticate that they are valid users. Now, this post isn’t about the crappiness of DRM in gaming. The point that I’m trying to show is how critical solid operations are to the user experience of your product. In...
3 tags
IBM's Experience at Devops Days Austin 2012 →
A link to my writeup of my team’s experience at Devops Days Austin this past April.
6 tags
Quick Tip: Testing XPATH Selectors in Chrome / Web...
I’ve been playing around with some web scraping lately in Yahoo Pipes and have been dealing with creating XPath selectors.
If you ever have to work with XPath syntax and testing a selector, you can use Web Inspector’s console to test a page with the following syntax:
$x("//your/selector[@id='test']")
Rands In Repose: Two Universes →
April 2012
9 posts
JavaScript on the XBox 360 →
6 tags
Ruby concurrency explained →
AWESOME deep dive into the benefits and drawbacks of Ruby 1.9’s threading features.
3D Pop-up Book Using CSS 3D →
Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What... →
IBM Joins OpenStack →
7 tags
How to run VBScript from Notepad++ →
Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection... →
Awesome (and easy to read) writeup of how Ruby 2.0’s garbage collection will take advantage of the copy-on-write method to save memory.
17 tags
Notes from DevOps Days (Austin 2012) Presentations...
DevOps State of the Union Kickoff - John Willis
“DevOps is a cultural and professional movement” - Adam Jacob
All started when John Allspaw did a presentation at Velocity saying that Flickr does 10+ deploys a day
DevOps Days Mountain View in 2009 really kicked off the movement because it got Velocity crowd and big name analysts to attend
John Willis and Damon Edwards saw a ton of...
March 2012
4 posts
16 tags
In Depth Analysis of Bioware's PR Strategy w/r/t... →
To give some context, the player base of Mass Effect are extremely mad at the ending of the trilogy. This is due to the promises made waaay back in 2006-2007 that choices you make in Mass Effect 1 may affect the ending you receive at the end of the trilogy years later.
Well, years later arrived and it turns out that almost none of the choices you made along the path of the game affected the...
14 tags
IBM Pulse 2012: Tivoli gets the bleeding edge of... →
I attended my first IBM Pulse conference last week to help showcase the work my team and I have been doing since I left school last June. I know I’ve been fairly quiet on this blog about my current work, but the gist of it is that I’ve been part of the team that is making sure that IBM and Tivoli delivers on the idea of “DevOps” (or its other name, “continuous...
February 2012
9 posts
11 tags
Using OVF Images in VMWare Fusion
For an upcoming demo, I had to set up a couple of virtual images on my machine to act as app servers. The problem I had to deal with was how do I import them into VMWare Fusion 4 when they were made with ESX4 and Workstation 7?
Well it turned out that I needed to convert the virtual image from OVF format into VMX since Fusion does not read OVF (afaik).
To convert the image from OVF to VMX, you...
Use Messages as a Multi-Device Clipboard →
15 tags
Ruby: In-place Progress Output with Net::SCP
I really like the Net::SSH and Net::SCP gems, they are pure ruby implementations of the SSH and SCP protocols. I’ve been playing around with these gems lately and I noticed an interesting tidbit in Net::SCP’s docs:
To receive progress reports for the current operation, just pass a block to upload or
download (or one of their variants):
scp.upload!("/path/to/local",...
Gilt Groupe's CEO on Building a Team of A Players →
R.A. Salvatore's Awesome Everquest Story →
If you’ve read some of Salvatore’s Drizzt series, you’ll appreciate this story.
Start your day as a producer →
I make sure to start every day as a producer, not a consumer.
When you get up, you may start with a good routine like showering and eating, but as
soon as you find yourself with some free time you probably get that urge to check Reddit,
open that game you were playing, see what you’re missing on Facebook, etc.
Put all of this off until “later”. Start your first...
4 tags
January 2012
8 posts
11 tags
5 tags
Even the Mozilla Web Dev Team is doing Continuous... →
14 tags
Printing Colored Output Text in Ruby
If you’ve played with the CLIs of various Ruby gems, you’ve probably encountered colored output of strings. I’ve always wondered how to do this myself and tonight I found that ANSI Escape Sequences are the solution to this problem!
If you are wondering how to print colored output as well, I refer you to the following:
How to output my ruby commandline text in different...
This paper-thin wafer may be the next big thing in... →
This seems like a pretty cool technology for gaming controllers and mobile devices in general. Here’s how it works:
The haptic effects in this case are created by a “dialectric elastomer film” sandwiched
between two layers of electrodes. The electrodes contract when electric current is
introduced, causing movement. You still need mass in order to give the player a
satisfying...
Why is good UI design so hard for some Developers? →
This pretty much sums up the way I look at designing the software I build:
What can you do to remedy it? The more hardcore you are as a programmer, the less
open you will be to normal user thinking. It will be alien and clueless to you. You will
think: I can’t imagine how people could ever use a computer with this lack of knowledge.
But they can. For every UI element, think...
11 tags
Bastion on the Chrome Store →
I just tried the demo for Bastion via Chrome and I’m really impressed by the performance of it on the Mac. The only thing that sucks is the lack of controller support.
16 tags
Mac OS X: Google Chrome Profile Could Not Be...
I recently hit this error every time I went to open chrome on OS X:
Google Chrome Profile Could Not Be Opened Correctly Error
To fix this on OS X:
Quit Google Chrome.
Open Terminal.
Change directory (cd) to
/Users/{user}/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default
Delete Web Data and History files:
rm -rf History*; rm -rf Web\ Data;
Start Google Chrome and the error should...
December 2011
11 posts
9 tags
Why EA Games is an Awful Stock →
Domain Transfer Day on 12/29 because GoDaddy... →
I plan on making the move. I’d recommend you do too if your domain is hosted with them as well.
Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for... →
The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX for the... →
Interesting post of how legacy code of a great system can be a major blocker to it’s evolution.
Vivek Haldar : GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression →
Cave Story+ →
If you were ever a fan of playing Super Nintendo games like Castlevania or Metroid - you need to play Cave Story.
16 tags
Automating Application Deployment: Environment...
I’ve been writing a lot of deployment automation scripts at work lately, and it’s been a great learning experience. One of the problems I noticed recently while writing some scripts to install JRuby was the reliance that some applications have on environment variables.
When writing automation scripts, the code needs to understand every minute detail that goes into an...
Wikistream: A live stream of wikipedia edits →
The 45 Most Powerful Images of the Year →
November 2011
8 posts
Reinventing engine trails in EVE Online - Dev Blog →
A great example of how basic fundamentals of 3D programming can still be used to create neat effects in modern games.
What I Learned Building the Apple Store - Ron... →
So the challenge for retailers isn’t “how do we mimic the Apple Store” or any other store
that seems like a good model. It’s a very different problem, one that’s conceptually
similar to what Steve Jobs faced with the iPhone. He didn’t ask, “How do we build a phone
that can achieve a two percent market share?” He asked, “How do we...
8 tags
Retail Isn't Broken. Stores Are →
For most stores, moving from a transaction mind-set—“how do we sell more stuff?”—to a
value-creation mind-set will require a complete overhaul. The Apple Store succeeded not
because we tweaked the traditional model. We reimagined everything. We completely
rethought the concept of “try before you buy”: You can test-drive any product, loaded
with the applications and types of content...
