Daniel (Moird)

Blog has been moved

moird — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:07:55 +0000

In the process of getting it all setup at www.moird.com

Onlive

moird — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:17:07 +0000

Onlive
Ok, I am going to jump on this one too as it is interesting and it is creating a fair amount of media buzz surrounding it. First of all I think it is a neat idea with some fascinating prospects around it. There is a lot of flexibility with the system and some possibilities game wise that may not have/could not have fully been explored before.
The technology as it is contrary to what everyone has been saying is not that new. Actually very similar things have been up and running for a long time in the form of Remote Desktop however remote desktop never was fully geared for gaming on the remote connected machine by even one connection. Even though people tried with mixed levels of success. So onlive has made changes to the remote desktop idea and is gearing it specifically for games. And instead of connecting and having full control over a system somewhere they have made it so that a player connects to a cloud and simply plays the game. The management of the games is all done by onlive and the player simply has to connect and play.
I am extremely curious to the networking aspect though. There are only so many things that can be done to reduce latency across network connections and a lot of areas of consideration in between. For instance, a ping packet is a relatively small packet of information that gets echoed by a another computer somewhere, and even on a local network there is a specific amount of time this packet takes to reach the destination computer and be returned. Now Onlive is talking about streaming video from a game and taking player input across a wide area network where in the better case scenarios there would be about a .1 (100ms) delay between sending the command and receiving the result. That is figuring about a 50ms latency between your system and theirs. The real question would be how the system handles latency in excess of 500ms.
This is all fine and well, they likely have done everything that they can to optimize the whole system. My concerns more lie on the side of what things they have done to handle the scenarios where the network isn’t running as optimally as they hope. Including time periods where there might be usage surges on their equipment like when a hot new title is released and everyone is rushing to get on and play it. Another question would be how well does like cable connections from comcast would hold up to two of these running at the same time on the same network connection. Another scenario would be if I wanted to pick up and go over to a friends house with the tvbox in tow how well would that work. I get this feeling that it really is being catered to a single gamer in the household with little on how well multiple of these connections would hold up in a house that has more than one gamer. Especially with the current connection requirements for standard/hd being 1.5mbps and 5mbps respectively. So if you were to take this over to your friends to have a mini lan party and they only have a 10mbps cable modem you would be really stressing their connection with two hd connections. And that still isn’t accounting for any of the other possible network issues that might come about while doing that.
Now there is plenty of technological hurdles, and customer hurdles for a system like this to really take off. It does offer some unique possibilities for game developers that haven’t really been seen before. Not just what everyone else has talked about i.e. software piracy and not having to wait for releases in lines at the store etc. There are other interesting prospects like really large scale games that have even more system requirements than what a household could possibly handle on their own systems networked together. What I mean is the games are running in a cloud of servers, and there are significantly more resources at the games disposal. Who says a game can’t be written to use more of those resources for like AI processing or for more expansive level designs.
Honestly I have preferred digital downloads for software to actually having the discs for a long time now. So long as I am able to download it again if it gets trashed on my computer. So Onlive’s method of holding the games doesn’t bother me really at all. This particular method is actually not a bad way of doing it, you don’t have to worry about patching your game to be able to run it, or install the game. Plus it alleviates some of the platform issues without requiring the developers to rewrite code to make it work on the different platforms. I see this as incredibly beneficial as then the game offerings that can be played on a Mac goes up significantly. Plus I can opt to play these games on a tv with their tv box if I wanted to.
All things considering, I really am excited to see this in action and see how it does. I don’t think that it will upset the console makers initially or even for a while. Honestly there really is no way to determine right now how well it does other than the general excitement it has been eliciting across the internet and media. I think that there is a good possibility that it would be an awesome system and I would be more than willing to try it out/purchase one when they are made available. And can’t forget, it is Shiny!

Moving off WordPress.com

moird — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:42:27 +0000

Well seemingly this is a short lived blog as I plan on moving away from it here in another week or two. But until then I will keep posting here as things go until I get the new service setup. The issue that I have with wordpress can easily be solved if I host it myself and can add plugins. Specifically for putting in code blocks and such which really isn’t that big of a deal. The other reason is because I feel like everything I am trying to do is a little too scattered as it is. When I can get a hosting package and setup everything that I need in the one spot and not have to go back and forth between services trying to fill in the gaps where possible. Seems a little anti productive and the extra time needed to manage across the different services could be better spent. But until I get it all setup I will probably continue to post here for a little while longer at least.

Wow mod xcalc

moird — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:51:53 +0000

So finally after about 6 months or so I got around to updating my World of Warcraft mod xcalc. Originally this mod I was using to learn a bit about lua and such, but as it turned out a fair amount of people wanted a calculator in wow and such. The update was not much more than some bug fixes I really didn’t add any features to the bill, there is only so many things that I can do at this point with it that might be useful like maybe a history of the last several calculations performed, and some better control on what kind of calculations can be performed. But that might be a little much for the addon too, and considering I haven’t really been playing the game that much of late it might just end up being left as is for the most part.
The latest update can be found here: Wowinterface – xcalc

Open Source Hosting

moird — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:55:49 +0000

So as it turns out I have only really tried two different open source hosts, but Figured I could write a few things about them.

SourceForge

Sourceforge has been pretty good for me overall. With the services hosting thing they are doing right now it has really gotten flexible with what you can do with sourceforge besides just hosting some code and a few other things maybe. Also with the ability to fairly easily turn those particular features on and off they really work well as an open source host (at least for me so far). My only real complaint would be with the project approval process, I understand why they would have it, but I think it could be worked on a bit. The bad thing with that would be for getting a project going if a person was going to put in for it on a friday they would likely have to wait until sometime the following week before they could start setting up the sourceforge site. I am sure relatively minor inconvenience for the people who are serious about their project, but still something I think could be made a little more streamlined. Overall though very well suited for large projects that require a variety of options/trackers whatever is needed to make the project work better.

Google Code

Google code is a whole different beast on its own. From what I have noticed more suited to smaller/quick get a project going and out the door type of hosting. Albeit what they offer is very well done, but for me there just are some things that I think are helpful to projects. Like forums instead of just mailing lists (not a big fan of mailing lists honestly). But the bug tracker and the wiki are nice and work well. They are at least easy to customize to a point and make them work well enough for most. But for me I still think it is better for smaller projects. Google also imposes some limits, like the entire project (source code/wiki/bug tracker etc) can only use up to 10mb and is limited to subversion only.

Overall both are good, I think when looking for open source hosting, the biggest consideration is what features are needed/wanted most to make your own project successful.

do you really need a college degree to get a programming job

moird — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:37:26 +0000

So this was an interesting article here at: javaworld about if a company was likely to find the most brilliant programmers by including a requirement for a bachelors degree to help filter out candidates for a particular job. For the most part I would agree with what he is saying, but I think some finer points may have been missed over the whole of the article. For instance when I got my degree my goal was to fill in missing areas, and fortunately the college that I went to focused a lot more on the design process than the coding process which I think is a good approach. So what I got out of the degree I feel is a more rounded out knowledge set than what I was getting by hacking day in and day out on code. Plus some of the other classes and work like english classes and math, science I would imagine would be helpful. Should hiring managers discount a programmer just because they haven’t gotten a degree I don’t think so, there are a lot of excellent programmers that may not have gotten a degree. On the same token though I don’t think that a person who loves to program and has gotten a computer science degree should be discarded as well.

My biggest complaint is companies trying to put a static number on years of programming a specific language. To me it is about being flexible and adaptive anyways. Lets look at this scenario, say a company is looking for a C++ programmer that has 5yrs experience programming C++. Now this company uses some obscure or internally developed libraries that have an odd or C like interface, are they really going to find the programmer that they need by putting that arbitrary figure out there? Well maybe they will, but someone who has been programming for 10yrs that might not have made it to C++ yet but has a dealt with a variety of different languages up to that point. I understand that it is a screening requirement to find candidates that are more likely to fit the bill, but it bugs me that it is there. I would think that it would be better to have the person who is adaptable and flexible not just within a single programming language but one who isn’t afraid to pick up the book on a language they haven’t been using for 5yrs and start working with it.

But what do I know here, I have a degree, and currently am unemployed but keeping myself busy working on a couple open source projects.

New Blog

moird — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:05:27 +0000

Setting up wordpress blog here, think it will be more suitable in general for what I was personally after in terms of a blog. At least in terms of the features that I wanted one was the categories and that was pretty high on the want list for blogs. At least to more easily associate the various topics that I might feel inclined to write something about.