Aurora

E3 is coming up around the mountain and since we're showing at the show this year it's naturally a little bit stressful. It will soon be over though and looking at the swine flu, perhaps not that many attending in person this year. Amidst all this, I realize that I have several projects in the pipe, in my "spare" time, one of which is this blog. Most of these projects have been neglected of late, even the weekly online gaming session. Which just frankly stinks a little bit, but let's do something about it!

I've gotten numerous requests for the slides for the talk me and Vassily gave at GDC 2009. Here they are for interested parties.

GDC is around the corner again and people are starting to get excited about getting together and get some new ideas and share knowledge. I on the other hand have started to get increasingly nervous about this year’s GDC since I for some reason decided to give a talk. The reasoning behind it eludes me as the stage-fright is starting to increase.

It's been a good while since I posted last. I wish I could have made a similar ...

There has been a little bit of resurgence for functional languages, I myself have on occasion spoken for functional languages, as have Christer Ericson and severalothers. Functional languages just makes sense in a way that you really can't appreciate until you've dabbled a little bit with them. The elegance of it all takes my breath away.

Oh no! Not another perforce post. Spare us. We're not even using perforce anyways. Uhm. Have those guys left? Ok, well then for the rest of us that are left, I'm going to assume that you either use perforce happily at work or you are forced by some guy to use it. If you're the latter, then you might look envily at other modern source control systems that literally run circles around this old beast. I'm not kidding, running circles really means that you in other systems have adopted branching as the most basic operation you do.

Recently I've been forced to look more and more at licenses for third party software that I use. This is in my opinion a complete waste of time and just a justification for more lawyers. Reading any license text is like reading the most boring end dense textbook you could possibly find on a trivial subject, and manages to make the subject incredibly complicated and hard to understand.

I got really excited that Tales of Vesperia was finally coming out (come on, a wolf with a pipe that fights with a sword, what more can you need?). I played Tales of Symphonia on my Wii, since it was listed as one of the all time best GameCube games and I really liked it, apart from it's obvious dated graphics. So when the news were that there was to be an HD version of that game coming out, I was all excited. Oh, foolish me.

So once again the curse of non trivial toy examples strikes. After spending about an hour trying to place a custom usercontrol onto a simple windows form in Visual Studio and C# I give up. In the most trivial example that I came up with it works fine, but as soon as I try to do this in my own little project (niftysolution plugin) visual studio does nothing but crash every time I try to drag my wizard generated empty user control onto the canvas of my slightly modified form.

The source control history is a precious asset. How your source code evolved over time, what and who made the changes (and why) are questions that can all be answered by the history. It's important to try to preserve the history, but it's also very easy to forget and not do it. It is very frustrating to do some detective work only to find out that the trails end cold when someone copied the file without telling perforce. Best of all, the person who did this might have quit and you have now no clue as to where that file originated.