The fine folks behind TOJam have finally posted all of the games from this year’s jam. Among them is the game we created that weekend: “Mousetrap Mania“. We’re quite proud of how it turned out.

The game was semi-inspired by “ChuChu Rocket!“, a quirky puzzle game for the Sega Dreamcast that was developed by Sonic Team. The player places arrows on the grid but instead of directing the mice, the arrows direct the car, which is strapped to a large wheel of cheese. The player needs to use the car to lure the mice into the traps but avoid allowing the mice hit the car. If the mice hit the car, they eat some of the cheese. If all of the cheese is eaten, the player loses. To win, the player must survive the mouse onslaught for 3 minutes. The victory screen shows both the number of mice caught and the number of slices of cheese left on the car — feel free to use both of these for bragging purposes. =)

You might also want to try “a game about bouncing“. Voted the best game at the jam, it sports a simple-but-fun gameplay mechanic centered around grabbing and bouncing off of bumpers and avoiding missiles. The visual and aural style are quite cool as well and, most amazing of all, it was all made by just one guy. He didn’t even need any graphics or sound “floaters” like we did. Graphics, audio, programming, all were done by him and him alone.  That’s some awesome talent right there.

Michael and I very often browse Reddit for interesting articles on all sorts of topics, including computer science and IT.  Today, I was looking through Programming Reddit as usual and the link at the top of the front page was to this site.  Reddit has made their code available through a public git repository and is encouraging programmers to take a look at it and submit patches.  They’ve included some basic guides on how to get started as well.

Pretty cool.  =)

I attended the first of Alfresco’s Tech Talk Live sessions for this summer and much of the discussion was demonstrations, though I did get to ask some pointed questions about Alfresco’s road map with regard to web content management.

By the way, a recording of the talk is available here. The next one is on Friday, June 13th, at 12:00 EST, so if you’re interested in technical discussions about Alfresco, definitely check it out! I personally enjoyed having the chance to interact with some of the members of Alfresco’s technical team.

After the talk, I took some time to set up a VM with a build environment for Alfresco SVN so that I could take a look at some of the new features in Community 3 for myself. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I found myself cursing at a web application, to which Enrico replied, “Now you’re one of us.” I truly feel like a web programmer.

Being the new guy involves a lot of catching up. I feel like I’ve read so much documentation that my eyes are ready to bug out of my head. I’ve spent most of my time working with Alfresco, setting up deployments and experimenting with content creation. Now I’m focusing my training more towards Fatwire, and have been going through a number of developer exercises with simple assets and templating. I have also done some HTML and CSS coding, making changes and fixes to the Tenthline website.

All in all it’s been quite the learning experience. I’m looking forward to getting the chance to put this experience to good use.

We’ve had a chance to play around with the Ingres/Alfresco bundle a bit more. One of the first things we did was install the WCM extension, which was easier than I imagined. Here are the steps:

1. Download the WCM extension (zip or tarball) for Alfresco Community 2.1.0.
2. Extract the archive into the installation directory for the bundle.
3. Move wcm-bootstrap-context.xml to <install directory>/apache-tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension.
4. Edit virtual_alf.sh to set APPSERVER to the virtual-tomcat directory.
5. If it isn’t already set, set JAVA_HOME.
6. Start the bundle, and then the virtual Tomcat (using virtual_alf.sh).

In summary, installing WCM for the Ingres/Alfresco bundle is basically the same as installing it for any other installation of Alfresco. The only issue we’ve run into so far is that deployment won’t work. We’re investigating this.

By the way, I’m not actually typing this entry — I’m dictating it to a co-worker. I got into a bike accident and sprained my right wrist. It could have been worse; I was wearing my helmet. The moral of the story? Always practice bike safety. =)

Update (June 12, 2008): We managed to figure out what was causing the deployment problems. The RMI calls were failing due to a mis-configured hosts file. The final message in this thread on RMI in the Spring Framework ended up being the answer to the problem. A lot of time spent, but now we now that WCM can be installed to the bundle and that the major features work — we had a chance to try the virtualization features as well and they seemed to be working.

Special thanks to David Maier from Ingres for all of his help! =)

Alfresco and Ingres recently announced a partnership, the first product of which is an all-in-one installer with GUI that installs Apache Tomcat, Java, Ingres, and Alfresco. This gives developers and end users a very easy way to get started with the two technologies, which together form a fully enterprise-ready open source content management solution.

We got a chance to try the installer on a Linux VM here. There were a few hiccups at the beginning; it turns out that the package won’t work if it is installed as root (this seems to be an Ingres thing). Once we re-tried the installation as a non-root user, it worked like a charm. Actually, this is one of the easiest installs I’ve ever seen for enterprise Linux software. We’ll keep you posted with our impressions as we further explore the bundle.

Our blog now supports OpenID for leaving comments.  OpenID is a “decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.”  You choose an OpenID provider and sign up for an account.  This gives you a URL, like mine: http://enricob.myopenid.com/.  Provide this URL to any OpenID-compatible site (like this one!) and you will be transferred to your provider to log in.  When the provider has successfully authenticated you, it will tell the site you’re using that you are indeed the owner of the OpenID URL that you provided.  Your OpenID URL becomes your one identity for use with many sites.

If you have an OpenID — you may already have one and just don’t know about it — try using it to leave a comment on this post.  Just enter your OpenID URL in the “Website” field and the rest will be handled for you.

When I was teaching myself HTML and CSS, I used to refer to Webmonkey, a site filled with tutorials, references, and resources on just about everything to do with web design and development. This was back in the late nineties or so, before the web standards movement gained the traction that it has today. Over time, the site’s content became outdated and I was forced to find other resources. Webmonkey had seemingly died out.

I was browsing Programming Reddit today and noticed a banner advertisement for Webmonkey (2.0 beta). Yep, it’s back, and it has a brand-spanking-new look and feel. The content and techniques seem to be up to date as well. I can’t make a final judgment on the new site because I haven’t had enough time to browse it yet but I’ll find some time to take a closer look soon.

EDIT: I’ve seen numerous database errors on the site as I’ve been browsing. I guess that’s beta software for you. Too bad; I really wanted to check out their article on Python for beginners. Not that I don’t love Ruby but I’d like to keep abreast of all programming languages that are currently used. And I’ve always been interested in Django.

You might remember my post about JSR-666 from April, where I asked whether the funny proposals to extend Java (for example, by adding a yoda keyword) were just a joke or a thinly veiled statement about the dangers of trying to shoehorn features into Java. So imagine my surprise when I saw another horrific JSR; but this time it isn’t a joke.

JSR-308 is a proposal to add annotations for types. It sounds harmless enough, right? But take a look at this sample code of the proposal in action: Read the rest of this entry »

TOJam was great fun, though I felt a little like a fish out of water. I haven’t used C++ in a while, and the last time I did anything serious with Visual Studio I had not yet gone to university.

As a result I spent most of my time writing game logic, the things which are more or less the same in any language, and didn’t touch much on things like SDL at all, leaving it in the hands of teammates more experienced. That was good for the team, but not for my learning. So when I got home, I took all the media files and the knowledge I had gathered, and re-wrote the game (with some gameplay changes that I wanted to try).

What makes this special was that I re-wrote it using a Ruby library called Gosu.

And I did almost single-handedly in under 48 hours.

Gosu has almost everything that a programmer who wants to play with game development could want. Installing is dead simple “sudo gem install gosu” and it is the shortest path between “blank file” and “image on screen” that I’ve ever seen.

One niggle, it doesn’t play mp3 music by default — you have to recompile that flag and assert you have permission to use that codec. Oddly enough, mp3 samples work just fine. I cannot pretend to understand this.

Regardless, if you like Ruby, and you want to make 2d games, I’d recommend it giving it a look. The minimalist design philosophy is excellent, and the time investment to get reward is very small. Rapid iteration makes for a very agile development cycle, which is a great thing when you’re shifting and twisting the code around to, as Miyamoto would say, “find the fun.”