Cylentware

So I hesitantly put this in the UbiComp heading but it might work. With all the talk about Cloud computing coming to save the corporate world from having to run servers and allowing users to host all their apps and data outside the org, I think another aspect should be given a look.

Software Distribution. Given that DVDs are currently what get burnt for most games these days and while they will continue to be layered to put more data on them, there will be a replacement sometime soon.

I think this will be flash drives. It provides a simple way for distribution. Just walk into a game store or computer store say you want X software. They check your flash drive and give you the data. When you install it does the same check on the internet that the current ones do. Every time it downloads to a flash drive it gives it a unique key like they have currently. Every time it registers it associates that key with your software there by giving the DRM that the sellers want while providing a simple access point that the buyers want.

You could even go so far as to have a suite of data that gets locked in that you can carry around. I figure this is where the Ubi Comp comes in. Say the flash drive is more like a stick of gum. With either a wifi on the tip or a RFID. this would give it the ability to handshake and update your preferences to things. Such as thermostat or background music. Or even which floor you will probably be going to in a building. The drive can be plugged in like normal and saved. Plus this keeps the data out of the cloud but still accessible everywhere. Sure you got to keep track of it but you keep track of your keys too.

So in an effort to keep working on my programming chops, I have refreshed my game. Pulled out some WCF code since it was getting in the way and basically just trimmed everything up. I will try to release .09 in oct which should include some combat. then tighten up some other things and see about getting .10 out in oct as well.

We shall see. I still got my other thousand projects to work on as well.

the WCF seemed like an effective tactic. Use it to house my game server. Do a singleton on it and just have it hosted separately. however it doesn’t quite work like that. If you chose to host the WCF inside the IIS project, IIS will launch the servers for you. However, it will create a new instance and drop it everytime a call comes in. Which doesn’t give me the singleton or the persistence that I was hoping to have.

So by pulling it out I condensed from 3 projects to just one. Since I had a login WCF and a Game server Service as well. I placed them all in the same project and normalized the objects so there weren’t any duplicates. Hopefully with some more testing I can get the next version of the code out. I still need to get a good version control system other than just backing up each days work. I also need a better deployment model. but in due time. In due time.

By 2018, geek chic will look a lot like what today we’d call a cyborg. The human/machine interface will be ubiquitous, with people walking around giving voice/whisper commands and using earbud audio and an eyeglass display that superimposes a machine-enhanced view of the world on ordinary vision. Nobody will notice that half the population is cyborg, because we’ll get there one small step at a time, as iPhone belt-clip holders give way to the iBeltBuckle, iGlasses (hey, that’s catchy!), and iEarRings. A new generation of computer viruses will take over the new display technology. Sometimes they’re fatal, as when the computer display shows an empty street, when in Actual Reality (AR) the street is filled with high-speed traffic. Other times they’re just funny, as when the display insists on showing mustaches on every face in view.

That is from Bob Lewis over at Infoworld. They usually do gimicky stuff to see if they can get viewers over there but I think more and more the bluetooth revolution is slowly making us cyborgs.

I want to see a day when I don’t have to pull out my phone to google something. I can just hit the button and say google define ubiquitous and it goes and does it and replies back to my ear the answer.

Not sure if it is an interface change but it should take into account sensors that also figure out where you are and what you are doing. If you are in the airport and you say is my flight delayed it should know about your flight and whether or not it is delayed to answer. or if your next appointment is a flight it should be able to figure that out.

So I got to thinking more about UbiComp. Something that is interesting is thresholds. Maybe something as simple as a rfid checker built into doors. Put it on the doors of your house and you can then know what room certain items are. Put them in the door of your fridge or your closet and you will know when you are out of milk (you threw away the container) or your shoes are not under the bed but in the closet.

Put an rfid key chain on your keys and you can narrow down that pesky where are my keys search. I would eventually like something that provides more power so I could just do a search on my house for keys and have them ping or a computer tell me they are behind the couch. Not sure if it is cost effective now, but maybe within the new few years it will be.

This is just a random thought piece

I am looking more and more into Ubicomp. I think that it will be the future of computers. Sure there will be desktops for people to do real “work” at but for the most part it is going to be a distributed system that you can access from anywhere and that will help you get the data that you need almost before you need it.

Slides from Weiser . Mark appears to be the father of the UbiComp movement and getting things rolling. I was checking out those slides from his talk and got to thinking of just things around the house that we would like to know when they are done but not have to watch them. Mainly I was looking at timers. Micrwave, Oven, and Laundry. All of these are set and try to remember when they go off. Sure you could hang out near them and wait, but linking them to some time of automated timer that could either give your phone a ring or contact you via bluetooth would be helpful. Sure they would have to recognize who set them so it wasn’t disturbing me when my roommate was nuking some burritos but it would help over all to get more control over the environment.

I almost said TV so it could remind you when your TV shows were on but I think DVRs will time slice tv out of having to watch something at specific times anymore. So that is a non issue.

So added a bunch to the game. it is out at 0.07 now. Going to try to get 0.08 done this weekend since I have only a hockey practice. We shall see.

interesting thing I learned:
have a separate table for stored procedures you want a heartbeat script to run. Better yet make sure you use a sql job rather than a console app which means using the actual sql server code rather than the express like I have.

I think I am going to work on getting it all set up via virtualization so that I can have multiple games running on one computer. PvP and what not.

Next update is 0.08 Like I said hoping to be done this weekend but we shall see. be nice to have .12 done by friday so I can have the guys at the lan party tell me how it is.

so much for fire and motion. I have been pretty productive on my game. It has been released up to 0.05. I got a lot of work for 0.06. I think I might need to break it down more so that my releases occur once a week or maybe twice a week so that I can keep the actual fire and motion going.

Design issue: I decided that I would parse strings back and forth to process the information from the game.

Pro: it was super quick to get it up and running.
Con: now that I need more robust information or want it more flexible I sort of painted myself into a corner.

I am now going back and refactoring those items. So that I can get more flexible. It just is slowing down the releases. I should have another section done tonight so that means just 1 more and then 0.06 release is done. I have it loosely broken down that my 1.00 release will be a pretty robust game. Hopefully it will be fun as well.

I’d provide a link but unfortunately I don’t have anything but a dotted quad available at the moment. Maybe when we get closer to 1.00 release

In the interest of writing stuff on this blog and keeping in the principle of fire and motion I decided to make this post a little more general so that I could post something on a programming topic.

So I am currently at SD West 2008 listening to a tutorial on Smart Client apps. Several times the concept has come up that people expect the same consistancy when they use computers. So if you are making a software program if you copy Microsoft Office in the UI elements no one is going to be surprised about where things are on the UI or how to do things.

So that got me to thinking, Microsoft Office is the lead on UI in the workplace on applications that run on your computer locally. But what about the web.

It seems to me that with Web 2.0 there is a UI Cold war going on. From AJAX and other things slowly bringing speed and quality up on the web. It is going to be interesting to see if there will be a convergence in the future or if there is going to be a “Google way” or a “37signals way” or maybe a “web 3.0 way”. And if there is going to be UI sections to the web that skin it in such a way that areas are themed like AOL of old vs Compuserve. Similar to the bloglines and wordpress where bloglines keep themes generally tight among the top but wordpress lets you put any theme you want giving a different set of ways to get places. Will there be a standard that wins out and then the next innovations will come in some other area?

Similar to the live version Spiders crawl the web. The idea behind a spider is to go to a webpage scan the page and then pull relavant links off of it. Then go to those pages and do the same. At some point collating data into a repository so that value can be extracted. For google it is processing the pages with keywords so that it can be page ranked, for pricewatch it is for scanning the relative prices on electronic items.

There are several goals for spider creation. To ensure links don’t go to a 404, to save a local copy of a website, to gather important information like emails (used by spammers but could be used for better purposes), to get pertinent information about a subject by cycling a webring, or even just to record outgoing links to provide bookmarks for later.

In some cases you need a database or similar repository to store what you retrieve. Getting the right format is pretty critical since you don’t want to keep adding columns as you iterate over the webpages. In some cases you don’t need a db at all such as a back up / local copy of the website. Either way a good data storage plan is a safe way to make sure you can get what you need back out.

I was going to shelve this and do some more research but since this is a blog and I can always review data and expand on this later, I’ll put it up and put more data up later.

So there are a few goals that I want to get out of the new and improved “work” blog. I have moved my personal blog over to here. This blog is going to be about programming and spiders. Hopefully I am going to use it as a place to explain things to me and myself. As well as keep track of things so I can have a reference as I go back to it.