Category Archives: general

stir fry: great example of game dynamics

The hip trend these days in game dynamics is “compulsion loops,” where in one of the game activities lets us win gold or coins or some kind of virtual currency, which lets us buy stuff, which helps us play the game better, which earns more gold, and so on. (Stephanie Morgan gave a great Creative [...]

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become a working developer in 5 months?

Jeff Casimir believes he can train anyone with the passion and will to learn to be a professional software developer. He goes so far as to say if you don’t make it (and you are really working at it), he’ll consider it a personal failure if you don’t. Also, he’s partnered with LivingSocial [...]

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sillicon valley love notes

We need more pop culture that show how strong men can be attracted to powerful, smart, technical women. A couple of years ago, I wrote about the rise in hacker love songs being a positive trend for women in computing. Today I saw Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling.

I can’t count the number [...]

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women 2.0 startup weekend documentary

I’m thrilled to be part of the Women 2.0 Startup Weekend Documentary: Start Something.  Filmed as a student project with San Francisco State University’s Digital Video Intensive program, Start Something follows three groups of entrepreneurs as they navigate Startup Weekend, a three day event where entrepreneurs come together to share ideas, form [...]

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a founder’s manifesto

I believe…

I do my best work when I also have time away to clear my head and reinvigorate my spirit.
People are more important than software. Software is made for people by people.  Also, the people that I love who are outside of my little startup world are way more important than my startup, but [...]

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setting up ec2 minecraft server

Goal: set up a minecraft server using free EC2 account from OSX
[update: FAIL -- game play doesn't work on a micro instance, if we want to use EC2 it looks like we need to use at least a small one. so be careful to adjust the steps below to pick a small instance if you [...]

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Why Flash Lost but HTML Still Sucks

I’ve been creating and using cross-platform tools for application development since the late 80s, from VideoWorks, HyperCard, and Authorware to Director, SuperCard, ScriptX and mTropolis to Shockwave, Flash, and HTML/Javascript. We’ve moved past the experimental days when it was called multimedia and techniques for interactivity, graphics, animation and information design are routinely applied for [...]

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debugging objective-c in xcode for iOS

I’m coding again in native Objective-C coding for iOS with the lovely XCode.  It has been a while so I’ve been reading up on debugging tricks.  Sadly, it still feels a bit like debugging in Macsbug in 1990…
The graphical display of object values is fairly useless, but in gdb, we can use the po [...]

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upgrading pie from rails 3.0 to 3.1

Whenever I upgrade Rails, I always start with “rails new” so that I get all the new config file goodness — I want to start fresh with whatever the new defaults are and then only make the modifications that I really want in my app. Here’s the process I went through upgrading the pie [...]

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mobile payments hidden costs

In the so-called 3rd world, mobile payments are stimulating economic growth and individual entrepreneurship. While in the United States, we struggle to overcome the legacy of an earlier trend in mobile payments facilitated by a plastic card. New players such as Square, Verifone, and Erply are bringing us, belatedly, into the modern world.
TechCrunch [...]

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