Tuesday 15th July, 2008 @ 1:08 am
Apparently it’s been over two months since I last blogged. For a change this hasn’t actually been due to having a lack of anything interesting to say but just not having enough free time. London days seem a few hours shorter than those elsewhere in the UK and my perpetual busyness isn’t overly conducive to my blogging.
My employers Mendeley have made the recent wise decision of employing some excellent other software engineers, including KDE’s own Fred Emmott who is working in my team. He’s a great guy to work with but is annoyingly productive; every time I find something to do and get on with my own work it seems like five minutes before he’s fixed the bug/added the feature and is looking for more stuff to do! Any suggestions on how to make him less productive?
It was a nice surprise to view the 2.6.26 kernel changelog and find that some of the code I wrote at Wolfson Microelectronics two summers ago has finally been merged. I can now grep for myself in the kernel! Yey!
I hope to blog more regularly now, hopefully with less self-indulgent posts and more useful ones as I’ve been having some interesting battles with the mighty CMake at work that deserve sharing.
I guess I’m signing off for the evening as it is late o’clock but hopefully see some of you soon as:
Posted in Random, Software Development
2 Comments »
Wednesday 7th May, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
I’ve recently left BT and joined a start-up called Mendeley. I’m now writing Qt code for a living which will hopefully benefit my KDE contribution’s quality and hopefully my work on KDE will benefit Mendeley. I’ve moved to London for the job, hence the decreased number of blog posts lately and my vanishing from the internet. I hope to get back to blogging and doing KDE work when the dust settles but let’s hear some more about what I’m doing.
Mendeley is providing a tool for managing academic and research knowledge, allowing people to be able to better find and manage academic papers and use a network of others to avoid mundane tasks when trying to seek academic knowledge. There will also be interesting benefits for those producing papers as well.
This consists of a desktop Qt application (for Windows/Mac/Linux and maybe other Qt supported platforms) which can plug into your Mendeley.com account and allows metadata to be gathered and shared. The desktop application and web application usage will remain free-as-in-beer but the desktop client will be (at least initially) proprietary.
We’re also looking for a talented PHP/Javascript developer with database experience (preferably MySQL) to join the team based in Central London. You will have a lot of responsibility from the beginning and must be passionate about the problems Mendeley are trying to solve and using social networks to solve them (*cough* Web 2.0! *cough*). You can read the full job advert on Mendeley’s site.
Although this may look like a blatant plug it’s also because I believe the sort of people that read a fairly technical blog like this may be more suitable for the position than on a random jobs board.
I’m enjoying Mendeley a lot so far. I’ve been able to make a real difference in my first two days and the other guys are great fun to work with and I look forward to learning more about academic research and Qt in the coming months!
Posted in My Life, Software Development
6 Comments »
Monday 14th April, 2008 @ 12:32 am
Before you complain about this title completely contradicting my last post I want to point out that I’ve already given myself a good telling off and I’m sure I will never do it again.
Do you like computer games? If not then why are you reading a computer games post?
Anyway, those remaining like computer games. Do you have a computer with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD or a GP2X, PSP or Windows CE device?
If so, goto the UQM download page and get it now while I tell you why it is such a great game.
I’m a real sucker for good stories. UQM is the open-source port of Star Control 2, one of the best game stories I’ve ever played (and I’ve played a lot of games). Humanity has been conquered by a brutal regime after attempting and failing to fight for their freedom. Their people are enslaved but safe on Earth and their allies have also been enslaved and trapped on their homeworlds or forced to fight for the Ur-Quan’s military. You come to Earth from a research mission on another world, cut off from Earth since the war and don’t know any of the above. The researchers discovered an ancient alien race and ancient technology. From then onwards it is your job to deck out your ship and kick some serious alien arse.
UQM is so good because it is full voice acted somehow, frankly amazing for a game released in 1992. The script is intelligent and amusing, each races having fatal flaws and how you talk to them has a real effect on your interactions with the races later in the game. You have multiple dialogue choices and a huge amount of dialogue available from every NPC if you choose to grill them.
As well as the discussion and interaction you need to gather resources to equip your ship by mining planets, some light trading or destroying enemy ships. No race is forced to be your friend and every race can be at least partially placated on occasion. Your ship can be decked out in the fashion you see fit depending on if you want to play in a bloodthirsty fashion, killing enemy ships, just carry lots of cargo or somewhere in between the two.
Every of the 10+ races has their own music, art-style, feel and area of space. The galaxy is huge with thousands of planets to explore and many nooks-and-crannies than can convey advantages through technology or pivotal diplomatic assets.
Combat is settled in a 2D shooter fashion, flying your little ship about with Newtonian physics trying to outshoot or flee from your enemies.
This game a strange fusion of adventure and action with RPG and RTS elements also thrown in. The bright, colorful graphics have actually aged reasonably well and don’t detract from the great game.
If you like computer games at all I challenge you to leave the Sol system in this game (<1 hour of gameplay) and not be enjoying it. I will be frankly amazed if you do.
This is a brilliant game, hats off to both the original developers and the open-source team that have made the game work so well on modern platforms.
Go and play it now!
Posted in Computer Games, Software Development
3 Comments »
@ 12:02 am
Anyone who knows me knows that I love open-source. If I could eat open-source software I probably would. If I could marry it then our children would be very odd. You get the idea.
There is something that open-source software seems to suck at and that is making good games. I play almost every OSS game I can get my hands on and the prettiest are graphically inferior to games from the average games of a couple of years ago, the audio is terribly mastered, the games are usually unbalanced and the stories are usually either ridiculously awful or involve Tux in some way.
Interestingly the freeware/mod scene on Windows seems to produce far better quality games than the open-source scene. I think this is because you where software fulfils a need for the user a game is a more creative act and needs a clear leader and a very undemocratic approach to aspects such as storyline and artwork. Games also tend to need to be “done” before they are released as no-one wants to play a story-driven game that just stops abrubtly.
I’m sure people are going to come onto this blog and complain that I’ve forgotten about all these great open-source games but I don’t really care. I’ve tried playing too many to find myself spending hours wishing I was playing even a poor paid-for game.
The only real exceptions I’ve found to the above rules are games which have been retroactively open-sourced such as Quake 3, Transport Tycoon, Tyrian and Star Control 2. These were all good games on release and open-sourcing them means they can be made more portable and keep being played for a long time. I highly recommend you check them out.
Posted in Random
16 Comments »
