In the debugger right now working on tactical AI. And I’ve wondered just how many spells there potentially are in a given game.  The current number: 175 (not counting strategic).

Working on tactical AI today. So many tweaks, so many little stupid errors (typos). Thank goodness I can fix and continue.

So I watched the most recent Star Wars: The Clone Wars (“Crisis on Naboo”) and really enjoyed it.  I enjoyed it enough that I decided to go over to TheForce.Net and see about conversing with others about it.  Oh god. What a mistake. I didn’t even get to the posting part. I just read pages and pages of bitching about how terrible the episode was.  Then I read the same thing about every episode they listed on there. Just pages and pages of ranting and complaining about how terr...

Here’s a growing problem: College graduates who have never had a job of any kind. I get a lot of these resumes on my desk now. 4-5 years in college, living at home, never worked. No mall job. No McDonalds. No summer landscaping. Nothing. I used to not pay that close attention to that but I do now.  I have to because kids who have never had a job have no idea what’s expected at a job. Basic things like getting up every day and being at work at a consistent time. 5 days a week. ...

I have so many passwords. And sites keep making the requirements more and more complex.  Mixed case, numbers, etc.  I already use LastPass and such but still, I wish we could get to a point where there was some better way to verify identification.

I get asked this a lot. And the answer I gave most recently was “About a third smaller than it is today.” As a statistical nut, I made a pie chart of what I spend my day doing. It was depressing. Most of my work day is spent doing business stuff.  And the more “successful” (and I use that term with some derision these days) the worse it gets.  Every week I can count on an hour of legal review. What kind of legal landmines do we need to watch out for now? If you’re a bus...

I was somewhat bummed to read on Coding Horror that Jeff Atwood is leaving the Stack Exchange.   As many of you know, we are pretty religious readers of Coding Horror and Joel on Software . Jeff’s blog had come up quite a bit recently as we are in the process of coming up with new coding standards here at work.  More specifically, his recent blog on anti-aliasing was a major inspiration for doing “spot antialising” in Elemental: Fallen Enchantress (the id...

I don't know if this has been widely reported yet but...   http://www.impulsedriven.com/publisher/valve  

There’s been a lot of talk about the New York Times article on why Iphones are made in china. If you haven’t read it, you can find the article here . I was reading comments on Slashdot and it was apparent that most of them didn’t read the article. They assumed it was all because of “cheap labor”. According to the article, it has more to do with the type of expertise that is readily available there – lots of people with mid level technical knowledge (i.e. people with say 2 yea...

Mashable Business has a good article today on starting a business. They list 6 things which are very useful. It’s missing a few items that I think should be added or emphasized more. Here are 7 through 10 that I would have added: 7. Get used to failing often. The article talks about not being afraid to fail. But I think most people will take that as meaning that your business might fail.  In my 20 years of running a business, 90% of the things I’ve worked on have failed (...

Victor Davis Hanson has a very lengthy and interesting article today on the various Republican candidates. I can’t say I’m terribly excited about any of them. You’ve got Newt who is all over the place on issues and frankly, makes me think it’s more about him and his love of power than any thought of public service. You’ve got Romney who I can’t even understand why he’s running in the first place as he doesn’t seem to be very passionate about anything. There’s Santorum who I...

I am just baffled that the President is blocking the Keystone pipeline. It’s such a win-win on all fronts. Powerline article:

Penny Arcade today: So who has a Kinect? What do you think of it?

I have MacOS X Lion running on a 30 inch Cinema Display.  If you have the latest Xcode, you can use Quartz Debugger to enable it.  What it does is allow you to run in a sort of retinal display.  In my case, it turns my 2560x1440 to 1280x720 but with very high DPI. It looks absolutely gorgeous and is exactly what I think most people have wanted out of their high resolution displays all along. Apparently, new Macs coming out this year are going to have screens that do crazy high ...

Because of the way the media treats those of us who are right of center politically, when we get into social situations, we are used to just keeping our mouths shut. But it turns out that a lot, perhaps even most, people are right of center (in the United States anyway) but we often don’t realize it because we get so beaten down that our opinions on liberty and freedom are so “unfair”. So usually a discussion will slowly unwind where a person stands bit by by.  First, you start o...