…and hilarity ensues:
Over at Canadian Developer Connection, we’ve got one more video from PDC in which Yours Truly conducted the interview: it’s with Jeff Atwood, the guy behind the blog Coding Horror and co-creator of Stack Overflow. It’s a brief interview; there were many people who wanted a slice of Jeff’s time, and we were lucky to even be able to buttonhole for as long as we did.
We’ll catch up for beers and Rock Band soon, Jeff!
You can file today’s Dilbert comic under “it’s funny, because it’s true”:
Google Maps, Live Search (a.k.a. Microsoft Virtual Earth) Maps and Yahoo! Maps are all based on Navteq’s mapping technologies. As a result, the tiles used in rendering the maps are the same size, and if you set the zoom to equivalent levels in each, you can seamlessly switch between the three. Take a look at the map below, which shows a map of Toronto as rendered by Google Maps, Live Search Maps and Yahoo! Maps:
The article Switching Between Mapping APIs and Universal Zoom Levels at David Janes’ Code Weblog explains that the mapping systems differ in their zoom levels:
David proposes a universal zoom level and provides code to do conversions between it and Google’s, Live Search’s and Yahoo!’s systems.
I saw these at Future Shop a couple of days ago, beside the Rock Band and Guitar Hero packages. You too can have rock star hair for a mere $19.99 (in Canadian dollars)!
Here’s another video interview featuring Yours Truly at the PDC: it’s with Chris Slemp, Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online group at Microsoft. In the interview, we talk about MSDN and its new social bookmarking feature.
Click here to watch the video.
If you’re looking to get into the mind of a game designer and the design of one of the most highly-regarded computer adventures games, be sure to check out the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document. Tim Schafer, in “a temporary fit of Cake-induced Grim nostalgia,” decided to put the game’s puzzle design document online in PDF form (it’s 2.3MB in size).
Here’s a great summary of the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document, written by Andy Geers:
I use that word "crafted" because that’s exactly what this newly released document shows: true craftsmanship. We see the incredible attention to detail, the pacing of the narrative as it builds and as the puzzles get increasingly sophisticated, always coaxing the player along with them. As somebody whose spent the last few years trying to write my own adventure game, what struck me most about this document is the sheer simplicity of it – it’s well established that it takes a great deal of clarity and hard work to boil down something so vast as Grim Fandango into such a simple representation that conveys so much information in such a succinct way.
It’s a considerably more interesting read than most specs.
Nothing gives you that frozen-caveman-thawed-in-modern-times feeling like returning to a software platform after not developing in it in seven years. Getting back into the swing of Microsoft’s development tools has been fun so far, but it is, as a lot of people have told me, like drinking from the firehose.
To quickly get acclimated with C#, ASP.NET and XNA, I’m expensing the following books I bought today:
I’ll let you know what I think of these books as I read them.
And finally, a couple of reviews from my all-time favourite game reviewer, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. The first one’s for Saints Row 2, which includes a great argument for why it might actually be a better game than Grand Theft Auto IV as well as a brilliant concept for a new game:
and here’s the latest review, for Dead Space, which he summarizes as “competent but bland”. Luckily, his review is anything but…
No matter where Robert J. Moore went, he kept seeing lawn signs like the one pictured above. While visiting his parents in his hometown of Glassboro, New Jersey, he saw “Single? www.GlasboroSingles.ORG” signs. In Midtown Manhattan, he saw similar signs: “Single? www.FifthAvenueSingles.COM” signs. While travelling through West Windsor township in central New Jersey to do a guest lecture at Princeton, he saw “Single? www.WindsorSingles.ORG” signs.
Wondering why a dating services would target such tiny locales and why a website would promote itself with lawn signs, Moore started to do a little investigating and found a company with franchise offices spread across the United States making use of a “low-profile marketing machine” and a “data-driven technological infrastructure that supports it”. Using parked domains, plain-Jane lawn signs and data analysis, they’re making 8 figures of revenue yearly.
It’s an interesting article showing some fascinating detective work. I have to concur with the first comment submitted by a reader: Robert J. Moore is the Upton Sinclair of lawn signs!