April 2012
2 posts
Compiling Storm on OSX Lion
Italics indicate output from a failed operation. Everything else is a command I entered. I started out in my Projects directory, where I have storm/ and now jzmq/ directories. This is mostly installation of jzmq, and subsequently zmq, so that running “lein compile” in the storm directory would succeed.
I got help from http://tjun.jp/blog/2012/04/how-to-build-jzmq-in-mac-os-x-lion/ and...
Free, Online College Courses
Summary: udacity.com: excellent, coursera.org: meh
I’ve recently tried some free online computer science courses from udacity.com and coursera.org. And by “try” I mean I actually watched a whole unit’s worth of videos and did all the related homework. Here are my opinions thus far.
CS262 at udacity.com is excellent ( after completing Unit 1). The instructor is a...
March 2012
1 post
Using Redis in a Storm Spout
Install Redis. That part’s easy.
Now, to talk to Redis from a Storm spout implemented in Java you will need the Jedis wrapper.
get Jedis and its dependency
wget https://github.com/downloads/xetorthio/jedis/jedis-2.0.0.jar /tmp/
wget http://mirror.nyi.net/apache//commons/pool/binaries/commons-pool-1.6-bin.zip /tmp/
unzip /tmp/commons-pool-1.6-bin.zip
...
February 2012
3 posts
My New soldering Station, the Aoyue 968A
First thing to deal with is the noise produced when you turn on either the smoke sucker or the hot air gun. It’s stupid loudm but it turns out there’s an easy fix. On the bottom of the unit there is a screw with a circle formed around it in the sheet metal. Mine had some red wax or something on it. That screw needs to be removed. Here’s a picture of the hole that needs to be...
lein error: "Unable to read the metadata..."
Suddenly I started getting lots of errors when doing
lein deps
They said “Unable to read the metadata” in files like ~/.m2/repository/org/twitter4j/twitter4j-core/2.2.5-SNAPSHOT/maven-metadata-clojars.xml
The files that the errors referenced were empty. I removed the repository/ directory from ~/.m2/ and retried lein deps. All is well again.
Seeing Storm in Action
I’m going to run through using storm-deploy to deploy a remote cluster in AWS. Then I’ll use storm client to attach to that cluster, submit a topology, and see what there is to be seen in the storm UI. Hopefully, we’ll get some speed metrics out of this.
cd ~
mkdir .pallet/
vim .pallet/config.clj
[paste in code from https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm-deploy/wiki]
[replace...
January 2012
2 posts
storm-starter Starter is Hidden in its Issue...
After spending last evening fumbling confusedly, I just found these copy-n-paste instructions for trying storm. They’re hidden in storm-starter’s issue tracker on github, where someone asked for more precise and concise steps for getting started.
First Steps with Storm
Talking about storm, from Twitter. I happen to have done this on a brand new installation of Ubuntu 11.10, so here is everything I had to do, including the stuff that is not really specific to storm:
cd /home/david/
mkdir Projects
cd Projects/
sudo apt-get install git
git clone git://github.com/nathanmarz/storm-starter.git ./storm-starter
sudo apt-get install vim
sudo vim...
December 2009
8 posts
Unity Booleans
If you declare a variable in one of your Unity scripts like this:
var enableThingaMaBob.Boolean;
then it shows up in the editor as a checkbox. Now I can quickly turn script-level things on and off from the Unity UI!
Well, I thought it was pretty nifty.
DrPetter's homepage - Projects
→
Sfxr is a great little tool for creating retrogame sounds.
Sculptris also looks very promising as a quick and simple 3D modeling tool, though it is still in alpha.
Continuity: A Flash Puzzle Platformer - a... →
The complexity of the puzzles is limited since you have only 4 pieces and you just rotate them until they enable you to make progress. This is assuming that the piece count doesn’t increase in later levels, I’ve only played up to level 6 or 7.
Still, the concept is beautiful and it’s merit well proven.
Same Splodey Cubes With Bounce →
When the material setting of the cubes’ box collider component is changed from none to “Medium Bouncy” the explosion, though it doesn’t seem to be any bigger, always has a few more cubes flying at the camera.
3 tags
Red Remover seems trivial at first, but it's... →
And I love the sound it makes whenever you fail.
1 tag
Unity Experiment: Overlapping Rigid Bodies →
Overlapping rigid bodies is one of life’s supreme pleasures. Giggitty.
I placed a bunch of cubes all stacked tightly on a plane (they are all positions at 0 on the Z-axis). Then I duplicated one of the central ones repeatedly. When it runs and the physics starts happening those overlapped ones burst apart, bumping into all the other tightly packed cubes. The rest of the geometry is fixed,...
Unknown filmmaker gets $30m for robot movie →
It ‘splodes. I’ll watch it.
Off-Road Velociraptor Safari →
I’m impressed with how well this game works, it’s really fun.
November 2009
11 posts
Dragon Age Origins - Toolset →
Like any editor for a specific game, this will of course be constrained to building more content in the style of the original game. It’s not like you get the graphics engine and can go about creating a FPS from a point-n-click RPG.
Still, for this style of player control, Dragon Age is the best I’ve ever seen and this toolset may divert my attention from Unity3D for a short time. I...
Unigine Engine's DirectX 11 Benchmark →
It’s pretty cool. I just like the floating islands, amazing piece of artwork here.
5 tags
I've installed a half dozen games this week...
and every friggin’ one of ‘em has installed DirectX. How many times must this happen? Wtf? I blame Microsoft.
4 tags
Unity frustration solved...
I think.
I have a dinky little project in which the standard pill shaped FPS Controller can move around shoot cube primitives. Yesterday, any compiled version of the project would not shoot, even though playing it within the editor still worked just fine. I couldn’t figure it out and knew of no recourse to investigate (I hate troubleshooting with no leads, would rather quit and play someone...
6 tags
I started playing Batman: Arkam Asylum...
and just about pissed myself with glee. I’m only about 20 minutes in, but this game has already achieved pants-shitting greatness in my book. The intro was good, the integrated tutorials are seamless, the hand to hand combat is simple yet robust, the graphics are unbelievable even on my PC, and already I’ve experienced several gameplay elements that are fundamentally superb and well...
3 tags
Fuck Yeah Googley Eyes! →
2 tags
I beat Blueberry Garden... →
after about 5 attempts. You get a password to a secret page on the developer’s site.
I’ll be vague to avoid writing a spoiler, but I’m kinda disappointed because I may have missed something at then end by doing something right before the fade to credits. Meh, probably not. This game was decent in a very strange way, but not real big on the payoffs. I mean content wise.
2 tags
I've been using Tumblr for about 20 minutes ...
and already I feel like this and Twitter should swap hype/popularity levels.
5 tags
I got Red Faction: Guerilla last night ...
and though it starts of well enough with the destructive play, the controls are messed up. There is extreme delay between the pressing of a button and onscreen response. This is most noticeable when driving a vehicle, as I can press the left arrow key and watch the wheels take a full second to rotate.
There was similar delay in Far Cry 2 when I first started playing it. The solution was to switch...