I’ve added an archive link to the top of the page and you can see all posts in chronological order. Finding old posts is one of the poorest aspects of this site so I am looking to improve it. The search is still a bit rubbish so I will fix that shortly as well.

In other news I’ve written a bunch of drafts for upcoming posts about the ICNH Framework and whatnot. Once I get a few more of them done I’ll post them with a bit of regularity. They are the kinds of posts that need reading with relative closeness. Rather than me having write one post and then get back to the topic three weeks later.

Alright! The year that is 2009 can be seen the following ways: 4 seasons; 12 months; 26 fortnights; 52 weeks; 365 days; 8,760 hours; 525,600 minutes and 31,526,000 seconds. I won’t work out how many clock cycles there are. You can do a lot in that time. These are my plans, some aren’t really time based or limited while some, in the end, are directly related to time and effort. All are dependant on the wind not changing as I pull a face.

Buy at least one house

I’ve been neglecting buying a house for a while and its high time that put a solid backup plan in place in case every single one of my ventures fails. Thankfully the market is looking pretty good at the moment. Anything I buy would be for investment purposes and my current rental agreement with my brother is sweet. I don’t really care where I buy as long as I could stand to live there.

Travel overseas

It’s been five years since I travelled last and my feet are well and truly itchy. Some say there is a cream to help with that. I’m looking at Thailand and India which are two countries with economies worse than ours but enduring some tumultuous times. Spain would also be nice so I could visit a friend. I suspect where I go will be driven by the season I choose to travel.

SocialTacit

Get the first proper version of SocialTacit out the door and let it stew for a while. See what works and what doesn’t and then visit it again. I like SocialTacit so far and I’ve got a feature list the length of my arm but I want to see value beyond our own experience before I implement too much.

Auspex

Auspex is the first product we will actually release with the immediate intention of spinning money. The only reason why SocialTacit gets the Guernsey first is because it is nearer to completion and I would like some practice deploying to production solo before I screw it all up with a press release and server not found errors.

Auspex is a useful tool, but whether it is useful at the right price remains to be seen.

Firestorm

Firestorm is the next product on the cards after Auspex. All of these products are developed concurrently. Firestorm will be the first game to use Auspex to ensure a quality balanced and importantly, fun game is delivered.

Firestorm will also be the first game to make use of the GamingKudos achievement system. GamingKudos needs at least one game to get moving and prove its abilities.

GamingKudos

There is no surprise if you are reading this from top to bottom that GK is the other big ticket item that we intend to finish this year. If you are not reading it in order, surprise! GamingKudos isn’t a complicated system. It just needs to be tested extensively. That is where it will take the most time.

TwentyZeroNine

You’ve already started experiencing some of this. I wanted to push myself creatively this year and in ways in which I am not as strong as I would like to be. Those two directions are photography and writing. Both of these are immensely useful in the game industry with the former going towards ambience, lighting and composition and the latter towards, interesting and entertaining storylines that don’t make you physically ill when you play the game. I’m looking at you Gears of War 2.

Writing and Photography are also my backup plan in regards to IT. I have chronic back problems and sitting down for 18 hours a day isn’t the best medicine. So I needed a backup plan that was both creative, something I wanted to do and had less sitting time than testing or coding.

TwentyZeroNine is broken up into the following components; each one a division of the year and the frequency of work.

365 Self Portraits – A picture of myself every day for a year. I have to press the button and it has to include some part of me. The goal here is to force me to use the camera and continue to come up with shots and ideas. The continual use will help me get better at lighting and composition. I am not very photogenic so this should be difficult project indeed. Fun though. My flick page is here.

52 Stories on Music – an idea based on Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs. I write a different story each week about a song I truly love. The introduction link is here and you can read all about it. Each one has to be out by Sunday. There is no word limit.

26 Drabbles – harder than it looks, a drabble is a story of 100 words exactly. I’ve also introduced this as a separate post and you can read that here. I’ve only done one so far and it was quite difficult. It really forces you to get to the crux of your point very concisely. Something I currently lack in my writing.

12 Short Stories – Once a month I write a short story. No more than 7,500 words and no fewer than 1,000 words. Arbitrary limits but bounds to work within. Short stories, like drabbles, force oneself to remove all content that does not directly relate to the story. I guess one could say getting to the point. These come out on the last day of each month. I will put out a pdf version when I release these for people who like to read them offline or prefer a printed version.

4 Novellas – slightly more ambitious are the novellas. These are stories that are between 17,500 words and 40,000 words. I like these. There is enough space to write a story with more than one plot. I can explore and be a bit flowery if need be without worry about word limits.

1 Novel – a few years ago I started writing a novel. Everyone that read it had positive comments about the style and direction. I never finished it. No Horizons and everything else were more important. I intend to finish that novel this year. It should rock in between 40,000 and 160,000 words.

An important feature of this project is that in the end, I am the final judge of whether an item is deemed completed. Unlike everything else I do, has been for commercial goals, this is purely about self-exploration, self-improvement and just being creative for my own purposes. It also means if I write pure tripe there shall be no complaints not meeting my goals. You can complain about the tripe though.

Another thing of note, the speed of writing isn’t the issue here. I can type fairly fast but I don’t need to. I worked out I only needed to put down about 6-7 words a minute for 10 hours a week to get the volume of content required for the entire project. Making sure I get the right 6-7 words each minute is the hard part. At my current rate I am writing at about 750-800 words of content per hour.

I will find a permanent domain for this project. I’ll start that in February. In the mean time you will have to put up with my writings as posts here. I will let you all know when I get a new domain and where it is.

Comics

I also intend to keep writing comics. Our goal this year is to work in a long running story behind it all to take the strip from a gag-a-day series to something, that while it has the same format, it also has a bit more meat. This is going to be hard but we have started tentatively. Stay Tuned!

Blogging

I’ll be blogging again this year. I’ve had a think about what I want to blog about and it will probably fall into the follow categories:

• Testing – ways to make it less painful and probably a good dose of bitching about the state of it.
• My graphics engine – the one I threw away. I intend to talk about the architecture of it and the performance improvements I implemented and the levels at which I looked at performance. It should be of value to someone somewhere as long as they work out how to make it look pretty elsewhere.
• Other bits of software I’ve written and never released to the public. I would like to document some of the different methods of implementation I’ve tried over the years and what worked and what didn’t work at all. Should be a laugh when you see some of the unique decisions I’ve made.
• About game development – mostly from a design perspective and some lessons learned. We’ve learnt plenty over the years and maybe we should share.
• The various products we intent to release this year. That probably should have a corpu-blog when they go live but until then I will talk about them here.
• Other things as they arise. I don’t plan to blog a lot just with some regularity.

Keep…

Reading… I am back into it and reading helps my writing. I doubt I will post reviews of books because I am not a great critique. I may do a brief, “I read this book”, “so should you” or “it was rubbish” (because you value my opinion). Who knows.

Getting in to shape… Part of what has helped my back improve is the muscle building exercises I do around my upper back muscles (rhomboids I think) and my core muscles. They were all a bit too weak for their own good. So I’ll keep this up with the hope of being able to sit at a desk for several hours without agony.

Learning Spanish… I’ll try again this year. If I end up in Spain at some point then it can only be a help.

Umm…

That is a lot of stuff to do in one year. I also intend to have a social life as well. Will I succeed? What will be his downfall? Which detour will take him too far? When will he stop writing in 3^rd person?

To succeed is to go in with the intention of success.

]]> http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/2009-%e2%80%93-international-year-of-finishing.html/feed 1 http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/for-those-who-came-in-late-2008-in-review.html http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/for-those-who-came-in-late-2008-in-review.html#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:55:22 +0000 Ryan Boucher http://distributedlife.com/blog/?p=192 I started this blog on the 9^th of January 2008 and made 151 posts. I’m not sure if this is more or less than I intended as I never really made plans for the number of posts I would make. I had a roll going there at one point and posted nearly every day for a month or two. Other months like December the posts are scarce. My posting frequency was mostly related to the compile time of whatever project I was working on. My C++ framework has a 15 minute build time while web dev has none.

I plan to keep blogging this year. What I’ll blog about, I’ll talk about in a separate post that is focused on 2009.

All in all I’m happy with improvements I have made to my writing style. I’ve got a long way to go but they only way to get better is keep practicing.

No Horizons

This year we put No Horizons on hiatus. I’ve not updated the website but I doubt anyone is really looking at it at the moment. We did it because we threw out my graphics engine and bought a third-party one. This was a pretty difficult decision for me to make as I had spent the best part of two years on that engine and it was a very fast engine. The problem was that it was ugly as sin. The new engine is much prettier. Some architectural changes need to take place to integrate the new engine and the existing code; but more on that later.

We will update the site soon just to give a status update and when we get up to putting the existing artwork into the new engine we will put up some much prettier screenshots.

No Horizons is not on hold indefinitely. James and I still think it is the game we have always wanted. We just don’t want the game we’ve always wanted to be flawed or incomplete.

Firestorm

Because of the differences in file formats accepted by the two engines we knew that there was going to be a long period of mucking around working out what we would need to do to our existing assets to get them to work in the new engine. We also needed to work out the issues of the new engine, especially around network architecture. This was going to be important when integrating with the No Horizons engine (we only threw out the graphics part).

We needed to cover the end to end usage scenarios for the art assets.  So we thought it best if we worked on a smaller game. A game that could be done in a shorter time period and one that had fewer assets but still had the same time of assets as No Horizons. So, we started Firestorm. There is no website for this yet but there will be one when it’s ready.

We have most of the big ticket models done for Firestorm and animation has started on a few. Once we have a site and some nice screenshots we will put them for you to see.

GamingKudos

In the middle of the year we started GamingKudos our achievement system / gaming social network. Steam and Xbox Live spring to mind but ours is different to the existing market. Playstation and Nintendo also have their own achievement systems. This is also part of the problem. GamingKudos looks to solve the problem from the perspective of gamers.

For obvious reasons the differences between the existing setups and our own are confidential. The final drafts for the UI have been completed and we are waiting for the design crew Voodoo to provide us with the final copies.

The backend for GamingKudos is an API that we intend to license to game developers for an achievement system solution. It provides all the reliability and security that is mandated by such a system without the issue of having to develop one. This is going to be increasingly relevant during these recessionary times and for is always relevant for Indie developers.

Auspex

We also started a game development tool called Auspex. Auspex helps game designers balance their games by helping them understand how their games are played. The Auspex engine and infrastructure is complete. I just need to finish coding the website. It should be out soon. You can read that as second priority. I won’t set a date because that would be silly.

Auspex is targeted at Indie developers as well. Most big shops have tools similar to Auspex, maybe not as extensive but sufficient for their purposes. Indie developers don’t often have the resources to create the game and the tools as well. Something we are accutely aware of. Auspex is here to solve that problem at the price appropriate for Indie developers.

SocialTacit

Our third web oriented project is SocialTacit, a knowledge gathering tool that we initially created for our own purposes. It’s something I had wanted for a long time in the testing world and will be free to most. We see three potential versions; a web version that is free for public use; an enterprise version and an open-source version for non-commercial but private use.

In the past month its usage scenarios changed dramatically and what we have now is something a bit different in the space of content management, knowledge gathering tools. It’s very cool.

The first version is a public alpha so it’s not polished (read: ugly as programmer art could be) and any feedback will be welcome. Once we get a good system down and people are happy with the direction we will take it, I’ll hire our favourite design team to come up with a UI that won’t blind you.

Hardlywood and On the Cusp

James and I also work on a separate little venture as a side project; writing a comic and designing t-shirts. We stopped the t-shirt aspect of it quick smart because the quality wasn’t good enough. Good quality printing comes from a print in advance, sell later business model rather than our print on demand model. The former works well if you have an existing customer base. We didn’t.

The comic we kept going and we managed 100 comics over the course of the year. It was a learning experience as I’ve never written a comic strip before. Some of them are quite strong, others are less so but that is always going to be the case. You can’t have summer without winter.

Testing Work

I had a good year testing. I’ve learnt a few tricks. I continue to work on my Action-Target-Scenario method for writing test cases. It is still working well. At some point during the second half of the year, in QualityCenter over 7,000 test cases were attributed to my projects and something like 5,000 test cases were attributed to all other projects. This isn’t a race, my method always means you have more test cases but you spend significantly less time writing them. In just the past week I’ve written 800 test cases.

The less time I spend writing test cases the more time I can spend doing what is most important, testing.

Salsa

During the last quarter of the year I started learning Salsa. It has been excellent fun and I intended to go back next year to keep learning. Salsa has been something I have always wanted to learn but never found the time to do. A friend told me when the school he attends had classes and there was a match with my schedule. I hadn’t planned on it but three months later, I am loving it.

Spanish

Once again I tried to learn Spanish. I gave it three separate attempts this year and while I managed to get to chapter five on my audio book and my pronunciation of the first four is pretty good I kept on getting distracted by other junk.

Reading

I started reading again this year. I’ve always been reading some form of reference or technical manual but not novels and not for fun. I’ve taken up the same habits that my mother has; a book in each room. Sometimes there is more in than one in a room. Each book has a different level of progression. I have close to ten books on the go.

I’m not really sure how reading ten books at once impacts my comprehension of each book. I suspect the reason why each one makes it only so far before being distracted by a shiny new book is that they are not very good or, not very good at getting to the interesting part.

Podcasts

I started listening to podcasts last year. I managed to get through several hundred IT Conversations, most of the Stack Overflow shows, eighty odd Software Engineering Radio shows and perhaps sixty A Way with Words.

Podcasts are great and once you get the hang of listening to them in the background you can listen to them and code, test or write tedious amounts of documentation. I learnt a surprising amount listening to podcasts. More than I expected to.

Music Listening

An interesting side note is that I have been using last.fm to track my music listening. I started it on the 31^st of May 2008 and racked up about 7,800 songs in that time. If we assume that I have a consistent listening pattern that’s about 13,000 songs.

Now this only records music listened to at home. I listen to music all day long at work, on the way to work and when I’m going to sleep. I spend on average an hour a day in the car which equates to 15; 4-minute songs or 5,500 in a year. At work I work 48; 40-hour weeks a year. That comes out at 28,000 but I’m not listening to music all the time. I have meetings, I talk to people, etc. So it’s probably somewhere between 15,000-20,000 songs.

Let’s say I listen to about 35,000 songs per year. The question I need to find the answer to is how do I listen to more varied music rather than more music? Beth Orton got over 1000 plays at home since June last year. I like Beth Orton, obviously, but I only have four of her albums. That is a lot of repeats.

Mah Back!

2008 saw me make significant improvements in the quality of my back. As I write this I’ve had a couple of really good days and they hint that the end may be in sight. My back truly was chronic where I didn’t really have the ability to sit for more than half an hour before becoming sore and needing to wander about and stretch.

Standing and lying down are fine, just not suited to IT.

Phew

So that was my year. I may have missed a few things. I will have to check my diary at some point to see what I did over the year. I’ll update this post if I remember anything of note.

All in all, 2008 was a tumultuous year of changing directions and starts. It wasn’t a bad year by any standard. I had a pretty good time for most of it.

What did you do in 2008?

]]> http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/for-those-who-came-in-late-2008-in-review.html/feed 0 http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/idleaide.html http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/idleaide.html#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:37:55 +0000 Ryan Boucher http://distributedlife.com/blog/?p=195 I’m going to Idleaide today. I’ll be back on the evening of the 1st of Feb. It will be nine days of sun, beaches and hanging out with my mate damo.

I intend to start blogging upon my return. I’ve scheduled up a couple of posts for tonight around what I did last year and my plans for this year.

Take care.

]]> http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/before-too-long.html/feed 0 http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/in-just-a-few-moments.html http://distributedlife.com/blog/2009/01/in-just-a-few-moments.html#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 14:47:57 +0000 Ryan Boucher http://distributedlife.com/blog/?p=183 This next post is a short story I’ve written about music. It’s part of a plan of mine to write better. In this case to write expressively about emotions and feelings and junk.

It was suggested to me that I explain to you the reader that I may not get directly to my topic. I will in the end but sometimes I like to talk about how I discovered the music. Sometimes it’s just as interesting as the music itself. Not in this case though.

After the story, I’ll post about the purposes behind these stories. I will move them to their own blog soon but just not right now as I’m busy. When they move you will all have the option of subscribing to it rather than being force fed.

In a few days I’ll publish my post on my 2008 and what I intend for 2009. Stay Tuned and I hope you had a merry xmas and a happy new year.

This pattern can be identified by anyone who is attempting collect the entire suite of products that are for sale from a particular software or hardware vendor. It’s a bit like fanboyism but more expensive.

One may argue that by purchasing all the products from one vendor than you ensure the ability for those applications to integrate, regardless of whether they do the job properly. For some reason having products talk to each other is more important than having the products do the job they are meant to do. In some cases vendors put out skeleton products purely to show that they are in the market without spending any effort to get there.

This is a win-win situation for the vendor. They spent no effort and little money making the product to enter the market. If someone cares about the quality of service of the product then they won’t by the vendor’s product. This is fine because the vendor wouldn’t have made the sale when they had no product at all. If the vendor makes a sale then it’s free money made by leveraging the popularity of their existing products.

Another argument is that the more products you buy from a particular vendor than the cheaper it gets whether it is up-front costs or on-going licensing costs. This is a lot like the bundling of services that infrastructure providers do (internet, electricity, gas, water, sewerage, etc). I see the deal, bundle five services and get 10% off the total cost. If their services cost the least then you wouldn’t need the 10% discount. What they are really saying is that; yes our prices are high, but if you buy five of our more expensive services, some of which you may not actually need, we will go someway to reducing your overall cost. But don’t be fooled, we are not here for you; this will not cost you less money.

So when you buy multiple products from the same vendor the question to ask is: is it really cheaper for you, sure you get the product for less but then you have to maintain, extend and work with an inferior product. The time wasted working with inferior products may end up costing you more in the long run.

I’ve always been taught fit for purpose. I know it’s a vague rule that doesn’t actually say what you are looking for, that is the point. It means find out what you want then find out if any thing meets the criterion. If a vendor does support your needs then go and buy that product. Integrate it later. If you can’t find a product that meets your needs then perhaps you should build it or ask the next best vendor to close the distance.

P.S. In my version of Wordpress 2.5ish if you schedule a post less than an hour, or there abouts, in the future it ignores your request and leaves it at publish immediately. This is unintuitive, annoying and stupid.

This smells like a feature.

There is a solution. If you push your scheduled time far enough into the future and then reschedule it at your desired time then it lets you use the previously rejected time.

So it’s a crappy feature that is buggy.

]]> http://distributedlife.com/blog/2008/11/im-back-2.html/feed 0 http://distributedlife.com/blog/2008/10/that-was-fun.html http://distributedlife.com/blog/2008/10/that-was-fun.html#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:57:04 +0000 Ryan Boucher http://distributedlife.com/blog/?p=156 I will leave service testing for a little bit. I need to finish my series of post from my Agile presentation about Agile and Testing plus I’ve got stuff on CakePHP, Aspect C++, some Game dev and design posts plus my usual posts on testing and coding.

When I learn something useful or new about service testing I’ll be sure to post it for future reference.

Woohoo! Go you good things!

Next week is the first foray for Hawthorn into an AFL Grand Final since 1991. Anyone who works with me will suffer another week of the mighty hawks guernsey.

To celebrate, check out this great song by the Kings of Leon.