Sunday, February 08, 2015
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Politics
This isn't my usual kind of post. But it is something I am paying attention to lately and have had a friend ask for more information about being informed when voting next week. So I thought I'd write a post about some of the things I have learned. And, since I feel somewhat inadequate, I am going to use youtube clips to help illustrate the point. I probably won't go over all of the voting, but I will go over the state race as that seems to be what people are most interested in.
First is the least glamorous of the decisions to be made, state auditor. The current state auditor website has a mission statement that reads:
"The purpose of the Office of the Utah State Auditor is to help ensure to Utah's citizenry, legislature, government officials, and other financial information users the financial integrity and accountability of Utah's state and local governments. Our purpose is accomplished by providing independent and innovative audits and investigations, and by monitoring and advising Utah's state and local governments. Our work has helped Utah to be recognized as having financially strong and well-run state and local governments."
Our current auditor, Austen Johnson, has been the auditor for years. He's got a lot of experience and does what he considers important happening with the current resources he has. He has made it pretty clear that he will keep doing what he has been doing if he has been re-elected. My take is that the current office is heavier on the "monitoring" and less on the "advising". In a speech I attended last week the incumbent mentioned that he was "working with" the legislature on the best way to get the information to them. He talked about a conversation he had on creating reports about the reports that were not being addressed. My opinion is that he should not be a "yes" man and do what is asked -- but hold the legislature accountable rather than helping them gloss over the information more.
John Dougall takes the opposite approach. Not only will what gets audited change, but advisement will be a more primary role in his job. I tend to agree with him more and will likely be voting for him. He also has a sense of humor and doesn't take himself too seriously. In the video below I very much appreciate his stance on the auditor's job being to gather data to help the legislature make better decisions. He has also been 10 years in the state legislature.
There is some concern that Dougall is not a CPA. I think that leadership can and should be the primary job of this elected official, as long as the conceptual understanding is there on what the job is supposed to do. I feel similarly for the attorney general's office -- that leadership is the most important qualification rather than the actual on the ground experience. It remains to be seen if changing the direction of this elected office is a good change. I currently support this change and will be voting for John Dougall. Both men are capable and I believe will do good things for the office.
State Attorney General is the next race. This is the one I am not fully decided on. Both candidates are lawyers -- one a trial lawyer and one a pseudo-lobbyist manager lawyer. I like what the current AG office is doing and I think they are going in a good direction. Keeping John Swallow (who already works for the AG office) would continue things down the current route. Sean Reyes will likely shake things up quite a bit. This seems to be a career move for both parties so it's harder for me to judge. I think both have their merits. I am leaning towards Sean Reyes, but I have concerns with leadership and being too close to the metal with him. I am concerned about the allegations of outright lying and shady dealing of John Swallow. It has been a very heated campaign.
Apologies, I couldn't find an independent review that was just John Swallow that wasn't a campaign video. Those are easily found on youtube if you'd like more.
Lastly, I'd like to briefly go over my feelings for the senate race. Last Thursday I heard a representative for Hatch and Dna Lilenquist speak at Spanish Fork High school. Just before we sat down I got to meet Dan and he mentioned that the best thing that has happened to his campaign was Sen. Hatch's representative. This turned out to be true that evening.
I am probably biased in this particular race. Senator Hatch is no friend to technology or intellectual property. he is the primary reason I got into politics -- my senator doing crazy things (not just voting for, but sponsoring over and over!) that I disagreed with. I voted against him last term 6 years ago though I knew it would not matter at the time. This time I think Someone has stepped up that can represent Utah better than Hatch. I'll post a 90 minute debate that happened before the republican nominees were voted for by our local representatives (before the primary). It's worth skipping around in and listening to.
There is always more but I'm well past the time I've had. Good luck voting this go-around!
First is the least glamorous of the decisions to be made, state auditor. The current state auditor website has a mission statement that reads:
"The purpose of the Office of the Utah State Auditor is to help ensure to Utah's citizenry, legislature, government officials, and other financial information users the financial integrity and accountability of Utah's state and local governments. Our purpose is accomplished by providing independent and innovative audits and investigations, and by monitoring and advising Utah's state and local governments. Our work has helped Utah to be recognized as having financially strong and well-run state and local governments."
Our current auditor, Austen Johnson, has been the auditor for years. He's got a lot of experience and does what he considers important happening with the current resources he has. He has made it pretty clear that he will keep doing what he has been doing if he has been re-elected. My take is that the current office is heavier on the "monitoring" and less on the "advising". In a speech I attended last week the incumbent mentioned that he was "working with" the legislature on the best way to get the information to them. He talked about a conversation he had on creating reports about the reports that were not being addressed. My opinion is that he should not be a "yes" man and do what is asked -- but hold the legislature accountable rather than helping them gloss over the information more.
John Dougall takes the opposite approach. Not only will what gets audited change, but advisement will be a more primary role in his job. I tend to agree with him more and will likely be voting for him. He also has a sense of humor and doesn't take himself too seriously. In the video below I very much appreciate his stance on the auditor's job being to gather data to help the legislature make better decisions. He has also been 10 years in the state legislature.
There is some concern that Dougall is not a CPA. I think that leadership can and should be the primary job of this elected official, as long as the conceptual understanding is there on what the job is supposed to do. I feel similarly for the attorney general's office -- that leadership is the most important qualification rather than the actual on the ground experience. It remains to be seen if changing the direction of this elected office is a good change. I currently support this change and will be voting for John Dougall. Both men are capable and I believe will do good things for the office.
State Attorney General is the next race. This is the one I am not fully decided on. Both candidates are lawyers -- one a trial lawyer and one a pseudo-lobbyist manager lawyer. I like what the current AG office is doing and I think they are going in a good direction. Keeping John Swallow (who already works for the AG office) would continue things down the current route. Sean Reyes will likely shake things up quite a bit. This seems to be a career move for both parties so it's harder for me to judge. I think both have their merits. I am leaning towards Sean Reyes, but I have concerns with leadership and being too close to the metal with him. I am concerned about the allegations of outright lying and shady dealing of John Swallow. It has been a very heated campaign.
Apologies, I couldn't find an independent review that was just John Swallow that wasn't a campaign video. Those are easily found on youtube if you'd like more.
Lastly, I'd like to briefly go over my feelings for the senate race. Last Thursday I heard a representative for Hatch and Dna Lilenquist speak at Spanish Fork High school. Just before we sat down I got to meet Dan and he mentioned that the best thing that has happened to his campaign was Sen. Hatch's representative. This turned out to be true that evening.
I am probably biased in this particular race. Senator Hatch is no friend to technology or intellectual property. he is the primary reason I got into politics -- my senator doing crazy things (not just voting for, but sponsoring over and over!) that I disagreed with. I voted against him last term 6 years ago though I knew it would not matter at the time. This time I think Someone has stepped up that can represent Utah better than Hatch. I'll post a 90 minute debate that happened before the republican nominees were voted for by our local representatives (before the primary). It's worth skipping around in and listening to.
There is always more but I'm well past the time I've had. Good luck voting this go-around!
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Monday, March 05, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Oblig. Zelda
I saw this a few months ago, but need to save it here for posterity.
Feel free to post this in your neighborhood bulletin board next to the free pet signs.
Not sure who did this first, but I slightly modified the wording to be the same as the original game. "Take one of these" just wasn't doing it for me, even if it's more gramatically correct.
Monday, September 26, 2011
The end of the world
I had a friend pass this on to me today and got a good laugh, thought I'd share. =)
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Curious about software development?
Here are a few tips from some of the major interactions between people in software development.
edit: fixed image, should be un-broken now.
edit: fixed image, should be un-broken now.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Terrain
This post was supposed to come after part 2 of my game design post. However I apparently can't be bothered with that now, I've got code to write! I'm doing no less than 3 active projects. Well, those plus some brainstorming and ideas floating around, and all that outside of work, family and church responsibilities. (I'm now teaching the 6 year olds sunday school. So far it's pretty fun!)
First, I'm working with a friend on some iPhone software to control hardware that he built. He's gotten an older iPhone 3G to control a comcast cable box and his TV. So we're probably going to go into business together to sell attachable hardware that acts as a TV remote. We'll see how that goes, we both expect to make little money off of it. I think it's hobby money for him and mostly a favor from me, but if it makes enough to cover our initial costs I'm ok with that. I mean how many people can say they have helped build hardware and software that attaches to an iPhone? =) That's project one.
Project two is a bit more public so far. You may not know that Garmin opened up their own geocaching website, opencaching.com last month. I'm looking to do with it's capabilities what I intended to do years ago. When the iPhone first allowed 3rd party apps on the app store and I thought I could work with geocaching.com to make an app. What was the point you ask? I had a plan to make geocaching software that is easy and seamless to use. That doesn't require a computer. Something you can simply use when you think about it. You can prepare offline if you'd like, but no real preparation needed. Open up the app and use it. It's been pretty fun so far to do and with this project I'm feeling like I'm (finally) hitting my stride with iOS programming. Maybe I'll even port it to android. Well, probably not, but it would be fun. You know, with all of my extra time. Doh.
Lastly is the project I'm most excited about. Mostly for my geeky self, but still something new and exciting that I've never done before. Well, not anything other than plain text. That's making games.
The end goal is to take the initial design of what I and a friend came up with in high school. Slycrel. (I really need to post about that too don't I? I need a blogging secretary) For starters though we wanted to make a simple dungeon crawl. Since after some discussion we realized that to make the entire game at first... well, it likely wouldn't get finished.
So I pulled out my favorite 2d graphics engine for iOS cocos2d. There are lots of games made with this free engine already and I've used it before in some small side projects. I then found some great tutorials on how to build a world out of tiles. It turns out that there's a really cool free application that you can download to make 2d tile-based maps and cocos2d uses it. There are 3 parts to this tutorial and I followed all 3, doing some heavy modifying to the third. That was new year's day, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I now had a ninja game where a ninja went around collecting cactus roses and bird enemies flying at him. My kids have a good time with it. What's cooler than ninjas in the desert throwing ninja stars!
I then set out to do something harder. I am not content to simply make maps and levels to go through. I want the computer to do the hard work. So I set out to learn about how I would go about making a tile map entirely within the program that uses it. The initial answer was to generate some XML files that looked the same as what was output from the tiled app. I wasn't happy with that. So I did the next best thing -- I made a template for my maps in tiled, that I could use to generate in my program. I also made my own tiles with simple graphics that I swiped from some earlier slycrel projects as well as solid colored tiles to have something definitive.
After a bunch of debugging and general grumpiness, I was able to not only throw together a map, but add crude roads and trees on top of it! nice!
Uh... great! Clown barf!
I should back up and explain what the tiles are above. Blue is water/ocean, brown is dirt/earth, green is grasslands/plains, the odd half-circles are hills and the grey represent mountains. On top of these are two different kinds of roads (straight and a bend) and trees. Not particularly map-like. It's... well, random.
Really it looks like nothing, but I had my foundation. My friend and I discussed ways to do this and he found an excellent article online about something called height maps. Shortly thereafter he made a height map implementation in java and sent it my way. After much pain with 2 dimensional arrays (sorry, TMI I'm sure, but that was the lion's share of the time embarassingly enough) I finally got it working. I modified his code a bit by porting it to objective-c for use on the iPhone and made it return percentage values for the height map. I then took the above templates and used the height map we generated (as percentages) to populate the tiles based on height, or in this case, elevation.
Here, i'll give you one of the better screenshots of my efforts. It looks almost intentional!
I'll try to get around to my part 2 post here in a few weeks.
I better run, lots to do. More later! =)
First, I'm working with a friend on some iPhone software to control hardware that he built. He's gotten an older iPhone 3G to control a comcast cable box and his TV. So we're probably going to go into business together to sell attachable hardware that acts as a TV remote. We'll see how that goes, we both expect to make little money off of it. I think it's hobby money for him and mostly a favor from me, but if it makes enough to cover our initial costs I'm ok with that. I mean how many people can say they have helped build hardware and software that attaches to an iPhone? =) That's project one.
Project two is a bit more public so far. You may not know that Garmin opened up their own geocaching website, opencaching.com last month. I'm looking to do with it's capabilities what I intended to do years ago. When the iPhone first allowed 3rd party apps on the app store and I thought I could work with geocaching.com to make an app. What was the point you ask? I had a plan to make geocaching software that is easy and seamless to use. That doesn't require a computer. Something you can simply use when you think about it. You can prepare offline if you'd like, but no real preparation needed. Open up the app and use it. It's been pretty fun so far to do and with this project I'm feeling like I'm (finally) hitting my stride with iOS programming. Maybe I'll even port it to android. Well, probably not, but it would be fun. You know, with all of my extra time. Doh.
Lastly is the project I'm most excited about. Mostly for my geeky self, but still something new and exciting that I've never done before. Well, not anything other than plain text. That's making games.
The end goal is to take the initial design of what I and a friend came up with in high school. Slycrel. (I really need to post about that too don't I? I need a blogging secretary) For starters though we wanted to make a simple dungeon crawl. Since after some discussion we realized that to make the entire game at first... well, it likely wouldn't get finished.
So I pulled out my favorite 2d graphics engine for iOS cocos2d. There are lots of games made with this free engine already and I've used it before in some small side projects. I then found some great tutorials on how to build a world out of tiles. It turns out that there's a really cool free application that you can download to make 2d tile-based maps and cocos2d uses it. There are 3 parts to this tutorial and I followed all 3, doing some heavy modifying to the third. That was new year's day, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I now had a ninja game where a ninja went around collecting cactus roses and bird enemies flying at him. My kids have a good time with it. What's cooler than ninjas in the desert throwing ninja stars!
I then set out to do something harder. I am not content to simply make maps and levels to go through. I want the computer to do the hard work. So I set out to learn about how I would go about making a tile map entirely within the program that uses it. The initial answer was to generate some XML files that looked the same as what was output from the tiled app. I wasn't happy with that. So I did the next best thing -- I made a template for my maps in tiled, that I could use to generate in my program. I also made my own tiles with simple graphics that I swiped from some earlier slycrel projects as well as solid colored tiles to have something definitive.
After a bunch of debugging and general grumpiness, I was able to not only throw together a map, but add crude roads and trees on top of it! nice!
Uh... great! Clown barf!
I should back up and explain what the tiles are above. Blue is water/ocean, brown is dirt/earth, green is grasslands/plains, the odd half-circles are hills and the grey represent mountains. On top of these are two different kinds of roads (straight and a bend) and trees. Not particularly map-like. It's... well, random.
Really it looks like nothing, but I had my foundation. My friend and I discussed ways to do this and he found an excellent article online about something called height maps. Shortly thereafter he made a height map implementation in java and sent it my way. After much pain with 2 dimensional arrays (sorry, TMI I'm sure, but that was the lion's share of the time embarassingly enough) I finally got it working. I modified his code a bit by porting it to objective-c for use on the iPhone and made it return percentage values for the height map. I then took the above templates and used the height map we generated (as percentages) to populate the tiles based on height, or in this case, elevation.
Here, i'll give you one of the better screenshots of my efforts. It looks almost intentional!
I'll try to get around to my part 2 post here in a few weeks.
I better run, lots to do. More later! =)
Thursday, December 23, 2010
THought I previously posted this...
... but I can't find it here. So I'd like you all to go to this link and read a few of these.
Your day will go better, I promise. =)
Merry Christmas!
Your day will go better, I promise. =)
Merry Christmas!
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Minecraft
If you build it they will come.
Or something.
Check it out if you're into legos and building stuff. It's pretty cool from a tech point as well.
Part 2 of the last post is coming, but probably after Christmas.
Which reminds me, Merry Christmas!
Or something.
Check it out if you're into legos and building stuff. It's pretty cool from a tech point as well.
Part 2 of the last post is coming, but probably after Christmas.
Which reminds me, Merry Christmas!
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Game Design Part 1
Ever since I was little I've loved playing games. When I was small we used to play games like candyland, checkers, aggravation and (probably a little later) rack-o, war and other card games.
I was introduced to video games at age 5. It was in the fall and we were in Sears. My dad pulled me aside and showed me the atari 2600. I was glued to it and we got one for Christmas that year.
Since mid-elementary school, I've been programming with the intent of making games. I started with basic on the commodore 64. We figured out that pressing ctrl and break at once would sometimes take you back to the basic interpreter where you could view the basic source code and make modifications to variables. You could then continue the game with your (usually fatally flawed) modifications. Later at the library, there were computer magazines you could check out for a week at a time. I still remember trying to type in the game "canfield" in GW-Basic. I never got it to completely work, but I did figure out some errors in the printed magazine and got it to kind of run. I remember having no idea what the asterisk, slash or parenthesis did, though I eventually figured out it was math related. I found the issue, this is apparently January 1988 that I was working out of. I think the cover helped as well, I was also interested in astronomy at this time.
In this era I was also enamored of the Grail Quest series of books and began shamelessly plagarizing by using the contents of the first Grailquest book I owned and making it into a GW-Basic game. I never got very far but I sure did have a good time with this series and learned a ton about programming. I did ghastly things like changing the screen background color randomly as well as randomly changing the text color.
In that era I played around some with my good friend's Apple IIgs and was introduced to all sorts of good games (and good times!), playing hardball 2 while waiting for the bus, zany golf, space quest, monte carlo and others.
Later on in high school I did some BBS programming which I briefly mentioned at one point. Did I ever actually do a post about slycrel? Maybe another day. I enjoyed playing Doom and Doom 2 with the guys at school along with master of magic, civilization and others.
One of the guys I played with from school was the principle's son. There was a policy of no gaming on the school networked computers, but my friends went so far as to create a key logger that got us admin access. We played both sides of the fence, keeping other kids out (sanctioned) and playing games ourselves (unsanctioned). I got a preliminary knowledge of novell netware 4 doing that, which was very interesting to me. I've never used it since, but conceptually it was a big deal, my first real networked IT experience.
After high school I had just about given up on gaming when I found half-life. Half-life gave me faith that the rest of the world wasn't stupid and that good games were still out there. I decided to not give up on gaming at this point and still have some hope. College was just around the corner, and who knows where I would end up.
(To be continued...)
Since mid-elementary school, I've been programming with the intent of making games. I started with basic on the commodore 64. We figured out that pressing ctrl and break at once would sometimes take you back to the basic interpreter where you could view the basic source code and make modifications to variables. You could then continue the game with your (usually fatally flawed) modifications. Later at the library, there were computer magazines you could check out for a week at a time. I still remember trying to type in the game "canfield" in GW-Basic. I never got it to completely work, but I did figure out some errors in the printed magazine and got it to kind of run. I remember having no idea what the asterisk, slash or parenthesis did, though I eventually figured out it was math related. I found the issue, this is apparently January 1988 that I was working out of. I think the cover helped as well, I was also interested in astronomy at this time.
In this era I was also enamored of the Grail Quest series of books and began shamelessly plagarizing by using the contents of the first Grailquest book I owned and making it into a GW-Basic game. I never got very far but I sure did have a good time with this series and learned a ton about programming. I did ghastly things like changing the screen background color randomly as well as randomly changing the text color.
In that era I played around some with my good friend's Apple IIgs and was introduced to all sorts of good games (and good times!), playing hardball 2 while waiting for the bus, zany golf, space quest, monte carlo and others.
Later on in high school I did some BBS programming which I briefly mentioned at one point. Did I ever actually do a post about slycrel? Maybe another day. I enjoyed playing Doom and Doom 2 with the guys at school along with master of magic, civilization and others.
One of the guys I played with from school was the principle's son. There was a policy of no gaming on the school networked computers, but my friends went so far as to create a key logger that got us admin access. We played both sides of the fence, keeping other kids out (sanctioned) and playing games ourselves (unsanctioned). I got a preliminary knowledge of novell netware 4 doing that, which was very interesting to me. I've never used it since, but conceptually it was a big deal, my first real networked IT experience.
After high school I had just about given up on gaming when I found half-life. Half-life gave me faith that the rest of the world wasn't stupid and that good games were still out there. I decided to not give up on gaming at this point and still have some hope. College was just around the corner, and who knows where I would end up.
(To be continued...)
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