Linus Torvalds on Git

Last night, I watched this very interesting talk by Linus on Git,  even the video is slightly out-dated, I was very impressed by his sense of design that goes beyond the back-end but takes in consideration the user's experience in it's core principals.

Another thing I noticed is that he has a very good sense of security and putting forward the importance of integrity checking does make his SCM solution safely distributable.

I'm really considering now switching from a Perforce base to a fully Git solution for my projects.

Toy Drummer

I’m currently working on an open source project which could be of interest to the chiptune scene, it’s basically an XNA application which makes it simple to connect a Rock Band/Guitar Hero drum kit your PC or xBox and assign custom sound samples to each pad.

The idea came about when I wanted to add a drum kit to my own nerdcore/chiptune performance setup but couldn’t afford it so when I saw my old Rock Band kit standing in the corner of my living room coated with dust , I decided as well use it for something, especially now that music video game market is dead, all that hardware is going obsolete and unused, a little bit like 2600s and C64s after the 80′s game market crash.

I tried to use Andrew Rudson’s Drum Machine (http://andrewrudson.com) tool but it wasn’t exactly what I needed, so I decided to make my own tool and open source it.

As I’m writing this, the code is at version 0.2.1, it’s still very dirty but it’s functional at a basic level.

I’ll be adding some VJing features in the coming weeks, customizable retro games, video loops and glitches/video effects which call all be mixed live and triggered by hitting the pads.

You can check it out here (http://toydrummer.codeplex.com), please feel free to contribute or send feedback, it’s always appreciated ^-^

Metrics in social games…

I’ve been reading some articles on the use of metrics in social gaming, like this short one from Gamasutra.

This is something I’m going to add to my online game framework I’m currently developing. The project’s name is P.O.G.E. (Persistent Online Game Engine).

It’s basically a framework build in PHP and Lua which I’m going to use to construct a new online game which will use different aspects of social gaming, MMO & augmented reality.

I said to myself, I’m spending all this time building tools why not share them with indie game community and so I’m going to release my framework under an open source license.

For the metric & stats aspect, it would be interesting to integrate it to the game engine, it’s data that could be used to modify the behavior of the game or add more dynamics between the “game master” or game A.I. and the players.

Watching GIFs on OSX

One thing I really love are GIFs but OSX and iPhoto don’t play them natively so I build the following Applescript to generate a local web page which lists and displays all my GIFs that are located in a specific folder.

You can download the .scpt here.

set gifFolderName to "gif:"
set gifDisplayPage to "GIFDisplayPage.html"

tell application "Finder"
      set currentFolder to container of (path to me) as string
      set gifFolderPath to (currentFolder & gifFolderName)
      set fileList to every file of folder gifFolderPath
      -- display dialog currentFolder
end tell

set gifPage to (currentFolder & gifDisplayPage)
set htmlStart to "Watch your GIFs" as string
set htmlEnd to "" as string

try
   open for access file gifPage with write permission
    write htmlStart to file gifPage as string
    repeat with currentFile in fileList
               set currentFileName to (name of currentFile)
               write ("<img src="gif/&quot; &amp; currentFileName &amp; &quot;" alt="" />") to file gifPage as string
     end repeat
     write htmlEnd to file gifPage as string
     close access file gifPage
on error errorMessage
     log errorMessage
     try
        close access file gifPage
     end try
end try

tell application "Finder"
      open file gifPage
end tell