Jay McGavren’s Journal

I really can’t pronounce it a huge success; I had a group of about ten people. Not insanely pleased with how everything went, but that may be just my own overly self critical eye on it.

Part of the problem was that I was flustered - I couldn’t get the projector working despite arriving 15 minutes early… 10 minutes in, Lorin Thwaits finally got it going with the help of some UAT staff. (Many thanks to him for rescuing the presentation!)

Got a couple questions, got modest replies, I think it was just too early in the morning for me and for everyone else.

starbucks OR “panda express” near 85032

WhiteCap 5 is absolutely beautiful. I haven’t messed with it (or any visualizer) since, oh, version 2.0. Bought the Gold version of that and G-Force, and then never touched them. I barely have time to listen to music these days, much less trip out to a screensaver while I do it.

Hmmm, speaking of G-Force, that’s next…

…and I need to create an EnvironmentalFactor for Zyps that manages the colors of all GameObjects according to their Location (for rainbows and such).

From the rSpec 1.1.4 release notes:

Note: we’ve removed the metaclass method from Object. There were some
generated specs that used it, and they will now break. Just replace the
metaclass call with (class << self; self; end) and all will be well.

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows (2005) is now available for download on XBox 360 Live, and I regret not catching it the first time around. (Well, no, I think $60 might have been too much to pay for it, but for $15, it’s freaking awesome.)

Basically, it’s an ultra-fast-paced, Live-enabled four-player God of War. It’s not especially deep; there are invisible walls all over the place, and the strategy doesn’t vary that much by enemy. But with multiple players, it definitely requires teamwork. “Someone cast the repulse spell!” “Save the cheese for me!” Diana, Lenny and I are playing it now, and it’s just challenging enough to get your pulse pumping. Good stuff.

If anyone downloads it and wants to party up, let us know.

Diana’s taking some Benadryl in to Lenny’s school - he’s breaking out in a rash. Evidently he’s inherited his grandmother’s allergy to… sunlight. The last time this happened was after the Ren Faire, and yesterday was Water Day at school. He was outdoors at midday for a prolonged period for both events.

I’d say no way this was the case, if his grandmother didn’t have it as well… Hopefully we’ll be disproven over time.

Google Health - well, that’s ballsy. I’d hate to see Google sued out of existence over a service that’s only barely in-scope for them, though. I wouldn’t touch the healthcare industry with a 10-foot pole.

I’m doing a talk on Zyps at Desert Code Camp on Saturday, May 31st. (Exact time TBD.) There are several other Ruby sessions as well, ranging from beginner to expert.

If you’re in the Phoenix/Tempe area, go get signed up!

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“In June 2007, the executive producer Bill Lawrence announced that he had signed a four-year contract with ABC[4], which will air an eighth season of Scrubs during the 2008-2009 television season.”

OK, here we go. The window on the left is the server, and on the right is the client. The server has absolute authority on all object movement right now, so objects on the client will occasionally “snap” back into the places dictated by the server. (That’s the jagged part in the trails on the client; the smaller boundary on the server causes them to change direction on the server only, and fall out of sync momentarily.) The shells in the background are both barfing debug data.

Next up is to test with multiple clients, and with joining/leaving whenever the client wants. I also need to get back the same degree of freedom for live coding that dRuby offered (shouldn’t be too difficult).