Jay McGavren's Journal

2008-04-18

Apparently the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce’s Phoenix Young Professionals site was designed in Mumbai…

Get Phoenix: Growing * Emerging * Talent As a young professional, your career is very important to you. You are smart and ambitious - and you want to be recognized for your talents and your skills. We can help you GET ahead. ... Benefits to Employers: -Attract talented employees -Compete in the competitive marketplace -Develop their workforce of tomorrow ... About Young Professionals MEET THE NEXT GENERATION ... They are a very diverse group between the ages of 25-40, are self employeed, employeed or actively seeking employment.

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2008-04-16

My mother in law gave me a Bush Out of Office Countdown calendar for Christmas, with daily quotes that show the man really is stupid.

It has a little Bush waving goodbye at the bottom of each page, that progresses a bit further each day. And, oh, that progress is SO slow.

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2008-04-15

Doing a quick experiment with NetBeans...

Gods, it’s slow as hell on Windows.

netbeans.PNG

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2008-04-15

Chipmunk

I didn’t really like that I was implementing my own collision detection and physics when so many other people were doing the same, and doing a better and faster job. Behaviors were always the main thing Zyps brought to the table, and yet I wasn’t getting to spend much time on them.

Chipmunk might someday fix that - it’s a 2D physics engine. You create a Body and place it into a Space (sound familiar?) and Chipmunk takes care of the interactions. If I create a Behavior that simply positions the GameObject and assigns its Vector as the Chipmunk Body tells it to, I should be set.

I’m not going to make it a Zyps dependency, though, nor am I even sure that ChipmunkBehavior will find its way into the main library. ProximityCondition should fulfill the needs of the simplest games, and I’ll probably point those who need something more robust in the direction of Chipmunk (or another physics engine).

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2008-04-14

Ker-squueeeeee-thumpthumpthump...

So evidently, about 3% of the fish species out there have mating calls. I don’t mean dolphins or whales, I mean fish, and I don’t mean pheromones released in the water, I mean actual sound.

Fish Sounds - Ocean Life - New York Times

The above article has a video interview and some audio clips; this is some really alien, bizarre stuff. They grind their own bones against each other, fart bubbles, and some even have structures akin to vocal cords.

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