Australia!

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while now. At points I've mentioned going to Australia, well, this is how that went down.

At this years Game Developers Conference, Queensland Games had a contest you entered by text messaging the capital of Queensland to some number. 1st prize winner got a 7 night trip to Queensland for 2, 3 runners up got a surf board. Since at the time I was hoping to move to CA, I decided to try my shot at a surfboard (like hell I'd win a trip!) and used my iPhone to check Wikipedia for the answer (Brisbane ). Winners were to be announced shortly after the show.

But they weren't. Apparently whoever was supposed to notify the winners left the company, and no one knew who the winners were. Until the company does some auditing, and I get a call while heading to lunch in my second or third week at Amazon. Apparently, I won a trip to Australia.

Of course I found the whole thing kind of hard to swallow. I mean, who actually wins a trip overseas? But, the circumstances seemed right, and no google-fu returned anything involving the company scamming anyone. So I guiltily accepted the prize (I feel bad for winning a prize at a game developer conference and not really being a game developer) and gave them my info. Even still, I was a bit suspicious. Then, on Monday I got a package containing the vouchers for airfare and hotel stay, plus a Sony DCR-DVD610 DVD Camcorder.



Ah hah, I knew there was something fishy! The airfare voucher is only good from LA to Brisbane! No, seriously, it's pretty awesome. So awesome, I kind of feel apathetic about it. I was so suspicious about it at first, that now it's kind of "there." Or maybe I'm just tired.

Funny thing, I'm pretty happy with my awesome Lumix DMC-LX2K camera and ultra-portable (yet seldom used) Flip camcorder. I really have no idea what I will do with the camcorder they sent, because I'd image it would be annoyingly large to carry during the trip, relative to my other devices. I've always liked the idea of having a camcorder, but I know it would be seldom used, which kind of annoys me. It's weird, but I dislike not using a gadget, and so I then I try to use said gadget, but instead it just collects dust. I guess it's a problem I'm lucky to have :)

iPhone Development

I spent a good amount of time yesterday creating a mobile Inversion client for iPhone. The funny thing is, most of my time was spent on some really stupid things not really related to the new material I'm working on. And there is, in fact, a lot of new material I'm working with. For example:

- Cocoa
- Objective-C
- iPhone Framework
- Interface Builder
- Socket programming

All in all I'm pleasantly surprised by the dev experience. Objective-C 2.0 is actually quite nice (properties in particular), and Cocoa works beautifully (keep in mind I've never done any GUI programming before). In under 200 lines of code, I basically have a "blind" client, in that I can register with a game server and send new GPS coordinates any times the phone detects a change. Our other client, using Windows 5, probably uses that much just to register with the server.

As a note, one thing that really killed a lot of time for me involved Interface Builder. For some reason, the default gui file (nib file for those with Cocoa experience) already had a control layer in it, which was blocking all gui events from reaching my app. It was quite surprising for me to find out that just deleting the base layer fixed my gui code, something I had been trying to do for a few hours saturday.

iPhone Development

I spent a good amount of time yesterday creating a mobile Inversion client for iPhone.  The funny thing is, most of my time was spent on some really stupid things not really related to the new material I'm working on.  And there is, in fact, a lot of new material I'm working with.  For example:

• Cocoa
• Objective-C
• iPhone Framework
• Interface Builder
• Socket programming

All in all I'm pleasantly surprised by the dev experience.  Objective-C 2.0 is actually quite nice (properties in particular), and Cocoa works beautifully (keep in mind I've never done any GUI programming before).  In under 200 lines of code, I basically have a "blind" client, in that I can register with a game server and send new GPS coordinates any times the phone detects a change.  Our other client, using Windows 5, probably uses that much just to register with the server.  

As a note, one thing that really killed a lot of time for me involved Interface Builder.  For some reason, the default gui file (nib file for those with Cocoa experience) already had a control layer in it, which was blocking all gui events from reaching my app.  It was quite surprising for me to find out that just deleting the base layer fixed my gui code, something I had been trying to do for a few hours saturday.  

Delicious and Remember the Milk

I generally have a ton of websites open in Safari (on average I would say 35).  Obviously this isn't a good idea for numerous reasons, largely it's a waste of space and a waste of memory.  I've lately have been making an attempt to cut this down, and I think I have a fairly decent approach.  For general items that I would like to read up on or consider for later, I use del.icio.us, usually assigning a tag "todo" or "tobuy."  If it's an action item, I use Remember the Milk, a great webapp that handles to do lists and can shoot you an email/im/SMS when something is due.  One of its features is that you can attach a URL to an item, allowing myself to get rid of any webpages that are only open to be acted upon at a later time.

My del.icio.us bookmarks

iPhone downgraded to 1.1.4

About a week ago I purchased an iPhone development license and installed the new 2.0 firmware beta on my iPhone.  Since then my iPhone has been crashing like made, but I figured I was at Apple's whim.  However, things got worse.  At approximately 3 am today, my iPhone showed the "pink screen of death," meaning i needed to reactivate my iPhone.  Yet, XCode told me the 2.0 firmware was out of date, and Apple has yet to release a new firmware.

Think about that.

Apparently, every iPhone developer has a bricked iPhone (potentially iPod Touch developers as well) until Apple pushes a new beta.  There was no warning.  In my opinion, this is not excusable, especially considering the horrid stability of the last version.

So what did I do?  I managed to circumvent Apple and downgraded back to 1.1.4 using Liberty+.  Now I'm going to do what I should have done and wait until the absolute last second to upgrade my iPhone for dev purposes. 

Amazon.com

I've accepted a position with Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book team as a Software Dev Engineer.  It should be a great opportunity to do some fancy AI stuff with distributed systems.  

This means I'll be moving to Seattle, Washington around July 17.  It should be interesting, as I've only been in the city for about 35 hours or so.  People have assured me I'll like it; hopefully they're right :)  The fact that it's the same city that gave us grunge and Utilikilts seems like a start.

Leading up to the move will be quite hectic.  I graduate on June 14th, leave for Ireland on June 26, hop over to England on July 8th, and then fly back to the US on July 13th.

iPhone SDK

About a week ago I signed up for the $99 iPhone Developer Program.  Since then I have been focused on learning Objective-C and Cocoa, but I finally managed to update my iPhone to the 2.0 beta (aka iPhone version 1.2).  There really isn't that much different from the most recent version.  The calculator has a scientific mode (pretty awesome), exchange is supported (I don't have an exchange server to test on), there is a Contact application on the home screen, and the Tunes Store is missing.  The main thing I've noticed, though, is that the version is definitely beta quality.  It's crashed at least 3 times on me today.  I'm contemplating downgrading for regular use, and then switching to 2.0 briefly to test my development software.  This is probably a good idea, as I'm at least 2 weeks off from getting anything close to deployable.

Luckily, my worry regarding an inability to use my iPhone as a phone after upgrading was unfounded.  Still, the crashes are too numerous for my liking.

Passage

Just played the game Passage.  It's really an awesome game, and very short, so I highly recommend everyone playing it.  I wonder if any other medium could pull off the same thing in such a "tight" manner with the same effectiveness.

Twitter

I really need to get my twitter feed on to this blog at some point.