rob’s blog

I recently wrote a brief paper on World of Warcraft, a game I’ve never played before, for the Service Strategies course I’m taking at Babson.  My paper discusses what about Blizzard Software’s functionality with the MMORPG of WoW was innovative or offered a bit of service differentiation.  You can read the whole thing here. (pdf)

I had chosen WoW for as my topic for three reasons.  One, it was among the suggested topics Professor Rao offered for the assignment, two, I love sci-fi and I played Magic in high school,  and three, my sister has played some WoW and she’s cool.

After spending a few hours working on that paper I realized that I should really have a crack at the actual gameplay for the good of scholarship.  Not because I have a lot of serious work to do that I’m trying to avoid.  Not that at all.

With a 10 day free trial, I couldn’t go wrong, so I started the download of the game and it was 3.6 gigs of data streaming over some type of resumabale http stream.  Oh well, I thought, I’ll let it go over night and try it out in the morning.

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Neutrinos just wrapped its second iPhone application, it is a 20 questions trivia game called iQ.  It is great step from our first app, TipTotaler.  For iQ, I took on the user interface design for the application in addition to my normal website design and marketing.

The amount of graphic design and image handling in iPhone development is extensive and I’ve already blogged about a tool to assist in the 3d iPhone application icon design.  But the most interesting stuff is happening in Interface Builder and in xCode that I’m not supposed to talk about here.

Apple has an NDA up with all developers that they can not talk about their experience with the SDK.

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My friend Dave Peixotto is in charge of coding and software repository work on our iPhone application development.  I am in charge of the marketing and business aspects of our software company, Neutrinos, LLC.

One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app.  As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.

There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers:  First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57.  Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.

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I ditched my Blackberry Curve and picked up an black 16 gigabyte 3g iPhone last week.  It had been a great experience so far, with only a handful of complaints.

[Note: Since this entry was written, I have been releasing iPhone applications to the iTunes store.  You may be interested in checking out our iPhone and iPod Touch Applications. -rob]

Yesterday, however I had a serious problem with the phone.  I was at Rock the Bells in Mansfield, MA and reached for my phone only to find that it had a solid white screen.  It would not respond to the sleep or home button.  I tried the hard restart (reset), and it would go blank, then if I did it again, flash the white briefly.  I did the hard restart (10 seconds home and sleep) a few more times and got to the Apple logo.

The device then boot up normally to the home screen, however the moment it went to sleep it would not come back to life.  It would just be a dead screen.  I could get it to come back to the home screen again by doing multiple hard restarts (not every one was successful in getting to the Apple loading screen, sometimes holding the two buttons only resulted in a vibration) but even then it required multiple attempts. If I missed the home screen and it went to sleep then the process had to be repeated.

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The 2008 Boston Marathon was today, and the course went just past the end of my block in Brighton. I’m usually drawn to road races as a spectator, since I’m not in anywhere near the condition to execute on a race like this right now, I get my kicks from cheering on the runners of the day.

Part of it is just the energy you get from cheering on total strangers. The other is the quiet self-motivation that I should be in training myself. My two marathons from in Portland are starting to seem a little far off, and neither of them were in a time that would have qualified me for the race today.

I did use the excellent vantage point at Cleveland Circle to take some footage of the elite runners group–ment and women leading the pack. I compiled the video and a few photos into a 90 second video and went ahead and tested out Flickr’s new video features.

There is some interesting discussion going on in the Facebook Developer’s forum. The gist is that Facebook has made changes that are causing some developers to feel disenfranchised. A few developers are upset enough that they are speaking of creating a union of independent Facebook application developers.

What might the goals of a union of Facebook application developers be? It would help to look at what has stirred the pot recently. About two weeks ago someone posted a complaint that Facebook had unfairly bent the rules to give CBS’s Sports NCAA bracket application advantages for faster viral spread across the Facebook user base. Adding insult to injury, the thread also pointed out that the CBS Sports NCAA bracket application had a poor user rating.

Two days ago another developer posted a thread titled, “Facebook has stolen my idea!” which describes the recently added “Do you know these people?” page on Facebook. The developer suggests he feels “cheated” because the new Facebook page duplicates his own application’s functionality. The developer’s application was forced to comply with platform development rules that required an obstructive approval process in order work correctly.

Facebook’s “Do you know these people?” page circumvents this approval process because it is not subject to the rules independent application developers must follow. Facebook made a better version of the application a part of the Facebook experience by bending the rules that crippled the original developer’s work. Continue Reading »

The modern software development process is sort of out in the open. Any sizeable project like a new version of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop is discussed widely in technology forums and blogs. Although beta testers generally sign NDAs with companies, details or full copies of beta software leaks regularly.

Google’s Android OS is not quite Open Source, but will rely heavily on the Open Source contributions from the public. This past weekend an ARS Technica article about updates to Android acknowledged Google’s creation of a public bug tracking system as a “sign that Google is taking the needs of the Android third-party developer community more seriously.”

Clearly, expectation of visibility into today’s major software projects has increased with the growth of the web. But what about older software? Who is looking into the games and tools that we used on a daily basis 15 years ago?

Know Your Mario History

A new Download Squad article discusses the impending release of a historical documents related to Sega video game development between 1993 and 1994. It claims that a “large community of Sonic fans have been searching for prototypes and lost levels in the games for many years now.” Indeed, you can read the granular details.

The new article says that a community member is planning on releasing “an entire year’s backup of data from the Sega of America offices from 1993-1994.” The article calls the eagerness of the community to review the information as part of a post-modern archeology culture, where people examine the assembly-level code of these game ROMs. Continue Reading »

I’ve been watching the Writer’s Guild of America strike with some interest through the reporting from Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily since before it went into effect but haven’t had reason to bring it up here until today.

In case you aren’t familiar with what’s going on, essentially all of the people who write scripts for television and movies are currently on strike over a contract re-negotiation that isn’t getting them what they want. The biggest points of contention are:

1. Writer’s want their take from DVD sales to increase.Currently writers see .3% of DVD residuals for the first million dollars in reportable gross, and .35% of takings after that mark. Writers feel that producers negotiated these numbers when production costs were much higher, and now the writer’s share should be revalued.
2. Writer’s want to see money from digital downloads and streaming, specifically a 2.5% share.This is apparently more important to the WGA than the DVD thing, because they are quite accurately predicting that downloads of some kind will be the most profitable and most important area to gamble their livelihood over. If you read this intriguing analysis by Jonathan Handel at the Huffington Post, you’ll read about him peering into the future of 3D entertainment.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) are the ones going up against the WGA on this and from what I’ve seen on the web and in print, they aren’t handling it very well. Continue Reading »

Audioscrobbler, aka Last.fm is a website that keeps track of your music listening habits. It does this by installing a little pidgeon in your mp3 playing software that flys to the Last.fm server each time you play a song.

The results from this is aggregate data on your music listening habits. It is really a fun way to keep track of what you listened to and share that information with your friends. At one point I had my most recent tracks showing on this blog, but pulled it out because it wasn’t updating correctly.

You can see what I’ve been listening to here.

Winamp 5.5 Breaks Track Reporting

My mp3 playing software of choice is Justin Frankel’s Winamp. It is preferable to iTunes for many reasons. Anyhow, Winamp pushed out its upgrade to version 5.5 a few weeks ago and changed the way that track play detection is performed. This caused in the audioscrobbler / Last.fm winamp plugin to malfunction, only reporting one out of a string of songs to the server. The result is that it looked like I was only listening to one track every several hours or so.

I finally got around to looking into it and found a patch in the Last.fm forums created by very astute user named DoctorO. I installed it and blam it is fixed now. I looked further in the thread and found a Last.fm staff member had updated their winamp installer to now detect the Winamp version number and then detect tracks correctly. I had some troubs with the new official one, however so I’m recommending the user submitted update. Continue Reading »

Babson requires its two-year MBAs to complete an international component which may take the form of a “significant international experience.” When I heard that one of the options is a semester (three months) abroad in Madrid, Spain I knew I had to take a hard look at it.

The Babson Office of International Programs hooked me up with a Babson MBA student currently undergoing the program and he found me Andreas Berghoefer. It took some coordination, but after a few weeks, we finally hooked up on Skype this afternoon to go over his experience so far. Hopefully, Andreas doesn’t mind me sharing some of the things he told me here.

In brief: Andreas is from Germany, and a part of the two-year MBA program at Babson College. He was involved in a number of clubs at Babson, especially the Babson Family Enterprise Club. One of his main interests going to the Instituto de Empresa was to reach out to a wider European alumni network.

One of my first questions was on how easy or difficult it is to stay connected to the Babson campus while taking a semester abroad. Andreas said that he still receives all of the emails that he would other wise so that is good. However, he misses out on all of the hands-on activities including Buffoonery which is a bummer.

On the academic side, he said that the quality of each class depends largely on the professor teaching it. Sometimes slides are not translated into English very well and it reflects sort of poorly on what is otherwise a well-regarded program.

Another concern was the administration of the program–which he seemed to feel had more red tape and difficulty in changing than what you’ll find at Babson. He has felt this especially with regards to the IT department which sounds like it is in some state of shambles at Instituto de Empresa. Andreas mentioned that many of the group organization has been outsourced to Facebook at this point. Continue Reading »