At my old company, I always felt there wasn’t enough life around the office. Okay, so it’s a games development company, so technically a ‘hostile living environment’ for most plants (animals, and lets face it, developers), but I liked to buy plants to make my desk feel a little more healthy. My old co-workers will attest to the hardiness of the various plants which did survive, and there were always replacements for the ones that ended up little more than twigs in a pot.

But here at the Company, I’ve decided that things will be different. As many plants as we can keep alive, and now for added organic feel, we have a mascot! Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce: Alfred the Oranda.

Why Alfred? Well, we realise the life expectancy of our mascots might not be so long, so some kind of alphabetical naming system á la tropical storms seemed appropriate. He doesn’t seem to move around much, so a bit like me, but I’m sure he’ll settle in fine.

Currently on the work agenda: looking at automated testing frameworks, as well as evaluating a game idea proposed to us recently.

Sorry to hear about the demise of Visual Science this week, although from the news the past month or so it wasn’t entirely unexpected. The Scottish games industry is starting to look a little cramped, shall we say. Here’s hoping another company will rise to fill VS’s spot north of the border (mostly because I don’t want to have to tempt all those people back north again when our time comes ;-)).

Anyway – I hope all the staff now redundant come out of this okay. Nick Oakley tells me that Kuju in Godalming are looking for people right now if that’s any help.

Okay, lets not be relying on the auto-upgrader from Dreamhost, as it’ll nuke the site templates. Urgh, I’ll restore from backups in a bit…

EDIT: Wow – that really did go quite badly wrong. Looks like it tried to do some horrible recursive copy sort of thing where it tried to backup the website into a subdirectory inside the website, which of course meant it fell over when it got to trying to back up the directory which it was filling up. All a bit messy. Mind you, its a beta feature, so I’ll give them some feedback as to where it went wrong, and hope they can fix it. In the meantime I think I’ll be doing my own patching/upgrading from now on, where I’ve only got myself to blame when I shaft the whole site! 🙂

Urgh – curse Pipex and their slow moving tar-pit of a customer service desk. Right! Sorry for the hiatus, but we have been sans Net connection for almost three weeks, following our move to a new place! My hands are still shaking from the withdrawal symptoms. But on the plus side, the new office desk and setup is way more ergonomic and pleasant than the last one, so I’m hoping the general raising of the pleasantness level in here will result in an increase in my work output too.

In other news – I’ve had all of my time sucked away by a full time contract with Barco down in Leith. Not the high-end display division, much to some people’s disappointment (like they’d give favourable deals to contractors anyway), but the medical imaging team (formerly known as Voxar). Much hard work, but pleasingly its back to hard core structural C++ programming, which has always been my favourite skill to exercise. Its also, heaven forbid, starting to convert me to the merits of exception based programming, test-driven-development, and XP!

More on my assessment of XP in the workplace later probably, still not sure if I’d adopt it wholesale, but its definitely got some good points.

Well, hope everyone had a good Hogmanay, and wishing you all the best from all of us here at Black Company Studios. Well, from me at least. Okay, from me while I’m in a good mood, which probably isn’t for very long. Look, stop hassling me – don’t you have New Years resolutions you need to go and break?

Anyway, this years holiday season passed with only a bit of over-indulgence on my part, as I was mostly busy with web-development contracts rather than my usual lazing around the flat drinking and playing games. Some might consider that a bad thing, but I think my liver is thanking me for it.

It seems this time of year is upgrade season as well – time for me to pull my finger out and sort out all the upgrades which have been hanging over my head. PhpBB and MediaWiki both have minor updates, and WordPress is up a full major revision. So, you’ll excuse the occasional broken page here while I sort things out.

Update: Everything’s now up to date, although I did lose this morning’s post and have to write this one from memory. That’ll teach me to back things up and then write more content before upgrading!

Erk! Didn’t realise how long it has been since I last updated. I’ve had my nose deep down in various web projects for clients, as well as a pitch for a ‘management training simulator game’. I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘Sim’ style games, and have spent many hours of play on whichever game I was addicted to at the time. This one has a more serious note however, as its primarily designed for training purposes and is for use in an academic environment (for a specific client who thinks the best way to educate is to encourage experimentation).

I’m hoping to take it a bit easier over Christmas though – since I’m finding one of the many problems in being your own boss is knowing when to stop. There’s always one more task to be done, one more client to talk to. Anyway, shouldn’t be so long till the next update anyway, although it’ll probably end up being after the big day.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Not that anyone will notice I suppose, but I’ve just cleaned up some of the front page code to shave 50% off the loading time. It seems like no matter how long I spend learning new Web coding tricks, there’s always more, and they’re all useful! So, yet more ticks in the accessibility column. 😀

Well, the plan to go with the older motherboard was thwarted by the fact that I don’t actually have a keyboard with a full DIN connector (rather than the more standard PS2/mini-DIN connectors now commonplace). D’oh! So its back to the same old motherboard, but sans the disk that died on me. So, still random stability problems, but now the shoddy disk is gone, at worst the machine will need rebooted to get access to things. Still sounds like a hoover though – I should probably retrieve my old P2 Celeron from the person I loaned it to and use that instead. Still, not too urgent.

I’ve decided to up my backup frequency though – restoring from an older subversion database is a pain, as all the changes made have to be isolated and re-commited to the DB seperately. Way more time consuming than it should be.

On an unrelated note – I liked the case study of EVE’s most recent hardware upgrade: detailed here. Sounds like a case of ‘can we have this new shiney bit of kit please?’ followed by ‘OMG thats shiney – everything works great now!’. Of course, the fact that you have to upgrade to faster hardware to sustain more users points to a flaw in their scalable design. In theory, a truly scalable design means that you can support more users by simply increasing the number of processing units of the same type available; otherwise you’ll eventually run into a hardware wall (disk drives can only get so fast). Still, I’m sure it won’t be an issue for a long while – increasing the power of the bottlenecked process by a factor of 10 in theory means allowing 10 times as many users before it becomes an issue again, long enough for another item to become the bottleneck first…

Well, thats that contract done with – can finally spend some time back in the office, tying up loose ends after 4 weeks, 9 till 5 in someone elses office. Good news – the company were glad to have me working there and everyone said nice things about me and my abilities/manner. 🙂 Bad news – come home and fire up the server machine to put some stuff into source control, to find out its pretty much toast. 🙁

So, will probably strip the machine and build it back up with the older motherboard/CPU I have – its much slower, but unless I get to the root of the reliability problems I’ve been having with the machine, its pretty much useless anyway. All I really need is a CPU, disk, network card and CD-ROM and it’ll suffice, but it has to reliable (and preferably be a bit quieter than the current one, which sounds like a hoover running – not a good thing for a machine that serves its purpose best when its on 24/7).

Will have to look at a list of objectives for the company as well; things have been somewhat slow recently, I want to get a handle on where we are going, how fast we want to get there, etc. Priorities really – the one thing you get from working a contract full time is a list of things you want to work on when you get a chance.

In non-company news – the Insolvency Payments people have come through on the unpaid protective award I was due from VIS – so thats a nice little bit of cash to help things along over Christmas. Yay for slow but steady government bureaucracy! 😀

Here’s a bit of comedy (or so I thought) for you: I’ve been sorting out Professional Indemnity insurance for the contract work I’ve been doing, and boy is it awkward to sort out. Anyway, the one firm I found who do it online (Hiscox) are the only ones who got back to me in any reasonable length of time with a quote.

So, I’m going through their online purchase procedure, and filling in more details; there’s a lot of yes/no questions where the yes answer boils down to ‘are you a risk’. E.g. ‘are you a crook’, ‘have you made any previous claims’, ‘do you make medical/aviation equipment’, etc. Then there’s a question:

Are you responsible for any of the following?
• Internet Service Provision, Application Service Provision, or games development
• full implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning systems
• full implementation of Customer Relationship Management systems.
• specialist work in relation to the security of networks and systems such as design of security systems, and vulnerability and penetration testing? (This does not include standard virus, firewall or router protection)

So somehow, games development is considered as bad as all these other (obviously) risky professions. How come?

I’ve worked in games development for a good while now, and I’ve seen some dodgy business stuff going on, but it rarely if ever came down to a litigious claim against the other party. Even when there was good reason to make a claim! If anything, negligence in the games industry is less likely to result in a serious breach of contract. If you screw up a business client’s database, chances are they’ll notice it, and complain and bluster and claim damages. If you screw up a game’s save and restore system, the players will moan and rate the game less, but it won’t come to a damages claim.

Maybe it’s down to the ge
nerally poor specification treatment that games contracts get. It is easier to see the specification of a business software contract and follow it to the letter; a games development contract requires a flexible approach to what work needs done. Then, of course, more flexibility leads to vagueness of responsibility, and the possibility of a claim being made as both sides disagree on what needs done.