SidesWays Blog

I've been looking around for a solution to messaging between devices since I'd like to experiment with creating a lite version of a game (Avatar) that I worked on in college as a learning experience. More about that at another time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(video_game) XMPP (Jabber) looks interesting. What's really attractive is that I may design the App with no server-side component with just message handling on the Internet. It's different since Avatar in college depended on shared memory (common) and only used a message queue for a portion of the game. Here's video that got me started (Hulu developers): Building Asynchronous Communication Layer w XMPP, Ruby, Javascript by Andrew Carter and Steve Jang http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZynQ04BuN8 And an interesting article: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Notes And a JavaScript library to experiment with: http://strophe.im/strophejs/ Jabber server to experimen...

I was fortunate to have worked my way through college as an Undergraduate Research Assistant with the Economics department at the University of Illinois working on multi-player bargaining experiments funded by some NSF grants where one of the researchers was Al Roth. He was already well known in game theory at the time these experiments were conducted. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2012 was awarded jointly to Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2012/ Three of his earlier papers where we (Ron Harstad, Michael Barr, myself) contributed by building multi-player experiments on PLATO: Expectations and Reputations in Bargaining: An Experimental Study (1983) https://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/papers/1983_AER_Expectations_and_Reputations.pdf The Role of Information in Bargaining: An Experime...

Working with distributed and overseas teams is a fact of life these days in technical environments especially and knowing some basic tips will utilize the talents of the entire team more effectively. Time Zones Time zone differences can accumulate to mean real schedule slippage so you have to try to use the time zone difference to your advantage. For example, if the shift in India starts 10 hours ahead of east coast time consider working in the evening for an hour or two to prep work plans for the next day. When you arrive in the east coast morning, the team in India will have had several hours to work on tasks that you'd agreed to. If you wait until the morning you may miss an entire day of productivity in India. This time zone issue even comes into play with east coast / west coast teams. If your west coast team gets a late start they are going to push the east coast team to have meetings at the end of the day. Not always practical. And having the west coast team get up ear...

Facebook sponsored test suite for HTML5 mobile development. Very cool. http://rng.io/