SidesWays Blog

Just starting on an adventure in HTML5 game development using Phaser and thought I'd keep notes online. There's a bigger picture application goal that I have in mind, but it will start as a series of exercises and I want to record them while I'm learning. First I wanted to create an example of a polygon moving around the screen using the cursor keys. After some exploration of the examples and reading documentation it boiled down to this basic example. First the index.html file: 1: <!doctype html> 2: <html lang="en"> 3: <head> 4: <meta charset="UTF-8" /> 5: <title>Polygon Test</title> 6: <script src="js/phaser.js"></script> 7: <script src="js/polytest.js"></script> 8: </head> 9: <body> 10: <div id="phaser_game"> 11: </div> 12: <script type="text/javascript"...

Ran across a couple of presentations that are relevant to building team culture, especially for virtual work groups. The first is a keynote by Jim McCarthy . I've been a long-term fan as he wrote a great book. See Pre-Agile Ideas: Jim McCarthy Videos for more. Here is the link to his keynote: Culture Hacking http://www.infoq.com/presentations/culture-hacking-singapore Some interesting quotes (he's very quotable) and take-aways: Get women involved! Technical teams lack diversity. "I'm not a real historian, but I like stories from history" "great editorial wall of China" "everything you do should be art" "team = product" Feeilings are "mad, sad, glad, afraid" "any process will work with presence" Book: Flow (P.S.) The other presentation that is full of tips for running virtual teams based on experience at InfoQ itself: Culture and Happiness in Virtual Teams http://www.infoq.com/presentations/cult...

Great presentation (30 minutes) on why multitasking is poor for productivity and how personal Kanban (and Kanban in general) works. There is a great short exercise at the beginning of the video that illustrates the cost of context switching. The Evils of Multi-tasking and How Personal Kanban Can Help You (by Sandy Mamoli) http://www.infoq.com/presentations/multi-tasking-personal-kanban Kanban in a nutshell: 1) visualize your work flow, 2) limit your WIP I'm experimenting with a personal Kanban board made using a 30" x 20" project board: The Pomodoro Technique is also discussed ( http://pomodorotechnique.com/ ). I'm experimenting with a Pomodoro App on my iPhone  

We had to change the names of 700 students in the student information system that I'm the product manager for at work. Instead of requesting that our support team write a database script, I figured it would be a good opportunity to try using Selenium ( http://www.seleniumhq.org ,  http://seleniumhq.wordpress.com ) to rename the students using the browser user interface. In the past I have written VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripts to control Internet Explorer and I wanted to extend that approach to control Firefox and/or Chrome. Excel VBA provides a very capable environment and the spreadsheet as an underlying model works very well for a class of problems. In this case we have a list of students already in the system and I added a couple of columns to contain the new first and last names. A simple loop through the rows using Selenium calls to manipulate the user interface and then record the results back in the spreadsheet is a straight-forward VBA macro. Of course, wi...

With smaller non-profit organizations, often the primary owner of the website is a founder or key board member who has taken on the job of creating and maintaining the website as a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) effort. Often this decision is made because of lack of funding or perhaps because the person has a passion for communication and the web. The website (social media too, but a topic for another time) is a critical resource for a non-profit organizations to leverage. This is an "evergreen" posting so web searches are suggested with some links that are current now. The intended audience is the current or potential website owner within the non-profit organization. Design of the Website There are good resources available on the web for this topic. Search " designing websites for non-profit organizations ". This is a good article to review: http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/galleries/best-non-profit-websites/ I suggest you lay out the organization of the site i...

At work today we discussed the need for a relatively sophisticated permissions system for controlling access to various features at a site we are building. I realized that something similar to what we were talking about was designed and built way back in the early 1980s on the PLATO system. Here's an Antiques Roadshow tour of PLATO Access Lists using a game I worked on in college as an example.... (if you want the PDF version contact me ). Avatar: A Multi-Player Dungeons and Dragons Game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(PLATO_system_video_game) An Access List is a system-provided capability on PLATO that allows authors (developers) to create custom flags that can then be used to control access to various features of a lesson (program). The example shown here is for Avatar, a popular RPG on PLATO. Keep in mind that this was created in the early 1980s and 512 x 512 plasma (orange) panel screens were state-of-the-art at the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_...

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...