Music is the most interesting one, last.fm is no longer free, 3 euros in Ireland, and the free web radio link is no longer supported as far as I can see. Doesn’t really matter anyway, I’m sure that it’s a tad egotistical of me to push a random selection of my taste of music at anyone who stumbles in here. What does matter is that I thrive off the recommendation system in last.fm, it works pretty well and I’ve found quite a few tunes through it. The selection of music on last.fm is huge, the catch is you don’t get to choose what order or when a song is played. At the same time I’ve been trying out spotify which is basically a music harddrive online. Apart from the considerably smaller (but growing) selection of music on spotify it works much better due to it’s playlist support and instant song playback. You can also share your playlists with other people or collaboratively make them, here’s one of mine. Problem with Spotify? It costs 10 euros a month in Ireland, although it’s still free in other places.

So the result is, to satisfy my music needs (and this is actually the only way I listen to music at a computer these days), I pay about 13 euros a month. This seems like reasonable value.

I got an iPhone. It’s too tempting as a development platform, particularly with the fairly open App Store which allows almost anyone to create new apps and sell them online. So as an exploration, much work has gone into making a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ48 laptop run Mac OS. This hasn’t been fun, many hours and about 100 euros in peripherals or software has been spent in this forbidden task. There was even a foray into running Mac Leopard in a virtual machine, worked eventually, but too slow. But the OS runs natively now, wireless, sound, usb, lcd screen, input, pretty much everything. Unfortunately I don’t think the iTune’s store likes my setup. Time to do more research and jail break that phone? Hmm, I’m half tempted to just spend the 600 euros necessary to get a mac mini and do it the right way. Consider this project ongoing.

I’ve been messing around a little with the Amazon EC2 service. This lets anyone, for a price, create servers online for whatever need the person wants. The benefit is mainly for people who want to shorten computation time of large tasks or dynamically (given the correct programming or systems) add more hardware when or as needed, instead of continually running servers non-stop for the worst case scenario. Cloud computing is in essence an innovation in pricing plans, more than in any virtualisation technology. It’s true, this area is just data and computing warehouses rebranded – but giving people like me a chance to play. If the prices came down by about half I’d consider keeping a server running full time and run all websites, subversion and remote services from it.

The “Shindig” event from the previous post went pretty well, the speakers were excellent and made it work. Occasionally someone has said something to me about it, and I’m sort of blank. “You don’t remember? Sure I said to you that evening of the Shindig? I was wearing my blue jumper?”. I guess I was pretty nervous and didn’t record much but people have been nice enough to say they didn’t notice. What’s interesting to me is how much energy it took to get it all going, it ate up much of my spare time for a few months and I was zonked for a few weeks afterwards. Another event.. um, no way Someone elses turn. But yeah, maybe this time next year we’ll do another.

While we’re geeking out I may as well mention Linux. It’s been about 9 months since I was forced to start struggling my way with linux and I’ve found the process of understanding Linux very close to that of trying to understand a new culture and learn the language. This isn’t a lame comparison, many things performed in Linux are command line based and knowing the correct program name is akin to learning a new verb while forming and piping commands is like forming sentences. The history of each program, the contexts that they are used in, the layout of the filesystem, the locations to find “stuff” is like mapping out a history and landscape of a new city. To summarise I think I’m starting to get over the steep learning curve and advance my Linux skills to the point where I can order beer and a bed for the night.

This is the first time that I’ve done anything like this and I hope to god I don’t mess it all up. I reckon it’s going to be 50% preparation and 50% “on the night”. We’ve already dealt with a date change and some trickiness in getting through to the correct people at our host location. That probably didn’t endear me to the speakers either. You need a thick skin too, there’s an element of cold calling involved. In general I’m noticing, like games publishers, no-one ever says no, they just stop replying (or take longer to do so). Right now the main concerns are tickets, they’ve already sold out in a day and I’m not sure many in our community got a chance to get them! Also, since the tickets were free and easily got online, I’m not sure how many will show up. We do have a guest list, but that will have to be managed carefully. A nice problem to have though, the bigger fear is that only 10 people would show up.

The high demand is most likely due to the suggested “recession proof” nature of the games industry (take away food, off-licenses and games, very popular as a cheap night out) and the large availability of idle talented people who haven’t gotten jobs since they graduated or have been laid off. Also games development has never had a lower barrier to entry. For example consider the I-Phone, 30 million sold, the vast majority of applications available for download are games, very popular games use and scaring the competition, 1 billion apps sold. For the developer you can pretty much add an application directly, no publisher, no huge console owner licence fees etc. Actually for my money I’d keep an eye out for google’s Android, there will be money to be made for early developers on the iPhone competing platform.

Now the down side here is that it’s a gold rush, with arguably a harsher market than the closed in home console markets where publisher, console and marketing fees provide a glass ceiling to protect the existing players. The choice here for iPhone developers is to cut prices or spend money on marketing – once you are outside the chart lists on the app store your sales plummet. It may not be long before we see a new tiered system on the itunes app store that puts publisher games in a special “high quality” section. Also calling the games industry recession proof is a little like saying the sea is waterproof. Most people in the games industry don’t stay in the one job more than a few years before layoffs or switching jobs with an average career reportedly lasting 5 years and companies go all the time… but then also those same employees either quickly go into new jobs or leave for other industries that pay better and the dead companies often spin out a new one or two. Recession like happenings are every day, but overall the industry is still growing.

There are also various other open platforms out there, Microsofts XNA and Silverlight platforms, Flash on browsers, some exiting 3d browser stuff from Unity, google’s o3d and good old native windows games downloaded online, and 10’s of others I’ve not remembered or noticed. There’s alot to be said for any game that you can make work only by visiting a web url; accessibility is everything in introducing new customers. I particularly think there’s going to be some interesting future stuff coming out from small independent developers which uses cloud computing (automatically purchasing more computing power from amazon / google as needed and sending the results back across the internet) to help with art and games graphics or a.i. Also anything to do with machine learning and statistics is a match made in heaven for computing. We’ve started to see games use it for playability testing, but I think we might see games use it more directly in the gameplay in synthesing a.i. and content.

In further non-games related news I’m tasked with doing a few tutorials for this years IET students working on the Cell (Playstation 3 like) architecture within the next few weeks. Honestly, I’m mid way through this learning myself, but that isn’t a terrible thing; I’m able to empathise with their needs and the best order in which they should try consume this info. Weirdly for me I’m not fretting about this set of talks, what needs to be said is very clear. We are also aiming to produce a journal paper at some stage on the work I’m doing right now day to day which would be nice.

Finally, my funding for the phd didn’t come through from Ircset. The competition was intense (2 out of 25 from Trinty Computer Science and Statistics). There are further options there for the taking, but the conditions are slightly different. In some way a part of me is relieved that I don’t have to decide yet, I can see advantages either way. If I were to put my main plus on pushing on towards the phd it would have to be the options and opportunities it might provide (colleges are a good cross roads of new people and startup opportunities), the main against, is the low pay and 3 years (almost 34 when finishing!) it would take to do and that I’m not actually too interested in persuing a career long term in either research or lecturing. Skipping the phd provides me with freedom to move jobs and location at a good time imo, October 2010, and get back into the games / software industry, hopefully in something with potential. The downsides are missing out on another good year or two of learning data mining techniques. A decision for later if I’m lucky.

Probably my next post will be after the event and discussing how it went. Until next time.

In other news I took a trip to London with some friends, Brian, Daitaigh, Derek, James and Oige as well as meeting my sister, her boyfriend and friends for my 30′th birthday. Thanks guys for showing me a good time, hope you enjoyed it, definitely a big weekend! This isn’t my first time to London, but apart from a brief day trip when coming back via Hong Kong and a few trips to ECTs (and old games trade show) I’ve not really been there for entertainment. It’s a big town with plenty of culture but you would need to be bankrolled by the treasury and have a year or two to really get a handle on things. Maybe that’s why it works so well, it’s big enough to give all the sub-cultures the critical mass they need to survive. E.g. One of the nights we ended up in a Rock-a-Billy and northen soul nightclub. Extreme tiredness aside that was a cool spot to end up in, even if Rock-a-Billy music doesn’t really get my blood going.

So what does turning 30 mean to me? It’s cool, although it does mean in my mind that there’s no room for feeling too irresponsible or frightened for trying things out. This is the height of manhood apparently, many of my cousins are married and as parents and lots of younger people are happily getting on with things like running companies, events and the like. I don’t think the man-child phenomenen exactly what I am, but I am aware I’m half my life expectancy and things won’t happen without a bit of conscious effort. Plus it’s never easier than around about now, young enough to have time, old enough to be taken seriously. I reckon if I’d not gone travelling I’d feel pretty pissed off about things right now; so I’m really glad I took to that challenge and enjoyed it. I have a lifetimes worth of memories in that year alone.

The future. Hopefully get a few more posts in this blog. There’s a games developer event I’m helping to run and organise happening soon, I’ll probably post more on that when the details are out. I will also hopefully have the nice decision of whether to do a phd or not, but this will depend on the funding bodies. And finally and most importantly I have to get the tomato sauce I’m cooking off the gas, I think it’s starting to burn.

So that’s where my head is at. As you can see, by studying the stunted sentence formation, the lack of any story or structure to the post nor the lack of anything of interest to any sane human being that I’m in full “nerd” mode. It’s an unfortunate side effect of too much programming, deep concentration and maths. I’m afraid I can’t do anything about this until my dissertation is done, I’m aiming to have it in 3 weeks early so I can go to Electric Picnic (again) and my sister’s wedding. Damn sight different from this time last year when I was getting fitted for a suit in Bangkok, drinking with strangers and discussing the state of all things prostitution wise. I love how the mind adapts.

About four weeks ago we were tasked with developing a game. The key idea was to create a fairly realistic project environment and get us the students to experience real-world issues: such as a customer, process management, team management, technical interest and of course the end game. Our customer was CRANN, an institute focusing on Nano-technology research at Trinity and it was around this area of the small-scale that we needed to base the game. In return we would get a small budget to spend on art. Split up into teams of about four we were told to make use of the ever more popular SCRUM methodology and start speaking to our customer. At the end of the project last week I would have to say I’m proud of what the team achieved and I have to thank those who helped us out, Dermy, Pete, Stephen, Alan B, David M and Keelin and a few other people who offered some very useful advice. The project went about as smooth as they can, a real mixture of conflicting, ever changing realities, needs and issues solved and continually fixed by some very proactive team members in a very short amount of time. I feel very lucky in the group of people I worked with, and each new project is always unique and a special education of its own. The only regret I have is that the art help we got in sound and art wasn’t utilised to its fullest (sorry guys) and there is little chance that we will get any time to revisit it again. Anyway the game, demonstrated above in very low res, may go live for PC at some stage in the near future so you might get a go and the IP now rests with Trinity.

I like those people because they become examples of how best to act. They now have to balance their old passion for games development and their new more important passion to raise and look after a family. This means there isn’t enough time in the day and they won’t be able to afford wasting it with stupid arguments, practices or policies at work. Time management and doing the effective and important tasks first becomes key. If they are at the wrong studio then they will immediately look for a more suitable studio that can accommodate them and provide stability and that can be of great benefit to studios who can accommodate these more experienced people. They can then give guidance for younger eager beavers who want to work hard to make up for their inexperience. Theory is no-one will fire you if you show up longer and work harder than everyone else, even if you are making a mess of things. This is obviously wrong and wasteful. It seems no surprise to me that more mature and important services like law, banking, doctors keep hours as steady as they can, 9 – 5 is the aim and no more; although I’m sure some friends could tell a few horror stories too.

The games industry is growing still, there is more money being made, this industry is recession-proof and those working in it are starting to ask for their worth and for studios to mature as they do. It seems to me to be something everyone can afford to do. Those that think they can’t afford to mature are actually those that won’t be around in five years time.

With that out of the way it’s time to study for the exams next week. That mostly means trying to prepare some maths and planning the “cram of attack” for the rest. Where was I this time last year? Christchurch New Zealand I think, high and content after doing a skydive, nice evening with an even nicer trip ahead of me down the west cost of the south island ending up in glenorchy for a while. That was probably one of the highlights of the year and I often wonder if maybe a games studio wouldn’t open up there soon. Peter Jackson was rumored to be up to something with Wingnuts interactive, but there’s not been a peep since.