Itsyourturn down

I was at vacancy last week and affraid to lose my ladder games at itsyourturn. When I logged in to itsyourturn at monday, I saw terrible news - all of the users lost their games! Itsyourturn's server disks crashed.
So I wait impatiently for this service to work again.
They also started a blog about itsyourturn service repairing - itsyourturncom

Good to Great

I started to read Jim Collins' book "Good to Great". I'm very impressed of this book. Jim with his team spend several years to find why some companies are great and some are just good. He reveals many factors which differ one sort of companies from another.
I recommend you to read this book even if you're not a top manager.

Few words in honour of free software

I am very astonished at quality of free software.
Right now I'm using Mozilla Firefox. I also use Mozilla ThunderBird.

Then, few weeks ago I started to use Netbeans.

Apache is well known by its HHTP server, Tomcat and many more other tools.

All of these products are free. But in spite of this, they are remarkable by high quality.

It is incredible. I only needed to spend some money for OS (I use Windows) and then I can get most software for free.

I can say more, even MS gives us its compilers for free!

We live at programmer's heaven!

What a wonderful Earth!

I found yesterday the great program - Google Earth. It is one step forward after new Google maps service. But now one can see our Earth in 3D, zoom in out to any place on Earth!

User interface is quite simple and comfortable.
I hope in near future we will see the Earth with more resolution and with realtime photos!

LinkedIn

I recently reopened LinkedIn network fo myself. I registered there for a long time, but only few days ago I understood all of its power.
This network created to help professionals find and connect each other through their friends, co-woкkers e t.c.

CodeGeneration

It is well known that number of bugs is nearly constant if calculated per thousands of lines of code. So less code we have, less bugs eat our time.
Hence, we need to write programs on high level language. It gives us more functionality with less number of code lines. Unfortunately using highlevel language is not possible sometimes.

Another solution is just generate your code! Codegeneration is very interesting thing. In our company we started with generating lexer&parser for our game scripts. For theese purposes we use ANTLR already for several years. ANTLR is a"language tool that provides a framework for constructing recognizers, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions". It is good.

One more helpful codegeneration solution is automatic binding code between different programming languages. You can find a lot of different tools on http://www.codegeneration.net/

You can also use popular feature of generating classes from UML diagrams. Many modern programming frameworks give you this feature.

Some time ago we found interesting project called cog. It is tiny tool that allows you to write metacode on python right in your source file! Metacode is just "code that generate code". Using this tool is very promising.

(Bug|Task)tracking with Bugzilla

I checked several tasktracking systems last days.
And I can recommend some -

free ones:

• Bugzilla
• Trac

commercial:

• Jira
• FogBugs

Trac has no release yet - gone from my list (it also has poor admin's features)
Jira & FogBugs are great! The only reason we'll not use one of them now is their cost.

Bugzilla is a tracking system I'm evaluating in greater detail.
It seems to be quite good, with only exception - it's User Interface (UI).
UI in Bugzilla is very ugly, it has no evident features, it is just a mess of textfields, comboboxes and textlabels.
Why all of this happen?
I think, guys from Bugzilla team just making product for their own. They're guru, they make UI templates everyday, so they just can't understand why good UI is so important for their product.

So what shall I do?
If Bugzilla's featurelist will fit our needs, we will change all their templates for new ones.
It's a pity.

How To Write Unmaintainable Code

I recently found a very interesting article written by many authors named "How To Write Unmaintainable Code". Name of this article speaks for itself.

Automatic Calculation for game levels

Today I've wrote an Ant script which helps us to automate process of precalculating game levels.

This Ant scripts can check for new files on file server, and of course it can run precalculation utility. Ant script is stored in Subversion repository, so our Luntbuild server gets it from repository and periodically runs process of level precalculation. That is great! Only you need is to export level to file server!
When some time passed, you'll get final version of level from another file server directory!

I also have to say that ant-contrib package is very useful for extending Ant functionallity.

Playing chess

I play chess online for several years at ItsYourTurn. It is a nice place to talk to many interesting people all over the world! You can also play many other games there!

Testing image uploads

This is my favorite picture. I use it as my user avatar everywhere.
If you know the source of this image, please let me know. I scan it from cover of pirated CD Dick Dale's Rock'N'Roll

My contribution to Open Source

I recently hosted my first project at Sourceforge.
It is Subdmin.
Subdmin is used to simplify work with Subversion repositories.

Automating build of our projects

Last several months I research continuous build system.
We already use Subversion + scons.
And we are very satisfied. So now I want to make one more step forward - install continuous build system.
Current goal of it is to continuously build all targets for all our projects. So we can see if something goes wrong. It also will help game designers to get last hot version of project.

In the future I plan to automate all build process - from SCM & File server to CD image with a game.

I searched for appropriate continuous build systems and selected some candidates:
CruiseControl
DamageControl
Luntbuild

Curerntly Luntbuild is my favorite. My requirements were:

• Easy install
• Web interface
• Easy setup for new builds

DamageControl & CruiseControl are very hard to install and setup.
The only disappointing thing in Luntbuild - It uses Ant system to build projects. And Ant doesn't support Subversion!
You can also see comparision table for continuous build systems here