Well, as previously reported, I got caught up in a big layoff from Disney Interactive / Playdom. Considering the amount of time I was there, I got treated pretty well and that has allowed me to take a couple of months off completely. Actually, without getting into details, I kind of can’t start another full time job until early May. But it’s all good. Very good. I’ve been enjoying the time off immensely. I could get used to this. But eventually, the clock will strike midnight, my coach will turn into a pumpkin, I’ll have to leave the ball and go back to scrubbing cinders.
Read more...Since I published Playing With Chaos on the Amazon store, people have been asking for alternate formats – PDF, epub, print. Well, I finally got around to cleaning it up and formatting it for PDF. Generating an epub from the Kindle .mobi format was easy enough. So you can now purchase DRM-free versions of the book from Gumroad:
https://gumroad.com/l/playingwithchaos
When you buy, you’ll get all three versions – PDF, epub, mobi. No DRM, so you can read them anywhere. Hopefully you won’t go crazy sharing them. Think of the children.
Read more...Well, that was a bit fast.
At the beginning of last April, I started working at Playdom, the social gaming division of Disney Interactive. As part of the Central Tech team, I wound up working on maybe a dozen different games, from Star Wars to Pirates of the Caribbean. I’d usually just go on to a game team for a short time to help out with something specific – build process, some library integration, optimization, implementation of some specific feature, etc. – then I’d move on to some other team that needed some help.
Read more...This is one I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Probably should have done it earlier, as it’s used in so many places. Anyway, here you go, how to find the distance between two points.
Read more...I figure I might as well post these here too. Just in case people aren’t aware of them. 🙂
Read more...Last week I kicked off a new series on the Coding Math Channel. It’s the Application series.
I was thinking that it’s nice to present new concepts in each video, but there is a limited amount that I can do with them. I try to make the main episodes be 10-15 minutes long. I can explain a concept, do a few drawings, show some math, write some code, see it in action, and maybe iterate on that once or twice. And then, that’s it for that topic. Hopefully the brief example was good enough, because I’m moving on to something else now.
Read more...For the last few years I’ve done a year in review type of post near the end of the year. I guess I blew that already. But January 1st isn’t a bad time to do it.
2013
2013 brought a big change for me. After almost 6 years of working at Infrared5, I left there to work at Disney Interactive. It was a tough decision. I started at IR5 because the people there were my friends. And more friends arrived over the years. But the company had started as a Flash shop and with the slow decline of Flash, I felt it was facing an identity crisis. Long story short, I felt I was stagnating there the last year or two and needed to move on.
Read more...Those who know me personally, or have followed my work on this site for the last twelve and a half years (has it really been that long???) know that I go in and out of all kinds of programming subjects. From the early Flash experiment days I was always into math and physics and interactivity. I’ve created some fairly popular games (Falling Balls, Gravity Pods). I’ve enjoyed creating algorithmic art at www.artfromcode.com, of which several pieces have been published or used in various contexts. And I’ve had a couple of gallery shows with my art. I’ve coded various other mobile apps. I’ve created a couple of very popular UI component sets – BitComponents, which were purchased by a company called BeamJive and published under their own name, and later the open source MinimalComps, which enjoyed huge success and popularity. I’ve worked on various build and process management tools, such as STProjectMaker, which has been pretty popular itself. I’ve revived my love of electronics from my youth and have posted a few things on that, which people have found useful. And of course I’ve written a dozen or so books on coding and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world. This is all above and beyond any coding I’ve done in my day job. Not a bad hobby!
Read more...Chrome is my browser of choice. I’ve just moved from an original Surface tablet/laptop to a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro. Chrome was a bit touchy on the Surface. Or I should say not so touchy. The relatively high DPI screen with the small size caused it to work pretty poorly with touch. I think MS did some updates of their own which seemed to help, but it was still a pain in the neck. I’d be jabbing at the screen like an angry woodpecker sometimes, trying to click on a link.
Read more...First of all, I am not a musician by any stretch of the imagination. But that fact will become obvious all too soon. But if you’re going to make sound with code, you wind up either making sound effects or music. So let’s start with music. My goal here was to create a simple “tracker” application. You program in notes, it plays those notes back in progression to form a song. Of sorts.
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