Wumple.com

2009/08/18

Speaking in September

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 1:39 pm

I’ll be speaking at two game development conferences during September: CEDEC 2009 in Japan and GDC Austin in Texas.  Details and links follow.

CEDEC 2009 – CESA Developers Conference 9/1 – 9/3 in Yokohama, Japan

  1. Handling Code and Assets for Huge Projects Using State-of-the-Art SCM
  2. What I Have Learnt From Japan (panel) – Tuesday 9/1, 11:20 – 12:20

GDC Austin (Game Developers Conference) – 9/15  – 9/18 in Austin, TX

  1. Defending the Realm: Resisting Exploits and Hacks to MMOs and Other Online Games (roundtable)- Thursday 9/17 3p-4p

Look me up and say hi if you are there!

2009/01/12

My Samsung TV Runs Linux!

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 6:59 am

It looks like my Samsung HL-T6189S LED DLP TV runs embedded Linux! Cool.

I was looking through the firmware downloaded from Samsung’s web site for the set (to make sure 1019 was the latest firmware for the HL-T6189S) and found the following files inside of the archive:

  • run.sh : a shell script
  • rc.local : a script ran during startup of many versions of Linux and Unix
  • Many .so and .ko files which are shared object files (similar to DLLs) and kernel modules (similar to device drivers)
  • Several .img files that appear to be compressed ROMFS file system images (compressed file system images)

Fascinating! Too bad Samsung has announced they are not developing any new DLP sets. I wonder if their LCD displays also use Linux?

2008/09/22

My CEDEC 2008 Presentation: Recent Trends in U.S. Game Development Processes

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 4:41 pm

Last week I spoke at CEDEC 2008 in Tokyo, Japan about "Recent Trends in U.S. Game Development Processes".  And then I followed it up with lots of sight-seeing!

CEDEC is the CESA Developers Conference, the Japanese equivalent to the GDC’s Game Developer Conference in the United States.

My presentation covered Agile development and Scrum, SCM tools including Perforce, and the emerging role of a build manager or build engineer on projects.  It was great meeting so many Japanese developers and discussing game development processes, comparing the differences between US and Japanese development.

To view the slideshow of my presentation, click "more…" below and use the presentation controls.

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2007/11/03

Non-Programmer Scripting and a Hybrid Solution

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 1:18 pm

Damien Schubert has an interesting video game development post entitled "No Scripting for You!" on his blog Zen of Design:

"Ubiq’s law of scripting: Programmers always say, “No designer scripting!” This lasts until they see the production schedule."

I posted a comment about hybrid solutions which can frequently achieve many of the benefits of the individual solutions while minimizing the drawbacks.   Basically, I suggest using data driven systems run by engineer-developed code as much as possible, and when additional scripting/feature coding is needed either have a scripter supervised by an engineer (via tech design, consultation, and code review) implement it for simpler cases, or an engineer implement it for more complex cases.

This could allow the use of more efficient and less error prone data driven system in most cases, while allowing scripting (code reviewed by software engineers) when needed when a more expressive solution is required.

More detail after the jump.
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2007/07/05

MisterHouse Using 100% CPU? One solution is…

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 1:39 pm

MisterHouseI’ve had a problem where MisterHouse was slowly growing and eventually using 100% of CPU time.  I was very irritated by this waste of CPU and electricity, and I think I finally tracked down a solution.

If you are not using MisterHouse triggers, disable trigger_code.pl and triggers.mhp.  (I also disable every single file whose functionality I am not using.)

Go to MisterHouse’s web admin interface.  In MrHouse Home -> Setup MrHouse -> Common Code Activation, disable trigger_code.pl.  In MrHouse Home -> Setup MrHouse -> User Code Activation, disable triggers.mhp.

Disabling these two files stopped a periodic five minute reload of all user code, and has seemed to stop the CPU and memory growth of MisterHouse.

2007/06/17

What I Want In My Next Car

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 2:56 pm

My 11 year old Honda Civic gets good gas mileage (about 30-35 mpg), is reliable, and still looks nice.  However, I know sometime in the next several years I will probably need to replace it.  Or a company will sell a vehicle that makes the environmental and cost advantages of buying a new vehicle too irresistible.

I admit I have been sorely tempted by the third generation Toyota Prius, but I’m hoping by holding off a few years I can get something better.

And here is what I want:
– A plug-in hybrid vehicle that can drive 20-60 miles on electric power alone (I prefer an all-electric range of 45-60 miles).  Uses a standard (120-volt) home electrical outlet to receive charge. (more…)

2007/01/24

Dynamically adding a device to a Linux software RAID 1 array

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 3:11 am

I recently switched wumple.com’s boot partition to a RAID 1 array so I will be able to boot up even if the disk that had the original /boot partition failed. I generally followed the directions (with modifications for my setup and Fedora, and skipping unneeded parts) from the HOWTO Install on Software RAID (Gentoo).

At the end, I needed to grow my RAID 1 array from 2 devices to 3 so I could add the original /boot partition to the array. 

It was much easier than I expected.  Here is what I did:

  1. Set up the partitions on the new disk as usual for RAID (including partition type fd, "Linux raid autodetect"
  2. Expand the number of active devices in the array (md1 from 2 to 3 drives in my case): "/sbin/mdadm /dev/md1 –grow -n 3"
  3. Add the new device (in my case /dev/sdc1) to the array: "/sbin/mdadm /dev/md1 –add /dev/sdc1"
  4. Watch the array rebuild onto the new device: "watch -n 1 cat /proc/mdstat"
  5. Followed the steps in the HOWTO to put grub back on the device

For some reason, in /etc/fstab I had to change /boot from "LABEL=/boot" to "/dev/md1" in /etc/fstab so the system could mount /boot during startup (and I know I gave the filesystem the label of /boot on creation).  Otherwise the failure to mount /boot when all local filesystems are mounted would stop the boot process.

2007/01/23

Replacing a failed disk in a Linux software RAID 5 array

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 11:28 pm

TuxI recently had a drive in my Linux software RAID 5 array begin to die.  When I went to install the replacement, I could not find any straightforward instructions on how to put the new drive in the array, so I thought I’d toss what I did here in case others find it useful.

My machine is running Fedora Core 6 using mdadm with a RAID 5 array (so one disk in the array can die without data loss).  For these directions, lets say the RAID array is /dev/md0, the bad disk is /dev/sdc, and the RAID partition on the bad disk was /dev/sdc1.
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Fedora Core 6 Upgrade (Part 6: X-11)

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 2:13 am

X.orgOkay, so there is another part of the Fedora Core 6 Upgrade saga.  🙂

When starting X-11 using the default GNOME desktop, many icons were missing (replaced with large X’s) and an error about dbus-launch failing to start appeared.

To fix this error, I had to manually install the dbus-x11 package (which the upgrade did not install for some reason): "yum install dbus-x11"

Also, at first startx would fail with a font failure error message.  I then remembered I disabled startup of xfs (the X Font Server) a few years ago.  I temporarily started xfs with "/sbin/service xfs start" and it was happy.

2007/01/22

Fedora Core 6 Upgrade (Part 5: mdadm and X-10)

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 2:56 am

I think this will be the last post about the upgrade of wumple.com to Fedora Core 6 from Fedora Core 2.

This post will cover RAID array monitoring with mdadm, and X-10 kernel module installation:
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