Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Christina Applegate Urged Me to Vote

    Weird people have been calling my cellphone. Last Friday I get a call from my hosting service out in Cali, Mediatemple, saying that I was getting attacked by blog-spamming Perl Scripts from Morodor in the thousands, thus eating mad bandwidth.

    Then, last night as I searched in vain for my wallet in her majesty’s vehicle amidst ninja attire and weaponry, I got a voice mail on my phone. It was Christina Applegate urging me to vote, although, she didn’t say for what candidate, nor why it was so important, merely using the word important.

    Sorry, I’m married, your a little old for me, although people do say love knows no age limit, flattery will get you nowhere. I did vote this morning, though, just felt kind of weird having a hot blonde (is she still hot and blonde, don’t follow her career…?) used as marketting fodder to get the X and Y gen’s motivated to vote.

    On a positive note, I do thank Miss Applegate for the encouragement and her efforts.

    Speaking of celebrities illegally obtaining my phone number/voice mail box, if whoever is responsible could please drop my digits to Murdock from the A-Team, that’d be swell. I’ve always wanted to thank him for being such a great male role-model for me growing up.

  • Halo 2 Lock-In @ New Media Arena

    HALO players,

    HALO 2 LOCK-IN! 4 X-Boxes on large screen TVs networked together for 16 player action all night long. Additional TVs available for bring your own equipment.

    Monday, November 8th 8:00pm – 9:00am Tuesday
    Sign up fast! Limited seats available!

    HALO 2 2 v 2 Tournament with Cash Prize to winning Teams
    Saturday, November 20th 11:00am

    For more details, please visit our web site @

    www.nmarena.com

    or call us at 770-579-3175.

    Also, for the next month, we are giving everyone that comes in an
    additional 2 hours on their account FREE with ID.

    Hope to see you soon!

    New Media ArenA
    736 Johnson Ferry Rd. NE
    Suite A10
    Marietta, GA 30068
    770-579-3175
    www.nmarena.com

  • File Sharing with Central

    Although Mike blogged this already, I wanted to pose a question. After Kenny showed me his creation this morning of sending a JPEG file to another Central user via Flashcom, it was interesting to note that even running local host, there was a 3 second lag in sending a 22k file.

    Now, the player didn’t lock up, and the speed at which Central was displaying the image after writing it and reading back was blazingly fast. What was slow was the actual sending and the time it took from the netconnection.send to the response from the server to call the method to render the file. Now, 22k is a sizable chunk to be sending over the wire, but neither I nor he could figure the exact bottle neck.

    I know this is a question for the Flashcom list, but was curious if anyone knew.

    I think in the future, most would be able to lessen the damage by establishing a link, and then sending over smaller chunks of the byte array, therefore giving you the ability to show a preloader at the cost of transfer speed. Still, just curious what part of it chokes since it isn’t necessarely the player and if that part is identified, what one can do to lessen it’s latency.

    Overall, the ideas here of file sharing applications via Flash and Central are definately cool prospects.

  • Gaming: Console vs. PC

    I read a rumor about gaming companies more apt to focus their efforts on the console market vs. the PC market. This was due in large part to piracy, but also to deployment. Although QA is a bigger deal, since as a coworker said, if you have a bug in a PC game, you can just dl the patch vs. a console game that has a bug, you just made a $50 beer coaster. I remember reading on Director Online about 4 years ago the frustrations of a gamer who loved consoles cause they worked. A software geek by trade, he wasn’t much into hardware, therefore the hours spent confirming your system worked, the patches were in place assuming you could even find a site that housed them and didn’t require registration, and the game’s settings were configured… you could not attempt to play.

    Consoles on the other hand just worked. You place the CD/cartridge in, and turned it on. Geez, that was easy.
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