Discourses

I’m helping organize a panel of faculty at my school who have been using a range of different technologies to support student interaction in and out of class. With so many options out there, we want to focus on what has worked for us, what hasn’t worked, and start some conversations around how to make the jump from looking at your course, with its content, outcomes, and pedagogy, and draw on others experience with these tools on the ground with our systems and our students to have some idea what options might be appropriate. Independently of this, I’ve got a … Continue reading Discourses

Sometimes you can blame the compiler. Sort of.

I don’t know if this weblog entry about bug hunting in large scale game development is more appropriate for my spring games course or my spring project management course. The stories are great for both directions. Team members with poorly defined roles! Frantic timelines leading to bugs! The reality of entire days lost to a bug that won’t be found, let alone fixed! Bugs explained in simple code a novice student can understand! I particularly enjoyed the explanation of why the live server compiler ran without debug capabilities, violating the ideal that the dev and live servers are identically configured, … Continue reading Sometimes you can blame the compiler. Sort of.

Risks in user content

My security class is talking about the types of commonly seen mistakes that can crop up when writing programs that lead to security flaws, and while I usually introduce the ideas using “normal” programming examples because it is the common background I can assume my students have, I’m trying to help the students map these ideas to what they’ve seen of database or web development as well. So I finally went back in my saved links and read through a Google blog post from a month ago about security issues in hosting user content, specifically web content. After a brief … Continue reading Risks in user content

Robots run amok

Interesting story of the life webcast of the Hugo Awards being blocked by copyright enforcement bots. Short version: the live webcast included clips of the television episodes up for best script (as award ceremonies do) and UStream’s bots for detecting copyrighted work spotted it and blocked the entire rest of the broadcast. The article points out that not only is that fair use but, the clips were provided by the copyright holders who were happy the content was being promoted as award winning. The whole thing is reminiscent of NASA’s footage of the Curiosity landing being removed from NASA’s YouTube … Continue reading Robots run amok

This entry readable in lynx 2.8.3 or higher.

This security critique of the Tesco website is a hoot. It walks through an increasingly deep, and increasing damning, look at what is wrong with their setup, and how you can tell. The critique is well peppered with links to additional content about the problems being described, so it’s not a bad starting place to learn something about web security. It is also an accessible illustration of the type of exploration and deduction that can be used to profile a system and its vulnerability. Finally, to me, it reads as a nice lesson in why you can’t just “throw some … Continue reading This entry readable in lynx 2.8.3 or higher.

Readability versus Realism

I’ve been reading a lot about games and game design over the past few months, and this recent blog post about when visual detail in games becomes overwhelming rung true for me. It’s responding to the difficulty that can emerge when trying to actually play the stunning, complex, 3D games that are coming out, when compared to less graphically “sophisticated” games. The idea of readability, and what makes a game readable, is nicely discussed. I liked the idea, hinted at, that if your game is only playable because you have added meta-labels that appear when you’ve successfully found or targeted … Continue reading Readability versus Realism

Playing games about making games

While Gamestar Mechanic isn’t really a fit as a development tool for my course, it’s an excellent example of a teaching game, and I would highly recommend it for anybody with a middle-school aged kid (I think that is the right age range for it). The game is structured as a quest to learn to be a game developer, but what surprised me was how much of the focus was on good design, not just how to place blocks and enemies and make things go. You start out by just playing the various types of games that might get built … Continue reading Playing games about making games

Tsk Tsk Speedometer

I really enjoyed this assessment of how a speedometer both breaks a ton of good-visualization rules, and yet is a great visualization given its purpose and context of use. I particularly liked its discussion of why you would want to change scale halfway through a visualization in this setting. Obviously, don’t break the rules until you understand them disclaimers apply, but it’s a really elegant example of how blindly following rules alone also doesn’t make good design.

Sourcecode access wanted

GameSalad is a graphical game-programming tool available for Windows now as well as the Mac (though I had to install something called the Microsoft XNA Framework which doesn’t sound horrible at all), and supports HTML5 for deploying games on the web but also iOS and Android for tablet/phone games (in the pay version). It seems like the pay version focuses on integrating tools for monetization, ads, in-game sales, and social gaming. The core of the free version is very full-featured though. The built-in behaviors and attributes are broad. It’s nicely object-oriented, which I liked about GameMaker when I used it … Continue reading Sourcecode access wanted

Blocky coding

One of my projects this month is looking into tools I might use in a very-introductory course organized around the theme of games. I’m still circling in on the exact set of capabilities I’m looking for, but since one goal of the course is to warm people up for a more intense Java programming course, exposing them to simple programming in a visual manner is appealing. One possibility is Blocky from Google. Web-based drag-and-drop programming where constructs are puzzle pieces. The maze demo gives a nice starting point for thinking about solving problems, using ifs and loops, debugging, etc. You … Continue reading Blocky coding