Halo Reach - This Is the Halo Game I've Been Waiting For (very minor spoilers)

I completed Halo: Reach (on normal). For once, it didn’t disappoint. No giant monkey hammer reverse Donkey Kong boss battle this time. A real, satisfying ending that wasn’t just a rehash of the now-iconinc race to get away from the self destruct from thehe first Halo.I only remember two escort missions, but they were very short. One wasn’t so much an escort mission as a “kill the big boss to allow someone to get away from it” and the single “follow this NPC and protect him” mission involved my favorite thing about Halo: ODST, so I was grinning instead of cursing during that brief section.

Published at September 20, 2010 ·  2 min read

I've Heard of Hard Sales Tactics, but That Was Ridiculous

So I picked up my new glasses yesterday. I’m told they don’t look too bad. Which is good - it means I got lucky.So I was at my optometrist last week, and I looked at the machines that measured my eyes, and then did the “which is better, 1 click or 2, click 1, or *click 2?” bit. Nothing unusual.So then he says he’s going to dilate my eyes. Fine, happens every time I go to the eye doctor.

Published at September 19, 2010 ·  2 min read

Sometimes it's good to be wrong. I'm really enjoying Halo: Reach

I had said that I wasn’t going to buy it, but, after being disappointed with the game I expected to be playing now, and being stressed out recently, and since my wife and daughter are out of town, I decided I needed something to do for fun. So I caved in and bought Halo: Reach. I’m really enjoying it. I’ve gotten through Mission 6 at this point, and I’ve enjoyed it so far.

Published at September 18, 2010 ·  2 min read

The Value of Slow: Lessons Learned via the Golf Course

Once upon a time, I was working on a project at a high tech company in an LA suburb, and I was working for a manager that I’ll call Mike (because that was his name).Mike had once worked managing a group that put satellites in orbit, and from that experience he gathered some great wisdom, some of which he attempted to impart to me, and some smaller amount of which actually sunk into my young (at the time) head.

Published at September 17, 2010 ·  2 min read

Please Stop This Thing, I Want to Get Off: Living the Merry-Go-Round of FAIL

There’s this pattern of application failure I’ve ended up dealing with a lot over the years. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Our scene opens with a multi-tiered client-server application, let’s say, for the purpose of argument, that it’s a web app. There are web servers in the front, usually with some sort of load balancer in front of them, then maybe a middle tier application server (SOAP, J2EE, that kind of thing), and some kind of shared state/storage at the back, let’s call it a SQL database.

Published at September 16, 2010 ·  5 min read

The Hard Stuff - iPhone App Design Edition

I was talking to my latest iPhone App customer today, and now that we’re both able to look at the prototype, we were talking about the features that we could add before the shipping version, or not. We talked about trade-offs, and I heard myself saying the same thing I’ve said many times before, so I thought I’d write it down. There are three really hard things about iPhone Apps (at least to me - I have a background Enterprise and Web Apps).

Published at September 15, 2010 ·  2 min read

What a Difference 2 Years Makes - a Study in Contrasts With iPhone Ad-Hoc App Distribution

The first iPhone App that I worked on was submitted in October of 2008. The month before we submitted, there was a flurry of emails between me and my customer, a sample of which are reproduced below: Begin forwarded message: From: Customer Date: September 16, 2008 12:58:19 PM CDT To: Carl Brown Subject: Re: iPhone project status My Identifier is XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Emails omitted for brevity. Begin forwarded message: **From: ** Customer

Published at September 14, 2010 ·  3 min read

The Rules - At Least As I See Them (Well, the First Two)

Since I’ve been dealing with computers, I’ve developed some rules of thumb. The first rule seems obvious, although I’m constantly surprised by the people that break it. It is:Rule 1: Never run a command on a computer that affects the communications path through which you are connected to that machine.This is slightly more complicated than it sounds - especially when configuring routing protocols in routers. You change things such that you lose your routes from where you are to that machine, and it’s time for Plan B.

Published at September 13, 2010 ·  3 min read