After being inspired by things the Kinect can do, as well as its compatibility with XNA Game Studio, I have decided to set sights on working on implementing it in unique gameplay.
On my way to school, I was daydreaming away on what I would do with my indie game studio once I could get things moving. That’s when I realized, maybe it would be better to go with a slight change in the name since it seems there’s some sort of Shadow Falcon comic book in existence. Sure, there’s a good chance that’s not a big deal, especially since the words aren’t all that original, but people can just be jerkovs about such things.
Anyway, was just thinking about some possible things. I definitely did not want to add “studios” to it, and I’d rather not explain why for that one. I thought maybe “games” would be something to add, but it just didn’t seem to fit right. But then, it hit me. Just one little change would make all the difference.
Whether I’ll stick with it or go back and forth between the original, I have no idea. But for now, I own it.
I have been thinking about getting started already on my own little game “company.” Names have been flowing in and out through my head. Something to stamp my work with.
Meanwhile, I’ve starting working through the book XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example to get me into a position of being able to build my own side-scroller for my game programming class. Judging from what I’ve seen of the class book (Learn XNA 4.0), we won’t be getting near side-scrolling in the course, and if I’m mistaken, it’d probably be at too late of a time for me to get my project up to snuff. I figure the sooner I get to it, the better.
I’ll talk more about the book later, but the overall thought of this post is: I want to start my own company. Start with indie games and move up. But, I need to decide what to do.
I let this place go dead, which isn’t cool. I just need to do a better job at keeping things up-to-date. It’s hard to do though if you’re busy.
My classes this semester are: an astronomy lecture and lab, a web programming class, and a game programming class. I hope to somehow use these to better my site. Maybe even end up making this all rather portfolio-y. Who knows.
In the web programming class, we make use of the Apache Tomcat server, which is pretty nifty. We also began using Cloudscape for databases.
The game programming class has us using Visual Basic C# in conjunction with XNA Gaming Studio.
I will go into more detail on things in future posts. At least that’ll give me something to write about.
More technical difficulties flowed after the previous fix. First, after installing a plugin, I had some sort of quarantine error.
I ended up finding the solutions here. It said it’s something Macs tag on files that haven’t been run yet to prevent them from doing anything until they have been approved. A very good feature, but it made the situation a bit annoying. What I did was deleted the plugin and downloaded again through Ubuntu. Problem solved.
But then, the permalinks weren’t working. =/ After some searching, I found the answer here.
To enable the mod_rewrite module at apache, I just simply do this 3 step:
First, add the rewrite.load to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/Second, edit the apache configuration for my virtualhosting. For example, in my computer I only have one virtual hosting (/var/www) that is default from installation, so I make some adjustment for that (In my case I have to edit this file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default)
sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
Change the Allowoverride value to all for the document root directory
For example, I made change to this part of the configuration:
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride all
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# This directive allows us to have apache2′s default start page
# in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
# Commented out for Ubuntu
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
Finnaly, just restart the apache
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
My suggestion though would be, for the second step, to do
sudo pico /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
instead. Much easier, in my opinion.
I was testing out running LAMP on Ubuntu 10.04. I tried installing WordPress to see if I had the databases up and functioning. However, I kept getting a blank screen on install. It seemed that no matter what I did, it wouldn’t work. I tried connecting to the database using the same information on another page and it worked. I didn’t get the problem.
Then, I found that I needed to put this into the terminal:
chown -R www-data /var/www/wordpress
That was it. Did that, and it worked! 
Crazy, huh?
Upgrade to the latest WordPress version? Are all of your comments for some reason going into the comment moderation even though you have the option off?
If you haven’t fully activated Akismet but have it turned on, disable it. It seems that little bugger is causing the issue. Otherwise, finish activating it and get it up to date. See if that works.
I had to help someone fix this issue and couldn’t find the solution on the internet. So I post this here for someone else. I did the same for the last couple posts. Maybe I’ll do this more often.
I’m making a list of the issues we come across in fixing Kuro’s Steam in case it might help for someone else out there.
First was that it could not write to writeminidump.exe. To solve that, we went into the Steam install folder and deleted ClientRegistry.blob.
Then steamTMP.exe was unable to open for writing. That was killed off in the TaskManager, and then Steam was restarted. This led to the issue next being for steamNew.exe. The Steam site actually had a solution for that. Apparently, there might be some security issues.
We tried turning off the firewall and running to see if that did anything. Also while running the file as administrator. All that made was:
Error: delete of Steam.exe failed, Win32 Error 5 “Access is denied.”
When the firewall was turned back on, it turns out it was putting steam.exe and steamtmp.exe in its sandbox. After taking them out, we tried again for the update.
AND IT WORKED! Kudos to Kuro for his level of computer literacy and helping to solve the problem all by himself.
I’m not sure if anyone has tested Google’s creation, the Chrome browser. It turns out that they’re not only out for the browser war. They’re taking a step into the OS market.
What makes their OS different? It’s just a browser. Yup, just a browser.
Picture this. You turn on your computer. After you log in, you’re automatically in IE, Safari, FireFox, etc., whatever your browser is. And you can use nothing else.
They do have a good idea on how to keep everything working. For instance, Google Docs works just like Microsoft Word online. If you want to write something, it gets saved there. But that’s the thing, everything is online. You write a paper, it’s online. Now, some may see this as cool, since you can access your stuff from anywhere.
But if you ask me, it’s only asking for trouble. That’s just waiting for a hacker.
Not to mention, that if you have no access to the internet, you’re out of luck. This thing can’t run without the internet.
For those who seriously only ever use the internet, this is good for you. But for the rest of us, who use programs and don’t want our stuff stolen, we’re good. We’re good.
Luckily, Chrome OS is being crafted for netbooks, where something like this could actually work.
Here’s some links you can check out for more:
We are all familiar with the battle between Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Mac for the right to be your operating system. But are they the only ones that exist? The answer is no. There’s another big name out there. What is it’s name?
Linux.
Right now, I’m typing on a Linux OS. Ubuntu to be exact. There are many different brands, or “distros” as they are called. Although there are a couple paid ones, a majority of them are free. Yes, free. Download, install, and you’re good. And everything there is to install on Linux, be it a media player or video editor, they’re all for free.
However, Linux is in the same boat as Mac with software compatibility. Everything is being made for Windows, so it’s lucky to have a Linux version. Extremely lucky. However, there are ways to run Windows programs. There’s the free emulator, wine. And then there’s running a virtual machine through VMware, but this means that you need a copy of Windows, which blows the freeness out.
