Nope – everything here is pretty normal. The Cuttlefish Engine is coming along quite nicely – after all this time (almost a year now) it’s exciting to see it all finally come together. Shipping an engine is way different than shipping a game – this is getting to be less and less true, but still, with a game, most of the code you’ve written you know isn’t going to see life beyond the game DVD. With an engine, it’s different – with an engine, shipping is the start of the fun, not the end. I’m definitely looking forward to getting your guys’ opinions on the engine, and seeing what you’re going to create with it.

I’m staying in NYC (because why would you ever leave?!?!), so if you’re local, hit me up for beers or something. I’m going into a bit of a communications blackout, so email’s best.

The engine itself is progressing well, I really think you guys are going to love it. If you’re thinking about making a game for iPhone, Droid, or iPad, definitely keep an eye on http://www.cuttlefishengine.com, and sign up for the email list.

I know, I know, not exactly the most content-rich post in the world, but everything is busy busy busy now, so it’ll have to do. Next time, promise!

USS MASON, DDG-87, United States Navy.

If you search for this site by googling just “Mason,” you won’t find it (I gave up after a dozen pages of results). But you will find all of these:

http://www.masonhq.com/
A language that lets you embed PERL into HTML.

http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/
A multi-agent simulation toolkit.

http://www.mason-ind.com/
An industry leader in the field of vibration isolation.

http://www.theparkdowntown.com/page.php?url=masons
A fine downtown Sacramento restaurant.

http://www.dj-mason.com/
Mason burst onto the dance scene with their groundbreaking tune Exceeder back in 2006.

http://www.emigre.com/EF.php?fid=104
A font in both Serif and Sans Serif varieties.

http://www.masoncorp.com/
A manufacturer of aluminum building productions.

http://www.myspace.com/musicofmason
The music of Mason, not to be confused with the band, Mason (http://www.last.fm/music/Mason), or DJ Mason, above.

http://gardening.wsu.edu/library/inse006/inse006.htm
The Mason Bee is slightly smaller than a honey bee, and a shiny dark blue in color. There’s also a red one (http://www.redmason.net/).

http://www.analysysmason.com/
Analysys Mason delivers strategy advice, operations support, and market intelligence worldwide to leading commercial and public sector organisations.

http://www.mason23.com/
An ad agency that “breaks down the barriers to purchase.”

http://www.masonstreetgrill.com/
A downtown Milwaukee restauarant, serves everything from upscale sandwiches to top-quality steaks and seafood.

http://www.masoncorporation.com/
Apparently a seperate entity from MasonCorp (above), The Mason Corporation is the maker of the Roller Racer, you know, that toy you move the handlebars on in order to go forward. Also, the Flying Turtle, which sounds sexual but isn’t.

http://www.masonsbakery.com/
Mason’s Bakery, specializing in photo cakes and cookies!

http://www.masonbox.com/
The Mason Box Company, manufacturer and distributor of corrugated boxes, shipping supplies, and gift accessories.

http://mason.wm.edu/
The Mason School of Business.

http://www.masonsteel.com/
Mason Structural Steel.

Let’s conclude with a quote from Mason, the DJ-slash-production team:

“2009 is set to be a big one for Mason, both as a production team and as a DJ. If sheer talent and karma have anything to do with it then expect to be hearing this name a lot in the future.”

Well put, DJ Mason. Let’s hope it’s more talent than karma.

More info at http://www.cuttlefishengine.com.

There’s probably a few of you who have found this blog through the Cuttlefish Industries site, and you may be confused about which blog to track. If you want to follow the technical development of the engine closely, this is the blog to subscribe to. I’ll post entries here about the minor engine decisions I’m making as I go. If you just want to know when it’s ready or when it hits major milestones, I’ll post those “big announcements” on the Cuttlefish Industries blog (and here too).

Use dropbox to sync your winamp settings (internet radio bookmarks, media library, etc.) between all your computers. Just set this up and it seems to work great. Caveat: I think winamp stores its media library in here, so if yours is big, you may eat up a chunk of your 2GB dropbox limit (in which case it might be better to junction to a removable drive).

junction C:\users\[you]\appdata\roaming\winamp C:\[your dropbox]\winamp

In the meantime, I thought I’d talk about backups. Up until last night, my backup strategy was, let’s say, severely lacking. Even after losing over 160 gigs of MP3s to a Diet Coke a few weeks ago, the only real backup I had was some folders I copied halfheartedly before moving across the country this time last year. Prompted by a conversation at work earlier, I spent the wee hours of Friday night working on… backups.

I found a program called Cobian Backup. I like it because it supports FTP transfers, meaning that in addition to backing up my internal drives to an external USB drive, it also can pull from FTP sites, so I can backup snapshots of all my web sites too. It’s a little rough around the edges but it’s easy enough to schedule stuff and it seems fairly reliable.

With local data and websites now safe and secure, I thought about gmail. Backups of gmail may seem silly – gmail’s not going down for the count – but, thanks to alcohol, it’s entirely possible that I could do something ridiculous to lock myself out of my account. And there’s always a chance I’d get hacked. An infrequent gmail backup couldn’t hurt.

Lifehacker will tell you you need to install cygwin and then point you down the path of UNIX-on-Windows hell. Don’t do it! There’s a much easier way – some awesome guy has written “Gmail Backup.” It’ll let you backup via a GUI, or through a command line interface. Through a couple scheduled tasks, I’ve now got my gmail, and my wife’s gmail both backing up to the USB drive every few months.

The one thing I wish I could figure out is a way to archive some of my pages on other sites. It’d be cool to periodically backup my twitter, facebook, and friendfeed pages. I dream of some sort of “web backup” tool that you can point at all these different sites and have it save off your news feeds and profile info. Also, where’s the plugin architecture for Digsby??? I want to write one to remember all the avatars and taglines I change and put them in one of those cool flash-powered timeline displays that are all the rage on the internet.

I’ve got one article in each book – “Lone Wolf Killers” is in Business and Production, and “Creating Good Game Art When You’re Not An Artist” is in Content Creation.

I’ve read through both books, and both are worthwhile. Definitely check them out.

So I got really good at installing software, and it also helped me separate the software wheat from the software chaff. Here’s the shortlist, the free software I find useful enough to immediately install on a fresh OS:

• AVG – always the first install.
• Firefox and Thunderbird – my Internet Explorer history will only ever contain one entry – getfirefox.com.
• DropBox – my wife and I share a dropbox because hamachi’s mac support is woefully lacking.
• CDBurnerXP – tiny and handy for when I have to plug in a USB burner…
• Deamon Tools – … but most of the time I just mount an ISO on the network.
• Hamachi – so I can get secure access to the contents of my PC anywhere.
• Evernote – this has gradually overtaken Onenote for my personal datastore.
• TweakUI Powertoy – mostly for its autologon feature. The cleartype tuner on that same page is also handy.
• Digsby – facebook chat aside, the feature this has over trillian is that your settings are stored online, so you don’t have to reconfigure anything, just install, login, and you’re done.
• DOSBox – cause Impulse Tracker won’t run directly under Windows, but runs under here using an emulated gravis just great.
• FoxIt Reader – this is the PDF reader that acrobat should be. I think the guys who made Acrobat and the guys who made Vista search should get together and build something that doesn’t matter.
• Launchy – great little app for launching programs via keyboard.
• Songbird – I hope they put in iPhone sync soon. Death to iTunes!
• VNC – another tiny tool that lets me remote desktop in (over hamachi!)
• VLC – the best movie player out there, if you’re cool with your movie files having traffic cone icons.

And no, I didn’t forget about chrome. The abridged chrome rant: a) no plugin support, b) UI sucks (we’ve had minimal UI for years now, hit F11), and c) why suckerpunch mozilla?

Google chrome is like the Ralph Nader of browsers. Ha, well, that’s a far cry from where this post started, so I’m taking that as a sign I should stop.

]]> http://www.masonmc.com/2009/the-must-install-freeware-short-list/feed/ 0 http://www.masonmc.com/2008/something-is-happening/ http://www.masonmc.com/2008/something-is-happening/#comments Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:31:08 +0000 mason http://www.masonmc.com/2008/something-is-happening/ I’m working on grand and glorious changes to this site in anticipation of approval of my first iPhone app! Whee!

This post is really just to test something. So yeah not much to see… Yet.

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