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!

public override RectangleF BoundingRect
{
  get
  {
    float x = WorldPos.X - (m_radius / 2.0f);
    float y = WorldPos.Y - (m_radius / 2.0f);
    return new RectangleF(x, y, m_radius, m_radius);
  }
}

I spent an hour this morning wondering why my mouse click code thought my circles were half as big as they were. Sigh.

The “proper” way to do this kind of multi-NIC setup involves a terrifying trip through proxies and subnets and the nuances of the IP protocol. The “better and works most of the time” way is to simply tell your computer, “hey, when you need to access something, try to get it through the iPhone first, and then if that doesn’t work try the corporate LAN.” This forces your web browsing traffic through the tether, yet still allows you to access internal IP addresses like network file shares, printers, etc.

The way you do it is by adjusting what’s called the “interface metric” on your network adapter. Every network adapter has an interface metric that tells your computer how expensive it is to get data from that network. Usually this metric is determined automatically, but if you want your computer to prefer your iPhone instead of your LAN interface, you punish the LAN – set the interface metric for the LAN to be much higher than for the iPhone tether. I set mine to 100, and it seems to work pretty well.

Of course, you have to first enable tethering on your iPhone. I’m too lazy to write up the details of that here but a quick google search will point you in the right direction. You’ll know you’re set up when you see your tether’s network interface show up in the network connections window (look for the one with a device name like “Apple Mobile Device Ethernet”).

Once you’ve found it, first thing you probably want to do is rename it to something more descriptive than “Local Area Connection 3.” Rename it “iPhone Tether”, so that things look similar to this screen:

Now, right click on the NON iPhone network (the corporate LAN, in the screenshot above, it’s the selected “Local Area Connection 2″), and say properties:

Next, select “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” and click Properties:

(Your screens here may look different depending on your network config). Click Advanced, and then uncheck the automatic metric option, and put in a metric of 100:

Click OK back through all the dialogs. Then, go into the properties for your iPhone tether and check the option to show it in the notification area when it’s connected. That way, you’ll see when it’s in use.

That’s about all there is to it, you may have to restart some apps but you should see data start to flow through the phone. When you pull the iphone from its dock, your computer will fall back to the corporate LAN, and when you plug your phone back in, your apps will stampede towards the iPhone’s “lower cost” connection. Anything on your internal network is still visible, but your computer will try to get to it through the iPhone first, so there may be a slight initial delay as it discovers that’s a dead end.

Enjoy, but remember, I make no warranties, and I’m not a network guru. And there may be some legitimate security concerns here, since you’re essentially opening your work PC to the internet at large, without your corporate firewall to protect you. So, be careful, and take the appropriate security precautions. It’s working well for me, hopefully it’ll work for you too. Browsing through the phone is of course slower than the LAN, but this might be a good thing, since it’s a slight disincentive to waste time at work. Overall, this setup is better for you and your company: you get more privacy, and unfiltered internets, and your employer doesn’t have to waste bandwidth streaming your stupid cat videos.

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.

public State FindByName(string name)
{
  foreach(State thisState in this.StateList)
  {
    if (string.Compare(thisState.Name, name) == 0)
    {
      return thisState;
    }
  }
  return null;
}

New Hotness:

public State FindByName(string name)
{
  return States.Find(
    state => (string.Compare(state.Name, name) == 0)
  );
}

Sweet sweet syntactic sugar!

I happened upon a comment:

...
// release: 1.02 on 06/24/99 by Mason (now safe for realloc)
...

Holy crap. That comment’s from exactly TEN YEARS AGO! The summer of 1999. I was… 22 (lol), working on Quaternion, a few months before I knew it was an IGF finalist. Apparently I had memory allocation issues.

The comment I found wasn’t in the UI code, but I want to believe that today ten years ago I was working on UI, browsing flipcode and sweet oblivion (aww yeah!), wondering what the GDC was like, dreaming of working in games, thinking Visual SourceSafe 6 was a pretty good tool….

Anyway, apologizes for the public introspection, but some coincidences are just too cool not to share. I also recently resurrected my gamedev.net login. Join date: 8/3/1999. At 1am. It’s now 12:40am. I guess some things will never change.

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.