Categories
process programming

I’ve been trying out the PSP

that’s the software process, not the handheld. I’ve been reading Introduction to the Personal Software Process by Watts S. Humphrey (the creator of the process.) And I’ve been putting it into practice by gathering statistics on my current project.

Categories
politics rights

The problem with democracy

Democracy, if it’s done right, is mob rule. It’s easy to forget but we get the odd reminder. Recently the local elections provided the slumbering British media with a horror story in the form of the BNP. The press love this kind of story, but only because they can spin it as the rise of the British Nazi.

Categories
process rights video games

No security through stupidity

To twist the words of W. A. Wulf: more resources are wasted in the name of security (without achieving it) than for any other reason, including stupidity.

Categories
environment process video games

It’s the routine that gets you

It occurred to me the other day that video game characters run everywhere. I remember being chided by Lara Croft about that once. On the other hand it’s amazing how much time we waste each year doing routine tasks.

Categories
process video games

QoL and SPI: battle of the ROI’s

Jason Della Rocca has an article on the Escapist about investing in game developers and SPI (software process improvement.) As a game developer, I have no problem with the first part of this argument :) but the second is a minefield. SPI is too big a subject to fully cover in a single blog entry or article, but I will jot down a few thoughts raised by this issue.

Categories
rights

Vendor lock out

The NTFS file system has some great features. But its proprietary nature means that if something goes wrong, you’re pretty much on your own. That’s why it’s vitally important to make a boot-able recovery disc if you’re using an OS like Windows 2000. Not that it would be hard for Microsoft to provide an ISO of a boot-able recovery disc.

Categories
politics rights

Crossing the event horizon

I may not remember exactly why I installed a blog; not yet anyway. But I’m beginning to see why blogs are so popular. I think they will significantly contribute to the future of individual expression in a way that I simply hadn’t considered before.

Categories
Wordpress

Switching sites with WordPress

The move didn’t go so well. I wanted to change physical server, domain name, and folder structure, all at the same time. This may have been a bit ambitious to try in one go. To further complicate things, the domain points to a sub-domain of the main site.

Categories
environment Wordpress

Moving in

Setting up an account with my new web host was painless. I have one account with 2 sub-domains set up so far: this blog and gamecontractor.org. I’ve already forwarded my personal domain name to the new host. All I need to do now is transfer the MySQL database containing these posts and the WordPress software itself. I might need to do a bit of url rewriting to get everything looking nice.

Categories
environment

A green home at last

It seems my mistake was searching for “green web hosting” instead of “green ISP.” The main problem with providing green Internet services appears to be in the data centres. However, I have found a company with a solution: they offset the emissions of the other suppliers in the chain. And they offer customised hosting packages, so I only pay for the resources I need. If their service is as good as it looks I’ll migrate all my domains over the next few weeks. Then this blog will have a permanent home.