I love the Xbox Live Arcade...

My two current favorites are:

Braid - side scrolling puzzle

and as of today:

Castle Crashers - cartoon knight in shining armor hack and slash RPG side scroller

Great games... great style... great gameplay

My phone rang at midnight last night...

"Unknown Caller"

A voicemail was left:

Seriously.. hahaha

So my brother is an artist... graphic design is his focus... here are some of his pieces:

Pretty awesome if you ask me...

And then there's my friend Tom Johnson (who you'll see floating around this blog)... here's what he likes to do:

Tom pictured here:

Whoops, I mean here:

So I have this crazy idea for an application... but it would require a certain set of data that seems to be guarded, yet used so frequently in our lives.

Think about how many places and times that you see channel lineups and television programming data.

TV Guides, Newspapers, Cable Box Guides, Tivo, Yahoo! TV, etc etc...

And what about applications that are open source, and free like MythTV... Where do they get their data?

So I did some research and I found out that MythTV used to use a service called Zap2it.com and provided progamming data for free, but since then, has been abused and they have formed a company called Schedules Direct. This company paid Tribune Media Services, which is a central company that provides TV data, for a license to use the data... and then in turn, you as an end user of MythTV, have to pay $20 a year for the rights to access the data.

Not a bad idea...

BUT... when you read through Schedules Direct rules and terms of service, it quickly shuts out any developer from utilizing it in a non-enterprise way.

Think about all of the services where you see the data, they are mostly enterprise level stuff, with large budgets, and can possibly make the money back.

What about smaller projects that need to have this?

The solution of Schedules Direct is to charge the END user, not the developer. Which is not ideal, but it's getting better, because $20 a year is affordable. But what really breaks the deal is that only approved applications can be associated with the end user accounts, which is controlled and completely up to Schedules Direct... and they have to be free or open source.

That leaves a huge gap... where there are commercial products that are relatively cheap, that need this kind of data, can't afford to license the data in an enterprise way with the big players... but also don't want to give their application away.

I would gladly pay $20 a year on behalf of my users, or considerably more (but nowhere near the pricing of the enterprise providers), so that my application (which is commercial), can use this without them knowing or paying up. Because I can understand that they have to pay for the license and that they provide a service offering which requires hardware and bandwidth. They are trying to do the good thing and bring costs down by introducing an "all together, pure volume" situation.

But it's not quite there. I'm still talking to the sales people at TMS to see what can be done, if anything...

I know I could be asking for the world, but it stinks that there's no middle ground here. Usually they exist, but in the case of figuring out if The Real World is on tomorrow night, it looks like it doesn't exist...

I'm staring at this molecule with a look of uncertainty...

When I started my professional development career, I joined the bandwagon of most geeks and consumed caffeinated beverages like crazy for 8 hours a day... Putting down cups of coffee until I left for home for the day.

And I noticed on days when I didn't have as much during the afternoon, I started crashing hard... struggling to stay awake at around 3pm...

So I decided to pull a "I have a strong will" move and go cold turkey... I had previously done this with alcohol (went alcohol free for 9 months, just to prove I could do it)... but let me tell you, going cold turkey on a serious caffeine addiction was hard. Headaches, muscle aches, stomach cramps, you name it...

But now... I enjoy some caffeine here and there... A pop a few times a week... a coffee a few times a week...

The hard part is that now I notice the affects of caffeine on my body and in the case more recently when I feel tired in the mornings and less motivated, it actually helps me become focused and work harder... making me think twice about starting a "one cup a day" regime...

But I'm also scared I'll run into the same problems I did before... Thankfully for now I have a french press that does 2 US standard cups of coffee (label says 6 cups, meh)...

We'll see...

I've started to read [Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X] by Aaron Hillegass...

It's a whole new world for me, Objective-C. It's C under the hood with Object Oriented goodness mixed in. Simple message passing to objects where every method is public and every instance variable is protected.

Coming from a Windows Forms background it has it's ups and downs... I won't compare it to Win32, because, well... you all know that anything could be better... Interface Builder feels a LOT different than the Windows Forms designer, but it really isn't... it just hides more of the code from you.

Objective-C feels nice in it's message passing. Very explicit. Feels very OO. But with the iPhone and < 10.5... doing the retain, release (aka poor mans garbage collection) is very ugly and introduces a level of bugs and debugging that is unheard of. Please give me a GC on the iPhone, I'll take the performance hit...

At any rate, if you're curious, I will be updating my git repository with all of the code that I write while following the examples in the book:

git clone git://github.com/whoisjake/cocoa_adventures.git

http://github.com/whoisjake/cocoa_adventures/tree/master

Technical post for Google Searches and my own personal record

If you fire up XCode, start a new Cocoa project, and hit build... and get an error that looks like this:

error: can't exec '/Developer/Library/Xcode/Plug-ins/CoreBuildTasks.xcplugin/Contents/Resources/copystrings' (No such file or directory)

Then either the installer failed (less likely) or you have an alternate Ruby in your path and you have removed your original /usr/bin/ruby that came with OS X.

So what you need to do is symlink your new Ruby to that same location...

ln -s /opt/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby

Now your XCode project should build!

So I completed one of my goals for the summer... by finishing The World Without Us by Alan Weisman...

It's a fantastic read... slightly documentary... slightly hypothetical story telling... it brings to light a myriad of environmental issues around global warming and other wasteful practices of our society. Reaching every inch of the globe; from Manhattan to the coral reefs in the big blue, Weisman leaves no detail not picked apart.

After reading these kinds of books, it almost always makes you want to go live in the side of a mountain with loin cloths and roasting wild game over an open fire. Then, even as I write this blog post, I think about how I'm taking advantage of the technologies (and wastefulness) of our current age and wonder what kinds of things I can do, at smaller levels, to make a difference.

One of those being that Becca will be selling her car...

At any rate... read the book and make a difference in how you live. I'm not advocating slashing Hummer H3 tires in Dallas, but I do want you to think twice about using polystyrene coffee cups or even those bottles of bath soap with "exfoliating" particles...

Definitely worth a pick up...

Snagged this from The Office Twitter Account (Official)

Thursday, September 25th can't come soon enough...

What an interesting piece of news... Brett Favre is traded to the Jets...

And the NY Jets are already selling Favre jerseys!

The deal leaked at 1:13 AM this morning and included quite a few interesting provisions:

"According to the NFL Network, if Favre takes 50 percent of total snaps with the Jets in 2008, the fourth-rounder becomes a third-round pick. If he gets 70 percent of the snaps and the Jets make the playoffs, it becomes a second-round pick; and if he gets 80 percent of snaps and the Jets make the Super Bowl, it becomes a first-round pick."

And more importantly:

"The NFL Network also is reporting that the Packers took great pains to ensure that Favre would not be traded to the Vikings by inserting a "poison pill" in the deal. If Favre were to be traded to Minnesota, New York would have to surrender three first-round picks to Green Bay."

Goodbye Pennington too... he was released... Could you imagine, heading the training camp one day as the starter and then released the next day because of Brett Favre decided he wants to play again...

And no, I will not become a Jets fan... Packers Green and Gold Through and Through...

Note: both quotes from http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/trainingcamp08/news/story?id=3522971

So I'll keep this brief, but I got an unexpected (slightly) call last Thursday morning from my sister, telling me that Grandma had passed away earlier in the morning... Becca and I spent the last 5 days or so back in Iowa with family and for the services...

Just as she was getting better, was transferred back to the local hospital, and after her major problems were gone... a sneaky internal injury decided to rear it's ugly head and take her life...

She was very close to me... and of course, my family... and her life will be celebrated. Her friends, family, and everyone that knew her will miss her dearly...

Goodbye Grandma

So Becca, my lovely fiance, got me another device (the same week as my new iPhone, :: wow ::)... the Flip Video Ultra...

A slightly newer product and a neat idea, let's cram 480p video recording device into a super simple, easy to use ecosystem... and the pocket of our users. Make it somewhat affordable ($150 for Ultra) and easy to share videos (built in software uploads to several different websites by default)...

Here's a quick demo:

And yeah, I'm a big freaking dork...

As you can see... the video is actually quick clear for non-moving shots... but once you get it out into the sunlight with moving vehicles, it does degrade slightly. It's light, easy to use... definitely worth it for having something to play around with and take on vacations with you. It records up to an hour of footage, which isn't bad, and has everything you need (from hardware to software) built into the device...

Here it is, in all of it's glory...

Mom used to tell me they fought over me when I was in the nursery...

Last night was the kickoff meetup for the Fort Worth chapter of Social Media Club... hosted by Lauren Vargas...

I caught wind of it through Richie on Twitter and decided to check it out.

Unfortunately the group was mainly comprised of PR/HR folk, I being a lonely developer there... and the physical setup of the location wasn't as conducive to introductory meetings as standing up and mingling would have, but I did meet a few people and talked about drop.io and other social media topics.

I'm still unsure if I will be attending the rest of the meetings, I heard a whisper that the Dallas chapter has more developers, but it's too far of a drive :: grin ::

At any rate... thanks to Richie for pushing me to go... and thanks to Lauren for putting it on!