My friend at Ubisoft linked me this… wow, just wow.
http://www.biscade.com/office/
As I said to some of you on MSN, I’m taking donations of all sizes to help me make my office this cool. Thanks in advance.
Edit: yes I know another short and meaningless update… when I’m on vacation (starting tomorrow) I’ll post a blog update about our game engine.
At random intervals I have people ask me “hey whats your <some-item-here>?”. Not all the time, but it happens… anything from video card to mouse or whatever. I figured this could be a good place to sorta lay it all out and explain why I use what I use.
My keyboard is a Logitech G11. At the time I purchased it, the G15 was already available but I didn’t see the need for the LCD display. I liked the idea but I felt it was a waste of money as I would rarely use it. I picked the G11 over other keyboards because after reading many consumer reviews, the back lit keys seems to be the most dependable and had the best visibility. I do most of my work on the computer in limited light situations and this was an ideal feature. Plus it had media keys and a toggle that disables the Windows Key, which always seems to get pressed during the most intense part of a gaming experience.
Simple mouse is simple. Its a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical USB. This was an easy pick. Wired = check. Scroll wheel = check. Mouse 4 & 5 = check. Optical = check. Cheap = check. Bingo.
As for the mouse pad (Rocketfish Gaming Mouse pad) I chose this because of the dual surfaces and the large size. I do not like material mouse pads, I strongly encourage metal pads and always have (well as long as they’ve existed). Material is so undependable and doesn’t have any continuity across several passes. I’ve always had more precise aim in games with metal pads.
I don’t have the biggest or the best tablet in the world, but it totally fits my requirements. Its a WACOM Bamboo Fun. Great price for a great starter tablet.
I use it pretty frequently and I very rarely run into occasions where I would need anything bigger. Sometimes for detailed areas the small tablet makes your hand cramp up because you’re trying to use such little movements.
Dual monitors… a fucking must. If you don’t run dual monitors you have no idea what you’re missing!
I have a 22″ widescreen as my primary and a 20″ 4:3 secondary. Not much more I can say about that, except I wish the Windows 7 Smartbar would extend across both of them! 
My sound system is a bit tricky. I split the audio and feed one line to my speakers and the other line to my headset. The speakers are a 5.1 surround sound setup designed for a home theater running off a mini JBL amp. Having the center speaker close to me and the sub near my feet adds to a great gaming experience. Gunshots sound like their in my face and I can feel the rumble of bombs in the distance.
And speaking of feeling… my headset has force feedback too. The eDimensional Audio FX is not only a great sounded headset with a great mic… but it has rumble ability. So not only do you hear a gunshot from the left, but you feel it over there too.
I’m Running Windows 7 Ultimate on a ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard married with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Conroe 2.13GHz. I have 3 Gigs of OCZ Platinum DDR2 SDRAM and a EVGA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB video card. My ATX case and all peripherals are black, except for tray of my DVD burner. I use the onboard ethernet and audio which work perfectly. I have 3 hard drives, one is a high performance Raptor drive which I run my OS off, the other 2 are SATA 3.0Gb/s for a grand total of 450 Gigs… which isn’t all that much but it works for now.
I plug so much shit in I had to recently get a USB Hub, which is a Rosewill 7 Port Hub, it can be self powered but I’m using so much juice I had to use the wall adapter. I also have an adapter to use my wireless Xbox 360 controller on my PC which is mainly for adding support to our game engine.
I have a T-Mobile G1 Google phone running the Android OS. I love this phone! Its my computer away from my computer. With a full web browser, YouTube viewer and countless+endless applications to get from the Android Market; it does everything I need and more. I recently downloaded an application that allows me to control my music on my PC from my phone, and even stream the music from my PC to the phone. It even has the ability to use the touchscreen to move your mouse and the keyboard to type on screen. Sometimes I lay down on my bed and control my PC from there… lazy fucker aint I?
I use it to Twitter all day long, chat, send/read emails, play games on the shitter and even take pictures. All the pictures you see in this post were taken with it… even the pictures of the phone itself.
I don’t have the best of the best of anything… I do that on purpose. You save a fortune if you find the top of the line and then buy one below that, which is what I tend to do. Some of my stuff needs an upgrade but right now it runs any app and plays any game I want at awesome settings so I have no real reason to upgrade… yet.
I think I covered just about everything… if you guys have any more questions ask in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.
The following is a real chat log. No names have been changed to protect the hilarity. WARNING: Do not follow any of the links unless you are prepared for the results.
(2:51:37 PM) Brandon: http://1guyand1cup.com/
(2:52:02 PM) Tom 'Termy58': WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH HIS PENIS
(2:52:04 PM) Tom 'Termy58': HIS ASS
(2:52:05 PM) Tom 'Termy58': ARHGHHG
(2:52:07 PM) Tom 'Termy58': ITS IN
(2:52:08 PM) Tom 'Termy58': OMG
(2:52:11 PM) Tom 'Termy58': WTF
(2:52:14 PM) Tom 'Termy58': WTF
(2:52:17 PM) Tom 'Termy58': NO
(2:52:19 PM) Tom 'Termy58': NOOOO
(2:52:23 PM) Tom 'Termy58': ITS BLEEDING
(2:52:27 PM) Tom 'Termy58': ITS BLEEDING
(2:52:30 PM) Tom 'Termy58': HIS ASS IS BLEEDING
(2:52:37 PM) Tom 'Termy58': HIS ASS IS BLEEDING
(2:52:42 PM) Tom 'Termy58': OH MY FUCKING GOD
(2:52:45 PM) Tom 'Termy58': HIS ASS
(2:52:48 PM) Tom 'Termy58': IS BLEEDING
(2:52:53 PM) Tom 'Termy58': OMG
(2:53:02 PM) Tom 'Termy58': HIS ANUS IS BLEEDING
(2:53:12 PM) Tom 'Termy58': OMG SO MUCH BLOOD
(2:53:16 PM) Tom 'Termy58': OMG
(2:53:22 PM) Tom 'Termy58': SO MUCH BLOOD
(2:53:25 PM) Tom 'Termy58': IS THIS FAKE
(2:53:27 PM) Tom 'Termy58': IS THIS FAKE
(2:53:39 PM) Tom 'Termy58': TELL ME THIS IS FAKE
(2:53:43 PM) Brandon: nope.com
(2:53:50 PM) Tom 'Termy58': BLOOD
(2:53:52 PM) Tom 'Termy58': OMG
(2:54:04 PM) Tom 'Termy58': FOSZOR THIS IS A WEIRD WAY TO SHOW ME YOUR PENIS
(2:54:16 PM) Brandon: you really haven't seen this video?
(2:54:23 PM) Tom 'Termy58': NO
(2:54:25 PM) Tom 'Termy58': OMG
(2:54:39 PM) Brandon: mr "thepounder" hasn't seen this shock video?
(2:54:44 PM) Brandon: I'm surprised
(2:54:45 PM) Tom 'Termy58': http://thepounder.com/
(2:54:47 PM) Tom 'Termy58': MINE ARE FUNNY
(2:54:49 PM) Tom 'Termy58': YOURS IS
(2:54:57 PM) Tom 'Termy58': A CUP EXPLODING IN THE GUYS ANUS
(2:55:11 PM) Tom 'Termy58': AND DIGGING OUT SHRAPNEL
(2:55:28 PM) Brandon: mine is funny too... to have other people watch it.
(2:55:37 PM) Brandon: its funny on a different level
The other day someone asked me why I haven’t really spoke about the game engine lately. The thing is, we’ve been doing plenty of work, and there’s a lot to talk about… but I’ve been sharing all the juicy details on our development blog, instead of this blog. We even have our own Twitter which is why much of my tweets about it are gone too.
He was right, I should sorta split it up. I’ll keep my personal tales about my work on this blog and save the big, more official updates for the development blog.
Where is this blog and Twitter? Well, oddly enough we’re not ready for people to be following our progress so we haven’t announced anything publicly yet (you could probably find them if you tried hard enough…). Which leads to another question you might ask: If no one is following your development blog or your Twitter, whats the point in having it? Its a fair question but our answer is simple: How many times do people come out publicly with some project their working on and have some website that you go and visit and all you find is “HEY WELCOME TO OUR NEW HOMEPAGE!”. Its pathetic really, there’s no point in going there at all.
What we’ve done is started populating it with information so when we’re ready to start discussing it, people will have some sort of content to read (plus the site itself isn’t really finished). In the next week we hope to do this, because we want to get a benchmark demo distributed. Our primary goal is to ensure what we’ve worked on so far works on everyone’s machines, not just ours.
This is my son Aidan’s yearly passport for Disneyland. Boy does he look excited!
He actually loves the place, just doesn’t like getting his picture taken. Oh well, these are the memories we’ll cherish. My wife took him there for the day because tomorrow he’s got to get his tonsils and adenoids removed, poor kid
So… you may have seen a post where I briefly introduced Mr. Frosty my coffee mug. Like I said in the post; I don’t drink much coffee. I stick to green tea most of the time. On occasion I’ll have a cup of coffee and I use Mr. Frosty…
…only problem is… I’ve discovered you can’t microwave the cup. I normally drink the coffee almost immediately, but today I brewed a cup and forgot about it. When I put it in the microwave HOLY FUCKING ELECTROCUTING SHITBALLS OF FIRE!! I’ve known you can’t put it in the dishwasher, but now you can’t even put it in the fucking microwave?!? So its a coffee cup you can’t wash or put in the microwave. That’s like a car you can’t sit in or drive. Fucking hell. Mr. Frosty has been replaced:
Introducing Tigger 
I retired Mr. Frosty to a pencil holder in my garage. Sweet merciful crap.
I started this series with an article discussing some basic tips to help the casual intertubes surfer. Today let’s talk a little about web design.
One of the more important tools for designing a good website is CSS. Believe it or not people still find this as an optional component. Technically it is, but to put together a website that really pops out to the user its easiest to make use of this. There are certain abilities that CSS grants you that I do not believe can be accomplished with any other method. Overlapping images and absolute positioning of elements being two examples. I think (less of using javascript) there is no other way of accomplishing this. Yes it means you have to learn another “language”, but its really not an entire language. Its mostly an extension to HTML.
One of the important maxims of computer programming is: “Be conservative in what you produce; be liberal in what you accept.”
Browsers follow the second half of this maxim by accepting Web pages and trying to display them even if they’re not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash…
That’s quoted directly from the W3D Markup Validation Service help page. The reason why we make validated sites is to ensure our site looks right across all platforms and browsers. Its naive to think you can develop a site on Firefox and assume it will work on all browsers, especially if you have used improper markup.
While you’re at it, you’ll want to validate your CSS too. Checking yourself for errors only helps you get better and learn from your own mistakes. Once you’ve validated your page, they give you some nifty little badges as a reward.
Adobe makes a great product called Kuler. This can be an invaluable tool when designing a website and inventing a new color scheme for it. There are two versions available: one is an online version and a standalone version (which requires Adobe Air).
The Web 2.0 movement is one of the greatest things to happen to the internet. Its a multifaceted concept; but my favorite part about it is utilizing the internet as a platform, instead of regarding it as a limitation. Prior to this idea, developers focused on the limitations that came with developing applications on the web and trying to find ways around it. Instead, you maximize the services that are only available when developing on the web.
Aside from that, we’ve seen a trend in the overall design (as far as layout and graphics) in modern websites. The sites are designed around the content instead of trying to jam content inside the design. We have brighter colors, flashier graphics, and a prominent KISS ideology.
There really is a lot more to it, which would require an entire blog post if I wanted to go into it in detail, so read that Wikipedia entry if you’re interested.
Part of the Web 2.0 moment has included a exponential growth in the usage and progressional development of AJAX. This is really neat because it increases your ability to provide dynamic features on your website, but decrease the amount of page refreshing that it requires.
Instead of going to a website to upload an image, press upload, get redirected to another page while it uploads, then finally get redirected to a summary page, everything can happen on the same page. Inline moderation, instant font or color adjustments, and toggling preview captions are just a few examples of what AJAX can do.
AJAX is mostly accomplished with the use of well designed Javascript working with elements inside your site. There are already tons of prebuilt libraries to make many of the AJAX features you may be looking for readily available. One of the more popular being jQuery.
Another useless and non-informative blog update… but totally awesome. Please tell me what the hell the idea behind this amazingly epic video is?
I expect an explanation in the comments…
