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Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Oct07
08

Dr. Randy Pausch, a huge proponent for game entertainment for education, gave his “Last Lecture” recently. He’s been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and only have three to six months of good health left. I have never heard of him before personally (there’s much in this world I don’t know). But after watching his special on Good Morning America, which highlighted some of his speech and some additional comments, there’s no doubt in my mind that our industry will lose a great deal when he’s gone. I am inspired and admire his courage in such situation. After seeing this, I guarantee you, your big problems won’t seem that big anymore.

You can view the whole lecture on Google. A transcript and other information are available on his university website. You can also read more about him on his Wikipedia entry.

Sep07
14

I have had a bit of revelation moment today. I have been thinking and evaluating about my experience with Scrum. For a long time now, I am been in the role of ScrumMaster, and filling in for Product Owner due to accessibility issue. I have come to the conclusion that, it’s really a recipe for failed Scrum implementation.


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May07
30

Finally, we have an XPlanner installation working on Linux. We are starting a new sprint, so I thought, hey I should try this. I happily entered data into XPlanner, putting in our story estimates, and then putting in our task estimates. Little do I know in current version of XPlanner, there’s no disjoint unit for story estimates and task estimates. As soon as you enter in tasks, their estimates are totalled and override the story one. This is really bad for us as it provides no way to track story points.


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May07
20

We haven’t been using ScrumWorks Basic much anymore. Some people don’t like the reports from it and the work of going into making your own makes it not worth it to some. We also haven’t had the time and resources to invest into make new interfaces via the SOAP API. ScrumWorks Pro has a lot of things that we want to have, but unfortunately at $249 per seat per year, that’s a bit too steep for us.

We started looking at XPlanner. It’s open source so it’s free, but documentation is minimal. With us not being a Java house, we are having some trouble setting it up. From a features standpoint, it looks decent. If only we can get it up and running. One of these days, I might just write one myself in PHP :)

Mar07
17

When I started using b2evolution, I received quite a few warnings from different people that it’s a giant spam magnet. I gave it a few months and my trackback and comment spam volume is simply enormous, despsite b2’s centralized anti-spam list. I have finally broken down and ported everything over to WordPress. Installation was a snap and only took me a few hours to port my skin over. So far, I am very happy with it :) No wonder it’s so popular!

Mar07
15

We are going through our GMC (Gold Master Candidate) process for The Lord of the Rings Online currently, and found some “gotchas” on Windows Vista 64-bit version. First of all, our game is currently 32-bit. However, to comply with Games for Windows requirements, specially for UAC, we had to make a bootstrapper application so we can preserve user priviledges.


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Mar07
09

I have been invited to be a reviewer for the FuturePlay Games Competition 2007. Here’s the reminder message that I received:

Teams that are interested in submitting games in any of the following categories are asked to submit a 1-2 page game concept sheet by March 16, 2007: Indie Games, Student Games or Serious Games. Those who are successful in phase 1 will be invited to submit a fully working game by August 3, 2007. Winners of each category will be invited to present their games at FuturePlay in November (http://www.futureplay.org) in Toronto.

Full competition details are available at
http://www.futureplay.org/games

If you are interested, make sure you meet the deadline ;)

Sep06
21

I mentioned in my last blog that my last sprint forced a lot of organization’s and the team’s own unreadiness up to the surface when I tried to release that product. After some more conversation with various folks, I have concluded that a release sprint is a very important concept to have when you have an agile team that’s embedded in a non-agile environment.

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