Filed Under Pragmatica

dice

Once upon a time, I ported a turn-based strategy / tactical combat game to the web. The average play time for the game is quite long (many hours), so saving games is an important feature.

PC/Console games have two ways to do "game saves":

  1. Save on the machine, keyed to the user thanks to the operating system's file system and
  2. Save on the cloud, keyed to the user by some identity provider.

1) is easy to implement (writing and reading a file to disk). 2) is much harder to implement, costs money to run, and requires the gaming machine to have network connectivity.

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§1394 · April 19, 2024 · Apple, Entertainment, Firefox, Games, Google, Software, Technology, Web · (No comments) ·

Orienting From Home

Logo for WebP

How's everybody doing? My work-from-home setup involves a Macbook Pro, a CalDigit TS3+ dock, two external displays (one in portrait, one in landscape), and a couple other peripherals. Since getting the TS3+, I've noticed that OSX screws up the orientation of the external displays ~50% of the time. This inevitably results in me furiously tilting my head sideways while I try to maneuver the mouse pointer onto the Mac Display preferences for that display and fix it before my first meeting of the day starts.

I found a Stack Overflow solution that works for me. I downloaded the free Display Rotation Menu tool from Mage Software and now I can just click and change the orientation from the system menu. Should be part of the OS in these WFH days!

§1229 · December 5, 2020 · Apple, Software, Technology, Tips · Comments Off on Orienting From Home ·

Mac Migration – Near Painless

I happen to get a new Macbook Pro this week at work, replacing my couple-year old one. Upon booting it up for the first time it offered me several choices to migrate my data. I chose the Firewire option and plugged my two computers together. After a couple hours of crunching I was delighted to find out that everything (applications, documents, user data) seems to have been migrated over to the new machine. I even had my existing browser history and cookies, my customized BASH profile, etc. It was like a brain transplant from one computer to another but without copying a disk image. There were only two gotchas:

  • Certificates that enable wifi at work were not migrated
  • Safari 4 was not migrated (I was left with Safari 3.2.1 on the new box)

I only realized the latter when I noticed that some SMIL animation had stopped working in Safari 😉

§542 · July 31, 2009 · Apple, Safari, Technology · Comments Off on Mac Migration – Near Painless · Tags: , ,

Reasons Why I Hate Mac OS X…

... or "how you can help me be more productive". Of course there are lots of things that I like in Mac OS X, and others that I'm sure I'll get used to over time. Please spare me your flames 🙂 Read the rest of this entry ...

§459 · November 23, 2008 · Apple, Software, Technology · 10 comments · Tags: ,

Apple’s Web Inventions

The last two years have been explosive for WebKit development - the project has really accelerated, moving at a much faster perceivable rate than the other notable open-source web platform, Mozilla. I've been noticing more and more innovations that affect web developers from the Safari blog. Read the rest of this entry ...

§453 · April 25, 2008 · Apple, Safari, Software, Technology, Web · 6 comments · Tags: , , ,

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