Author: Gianfranco Berardi

Categories
Geek / Technical General

POTM for January: GnuCash

This month’s Project of the Month is GnuCash, the personal and small-business financial-accounting software.

I use GnuCash to keep track of my finances. Even before I started my business, GnuCash helped me to organize my income, expenses, and bills. I have stopped using my checkbook’s registry just because it is easier to use GnuCash to update my savings and checking accounts.

What appealed to me was the familiarity I already had with this system. I took a couple of years of accounting in high school (thanks, Mr. Mullin!), and so I was quite familiar with ledgers, journals, debits, and credits. Don’t think that you need to know accounting to use GnuCash. It’s just that knowledge of the principles of accounting help, regardless of the application or tools you use to balance your books. I haven’t used anything like Quicken or Money, so I can’t comment on them. I do know that when trying to setup either of those programs on someone else’s machine, I had a tough time figuring out how to enter transactions. It just wasn’t worth the effort to figure out how those applications tried to make it “easier” for me.

By the way, if you already use Quicken or Money, it can import your data, so if accounting software is the only thing preventing you from moving to a different operating system, you don’t have to feel that your data is stuck.

GnuCash provides a way to see your financial data in customizable reports, complete with graphs and charts. You can use multiple currencies, track your stock portfolio, manage your small business, reconcile your statements, and schedule transactions. I personally haven’t used all of these features, but I am starting to do more and more. I recently decided to transfer a set amount each month to my ING Direct account, and instead of requiring me to remember to manually enter the amount each month, GnuCash does it for me.

The only feature I am waiting for is the ability to close balances. Supposedly, the code is actually written for this feature, but it is disabled since it has not been tested thoroughly enough. For now, each December 31st, I manually transfer all of my expenses and revenues into a temporary account, then I transfer the balance to my equity account.

To donate to this project, please visit http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=192 or learn about other ways to help.

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Project of the Month

Larry Garfield has announced the Open Source Project of the Month.

While there are some major, ubiquitous pieces of open source such as the Linux kernel, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and Apache, there is plenty of great pieces of open source out there that doesn’t get funding from companies such as Red Hat, IBM, or hardware manufacturers.

While many would argue that fame is more important than money to open source volunteers, I’ve yet to meet one that didn’t like money as well as fame. Really, who wouldn’t? The goal of Project of the Month is to provide a little of each to open source developers, whether they’re already getting revenue from their work or not. The vast majority of open source code is also free-as-in-beer, and while I won’t say that anything is “owed” to those developers (they do, after all, release their code free-as-in-beer by choice), it’s still polite to acknowledge their work.

POTM has two steps each month:

  • Donate $25 USD to an open source project of your choice.
  • Blog about the project.

The idea is to promote and show appreciation for the lesser-known open source projects out there. For more details on how to participate, check Larry’s POTM blog post.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: January 22nd

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 7.75 (current year) = 270 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 0 (current year) = 616 / 1000

I am coming up on 300 total hours, but I am not pleased at the rate I am getting there. My routine has been disrupted this past week, but I believe I did prove that I can dedicate myself to some task for many hours. If I can just focus on doing the things a game developer would do, I could make some real progress.

I’m still optimistic about this year. I just haven’t been putting forth the effort I need.

Categories
Geek / Technical

MythTV and Me

I finished writing an article about My MythTV Install Experience.

MythTV is an open source project to allow you to use your PC as a custom-made digital video recorder. It has even more functionality than anything the media companies would allow, and it is actively developed.

Unfortunately, it is also still maturing, which means that there were quite a few nights spent trying to get it to work. MythTV is at v0.20, though, so I suppose expecting it to “just work” was too much to ask.

If you want to make your own MythTV box, I would strongly suggest researching your motherboard and your capture cards. I had the most trouble with the nForce 410 chipset which prevented me from using onboard audio. I also had trouble with two non-hardware encoding capture cards, but once I replaced them with well-supported hardware encoders, my problems seem to go away.

It took way more time than I would have liked, but it is pretty much finished now…just in time for Battlestar Galactica and other shows to start.

Categories
General

AI Programming Competition Announced

Thousand Parsec announced an AI competition.

One major prize and one minor prize will be awarded in each of the two categories:

* “Battle Points” – The AI which gains the most “battle points” via beating other AI into a bloody pulp.
* “Good Code” – The AI with the code judged to be the “best”.

It seems that the competition will involve a Thousand Parsec game server, and each competitor will face all other competitors in two separate types of battles. The “Good Code” competition will use the expected criteria: how easy is it to maintain, and how easy it is to use.

You can use any language, so long as it has an open source implementation that runs on Ubuntu Dapper. Get your entry in by March 1st, 2007!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games

First Ever Carnival of Game Production Has Started

Juuso at GameProducer.net has posted the first edition of the Carnival of Game Production. One of my posts is featured, and many of the other authors provided practical tips.

The featured articles:

  • How one man made an MMO: an interview with Gene Endrody
  • Interview with Georgina Bensley, Creator of Cute Knight
  • Automating Build and Test Systems < ---- I liked it. B-)
  • How many polygons in a piece of string?
  • Multithreaded Game Scripting with Stackless Python
  • Learn to love your level designers!
  • Wii design elements: Wii’ve Been Played!
  • The 10 reasons you will never finish your game
  • A Great Time to Be an Independent Developer
Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: January 15th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 4.5 (current year) = 266.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 0 (current year) = 616 / 1000

Another slow week of development. I spent the little time I did work on figuring out how to handle the explosion effects. I studied a few bits of source code, and I am now rolling my own set of effect classes. It’s not as complicated as I may make it sound, but it isn’t trivial either.

The main reason why I am not working so hard on game development is because I am spending way too much time trying to get MythTV installed using Knoppmyth. So far, I have narrowed it down to a weird-hardware-configuration problem when booting after the install. Basically, it could be anything that a newbie MythTV installer like me would think should just work.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Becoming a Game Developer

Steve Pavlina recently wrote about becoming a millionaire by thinking like one. One of the things he mentions is the identity shift needed, which ties into the topic of his recent podcast on faster goal achievement.

When I first heard the podcast, I realized that I am not going to finish making games so long as I continue on the poor results I’ve been posting. I need to change how I act. I need to act more like an actual game developer and less like someone who is hoping to make games in the spare time I can squeeze. I need to be a game developer if I am going to do game development.

In the Thousander Club, I have managed to pull together over 250 hours of spare-time game development. If I was actually acting like a game developer in the past year, though, I imagine that I would have put up stronger results. I shouldn’t be satisfied with only 25% of my goal for the year, and practically speaking, I shouldn’t be satisfied with not having an actual, complete, professional-quality game in all that time. And if I am honest with myself, I know that I am not satisfied.

Maybe a year or two ago, 250 hours working on an ambitious-yet-unfinished component-based game engine, a poorly designed-and-unfinished puzzle game, and a mostly-finished Pong clone would have been fine, but I can’t be satisfied with similar results at the end of this year. It’s not like I don’t appreciate the real-life experience that the past year has given me. I just want to be serious about being a game developer, and I realized that I was being half-hearted about my efforts.

Bottom line: if I want to change anything, I have to change how I identify myself.

It’s going to be hard changing my habits. Even though I’ve identified this problem before, I am still treating game development as a lower priority task, and it is usually the first thing I put on the back-burner when my schedule gets disrupted. How can I expect to make games for a living if I can’t even consider them important enough to make in the first place?
When people ask me what I do, I tell them about my day job, and I sometimes mention that I started my own shareware video game business. I mention my blog, I mention that I reviewed games for Game Tunnel, and I might say that I am slowly programming some simple games. How can I expect to make GBGames into a success when I won’t even acknowledge what I want to do? Did DaVinci say, “Oh, by the way, I also sort of paint”? Did Einstein say, “I work at a patent office. Oh, and sometimes I like to think about physics”?

I am a game developer. Once I can think like one, I can act like one.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Politics/Government

Second Life Client Source Code Released as Open Source

I found this bit of news on LinuxGames.com. Second Life, the virtual world created by the players, has had its client code open sourced. Linden Labs released the client code under the GPL.

I’m excited by this news because it means that progress on the GNU/Linux client might actually move forward, putting it on par with the Windows and Mac clients.

Categories
Games Marketing/Business Politics/Government

Inconvenient Copy Protection or Inconvenient Copy Protection?

I just got the latest issue of PC Gamer, and I was reading the letters to the editor when I came across the complaint of Jon Ferrell. Jon wrote about the annoyance and pain involved in needing to have a CD in the drive for no other reason but copy protection. Besides being inconvenient to have all of your game CDs available if you ever want to play any of them, if any of them break due to constantly being on the move, guess who replaces them? Not the manufacturer!

His letter continues, pointing out that the advent of hard drives eliminated the need for floppies to run all of your software, but then we regressed for the sake of copy protection. In fact, it got worse as we now have automatic, online checks for compliance.

So what is the PC Gamer response? “As much as digital rights management inconveniences paying customers, we find it difficult to criticize game makers for taking reasonable steps to protect themselves from widespread piracy.”

The editor goes on to say that now with systems like Steam, online checks make your CD-swapping days a memory…of course, some people don’t appreciate the fact that their limited bandwidth or their privacy are compromised in the name of copy protection. My favorite quote:

“If only someone would come up with an either/or scheme, where you could insert the disk or check in online, then we’d get the best of both worlds.”

WTF? Best of both worlds? Both worlds are pretty messed up, if you ask me, and it is pretty messed up to think that they are reasonable measures to take. It wasn’t too long ago when Stardock made the news for not using copy protection in Galactic Civilizations 2, and I seem to remember reading about it in PC Gamer, too. In fact, around that time, PC Gamer had an entire article dedicated to the problems with Starforce and rootkits. Best of both worlds? I’ll take the world of Stardock’s creation over draconian measures to protect companies from their paying customers , thank you very much.