Steve Mactaggart's Blog http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/weblog/ A snapshot of the world through my eyes. en Copyright 2008 Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:26:14 +1000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Who is this Guy? We have a couple of new mac's at work, and I was playing around with photo booth, that not only takes warped photos, but makes warped videos. I know, its lame, but still cool.]]> http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2008/03/who_is_this_guy.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2008/03/who_is_this_guy.html Cool Stuff Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:26:14 +1000 Game On Australian Center for the Moving Image. I think its $14 per adult to get in, and discounts available for concession card holders, students and kids. So what is it, well for more details head over to the Game On site, but here is the official blurb.
Get ready for Melbourne's must-see exhibition of 2008 - the action-packed celebration of games culture that has thrilled over one million players of all ages around the world. Game On tracks the development of videogames from the first computer game to arcade-era hits and the very latest from today's billion dollar industry. Original illustrations by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto and concept sketches behind classics like Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto provide unique insight into the creative process of game development. Rarely-seen consoles, controllers, arcade machines, packaging and collectables are brought together in a showcase of game history like no other.
So what are our thoughts... Really interesting to see all the consoles, many more than I remember, but there was not enough detail on the games. They have sort of collected games into areas like, family, multiplayer, regional games, etc.. But they should have done more about genre's like the evolution of RTS and such. Classic games like pong, space invaders, galaga and such are there, but its the early pc titles that started the genre's that are dominant today were spaced out. Don't get me wrong, the presentation was great, we spent over 2 hrs walking around reading about the history of the consoles and games and such. There was a great collection of handheld gaming platforms on show, and most of them even playable. But there were some things that I think were missing. There were some classic games that launched entire genre's, things like First Person Shooters, Role Playing Games, Real Time Strategy and Multiplayer Online Games. These sections should have shown some of the early games that were ground breaking, and the evolution of these games as the technology progressed. So lets start with some lists. First Person Shooters
  1. Doom I and II
  2. Quake
  3. Duke Nukem
  4. Goldeneye
  5. HalfLife
  6. Halo
Role Playing Games There are a whole heap here, and I'm not sure where they work in order but these are some of the most early classics I can remember.
  1. Final Fantasy
  2. Phantasy Star
  3. Might and Magic
  4. Zelda
  5. Wonder Boy
Real Time Strategy
  1. Dune 2
  2. Warlords
  3. Command and Conquer / Red Alert
  4. Dark Reign
  5. Warcraft
Multiplayer Online Games With the recent introduction of widespread broadband, these games have been a more recent introduction. But even spanning back to the early days you can find games which had a life of their own online playing with and against friends. You'd be hard pressed to find a modern game that doesn't have some sort of online option, although that is becoming more
  1. Unreal Tournament
  2. Ultima Online
  3. World of Warcraft
There are many other genre's also like side scrollers (sonic/mario), early adventure games (commander keen/rodger wilco), text games (leisure suit larry / kings quest) and racing games (outrun, street rod, carmageddon, many more). Other games I can think of that were a big part of my childhood. Alex Kid Breakout River Raid Teddy Boy (Don't touch the den den's) 1942 Anyway this is no where near an exhaustive list nor was it supposed to, but if there is another games show I'd love to see someone (with more resources than me) research all of these games, their release dates, sales figures and the consoles they were released for. We wouldn't have to have working versions of them all, but just the recognition that they existed and had an impact on peoples lives (and futures :) ) is all I ask.]]> http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2008/03/game_on.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2008/03/game_on.html Games arcade classic gaming fps game on gameon gaming rts Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:32:36 +1000 Long time, No post Lachie's now about 6 months old, a couple of our friends are pregnant, and another has just had a little girl 3 months ago. It seems like its baby season, and it doesn't look like it will stop any time soon. Things at Best Bets are going great, we got purchased by TVN and so now you can see Peter Lucas' ugly mug on the TV every Friday morning doing a TV version of The Right Odds. Speaking of The Right Odds, its still going strong. We're in the process of recording episode 80 at the moment and the stable of stars has expanded to even include a regular phone in guest. Umm what else.. The dev team is working on some new cool things that will be hitting the web in a couple of months so stay tuned to that. But I guess the big news recently on the development front is that we now run the Racing Victoria website. This has been a great success for our development process and technology, although we did have a few days of server issues, these things have now been cleared and the site is running like a charm. Keep an eye out there too about new developments. So in all things are great, the puppies are healthy, Rach is loving being a Mum, Lachie is becoming a little man, we're winning at Cricket and Soccer, and work is keeping m busy.. A great time to be alive. CYA]]> http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2008/02/long_time_no_po_1.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2008/02/long_time_no_po_1.html Personal Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:37:08 +1000 My New Toy We've had it for a while, but haven't had a chance to blog about it.  Its my new Wii.

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At the moment I'm in the middle of Zelda and Paper Mario.  Really waiting for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

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Really want Nintendo to get their internet access and channels developed for the Wii.

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http://lachlanmactaggart.com/

]]> http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/09/lachlanmactagga.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/09/lachlanmactagga.html Personal Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:35:21 +1000 More Lochie Photos He's now 4 days old and already much more alert.  Mum and Dad got lots of big hugs today.

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]]> http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/09/more_lochie_pho_1.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/09/more_lochie_pho_1.html Personal Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:47:29 +1000 Little Lachlan Welcome Little Dude, although you are real early, you still understood to get a corporate plug in.

Too bad we don't work for them anymore..

Little Face

]]> http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/09/little_lachlan.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/09/little_lachlan.html Personal Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:12:07 +1000 SportsLine on Mogulus ]]> http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/08/sportsline_on_m_1.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/08/sportsline_on_m_1.html Work Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:18:39 +1000 Where is the isOpen()/isClosed() on javax.jms.Connection I mean really, why doesn't the JMS spec dictate that there is a programatical way to determine if a JMS Connection is open or connected? I have built a JMSBroker to handle all the internal JMS stuff to create connections and get access to Queue's and Topics, but the biggest issue I have to deal with is reconnection. It seem that we often have connection issues to the JMS Server, and so want to have the underlying JMS client side layer automatically handle this and retry the message. To do this I have to use the following logic. Build the Packet, Try to send it, If that works YAY packet out. Otherwise... work out what failed, - which could be either the connection or the session. - Theres no way to know except which method call failed, so the try catch loops have to be tight with error handling in multiple places. - Re-connect each of the broken bits, and go back to the start. Would it be much nicer to do: - getConnection() - checks if cached connection is open, if so returns, else creates a new one and returns. - getSesison() - checks if cached session is open, if so returns it else calls getConnection().createXXXSession() - Message uses session to send out.. Now isn't that cleaner... I think so. http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/06/where_is_the_is.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/06/where_is_the_is.html Java JMS Java Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:45:56 +1000 I'm a gym goer now Well I have been for a few weeks now, Sharkey talked me into it and then he goes and has a son and isn't available to get there that much. But from my stand point the Gym has been pretty good.. I try and get there at least 3 times a week, and have been succeeding most of the time. Theres only about 18 weeks til I'm a father, so gotta try and loose some weight and get fitter b4 then. http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/06/im_a_gym_goer_n.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/06/im_a_gym_goer_n.html Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:17:09 +1000 My Current Wish List A set of Rear Jensen speakers for my home Hi-FI. A universal remote thats programmable for the TV stuff. A new PC for gaming and such. A Wireless Media Player (Zensonic Z500 to be specific). A digital TV-Tuner card for my PC. Enough spare hardware to make up a MythTV box. See the trend? HI-FI hardware. http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/05/my_current_wish.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/05/my_current_wish.html Thu, 31 May 2007 18:07:07 +1000 Quick Blog from imified.com I have just signed up to imified.com and now should be able to post to the blog.. Lets see if this appears? http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/05/quick_blog_from.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/05/quick_blog_from.html Thu, 31 May 2007 17:24:15 +1000 Trying Eclipse - Part 1 I have long been an Eclipse Junkie, but recently have found that I am hearing more and more about NetBeans, even using it in parts over the last 12 months to do some quick UI work. So I have now undertaken a serious effort to get my projects working and editable inside NetBeans. I'm running the 6.0 dev version M8, and so some of my issues may just be due to the Dev nature of the build. So in this post I'll give my inital feelings, then look at later ones as to pros and cons of NetBeans vs Eclipse. Straight off the bat its nice and small. 40 odd MB for the NB IDE version, in comparison to 150+ for the Eclipse / WST bundle. I guess NB is a bit bigger as I used the Update Center to get all the editing tools for the web stuff, but still feels way under the 150+ that Eclipse is. Maven integration is COOL. With a capital Cool... I just check out each of my modules then do Project Open and boom... Project is open, all dependecies are downloaded, and different code sections are layed out nicely. Things I miss, or can't find yet: - A problems view for each project? Must be there somewhere but can't see it. - Collapsing packages to those that only contain classes or multiple sub packages - Sync the Package Tree and selected file. But so far so good.. Update later http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/04/trying_eclipse.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/04/trying_eclipse.html Java Sat, 28 Apr 2007 15:38:17 +1000 Back on the Bike Sharkey and I got out on the bike again this arvo, only a short ride to Jells Park and back. Total 26km http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/04/back_on_the_bik.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/04/back_on_the_bik.html Cycling Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:48:52 +1000 Twitter n Me Twitter / stevemac I'm now on twitter, sign up let me know what you twitter.]]> http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/03/twitter_n_me.html http://www.whitesquaresoft.com/mt/archives/2007/03/twitter_n_me.html Cool Stuff Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:02:08 +1000