John Goewert's Log

Raspberry Pi - Day 2, 3 and 4

noreply@blogger.com (John Goewert) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:05:00 +0000

I spent Day 2 about 350 miles away from my RPi, having to go to a convention for my day job. Days 3 and 4 were wrapped around trying to get the Debian kernel to find the uvcvideo module. On a whim, I went ahead and tried the ArchLinux build and low and behold, uvcvideo was cooked in. I moved my scripts over from the Sheevaplug that I was prototyping on and got to work.

Things that I have installed that worked without issue:

* motion - gets 6 GPS with movement processing
* uvcvideo - Mounted my 4 USB cameras without an issue
* MySQL
* git
* opencv
* python2

Things that partially worked:
* audio - The mp3 player I was using, mplayer, is panicking the kernel due to issues with the kernel that are in process of being resolved. TBE worked much better, but has a weird problem that the process hangs for a few seconds after the stream ends.

Raspberry Pi - Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (John Goewert) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 02:42:00 +0000

After a long wait, a quick rush to order at 1 AM, and another slightly shorter but long wait, my first Raspberry Pi showed up on my doorstep. I have been prototyping a system to basically create a home sentry system (aka Turret from Portal 2).

Up until this point, I have been using a SheevaPlug with a USB soundcard, a USB camera, and an Arduio with a Motor control shield. I ran the ARM version of Debian, which the RPi has a release already created as well. On top of that, I use the OpenCV library in a Python script to handle the webcamera feed and detect movement. If no movement occurs after a long time, the bot starts talking to itself. When it detects movement, it plays sounds from the "Detect Movement" bank and runs the motor to open the arm sockets. When it detects noise, it plays sounds from the "Detect Noise" bank. After a interval, if noise or movement stops, it goes back into a Caution state and plays caution sounds for a while and retracts the arms, then goes back into a sleep state. I did a quick prototype prior to digging into OpenCV using a great app called "motion".

A rather simple project, but one that involves computer vision, motor control, audio files, and is possible to do extremely inexpensively, especially due to the RPi being $40.

Code will be posted when I get to at least an Alpha state of the project.

Tonight, I was able to load my SD-card with the Debian install, expand it out to the full size using a GParted Live disk in a VirtualBox window on my Windows 7 PC, and accessed the RPi via SSH. I then loaded motion, opencv and python-opencv. Python is already installed. It looks like the uvcvideo module is not installed and I am having problems grabbing the kernel sources to import it myself.

So, I guess this puts an end of my first day of this.

Pogoplug+: From Out of the Box to Media Grabbing and Slinging Machine

noreply@blogger.com (John Goewert) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:44:00 +0000

This guide will walk you through modding a Pogoplug to handle grabbing media from Usenet to serve out to the rest of your home network.

We will be installing:

ArchLinux|ARM for the Operating System. (The current V3/Classic/Pro kernel is 2.6.31.6_SMP_820.)
Sickbeard and Couchpotato will be used to grab media through Sabnzbd.
Samba to serve files to your Windows PCs and Media Boxes

Other things you can install:

NGINX to wrangle all the ports into easy to remember urls and accessibility from the Internet
MiniDLNA or MediaTomb to transcode to devices like the PS3

I used a Pogo-B01 (aka Classic) on 4/4/2012, changes to the OS or Apps used may change after this date and require different instructions. The packages involved should be available for your Pogoplug. The only major difference being the initial loading of ArchLinux|ARM. Also, this fits a few of my personal tastes in setup

What you need:

Pogoplug (Try to get a V3/Classic/Pro - http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/pogoplug-provideov3)
USB Memory Stick - For the OS and Apps - minimum 2 GB
USB Hard Drive - For storing videos

An SSH terminal client (Windows: Putty - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)

Only have your OS drive plugged in until later. This way, you won't accidentally wipe out anything you give a care about.

Steps:
1. Set up ArchLinux|Arm on the system per your particular Pogoplug’s revision http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms

For the V3/Classic/Pro: At the step 14, before running depmod, you may need to set up the modules.builtin file first:
cd /lib/modules/2.6.31.6_SMP_820 && find . | grep ko | cut -f 2,3 -d \. | cut -f 2- -d \/ > modules.builtin
For the V3/Classic/Pro: At the step 16, where the instructions say to update packages using pacman, it will ask to update pacman first, tell it NO! Also, if it asks you to remove udev-oxnas for udev, tell it NO! It will only ask if you try to update pacman first before updating everything else. Replacing udev-oxnas will udev will cause your plug to no longer boot. If you somehow have still went ahead and did that, see the “Help! It stopped working!” part at the bottom of the http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms page for your box to start recovery of the OS.

27% of diskspace on a 2 GB memory stick already eaten up

2. Create a swapfile:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile.img bs=1M count=512

mkswap /swapfile.img

swapon /swapfile.img

echo "/swapfile.img none swap sw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

We may be able to get away with 256, but I want to play it safe when this thing will be doing large unrar operations.

3. Install SABnzbd:
pacman -Sy sabnzbd

4. Configure SABnzbd to listen for remote machines and require a login:
nano /etc/conf.d/sabnzbd

Change the below line, replacing 127.0.0.1 with your boxes IP address:
SABNZBD_IP="127.0.0.1"
Example:
SABNZBD_IP=”192.168.1.107”

Change the below, adding in a login name and password with a colon separating the name and password and an @ after the password:

SABNZBD_USPW=""

Example:
SABNZBD_USPW=”john:password@”

Press Control-
5. Start SABnzbd:

rc.d start sabnzbd

6. Log in to SABnzbd to make sure it works.
http://192.168.1.107:8081

Don’t load any files just yet or you will run yourself out of diskspace quick.

7. Get yaourt to install other apps:

pacman -S yaourt

8. Install Sickbeard:
yaourt -AS sickbeard

Respond No to “Edit PKGBUILD?”
Respond No to “Edit Sickbeard.Install?”
Respond Yes to “Continue Install?”
Respond Yes to “Install Sickbeard?”
Respond Yes one more time for the “Proceed with Installation?”

9. Let’s fix a very out-of-date sickbeard:
cd /usr/lib
mv sickbeard sickbeard-bak
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/midgetspy/Sick-Beard/tarball/master
tar -zxvf master
mv midgetspy-Sick-Beard-xxxxxx my-sickbeard-install
chown -R sickbeard:sickbeard sickbeard
rm -rf sickbeard-bak

The xxxxxx will be something like acaf5ca, just look at the output from the “tar” command.

10. Start up SABnzbd.
rc.d start sickbeard

11. Log in to SABnzbd to make sure it works and click the “Update” button at the top.
http://192.168.1.107:8080

Don’t load any shows just yet or you will run yourself out of diskspace quick.

12. Install CouchPotato:

pacman -S couchpotato-git

13. Start up CouchPotato.
rc.d start couchpotato

14. Log in to CouchPotato:
http://192.168.1.107:5000

Don’t load any movies just yet or you will run yourself out of diskspace quick.

15. Install Samba using this guide: http://archlinuxarm.org/support/guides/applications/samba

16. Run “df”. You should now be setting at around 77% of a 2 GB drive used. This is why I wanted to make sure you weren’t using up drivespace with downloads. We need to set each tool to use a different drive than your USB stick for their storage needs.

17. Plug in your USB hard drive now. If you had done the udev-automount from the ArchLinux|ARM instructions in step one and your drive was already formatted in Windows using the FAT32 or NTFS file systems, it should have just mounted on your Pogoplug. If you need to format it or want to format it in a Linux format like EXT3, do this now. I figure many of us have a drive already formatted in Windows and would like to be able to take it other places. If you do, format FAT32.

17. Run “df” again. You should now see /dev/sdb1 mounted on /media/hd-sdb1.

18. First, let’s make a good spot for SABnzbd to dump stuff and link it to the default location. This will protect you from a problem with your OS drive overfilling if your storage drive goes AWOL.

mkdir /media/hd-sdb1/sabnzbd
rm -rf /opt/sabnzbd/Downloads/

ln -s /media/hd-sdb1/sabnzbd /opt/sabnzbd/Downloads

rm -rf /opt/sabnzbd/logs

ln -s /media/hd-sdb1/sabnzbd /opt/sabnzbd/logs

19. Feel free to change the log location for sickbeard to the storage drive as well. You can do it at:
http://192.168.1.107:8081/config/general/

20. You are ready to rock and roll. Configuring your Apps is dependant on the services you use. There are wonderful guides for these tasks at:
http://www.ainer.org/

Saigumi.net is back!

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:02:00 +0000

The second domain name that I ever bought, years upon years ago, called saigumi.net expired. I had used it to host tutorials for whatever programming language or tool I was using at the time, post information that people now use things like Google+ or Twitter for, and just generally made it a place of my own.

Then, one day, I just decided that there really was no reason for me to try to be anonymous on the Internet, so I registered goewert.org (as one of my distant relatives got the .com) and have been using it for more personal things.

The domain was snatched up by a squatter due to it having a Google pagerank of 4. I patiently waited for years. In the meantime, I bought the .com of the same name, but never really got it back to what it all was about. Last month, the squatter finally abandoned the site and I was able to reregister it.

In the next coming months, I hope to correct all the links to the content that was there that I still get messages about as well as add new content, mostly focusing on software build and process automation, XNA, XBLIG, game development, and other tech and software interests.

Cosmic Epic - Space Exploration for XBox360 and Windows PC

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:00:00 +0000

While Level Up! is kind of stuck in a bit of null space in the review process, I started working on my next game. I was hoping to use sales from LU! to help fund this one, but I just don't know how many sales on XBLive I will get because of its obscure nature.

My next game is tenatively called Cosmic Epic. It is a space exploration game that has little hand holding. This game focuses more on relations with alien races, resource management, trading and searching rather than combat. Yes, there will be combat, but more from a captain's or admiral's point of view rather than fast paced button pounding.

Here it is with a mix of art created by me or borrowed as a placeholder.

XBLIG Review for Level Up! and Indie Games General

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:43:00 +0000

I put LU! into review last week and a few defects were found. I did some patching and cleaned up a few other areas that I now realize weren't that greatly coded. Another round of playtesting will begin today with another review after that.

Several people have pointed out that it isn't very interactive and "not a game". The interactivity portion is true, however the "not a game" isn't. The root of what makes a game is that there is some sort of competition. I agree that this definition allows games like "Press this button and hold it down as long as you can" to exist, but in the case of LU!, there is avenues of fun to be had. It's foremost 'competition' is basically seeing how long you will let it run. That is it. You can compete with your highscores as well. Past that, like Progess Quest, any other forms of competition are based on your own imagination.

I know that most gamers today are trigger finger twitchers, but this game does have its place. I added a tutorial the first time the game is played (and if you decide to turn it back on) to explain the game in full so as not to be deceptive about what exactly the game is at all, though, I know I am bound to receive some hate mail about it.

People are so finicky when it comes to spending $1. I have seen people blow $60 on a hastily released FPS, play for 20 minutes and uninstall because it is crap and not level the same amount of vitriol at those developers than I have seen on forums of XBLIG developed games. It confuses me as unlike the $60 FPS games out there, all XBLIG games have demos. You can actually try before you buy to find out if you like the game or if there are some problems with gameplay that irritate you or to figure out if you even like it. Guess what... you can even buy 60 of them for the same price as some FPS from a company that urinates on their developers to have them crank out Sequel Shooter 5: Herp of Derpers. Think about it this way, you could even blindly buy 60 of them and if even 1 give you 4 hours of enjoyment, you WIN! (4 hours comes from the average amount of time a person will play a AAA title released game.)

Anyhow, get out there, support the games you like regardless of who makes them. If you like Herp of Derpers, buy Herp of Derpers. But just go out and explore and try new things, you may find something wonderful that you enjoy.

7th inning stretch for Level Up!

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 03:09:00 +0000

I just finishing closing or deferring the last few items in Level Up!'s project plan.

Over the last week, I focused on finishing up the art and buckled down to finish the last few features.

There were finally some replies to my search for artists. Matt Brooker created a cover for me.

So, I have started posting links to the game on sites that I frequent to get some last minute eyeballs looking at it. I'm sure someone is going to say "But, I don't do anything but create a character and the game just plays itself.

Download the game at: http://goo.gl/02bNC

Screenshots here: http://johncgoewert.imgur.com/level_up#e9yQ7

Videos of Level Up!

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:36:00 +0000

Here are some videos of the game in action:

Level Up! - Graphical Progress Quest for the XBox 360 and PC

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:54:00 +0000

For the last few weeks, I have been working on a graphical version of Progress Quest for the XBox 360 and PC.

I'm in what most people think of as the last 10%, which is actually the last 90%. Basically, a lot of adding graphics, sounds, special effects, parties, guilds, and features. They game itself runs exactly like Progress Quest and the actual gameplay is done.

Since I'm not much of an artist, I have been trying to stay simple. I used David Gervais's sprite tiles for most of the art. For the menu borders, I have been drawing my own using inspiration from around the house. I'd like to find someone to help out in drawing the title screen and tightening up the graphics to look good, but at this point, if I don't I should still have a fairly decent looking game.

Angry Cosmos

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:50:00 +0000

For Week 3, I had a few ideas on what game to make, but I really wanted to learn how to do true vector based graphics.

So, after a false start and 3 days of being sick and watching the entire season of Cosmos in between naps, I bring you "Angry Cosmos", a XNA 4.0 implementation of Asteroids.

I never truely understood the whole 3D Matrices until now and once I did was able to whip this out pretty fast. I believe the skill I gained from the last two projects helped as well.

Source available on GitHub: https://github.com/jgoewert/angry_cosmos

One Week Game Making Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:22:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, Frank gave me the idea of making/remaking a game a week using XNA 4.0. Starting last Sunday, I have been doing just that. I am redrawing all my own sprites and generating all the sounds.

Now, most people will say "I can crank that out in a day, and it takes you a week." While that may be true, working a full time job and having a family of four with young kids makes my time commitment about 1 hour a day and 2 a day on weekends. So, in the end, I do spend about 8 hours total.

Week 1: Derp's Revenge - an homage to the Atari 2600 game, Yar's Revenge.

Source Code and Binaries are available on Github.

Day 1: Got Derp (the

player) moving around and shooting. Added Qotile and shield blocks.

Day 2: Added nibbling of shield blocks and keyboard input

Day 3: Added shield movement (up and down and rotating)

Day 4: Didn't work on.

Day 5: Added enemy missile, large cannon, sound effects and background music.

Day 6: Handled player death and resetting game

Day 7: Added the neutral zone and the Qotile turning into the swirl. Game = Done

Since then, I have started bug fixing, code cleanup, and just general upkeep stuff.

Week 2: Herp Invaders: an homage to the arcade game, Space Invaders.

Source Code and Binaries are available on Github.

Day 1: Created the basic framework (GameObject from Derp's Revenge)

Day 2: Added invaders, player, and controls.

Day 3: Added shields.

Day 4: Invaders shoot back.

Day 5: Merged GameObject with my Derp's Revenge GameObject (Started using velocity for movement)

Day 6: Enemies destroy shields and added next level reset

Day 7: Added UFO, player destroying own shields, sounds and scoring

RubyMidwest Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:22:00 +0000

Day 2 started off with an inspirational session from Katz and continued with more technical seminars.

Me, reading about the content of the presentation

One that most people ignored, but had some impact for me was Mark Daggett's Facebook presentation. The big quote for that one is "Facebook development is like building a ship in a bottle... inside another bottle... while wearing mittens." It gave me a shudder at all the times I tried to start using Linux back in the late 90's and being thwarted with the only comments from other user being "ura lamer". Thankfully, "lol" wasn't in much use back then. I have wanted to try to figure out a way to tap in to less technical people to get the word of Lomby Zombie out there, and it gave me an idea for my idea junk drawer to do.

The other that stuck with me was "G.U.R.S.F.S.A - The Grand Unified Ruby Solution For System Administration" by Joshua French. Being a system administrator for many years and specializing into Configuraiton Management, this was exactly what I am all about. The basic takeaway was that Ruby is just as good or better of an interpreted/scripting language for admins to get their work done, just like Perl or Python. I have been using small ruby scripts to watch things for me on my virtual servers and took this as a solidation of my own work.

As the conference wore down, Jen and I went over to O'Dowd's for beer and dinner with whoever stuck around. We had a nice dinner and conversations with Alex Sharp, Aman Gupta, and Nick Quaranto. Afterwards, a quick stop at the toy store down the street and a huge walk back to the hotel, which Jen claims was an attempt by me to cause her asthma to spark to kill her.

RubyMidwest Wrap-Up - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:18:00 +0000

After travelling all around Missouri just the week before, I ended up back in Kansas City again for RubyMidwest. Being the first year for the single track - two day conference, it gathered a good-sized group of around 160 to 170 attendees. I have gone to some larger conferences, such as RUC , but this was the first time I have gone to a conference on something that I personally want to find out more about. What a difference it made.

Doing some scouring ahead of time, it turned out that I could get a pair of round trip train tickets from STL to KC for the astonishing low price of $110 for both of us and the ride was 5 hours (about 1 hour shorter than driving, the same if you stop for dinner). On the ride out, I started working on a side project I had cooking in my brain for the last few years and never dove on. So, I was on rails programming in Ruby on Rails.

We arrived late for the pre-conference meetup, but there were still a few souls milling around. I showed my app to a guy named Veezus and he made a comment on the design I was using and recommended snagging something from ThemeForest. Yeah, I have some lousy designs when I first start out I just get it working and put things in boxes to be able to tell what is what. That night, I dove through and found one I liked and implemented it during the breaks and presentations that I didn't have a strong interest in.

The presentations the first day were great. One that stuck out in particular was Jeremy Evan's topic of Classes and Inheritence. The topic reminded me of brainfcuk, but pushing limits is how you make yourself better. Later that evening, he did a lightning presentations on classes, singletons, and methods. It was nearly completely an academic concept he brought, the absurdity of the depth he dove in had the audience rolling with laughter. There you go bringing class into it again. I also got some more information on Fog and the part it plays on getting you into cloud computing with an extremely simple gem.

Day two was more laid back and attendance was slightly sparser than the day before. That is a story for tomorrow.

Ruby Midwest this weekend - be there or be hexagonal

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:00:00 +0000

I usually don't got to conferences or conventions, mostly because I didn't see the value in the ones I was forced to go to by my employer at the time. The technology conventions were where a bunch of people showed off examples of what they had done with a tool that is fine and dandy for them, but their implementation would not fit my companies setup or usage strategies.

Also, most of them are held in extremely far away resorts, so the things that interested me were always an expensive flight and an expensive hotel away. So, unless my employer was paying for it, I really couldn't go. Few things that interested me and were on my employer's docket to attend merged.

This time, I have found one that really piques my interest, is close and inexpensive to get to.

Ruby Midwest

I have been dabbling with Ruby since... oh geez, sometime in the late 90's. It was simple, it was functional. In minutes, I had built the entire framework for a client-server application. A labor that had taken days in Visual Basic or C++. We would use it to prototype out numerous projects and then reimplement in C++ to get the speed.

When Ruby on Rails came around, I knew that it is something I wanted to use. Working with it finally drove in what the Model-View-Controller architecture really meant and how to use it properly. I have made a few projects in it that have seen the light of the web. The rest of the iceberg were 1 off projects that I was testing out ideas and getting used to how to do things. One such project was GoozexIndy.

Last week, during the family vacation, I started working on a small, doable, and interesting project that I hope to get some input from during the convention.

That right there is the key to why I want to go to Ruby Midwest: Peers. I hope that the inspiration, the networking, the critiquing, and the knowledge that comes from the interaction makes this a wonderful trip.

Vendor Negotiations - These people should not be tolerated

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Every business I have owned, I tried really hard not to be "that guy". The one that renegs on a done deal knowing that they have the upperhand because the work has been done, but money hasn't changed hands. My modus operandi was always to treat my employees and people I hired to do well. In several business attempts, they were paid more than I was. A few times, I was in the hole.

When Frank and I made "Lomby Zombie", we hired an artist and tried to pay him as much as we could. When milestones were met, check were sent in full immediately. No squabbling. No futzing around. Work has value. The work required to make the product, even if the product isn't used, has value.

People like those in the video below irk the heck out of me.

Making a Board Game Box for Lomby Zombie

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:59:00 +0000

Depending on how funding goes, I have started working on some prototypes for a box for Lomby Zombie and LZ: Corporate Stiff.

When Frank and I first did Lomby Zombie, the bulk of the costs of making it was around:

Art - $600
50 Tshirts - $450
1000 Dice and 5000 Stands - $400
36 Inkjet Ink Tanks - $260
Misc Parts like Bags - $300
Business License + Lawyer Fees - $600

At little over $2500 just to get things going and that doesn't include any sweat equity that we put into it. While we had some great lessons learned and found ways to cut some costs while improving the quality of the game, it will be about like that to do this again. That was a lot to front for just me, which is why I hope the Kickstarter page for Lomby Zombie helps out this time.

But that isn't what I wanted to get into today. What I want to talk about is packaging. When we did LZ, we opted out of packaging. It was something we didn't know how to make ourselves and printing companies wanted a minimum of $5 a for a telescoping box, $12 to have printing on it. For a game we were trying to retail for $20, that was a lot to swallow. So, we didn't.

Instead, we did this:

It wasn't the professional look we wanted, but got the job done. A lot of people at Archon that year though it was an alpha version as most of them were used to the completely gussied up box packaging and not the "Cheap Ass Games" style

Obviously, the flaw is that it doesn't fit well on most gamers shelves and wrinkles horribly. A few months later, I repackaged most of them in a large clear plastic bag that kept the game looking better, but still doesn't fit well on most gamers shelves.

Now that we are attempting to make a much nicer version of the game and the expansion, the first thing I have turned my eye to is a box. After reading a few guides on how to make a covered chipwood box, I made a quick prototype to see if everything we already have done fits.

Getting my name out there

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:27:00 +0000

I have had some popular sites when I was writing metric tons of tutorials. All of them pointed to one site and that is how a lot of people found my work. Unfortunately, one frigid morning in May, I let my domain name expire. (Goodbye, saigumi.net, I wish that domain hoarder would relinquish you.)

A lot of the newer web technologies have been passing me by as I couldn't quite grasp the concept of how they could be useful to me. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and all of their derivatives meant little or nothing to me. I don't get caught up farming virtual sheep for hours on end (Except maybe in Harvest Moon) and I am a genetically inclined introvert, so having a broad ground of friends and acquaintances never had a strong appeal.

Well, in the last two weeks, I have been turning that around. I have been adding babble to Facebook, twitting on twitter, adding my photo to my online profiles, and generally adding to the noise. Heck, I may just actually accept an invite from someone I don't even know.

So, tell me about why you haven't yet funded Lomby Zombie: Corporate Stiff?

Lomby Zombie: Corporate Stiff Kickstarter in Progress

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:55:00 +0000

Lomby Zombie: Corporate Stiff is now in active fundraising over on Kickstarter.com

If you enjoy zombies or board games or if you just have a buck burning in your pocket, why not go by and pledge it towards the project. You will be rewarded with more than just the warm feeling in your heart. You will get some nifty stuff as well including copies of both games, tshirts, personal artwork and other doodads depending on your pledge level.

If at first you don't succeed...

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:31:00 +0000

... you should still try.

I put my submission in to kickstarter.com. So, fingers crossed.

I went through the costs we had in making LZ, factored in how much things cost today. Got some materials quotes and talked to a couple artists to get the ball rolling to be ready when we get this ball rolling.

After doing some research, I found a project planning site that I will be using for this project which allows collaboration, has enough space, and is free: goplan. I found it by looking for "Basecamp alternative". While I would really like the full power and usability of Basecamp, I would really like to reserve the funds I am putting into this project for other things that enhance the player/customer experience.

When you run with limited funds, everything is about going lean. Out here in the middle of the MidAmerica soybean fields, you don't have the millions of angel investing dollars like on the west coast to allow you to blow on things like Segways and Aerons for the staff. You get things done with whatever resources you have and are thankful you have them.

Putting the ship back in shape

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:16:00 +0000

I spent the morning refilling the Lomby Zombie site with content and trying to find all the old photographs that Frank and I had made for the game.

A lot of content for the game was put onto BoardGameGeek by players of the game and should help new players get a feel for what it is about. However, I'm trying to work on some demonstrations to show the game mechanics and get old and new players more information on how to play the game.

I rules aren't simple as games like Othelo or Checkers or overly complex like Dungeons & Dragons can get, but they aren't the easiest to cold jump into. So, I figure something like a video series on how the game plays may gather some interest on those who want to play new games, but can't quite get over that wall of not knowing if they will like the mechanics or not.

Next on the list is to work on the Kickstarter proposal. I wanted to have a good framework in place before starting that and it seems to be progressing well. I want this project to exude the confidence I have in it to help push any wallsitters over the edge and drive this dream to physical reality.

Projects and Funding

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:09:00 +0000

I believe the micropayment investment strategy has come to maturity and am planning to try my hand at it. I have had several coals in the fire for a while that hinge on having the things created that I cannot, usually art or speech work. The ideas cycle and breath and wait for a time that I'm not sundering in the ocean of long hours and exhaustive schedules of my daily job. With the completion of our latest product, my job has reduced gears and gives me back those hours of the day and afterhours energy to get some of my other dreams out there.

The main problem I do have is a lack of funds. My day job pays well, but I'm trying to quickly pay off the loans from my ambitious previous venture and take what I learned from it to make something even better. However, I'm stuck in the chicken/egg dillema. I can't get my project really rolling without cash and I can't get cash without my project rolling. For a lot of what I need, it is way less expensive to buy in bulk ahead of time than it is a few at a time to meet customer needs.

For my next set of projects, I will be trying to leverage a funding paradigm created by kickstarter.com. I feel that I have a project that will fit in perfectly, is creative, and I have a good foundation of rewards to give to funders to make it more worthwhile for them to invest in me.

My idea? Get around to creating 'Lomby Zombie: Corporate Stiff' an add-on/standalone expansion to Lomby Zombie (LZ). I felt we did a really good job on the original LZ game and have sold 50 physical copies and about 27 print-and-play copies with a mediocre advertising scheme. Oddly enough, we have sold over 100 LZ "Horde of One" shirts. Yeah, that's right. We have sold more paraphenalia that games. Mostly because they were a big hit at Archon 2005 and it is a pretty sweet tshirt.

LZ was done almost completely inhouse. We designed the game, made the tiles, printed everything, put protectant film on everything, bagged everything and shipped everything. It was a very Indy project and in the end felt that way. The one thing I outsourced was creating the art used on the cover and cards to this great artist, Paul Dozier. I have been trying to get ahold of him to see about getting more artwork done.

So, what I plan to propose on Kickstarter is rewards of copies of LZ and shirts to fund the creation of LZ:CS. I'm trying to figure out the exact budget and looking into how much it would cost to have it professionally printed and cut. I would need to pay an artist to make more art. Also, I would want to have a bunch of shirts pre-printed since it is way less expensive (around $9) than having it Print-on-Demand (around $15 and usually is digital instead of screen printed).

Living on the web as a developer for free

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:03:00 +0000

Webservices have advanced dramatically in recent times. For the last 7 years, I have been using a differing degree of shared hosting and running my own dedicated server to create a playground for all of my projects.

I challenged myself to port everything over to the web and do it for free (or at least stinking cheap when there was something I wanted to not be public).

The first step, and one that I have been using for over two years now is Google Apps Standard Edition. With this, I relieved my email server of duty and switched over to the slick and more easilly managed Gmail. No more having to spend hours trying to figure out why my mail spool went belly up or try to shoehorn in Spamassasin to keep the junk email at bay. Plus, as an added benefit, I got Google Docs and Calendar integration.

At this point, I could have used Google Sites, but declined and switched my weblog provider to Blogger (a Google owned service).

The straw that broke the camel's back on my Rails development needs came in the form of Heroku for my application server need and github for source control.

Once I was able to get those online, I was able to drop my $59 dedicated server bill and free up some cash for other projects.

An end to my GoozexIndy development for now

noreply@blogger.com (John) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:48:00 +0000

A few months ago, I was working on the latest version of GoozexIndy, a webapp that lets users of Goozex track to see where the game they traded off or just received has been. I believe it was a great learning experience for how to properly use Ruby on Rails and the myriad of plugins available for it.

However, last month, Goozex did a update and broke their API feeds, crippling almost every application made for it and made enough of a process change to make it a pain for me to update with very little personal benefit.

I had just completed a rewrite that gave an overall better user experience while limiting resource usage of the API feeds to keep from wasting Goozex's resources.

The source code is still available for review and the Heroku server is online in case the API is fixed enough for me to be able to prop up minimal functionality.

Plugins used:

ActiveScaffold - Backend Administration Scaffold
Acts_as_list - List handling
GeoKit-Rails - Geospatial calculations and map landmarks
Restful Authentication + Role Requirements - For Logins and User Account levels
YM4R - Google Maps API for Ruby