CodeVerity

Hiring the Right Person

timweaver — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:27:58 GMT

The other day I saw that Valve's employee handbook was posted on the net. Being more than a little curious I went a took a look. It was both humorous and informative.

Go take a look, I'll wait....

One of the things that really struck me was their attitude towards hiring. They only hire "T" individuals, where the top bar of the T is the your broad generalization and the post is your deep vertical.

By hiring only individuals who both traits you end up getting a specific type of personality: driven to know something well, but open to change and new ideas { my take, not necessarily their's }. In many ways I've always tried to hire that way, but I've never seen it expressed so well.

MyPetMinder - Burning Ember Software

timweaver — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:40:00 GMT

My iOS app MyPetMinder is now available in the app store. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Here's the site link: PetMinder

Global Command by BurningEmberGames

timweaver — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:31:00 GMT

Explore, build, and conquer with Global Command by BurningEmberGames

Global Command is the turn based strategy game now available on iPad and Android. Check it out and let me know what you think.

The Year in Review

timweaver — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 02:21:00 GMT

It's been a very busy year around here and my blogging has fallen off a cliff. Ironically, this is post 701. Somehow seven hundred became the magic number.

So what's been going on:

The 3D Room Planner on Lazboy and Thomasville and others as well.

The iPad version of our 2D room planner available on iTunes.

Then there are the side projects:

I published 3 full length novels this year.

My Amputee Wife

The Desert War

Oasis the New Dawn

Two others are complete and in editing phases with expected publication in 2012.

The Daughter of Ceras - www.tjweaverbooks.com

The Slave of Oasis - www.tjweaverbooks.com

2012 will see the completion of at least two additional novels:

The Swordmaster of Oasis

The Hidden God of Oasis

I founded Burning Ember Games (www.burningembergames.com) which is dedicated to mobile turn based strategy games.

Our first title, Global Conquest, is in early beta testing and bug fixing. There are still some AI issues to nail down before I can settle on a release date.

The next release is entitled Flat-top: Midway.

I am also slowly working on another iPhone/Android app that will likely be published under the Burning Ember Software moniker, but is not a game. More on this to come as the product progresses.

It's been a busy year and next looks to be even more jam packed as Burning Ember Games ramps up with two releases scheduled for the iPad and Android.

Happy 236th Birthday Marines

timweaver — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:24:28 GMT

I’m reading My War by Andy Rooney. I bet I haven’t watched 60 minutes in 15 years, but reading this book I can hear his voice and that same no nonsense character. He was as brash and stubborn as a young kid as he portrayed himself on 60 minutes.

Andy had no shortage of opinions on Patton, Hemingway, Ernie Pyle, and a great many other “famous” people that he met and or served with during the War. The book is a pleasure to read as it is laced with his wit and wisdom.

This book will remind you why we have a Veteran’s Day and what there is to be proud of, whether you are a Marine, a Soldier, a Flyboy or anyone else who served in the military.

Embed Fonts using FlashBuilder 4.5 Actionscript Only Project for a Mobile App

timweaver — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 18:11:55 GMT

Last week I lost a good 6+ hours trying to get embedded fonts to work on an iOS / Android Flashbuilder project. I know Adobe is aware of this, but I’m going to say it again. Embedded fonts is just plain screwy. There is no reason it should take an entire day to get a font to rotate and actually appear on the screen. I can rotate fonts all day long in every major browser with just a few lines of CSS, but making the same happen in Flashbuilder is like standing on one leg while walking a tight rope.

If you want to rotate a font it MUST be embedded.

To embed a font in an Actionscript only project you use the embed tag:

[Embed(source='/fonts/times.ttf', fontFamily="FooFont")]

public var FooFont:Class;

There are a number of other properties you can include, but this is enough to make rotation work.

There are a lot of sites dedicated to this issue, unfortunately none of them had the answer I needed. There is one Adobe bug report that contains the key to solving the problem, but it wasn’t clear at all to me what the problem was so it was hard to identify the solution.

You use the embedded font like this:

var textField:Textfield =new TextField();

textField.text = “blah”;

textField.embedFonts = true

textField.antiAliasType=AntiAliasType.ADVANCED;

var tf:TextFormat = new TextFormat();

tf.font = “FooFont”; <—name of the fontFamily

textField.setTextFormat(tf);

textField.rotation = currentRotation; <—some rotation value

addChild(textField);

Run your program and what do you see? Nothing. The text will not display. If you remove the rotation it still will not display. If you change embedFonts = false then your text will display but not using the embedded font. If you iterate over the embedded fonts you will see that the font we embedded is actually there and the size of the swf reflects that.

The fix is the embed your font using the following:

[Embed(source='/fonts/times.ttf', fontFamily="FooFont", embedAsCFF="false")]

If you don’t include embedAsCFF = “false” it will not work. Now there are use cases for having embedAsCFF = “true” so I suggest you look up what it means… go here for those who can’t google.

FlashBuilder 4.5 and iOS vs. Android

timweaver — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 01:15:24 GMT

One of the new features in Flashbuilder 4.5 is that it can publish to Android, iOS and Blackberry. We are still waiting on the iOS update to build Flex iOS projects, however you can build a strictly AS3 project and publish to iOS. That all sounds great, until you actually try and do it.

The steps necessary for me to publish to my Iconia tablet were 2 – Configure the IDE and Install the USB driver. From that point on I can publish to my tablet and I can debug on it.

To publish to the iOS based tablet is a whole lot of steps most of which are not consumer friendly and frankly have so far have resulted in us NOT being able to publish, debug or even run on an iOS device.

It would be easy to blame Flashbuilder/Adobe for this, but the reality is the issues we are having are strictly with Apple. Getting a certificate onto the device is a nightmare. Their notifications about “Pending Certificate Request” are obnoxious and buggy. The emails come in with links to requests that are not visible on the site so that my teammate and I played certificate tag. It just shouldn’t be that difficult.

I rate the experience a MEH!

Going Mobile

timweaver — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 01:08:01 GMT

So I bought an Acer Iconia Tab A500-10S16u 10.1-Inch Tablet Computer (Aluminum Metallic) tablet and have used it extensively for a few week now. For the most part I must say I like it better than the iPad with one big notable exception: Netflix and Hulu. Neither one of these work on my tablet which is a serious issue for the adoption of Android based mobile computing. Let’s face it, the tablet is the best form factor for consuming both of these video sources and not being able to just sucks.

Tuscan Marine Shot and Killed By Swat

timweaver — Fri, 27 May 2011 11:22:39 GMT

This is the second article I’ve read about this and I have to say that the bias in both is appalling. I would expect that some reasonable fact checking and detail verification would take place before writing and posting inflammatory garbage like this:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/05/27/arizona.marine.death/index.html?hpt=T1

You might think I would be on the side of the Marine, after all, he was apparently innocent… The fact of whether this man was innocent or not isn’t actually all that relevant. The focus on both articles has been: Marine, Vet, SWAT, Excessive force (71 shots fired).

Let’s take a look at a few of the pieces of information:

The SWAT team announced themselves and entered the home forcefully. They were confronted with a man brandishing an AR-15. They fired 71 rounds, which sounds like a lot until you consider exactly how long that would take. A semi automatic AR-15 firing 3 rounds bursts can put a lot of rounds down range very quickly. If only 3 officers were able to shoot at the victim they could have easily put more than 70 rounds down range in under 3 seconds… do the math people. 3 seconds isn’t a lot of time. Should they have stopped to see if he was dead? Yeah right. I can tell you, as a Marine, that if cops or anyone else broke into my house, shot me and I was capable of returning fire I most certainly would, if only to gain some time. It’s ridiculous to blame these guys for following their protocol.

I also read they prevented the paramedics from rendering aid for over an hour (until after the victim died). Shame on them. There is no excuse assuming that is really true.

Was the guy a criminal? Well the articles don’t say. They tell us no drugs were found, but assault rifles were as well body armor. Were the weapons registered? Why was a warrant issued for his house if there wasn’t probable cause? To me this sounds like a case of SWAT doing their job and possible shoddy police work up front, but even that you can’t determine because of the biased focus of the writing.

Would You Do It Again

timweaver — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:16:12 GMT

I was driving home on Friday and as I stopped at a light the car behind me turned to the shoulder and came to a stop next to me. I looked over and the young guy driving nodded, his passenger window coming down. So I pushed the button on mine and he goes:

“Were you a Marine?”

Gee what gave it away? The veteran plates or the big Marine Corps sticker on my back window? “Yeah,” I answered.

“Would you do it again?”

The light went green, but there were still a few cars ahead of me not moving. “In a second.”

He smiled nodding. “Should I join? I’m twenty four.”

I stated to answer then stopped. Too many questions popped into my head.

“You just said you’d do it again, right?” He said when he saw my hesitation.

The car in front of me pulled away.

“Sure I would. Best decision of my life.”

He grinned back at me nodding. “Thanks.” He drove off, turning at the light.

Recruiting for the Marine Corps has never been so easy.