21 Dec 2005
Often, non-Swedish movies are given new Swedish titles for the Swedish market, e.g. The Hulk becomes Hulken. This choice is made by whoever acquires the rights for distributing the film in Sweden.
Sometimes, however, movies are given new titles that are, at best, inexplicable, and, at worst, unintentionally hilarious. Some of the worst of these occur when a movie with an English title gets a new title which is—get this—
another English title.
Case in point: A week or two ago, I noticed a movie in the Swedish TV schedule that looked interesting. Its original title is
Cypher, which is of course just an odd misspelling of the word “cipher”.
Now, Swedish has a perfectly good word for “cipher”, that could be used to translate this film title for Swedes who may not know the word “cipher”: The word is “chiffer”. The distributer could have chosen to call the movie
Chiffer or some artificial misspelling like
Skiffer or
Chyffer, whatever, to emulate the original. But they made a different choice. They chose to call the movie
Brainstorm.
Don’t get me wrong, “Brainstorm” is a perfectly good name for a movie. I quite liked the
1983 movie with that name, starring Christopher Walken, when I was a kid. But that’s just it; If you’re going to rename a movie to suit the local language, why choose a new name that
(A) is not in the local language,
(B) has already been used by no less than two other feature films, and
© bears no relation to the original title! Why, oh silly film distributor,
why???!?!
Read on →
28 Nov 2005
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Please welcome
Torched Turf to the world. Torched Turf is based on the standard old “artillery” style of computer game, but with a few new elements that make it stand out on its own.
Torched Turf was created for the
iDevGames Original Mac Game Cup contest. The terms of the contest call for a game with one complete, playable level, and currently that’s what we’ve got. In other words, despite its 1.0 status, Torched Turf is still a work in progress, and will be enhanced further in the future.
In the meantime, download the
Mac version or the
Windows version and give it a try! Later, sometime between Dec 1 2005 and Dec 15 2005, be sure to go
vote for this or any other game you feel is a worthy winner.
I am proud to consider myself a member of this world-spanning team of like-minded would-be game-builders, and hope that the release of Torched Turf paves the way for yet more games featuring exploding sheep.
Read on →
21 Nov 2005
The notion that electronic voting machines without paper trails are dangerous to democracy is something that’s been talked about before. Now, a General Accountability Office report shows pretty clearly that there were lots of irregularities in the 2004 U.S. elections, connected to the use of electronic voting machines.
Regardless of your political affiliations, regardless of whether you believe that Bush & co stole the elections, it’s important to understand that
electronic voting machines without paper trails produce unverifiable results. The simple fact is the
actual results of last year’s elections are, inherently,
UNKNOWABLE. There is simply no way to know how many people voted, or for which candidates they voted.
This goes beyond the issues of
"hanging chads" that vexed us after the 2000 elections; Then, you could at least theorize the existence of a person or device that could divine the intent of the voter with a high degree of precision. With unverifiable electronic voting machines, it’s just a total crapshoot. The
GAO report cites several known cases where large numbers of votes went to the wrong candidates, which were supposedly “fixed” afterwards. The problem is, how many
unknown, similar cases are there? We’ll just never know.
Again, this is an issue for
EVERYONE concerned with the preservation of American democracy, regardless of party ties. This time it may have been criminal, unethical Republican asshats who used some wide-open holes the security of these machines to secure elections for their candidates; Next time it could be criminal, unethical Democratic asshats doing the same! For that matter, it may be that
BOTH parties had people trying to fake out the voting machines in 2004, and that the Republicans just did a better job at it. Who knows?
Read on →
14 Nov 2005
I’m pleased to announce the release of spinvaders 1.0.0!
The main change in this release is the introduction of fantastic music and sound effects courtesy of
David Tweet. Collaborating with David on this release has produced fantastic results. It’s almost like a whole new game!
Also new for this release is that spinvaders is now open source, with its own
project hosted at sourceforge. This means that not only can Mac and Windows users download a precompiled package, now users of
BSD, Linux, or other unixy platforms can download the source and all its dependencies (which aren’t too terribly many) and run it on their platforms as well.
Here’s where to get it:
Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting “spinvaders.exe” from within the directory.
Read on →
31 Oct 2005
Peter Lindberg
posted some thoughts about the lack of "sketching" in software development, which got me thinking a bit. The following was my emailed response to Peter:
Personally, I do a fair amount of software “modeling”, in the form of prototypes. If an application calls for a new
GUI component, for instance, I’ll set up an empty application/shell/playground with some “scaffolding” to provide the component with its inputs, then start “playing” with it until I find something that feels right. Sometimes it will be a continual evolution of the design in the code, but sometimes I’ll duplicate classes, and rename them with some sort of version ID in the class names, so that I can view several stages of the evolution at once.
The same applies to games I’m designing, or ideas I have for new applications, or, for that matter, changes I’m considering in the
CSS code for a website. Seldom do I start off by mapping out “here’s exactly what I want to implement” in my own projects; Almost always, in work that I’m doing for myself, I start off with an exploratory phase just to see what comes out of my fingers, and after a few iterations of coding, and trying out what I’ve done, and sometimes putting the project away for a few days or weeks, eventually things tend to settle into a zone that feels right.
In a group effort, this doesn’t always work that well. When several people are involved from the beginning of a project, if everyone just spins off into an exploration of their own ideas, it can be harder to gather everyone back to some common point to get everything working together. Maybe that’s why software design tends, as you say, to be focused on “producing construction plans” and defining APIs for how modules will work together.
Read on →