Chris McCormick

Wow, today marks a huge milestone in the life of Infinite8BitPlatformer, thanks to my friend Crispin. He's written some code which adds a line tool to the existing suite of pencil and fill tools, and he created a level with it. This is the very first substantial code submitted from someone else, and the very first user contributed level, and the game isn't even released yet! In case you can't tell, I am super excited.

This was also the first opportunity for me to experience the proof-of-concept of exploring a level someone else created. I must admit that it lived up to my expectations. Running around in the new level, exploring, and finding items was a genuinely enjoyable experience, and one I can't wait to repeat many more times as the game matures and gets further contributions. Good times.

Thanks, Crispin!

PS The game is currently in pre-alpha testing. If you'd like to try it out, drop me an email and I'll send you the link.

Recently on Engadget this little gem slipped past quietly. If you read the about page you will find a fascinating company.

"...legal entity in Hong Kong and main offices in the Shenzhen City (China)..."

"The devices we deal with must be powered by opensource software ( no vendor locks ) and mantain general high quality standards concerning all phases of the production flow."

"We absolutely refuse to work with any company that contribute to destroying our planet, and act unethically or illegally."

"All our staff comes from different countries, like Italy, Canada and Sweden."

Equally fascinating are the specifications and the competitive price of this gadget. At under $US 200 it's quite irresistable. If the quality turns out to equal that of American sourced devices, I think that this could be the start of a tidal wave of new devices coming out of China and its SARs and satellites.

In previous decades the car companies of the United States were completely decimated by their asian counterparts who started out making cheap copies, and ended up making better cars for less. The gadget makers in the USA (yep, even the big ones) are in for a similar suprise during this decade.

Technically it's still yesterday where the server that hosts this blog lives, so I'm not too late to post this. As is traditional on Ada Lovelace day, I am going to write about women in technology who have influenced and inspired me.

First up is somebody I don't know personally, but her hardware hack is so ridiculously awesome that I just have to mention her here. Her name is Jeri Ellsworth, and she is a self-taught chip designer and technology consultant. The hack which excited me so much was to make a regular old floppy disk drive into an audio delay effect. Check out this youtube video. I so have to make one of those! If you read her blog and Wikipedia page you'll notice a large number of other awesome techy things she has done with her time too.

Kay Smoljak is somebody I worked with in my first real programming job. Kay was one of the most productive coders at Perthweb, singlehandedly developing some enormous sites in Coldfusion and putting the rest of us to shame. Now she and her partner Dave run a successful web consultancy business called Clever Starfish, in between rocking out at metal gigs. Because of those guys I got to hear a lot of great metal. I haven't seen Kay and Dave for years, but we should have a beer sometime!

This will probably embarrass the hell out of her, but I also want to name-drop my friend and colleague at RjDj, Andie Nordgren. Despite the presence of the word "manager" in her title, Andie is utterly invaluable, and different from every other manager-type-person, because she has committed actual code into our various project repositories. She knows the correct syntax for a handful of languages, as well as diving into new ones at the drop of a hat, and I've witnessed her banging out SQL statements to extract stats from our database when we were too slow to get a proper frontend working. That's an exceptionally rare and wonderful thing in someone who goes by the title of manager! Finally she's just an all round nice person and I think everybody in the team feels on a level with her, never "managed", although she has saved the team from mutually assured destruction a couple of times by coming up with technical and management solutions which nobody else did. So thanks, Andie, it's really great working with you! P.S. also check out her "soldering is easy" instructional comic.

The last woman in technology who I'd like to mention is my mother. Sally McCormick taught this young whippersnapper how to program on an Apple //e shortly after I learned how to walk and talk, and I've never looked back. I quite literally owe her my entire career and luckily I know she's much too nice to ever ask for it back. After a distinguished career teaching mostly science and mathematics at several different schools around the planet, she now teaches information technology in Western Australia. Often's the time I drop past my parent's place in the evening to find her, head down, snoozing into an Actionscript book or Java manual. Pretty sure she learns by osmosis. Thanks Mum!