The Mail Owl Scrolls

Ready Launch 2005 - Durban

Hey people, I’m back from the Visual Studio 2005 Launch in Durban and I’ve uploaded the photos to my blog.  There weren’t half as many people as the Johannesburg launch but that just made it nicer because there was more food and drink and easy access.

The launch is more of a marketing campaign than a technical overview, although they did have some cool demos floating around.  By now you should have already been playing with a Beta and attended Dev Days, Tech-Ed or one of the community talks and seen the power of VS 2005 and SQL 2005 for yourself.

In Durban we had an Idols contestant (I don’t know who) as the singer for the end of the party and the local comedian we had during the launch was Absolutely brilliant.

Unfortunately, I won’t be going to Cape Town (I’ve been helping to run the Partner stand for the launch but we have a branch in CT which’ll do the job) so I’m going to say Thank You now to Microsoft for bringing Eric Lee and the others out to South Africa to talk to us.

Digital Gaming Hot Labs #6

When: 26th November 2005, 12:00 – 14:00
Venue: Microsoft, Bryanston (Map)
Presenter: Andre Odendaal
Topic: A look at DirectSound
Level: Beginner to Intermediate
Language: C#
Platform: Direct X 9.0 Oct 2005
Objective: For the 6th Hot Lab I'm giving a introduction into Microsoft DirectX DirectSound and how to implement advanced 3D positioning effects and filters for echo, distortion and reverberation.
RSVP: On my blog

I’m really excited about the name change to Digital Gaming Hot Labs.  It means I’m expanding the sessions to include other languages, platforms and frameworks.  I’ve already got some passionate speakers lined up for 2006 to talk on OpenGL in Delphi.  I’m also hoping to cover console development as stuff becomes available.

VS2005 Lauch Quick Post

Forum post makes the news

Wow! I can’t believe how an article can go from forum to email distribution and then to a newspaper; and what’s more, the instigator is none other than an old SA Developer Lead, Stuart Gunter from Durban!

Stuart’s post “The true cost of Telkom ADSL” on the myASDL forum points out how it’s cheaper to fly to Hong Kong to download 100GB than to use Telkom.

But now he’s in the news about it! (You can read the article here from IOL)

I have received 3 emails from my various joke contributors with a copy of Stuart’s findings and it’s even been discussed around the coffee machine at work during the morning de-zombiefication.

Isn’t it incredible how small the world is, and how this is just another indicator of the networking power of communities like SA Developer.  And how forums and blogs are not just the realm of geeks and you’d better watch what you say because you never know who’s reading it and make going to make use of it.

CANSA Shavathon 2005

His wife, Coral, and I also went under the shears and his 2 kids got their hair coloured.

Despite the scandal around the use of the money, and the road to hell being paved with good intentions; charity is good karma, a lot of fun and Does benefit its intended recipients.

Slurge's Birthday

I completely forgot to mention Slurge’s birthday party last Friday!  Vagabonds might not know how to serve a Flaming Lamborghini but they score 10 points for getting someone drunk!

On stage were: Scizzor Wrist, Nil by Mouth and Choking Hazard.  None of the bands this time seemed to have websites this time *frown* but check out you can check out Scizzor Wrist at Roxy’s on the 16th November 2005.

So until next!

DirectX Hot Lab #5 Review

The last DirectX Hot Lab went off well, with Danny Day blowing us away with a barrage of tools for game development.

What grabbed my attention was Wikipad, which is a notepad like app but with powerful wiki building capabilities for offline.  Yes, it exports to HTML as well.

But the star of the show was Game Maker, a REALLY powerful and awesome tool for Rapid Game Development.  I can’t even begin to go into how cool this tool is, and all the functionality behind it; you’ll have to come down to the next lab and see for yourself (that, and I’ll be posting about my experiences using it for the NAG Comp 05 later in the month).

We had 14 people there, the largest attendance for a Hot Lab, and at the break we had pizza and cool drinks (I’ll remember to get Margaretas for the people who don’t eat pineapple… or mushrooms… or hams… or anything!) but next time there’s BEER!!!

So to end off here a list of the other tools we checked out (in no particular order):
http://www.virtools.com
http://www.eonreality.com
http://www.quest3d.com
http://developer.popcap.com
http://www.clickteam.com
http://www.garagegames.com

See you at the next Hot Lab!

Microsoft Expression

If you haven’t heard anything about Microsoft Expression yet, check out this tour video and then download the latest Microsoft Expression “Acrylic Graphic Designer”.

I’ve been using Expression for just over a month now to do graphics for my game development and slide presentations, and I’ve been blown away with what I can do!

I used to be a Paint Shop Pro fan; and Expression is definitely hitting the mark in terms of use and easy-to-implement cool effects.

Now what I’m waiting for is “Sparkle” Interactive Designer with its promised ability to build rich UI for the Windows Presentation Foundation.

IMHO, with Microsoft’s drive into the non-developer IT Pro space I think we can except to see a huge improvement not just in terms of visualizations of customer applications, but in reliability and security (these IT Pro’s are picky!) and all the other things developers haven’t gotten around to.  Developers are going to be totally focused on functionality.

Google Print

Google Print has been launched and it’s pretty cool!

I typed in Bildo as a search and got 5910 pages with the word.  Some of the pages require that you sign-in with your Google Account but most seem to be freely viewable.

Read more about that they're up to on IOL

Anyways, happy hunting!

Be Happy or you're fired!

This is just dumb!

Nutzwerk, an IT company in Leipzig, Germany, has implemented a good mood policy as part of their employee’s contracts.  It is a fireable offence to be in a bad mood, be grumpy, moan or complain.

This draconian enforcement is a scary sign because it probably means they’ve already gone down the route of team building sessions, desk re-arranging, employee-of-the-month awards and team restructuring.  And if those “management pleasing” mumbo jumbo methods didn’t work their problems run a lot deeper.

Anyways, the point of this post is to highlight a dictatorial attitude to a person’s state of mind which smacks of big brother rule.  I hope this policy doesn’t become a trend.