Syrious Acknowledgment

I must give many thanks to my wife and kids for putting up with my long hours and lack of attention while I was completing our new game Syrious Blasts and launching our new brand Syrious Games. Your patience with me is greatly appreciated!


Archived Comments

Tina -

You are very welcome. It is fascinating to see you create such magic! You are a true genius.


Dell Studio 15Z Waking Up at Night

My Dell Studio 15z (Windows 7) has been waking up by itself at night for some reason which I haven’t determined yet. It’s not waking for virus scans. The bad part is it doesn’t shut itself back down. The other night I had it hibernated and it was not plugged in. When I got up in the morning, the battery was dead. After some searching, I found that it’s a Windows 7 thing. [Read More]

Wicket Web Beans 1.1 Released

After an overly long delay, Wicket Web Beans 1.1 has been released. I really appreciate Daniel Toffeti’s contributions. Also thanks to Cemal at (http://jWeekend.com) for pushing us to get this release out. jWeekend is gracious hosting the live samples for us (see below). Looking forward, Daniel is going to start on the Wicket 1.4 migration. And, maybe someday, I’ll get back to WWB 2.0. The code for it is on the 2. [Read More]

AlphaMixr Reviewed - Demo Downloads Hit 10,000

AlphaMixr, my game for Google Android (T-Mobile G1, et. al.), was reviewed the other day and got 4 out of 5 “droids.” You can read the review at Android Tapp. You can also read AlphaMixr user reviews on Cyrket (an online Android Market browser). In other news, AlphaMixr Demo hit the 10,000 download mark today at Android Market. I think this will pick up even more as additional Android-based devices are released globally this year. [Read More]

AlphaMixr for T-Mobile G1/Android Released

Google released paid apps today on the Android Market today (2/20/09) and so my game, AlphaMixr (now Syrious Scramble®) was released into the wild. AlphaMixr is a scrambled word game in the spirit of Text Twist and Jumble. It adds another dimension of Global High Scores so you can compete with other players around the world. You can read a glowing review from a friend of mine who’s been a beta tester at This and That Visit SyriousGames. [Read More]

Fun With Generics

I was trying to declare a array variable this morning:

Map<String, String>[] mapArray = new Map<String, String>[2];

However, the compiler reports an error with the above statement: “Cannot create a generic array of Map<String,String>”. I had to replace the statement with:

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked") ... Map<String, String>[] mapArray = (Map<String, String>[]) new Map[2];

!?! If one of the goals of generics was to eliminate casts, it certainly failed here.

Bad Smells

We were working on some refactored code today that wasn’t refactored properly. The tests had been changed to make the refactored code pass. My colleague said that I should write-up my “profound” comment on the situation:

If you’re performing a refactoring and you find yourself changing asserts in existing unit tests, something should smell bad. You’ve probably done something more than refactor the code.

Ubiquitous Ubiquity

If you haven’t got it yet, go get the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. I think applications should have this kind of feature. Instead of navigating menus, etc. have a shortcut that takes you where you want to go or helps you do a task.