IAM Blog Engine

From the IGDA announcement:

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Joshua Tsui and David Michicich from Robomodo will discuss how they were able to put together a team, a studio and a publishing deal in such a short time. In one month Joshua and David went from being unemployed to heading up a new Chicago game development studio working on one of the biggest franchises in the industry. Find out the details of all that happened during that time and what is about to happen. Topics to be covered:

• Getting a team together in short time
• How did we get our project and publisher?
• Recruiting for a Chicago studio
• Legal Issues
• Challenges ahead of us

MEETING DETAILS:

When: Wednesday, July 15th, Doors Open at 6:30, Presentation starts at 7:00.
Where: Adler Planetarium, 1300 S. Lakeshore Drive, Chicago, IL, 60605
South Box Office Entrance**, Universe Theater: http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/index.shtml
Meter or lot parking is available
Members: $5, Non-Members: $10

RSVP: Please send your name & email to igdachicago@gmail.com. Space is limited so make sure to RSVP fast!! We also need a few volunteers, so if you’d like to help, please note this in your email.

**Please note: It’s very possible the Adler Planetarium will be closed to the public except for our meeting and the main doors will not be open

FREE

I saw an opportunity to save my employer a few buck today (this is the type of $#!+ that gets you noticed boys n gals).

We appear to spending a considerable amount of money and time doing cross browser testing. I generally only test for IE7, Firefox, and Safari, sometimes IE6, but when you are working a large corporate client’s website they generally require a bit more testing.

There are a number of hosted serviced out there that allow you to cross test your sites, of course, this is a service and therefore has a cost associated with it. If you running a static site i.e. html/css, you can get away with using one of the free services out there (like http://browsershots.org/) but they tend to only provide you with screenshot of each page, and you cannot navigate through the site.

I you need to navigate the site; you’re going to shell out some bucks and may charge by the minute. So, here is how to avoid paying the ongoing fees. Get your self an old PC or Intel based Mac. We happened to have an old p4, 2 GHz, 1 GB ram lying around. Get yourself some virtualization software (VMware, Parallels, Microsoft Virtual PC, I like VMware…)

After installing the virtualization software you can start installing the OSs you require. I had to go as far back as Win98 (yea, I know…wtf). But, you can take this a few steps further if we want. What if I’m at home and want to test a site, my virtualization machine is at the office. Well, VMware has native support for remote connections using VMware’s remote client. So, if you have a static IP, or have a dynamic IP and want to use a free dynamic DNS service like DynDNS you can even connect the virtual machine from home use the different OSs/browser to hit you dev server and cross browser test your site.

A few hours of installing and configuring = about $600-$800 in saving per month. Not bad.

GAME all week. Mostly…

My week started off pretty good. I was asked by one of the ACDs to ‘tutor’ one of the new hires in Flash animation. Bonus! That guy is a full time and he’s being tutored by an intern! Surely that must look pretty good? I sent him along with some tutorials I’ve done in the past, as well as some examples from my Web Anim 1 class which gave me a good basis of things.

The call on Monday went, by the way. I was in with the lead designer on Monday. We basically just went over the changes we made to the wireframes at their request and the design process we used. On GAME, we keep getting feedback a day and a half after conference calls. At first it was a lot of tweaking. I worry about getting things signed off as they really pour over the document with a fine toothed comb. Not that that’s bad! But some of the things would be handled by cascading style sheets, like the exact colours of the colour scheme. A purple was off by the tiniest bit, and they threw a hissy fit

On Thursday, I set about finishing the details of the product page and started work immediately on format page and home page for the second review taking place on Friday. The lead designer is to work on the homepage “wideboy” or the javascript promo panel at the top of the page as well as the promo panels. He ended up getting sick on Thursday with a bad case of … stomach aches, so he worked from home. I had to send him all the files.

Also on Thursday, was an impromptu all staff meeting for the announcement of the company! We got free beer and snacks. The acting president unveiled a new corporate-level unit that will be the central hub of digital media services, tools and partnerships spawned by its disparate media operations: Denuo, Starcom MediaVest, ZenithOptimedia and Digitas. The new unit, dubbed VivaKi, will be led jointly by Managing Partners Jack Klues and David Kenny. But there are no immediate effects.

On Friday, the designer was sick again. Luckily he’d done most of his part on the homepage and other modules were carrythroughs from other pages, so I could give him those. I finished all my designs early, and managed to send them off to the client before the meeting.

In the afternoon was our conference call, with cookies even! Again this was just like our conference call earlier in the week. We went through the list of amends they had and the designs we came up with. They were mostly happy with the product pages, there were just a few kinks to work out. I assume these will be ready for close and sign off by next week.  They did love my of my designs though, saying everything was very well received. The only reservations they had was mostly on the lead designer’s work, which really inflated my ego (in a good way). He said he’d go through and rework them a bit because they weren’t quite what they were expecting.

I also realised at the end of the call, we hadn’t yet done the final page, the image gallery! Everyone else forgot. So I took those under my belt while the lead designer revised his designs. Also, the issue of a few call-out functionalities and designs need to be addressed yet, as well as the left hand navigation.  The statement of work wasn’t very detailed and left kind of open to interpretation, so we’ve compromised with the client.  We’ll do the navigation if they can give us consolidated feedback by Monday next week. That way we’ll have enough time to work on it and get more feedback. We’re still hoping to have this delived by  next Friday the 4th.

After work on Friday was my line manager’s leaving do.  I wasn’t feeling really up for it but he has been a good role model and I always thought he was a blast having around the office so I was persuaded to go. We went to a pub in Camden town, and it was great fun! My creative director went as well as a bunch of designers and ACDs and people from planning. I’ll definitely keep in touch with him. He starts at a new agency on Tuesday where he’ll be a creative director.

Two weeks in to my internship and I am totally exhausted. I didn’t think I would be this busy. I stopped myself today to write my first (and well overdue) blog entry. My first week did not start off like most of the other jobs I’ve had. I walked in to work the first day wearing jeans, I haven’t been able to wear jeans for years (not to work at least). Not that jeans make everything ok, but they sure make it better.

My first week flew by, I spent much of my time getting acclimated to the new gig and learning how the business runs. Once I was setup in the billing/project management system I started getting tasks to complete. Much of the work I has been html/css updates, and updating database content, not exactly my ideal gig but a good starting point. Moreover I think they were just testing me out to make sure I could handle simple tasks, not to mention it’s afforded me some interesting opportunities such as looking through application and website source code.

Week two is when the work load really picked up. I’ve started helping with site wire frames and prototyping, something I’m very comfortable doing. I was also asked to start working on the company’s main website (super exciting). Since I’m one of the only people there that also does web design, I was asked by the owner to throw some ideas together for a site re-design. I will be sure to talk about this a lot more in my later blogs so I will spare you the details now, especially since I’ve got too many ideas floating around in my head.

I started learning ColdFusion and my “mentor” Mike has been great in answering all my questions. ColdFusion is the main server-side technology used at Ignite, so I wanted to make sure I gave it a try despite all the CF bashing. For fear of asking completely uneducated questions I went out and picked up the new Adobe CF 8 book ( the beginners volume) From what I’ve seen and learned thus far, I find it easy to setup, easy to code, not much to bitch about or bash. I’ve been sifting through code learning and testing on the testing servers. I’ve also got a nifty little crud app going for the extranet site I need to help build out

I have been working on porting over old php code from a client’s legacy website (shopping cart) to the new and improved ColdFusion version. Ignite already has a CF e-commerce engine but it doesn’t fit the business “flow”.

In looking through the client’s entire site, work flow and back office process that follows an order, I’m wondering what the previous developers and business owner were thinking? Maybe I’m just a bit paranoid about e-commerce site and security given that I’ve been working in the Info Sec./Banking field for the last few years, but these guys have like zero controls in place. (no i will not give u the URL)

I have however learned a tremendous amount about both PHP and ColdFusion in doing this. For all the newbie developers out there, give it a try. Find yourself some source code and rewrite it, in the same language or a different one. The amount of research I had to do in order to complete the task far outweighs what I’ve learned in any programming class.

To get a bit more specific, I’m only rewriting a shopping cart, but that’s been enough to keep me busy. Back to lack of controls….before you process a card number MAYBE, just MAYBE you should validate it first. I just devised a new way to validate a card number prior to submitting it for processing, check this out: (the “I devised” part was a joke, it was created by IBM scientist Hans Peter Luhn )

<cfoutput>
<cfif IsMod10(“4123333344445555″)>
String passed
<cfelse>
String Failed
</cfif>
</cfoutput>

Pretty easy huh, it’s called the Luhn algorithm, if the Mod of the card number is equal to zero , the checksum is valid (could still technically be a bad card, but helps reduce unnecessary authorization attempts). Also makes it a little less likely for your site to be used as a testing point for compromised cards.

A few other things help, like a max number of attempts from a certain IP (though it looks like the acting “acquirer” has a velocity limit in place. Sorry for the rant, I get a bit touchy on poor controls.

The entire Columbia College Chicago campus will be closed on Thursday July 3rd and Friday July 4th for the July 4 Holiday. There will be no classes; all studios and buildings are closed.

Everyone is invited to check out the new “I Am Columbia” build which is part of Second Life’s 5th Birthday.  It is located on SL5B Edit region sim. The back 40 (acres, as I like to call it) is dedicated to Rachel Carson, founder of the modern environmental movement. Here in the Mermaid Grotto and River Ecology Project participants are encouraged to read about River Ecology (data from Friends of the Chicago River) and meet and greet and roleplay Mermaids who take care of the river. Can you find the environmental toxins? Waterbugs? Fish? Free Second Life account is required. Thanks to Janell Baxter for this opportunity!

Underwater view

old lakefront Nike missile silo (leaking)

land view with info glow link

mermaid

Our SL5B exhibit is in progress! We will continue working on it this week for the launch on June 30th. Even though our exhibit space isn’t officially launched, it is open to the public. If you have Second Life installed come by and see our progress (if you don’t have SL you can download it for free at secondlife.com).

The view from the road on the west side.

Information about the IAM department, and part of the Virtual Public Housing Museum mini-exhibit.

The view from the road on the east side. On the left is Ti Mosienko’s Women’s History Project and on the right is part of Man Michiniga’s Empire State building.

More screenshots are online with close-ups of some of the exhibits.

Exhibit coordinator avatars: Man Michiniga, Ti Mosienko, Mira Runo, Talus Nemeth, and Prijian Toland (two faculty, one staff, one alumnus, and one student).

[via Grand Text Auto]

A list of new media programs (Bachelor’s Degree or higher)in the U.S. has been published by Edgar Huang of Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis School of Informatics. There are 170 links in the list. I note the Electronic Visualization MFA at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago, the program I will be entering in the fall, is not on the list, for whatever reason. (updated - a quick email to Edgar Huang, Ph.D. fixed this nearly before it was posted).  The researcher does note that “some of such schools/departments/programs/concentrations may still be unintentionally left out”. The list also includes some game design programs.