realmensch.org

For the first time, I'm trying to put a lot of effort into social media. I'm posting on Facebook (which cross-posts to Twitter). I've updated my company blog. I'm posting on Google Plus, even, and starting to dig into other sites relevant to the game that I'm putting together.

After months of spending time at others' beck and call, working on various consulting gigs, I'm finally back in the development chair. At least almost.

A while ago I wrote about the troubles I was having with Lua bindings. Some were too heavy, some were too flaky.

And after spending all that time reviewing them, I ran out of time and had to pick one -- and I made the mistake of picking a flaky one, with the result being that I have wasted a LOT of time over the past year fixing corner cases and issues with it.

I've been seeing bloggers panic about an alleged change with the new Google Android Developer Agreement. As was pointed out by one developer on Twitter, the text hasn't changed.

So what has changed that they want us to agree to?

Today we were enjoying a nice, warm day that made it seem like summer hadn't really ended...until about 2:16PM, when all of a sudden someone turned on the wind, which started gusting at over 30MPH, and which brought with it some clouds and fog that spattered rain all over us. So much for summer. :)

In other news, they had to remove a mountain lion from a student apartment complex. Apparently it was pretty scared of the students who were standing up on a bridge nearby to take pictures of it.

As many people know now, web sites can put small packets of information on your computer, called "cookies," and they do this for various reasons. Sometimes it's to save your password on a site, but sometimes it's to track ads you've seen and products you've purchased.

A lot of people seem to want to know how to see what "cookies" have been placed on their computer, and what pages have placed the cookies there. And while they're at it, delete some or all of them. Here is how to see and modify various kinds of cookies:

The big news today is that Nokia and Microsoft have created a partnership, and that Nokia will start selling smartphones based on Windows Phone 7 (WP7).

As an app developer, I think this is a terrible idea. Having to support two phone ecosystems is annoying enough.

Ahh, the Android build process is always fun.

In my previous blog post I talked about how huge LuaBind and OOLua++ were. Apparently I needed to do a clean build, though, because now I'm getting different numbers I'm an idiot. The new numbers I was seeing was because I was reading their sizes wrong. Divided by two. I've updated the incorrect numbers in the previous blog entry.

Edit on Jan 24, 2012: A new Lua binding generator now takes top honors.

I write game libraries first, and then games. It's in my blood, or at least I'm in a rut. One way or another, it's a habit that I find hard to break.

And I've become a major fan of the programming language Lua; it's fast and small and easy to bind to C or C++. Or so I thought...

Warning; this post gets technical. If you don't like reading about C/C++ esoterica, don't hit "Read More." You've been warned. :)

Barring any remaining issues, I've finished my first Android game, so it's a reasonable time to reflect on what I've learned.

Android is not an easy platform to develop C++ games on; they originally designed it to be Java-based, and there are dozens of pitfalls that can even trap an experienced developer.