blueZhift Blog

Last Sunday, the sermon at my church was based in Revelation Chapter 20 in the Bible. Revelation is a book full of vivid imagery of the return of Christ, war, judgement, salvation, and the end of the world. That vivid imagery is what made Revelation one of my favorite books of the Bible to read when I was a kid. This Sunday, while trying to construct and explore these images and their underlying meaning, particularly for my own personal end times, it suddenly struck me that maybe it can be compared to an instanced dungeon. After church, I began bouncing this idea off of my fellow congregants, but alas, no one else there knew what an instanced dungeon was. Not too many WoW players at my church, *sigh*. So I write of it here.

In a massively online mulitiplayer game, MMO, there may be thousands or even millions of players spread out over dozens or hundreds of servers. Even with a large number of servers, it isn’t feasible for a lot of player to play the same special content, i.e. a dungeon, at the same time. To solve this problem, each player or group of players gets their own copy, or instance, of that dungeon. That way everyone gets a chance to play special quests or challenges.

I believe that at death, when we go to be with God, we are pulled out of time. I think of this as a change of perspective really to one where time no longer passes as we experience on this side of reality. So in Heaven, there is no waiting for those who died after you to arrive. When you die, you’re at the end of the story, boom, everyone who ever lived is there just like the vision John describes in the book of Revelation. Our individual deaths are like getting an instanced dungeon of the book of Revelation. But since God has more than enough servers and CPU cycles (LOL), I guess only the dying part is truly instanced for each person. Everyone gets to share the experience of John’s vision together.

Somewhere along the line, I went from being the premiere gamer in my household to dead last, even behind my 8 year old son in hours of gaming per week. Seeking to stop and reverse this alarming trend, I decided to spend a little time exploring the beta of a new MMO from SOE. While the game really looks good and I think has a lot of potential, it also reminded me of the great need for large betas. Not really a complaint or a slam. People too often forget that beta means test in the development world. And I should note that it made me hunt down and remove Zimbra Desktop which sucks down a lot of resources even when you are not using it. Just sitting there it had swiped 100MB of memory and I suspect it was responsible for some Firefox slowness and wonkiness I’d been seeing. So thanks SOE! Nothing like seeking gaming goodness to get one to do some digital housekeeping!

Back to gaming. Thanks to Google Reader, keeping up with gaming news from a variety of sources has gotten a lot easier. One source I discovered that way is Massively. Judging by the stories and the ads in the news stream, there are a buttload of MMOs, most free to play, out there now. It’s like the plague of list your Top 5 X applications on Facebook! From what I’ve read, most are not top quality, but for free, what do you expect? That aside, someone must be making money on this. Probably the game engine house most of these are probably using along with the server hosting facilities. It definitely bears further investigation. If computing horsepower of the magnitude needed to support the typical MMO, plus bandwidth is widely available and cheap, that just screams opportunity. And so far, at least, the economic downturn hasn’t greatly impacted the gaming industry.

Over the weekend I got a new AMV finished just in time for the Anime Central Anime Music Video  Contest!^^ This one has been in my head for a long time, so I’m very happy to finally complete it. I just hope I haven’t totally misjudged the content of the song. Now I’ve costumes to finish!

I finished filing our income tax returns last night. A precipitous drop in household income resulted in some deductions and credits we wouldn’t normally get leading to a nice refund this year rather than a tax bill like last. Normally, having a tax bill is considered to be a good thing, because if you take the money you would have gotten as a refund and invest it, you should get a higher return over the year than letting Uncle Sam hold on to it. But given what happened to my investments in 2008, I think this time around Uncle Sam was doing me a big favor, albeit accidentally!

Sadly, family commitments kept me away from Flourish! on Saturday. But I did get a lot of time to play around with Kubuntu in a VirtualBox VM. The main hiccups I had were VM issues more than anything else, like learning that I needed to install the guest tools and using ICH AC97 sound. I didn’t get host folder sharing to work before I gave up for the day.

Again, not issues with Kubuntu itself. My first impression is of a very polished desktop that a Windows user should be able to use right out of the box. My only complaint was not finding any way to move icons on the panel around. Somehow my K menu ended up on the right side of the screen rather than the left.

I’ll probably play around with Kubuntu some more, but first I want to jump into Processing. I downloaded the installation from Processing.org and had been hoping to attend the workshop at Flourish. Since that didn’t come to pass I’ll just have to poke about on my own, which is pretty much SOP for me anyway, and a lot of fun!

Software development is a world that is always changing, especially the world of open source software development. It takes a bit of effort just to keep up, so with that in mind I decided to go to Flourish! Open Source Conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago today.

I almost didn’t go because nothing on the schedule appeared to be directly related to my current projects. But after having been reminded of the conference by a coworker, I decided what the heck, it’ll probably be fun! And I was not disappointed.

I went to talks on Kubuntu, the Open Source Lab at Oregon State, the Processing development language and environment, and a couple on Android app and game development. I was particularly interested in the Kubuntu presentation because KDE apps have started showing up everywhere, including Windows. But the presentation that totally blew me away was Processing!

Processing allows artists to create incredible graphics and animation often with only a few lines of code. I’m really not doing it justice with this description, so please visit Processing.org. All I know is that I just discovered something that I may be able to use to better visualize the data in a big project I’m working on!

So my day at Flourish has paid off far more than I would have imagined. It really is a blessing to be able to do what you love for a living! I won’t be able to make the whole day tomorrow, but hopefully I can at least get there for the Processing workshop and afternoon panel.