Vorg Linux blog| Hey, That's Pretty Funny | gawk; talk; nice; date; wine; grep; touch; kiss; unzip; strip; touch; finger; lyx; mount; fsck; more; yes; umount; more; yes; suck; make clean;
make mrproper; sleep | |
| Platforms to Stand On | My company currently makes games for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
The first 2 have a good business case. Lots of people run Mac OS X and Windows, and buy games to play. (Thank you to all the customers who keep us small developers alive.)
Linux doesn't have as good a business case for us. Not very many people buy the Linux versions of our games. But, I foresee Linux continuing to grow in leaps and bounds on the desktop. And our codebase is in Java, so it isn't that much extra work to make Linux versions.
Going Mobile
The mobile OS wars are warming up fast. In the past we've gotten some scattered requests for PocketPC or Palm versions, but it hasn't seemed worthwhile. Apparently there was good money to be made selling Palm apps in the past, but greedy distributors (hearsay says Handango) and a decaying platform have destroyed it.
J2ME and BREW cellphone apps are making money, but only for a few big companies (at least in North America). The carriers have been very greedy distributors, and locked down their platform tightly.
Apple's iPhone is fresh mobile platform coming on strong. They've publicized their app distribution rate as taking a 30% cut. That's a lot better then most desktop games distributors (Yahoo Games typically takes 70%). Apple has been tremendously successful at iterating the iPod from version1 to perfection. They're following the same process with the iPhone, building a mobile platform from the ground up. I think the iPhone will be one of the long term mobile platform winners.
Google Android is the other mobile platform I'm keeping an eye on. Open-source and available for carriers to build on. Apps are written in the Java language, but using G's own VM and libraries. (A nice end-run around SUN, straight to Java developers.) It hasn't launched on any real phones yet, but I think it has huge potential. The first Android phones are supposed to be available "soon."
You already have a computer in your pocket (your cellphone). The big question for software developers is: what platform is your next one going to run? | |
| How to set up a BitTorrent tracker on Linux | Here are the steps I took to install a BitTorrent tracker on a headless redhat Linux server:
1. Go to the BitTorrent homepage. Then go to the 'Click here for source and older versions' link below the obvious download links. On the sourceforge download page grab the .tar.gz archive of the most recent release.
2. Upload this archive to your Linux server and expand it somewhere. You can unpack the archive with the command: tar -xzf BitTorrent-4.1.0.tar.gz (adjust the filename if needed).
3. cd into the directory you just unpacked. Run this command to start the bt tracker in the background: python bttrack.py --port 6969 --dfile dstate --logfile tracker.log &
To get an explanation of all the command line options available execute python bttrack.py without any options.
4. If you have a firewall installed (and you should) then make sure it allows inbound connections on the port you started the bt tracker on.
Ta-da! You should now see some messages if you point your web browser to the bittorrent port on your server (e.g. http://yourdomain.com:6969) and your announce URL will be something like http://yourdomain.com:6969/announce
Thanks to Dessent.net's btfaq for bringing some clarity to the tangleweed that is the internet. | |
| free software v Microsft | There is an excellent debate on the 'morality' of charging for software in the comments on a lengthy weblog post by Robert Scoble.
Scoble (who works for Microsoft) takes the side of profits are good, and Jeremy Allison (an architect of Samba, a networking component of Linux) shows up to take the side of free software. Various other parties jump in as well.
For those of you who are unaware of free/open software might want to check out a definition of the free software movement. It's the current to next trend in the software industry. | |
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