I am pleased to announce that I have accepted an offer to intern at Google this summer, from May 28 to August 23. I will be working with the Search team in Mountain View, California.
Google Internship
Reply
Read Across America
Like last year, I once again participated in NEA’s Read Across America. I read “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” to a classroom of second graders at Wildwood Forest Elementary.
After the story, the students asked many tricky questions about game development and game design. Some days are like that, even in Australia.
Educators Panel at Carolina Games Summit
I was one of the panel members at this year’s Educators Panel at the Carolina Games Summit, representing the Simulation and Game Design department of Wayne Community College. The panel was comprised of members from Wayne Community College, North Carolina State University, and Living Arts College.
Box 2D Type Error in Flash
If you are using Box2DFlash v2.1a with Adobe Flash Professional CS6, you may encounter the following error message upon trying to compile any of the examples under Box2DFlashAS3 2.1a\Examples\:
Source\Box2D\Dynamics\b2World.as, Line 871 1046:
Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant:
b2Fixture.
This compile error occurs in Benchmark.fla, HelloWorld.fla, as well as Target has been inadvertently set to Flash Player 9. Simply change the Target to Flash Player 10.3 or above to eliminate the compilation error.
GPG Key Updated
After nearly a decade, I have generated a new 4096-bit RSA PGP/GPG key. The new key reflects the latest OpenPGP best practices. You can also view my key transition announcement for instructions on obtaining this key. The transition announcement has been signed by both the old and new (replacement) key.
If you are using gpg, you may want to add the following to your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf configuration:
personal-digest-preferences SHA512
cert-digest-algo SHA512
in order to prepare for the eventual migration off of SHA-1 in OpenPGP.
Bots Detection in Casual Games
An article on our work in using low-level input characteristics as a mechanism for bot detection has appeared in The Abstract, the official blog of the NC State Newsroom. Bot detection is one of many possible applications in the broader research context of how computational approaches to evaluating input interactions can be leveraged in order to better understand and predict the underlying cognitive processes of a user.
If you’re interested in contributing to a related follow-up work, then please take a moment to participate in my newest research study, the Concentration Game.
Advisory Committee Meeting
I attended our semester Advisory Committee Meeting at Wayne Community College, where faculty and industry members meet to make make curriculum suggestions and advise instructional faculty on trends in the workplace.
Beer and Bourbon Festival
For a much needed break from graduate studies, my friend Stacie and I spent Friday evening attending the Beer and Bourbon Festival at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary, North Carolina. Admission included over 40 bourbons and 60 beers on tap, along with a great selection of barbeque.
Emacs AUCTeX and PDF Synchronization on Windows
In this technical note, we’d like to setup GNU Emacs and AUCTeX so that it can do both forward searches (using Emacs to control the PDF Viewer) and inverse searches (using the PDF Viewer to control Emacs). This work is based on William’s instructions, but with some additional modifications from Miguel Frasson that remove the dependency on sumatra-forward.el, as long you primarily use pdflatex as your LaTeX target. The technique uses the command line rather than DDE to interface with Sumatra PDF.
Playing Fallout in a Window
This article describes the process for playing Fallout and Fallout 2 in windowed mode (that is, not full screen) successfully on Windows 7. The modifications to both Fallout and Fallout 2 apply to the non-DRM versions available at GOG.
- For Fallout 1, you will need to use D3DWindower. Unfortunately, the program and Geocities site (surprise!) are in Korean or Japanese, but a badly ported English version is available if you look hard enough. Extract the files and copy them directly into the Fallout installation directory.
For Fallout 2, use sfall.