My next game is now available out on iTunes.

Astro explorer is a turn-based strategy game where you are trying to find all the hidden gold before your power runs out or you die in a cave in. Check it out and let me know what you think.

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After way too long of being ignored, I finally moved my blog to a new server and platform. Unfortunately the years of migrations made the data rather screwy so not everything came over correctly. At the end of the day, it's close enough.

If you are looking for something and can't find it let me know. more

 The other day I saw that Valve's employee handbook was posted on the net. Being more than a little curious I went a took a look. It was both humorous and informative. Go take a look, I'll wait.... One of the things that really struck me was their attitude towards hiring. They only hire "T" individuals, where the top bar of the T is the your broad generalization and the post is your deep vertical. By hiring only individuals who both traits you end up getting a specific type of personality: driven to know something well, but open to change and new ideas { my take, not necessarily their's }. In many ways I've always tried to hire that way, but I've never seen it expressed so … more

 My iOS app MyPetMinder is now available in the app store. Check it out and let me know what you think.  Here's the site link: PetMinder more

Explore, build, and conquer with Global Command by BurningEmberGames    Global Command is the turn based strategy game now available on iPad and Android. Check it out and let me know what you think. more

It's been a very busy year around here and my blogging has fallen off a cliff. Ironically, this is post 701. Somehow seven hundred became the magic number. So what's been going on:   The 3D Room Planner on Lazboy and Thomasville and others as well.    The iPad version of our 2D room planner available on iTunes.    Then there are the side projects:   I published 3 full length novels this year.  My Amputee Wife The Desert War  Oasis the New Dawn  Two others are complete and in editing phases with expected publication in 2012. The Daughter of Ceras - www.tjweaverbooks.com The Slave of Oasis - www.tjweaverbooks.com   2012 will see the completion … more

I’m reading My War by Andy Rooney. I bet I haven’t watched 60 minutes in 15 years, but reading this book I can hear his voice and that same no nonsense character. He was as brash and stubborn as a young kid as he portrayed himself on 60 minutes. Andy had no shortage of opinions on Patton, Hemingway, Ernie Pyle, and a great many other “famous” people that he met and or served with during the War. The book is a pleasure to read as it is laced with his wit and wisdom. This book will remind you why we have a Veteran’s Day and what there is to be proud of, whether you are a Marine, a Soldier, a Flyboy or anyone else who served in the military.  more

Last week I lost a good 6+ hours trying to get embedded fonts to work on an iOS / Android Flashbuilder project. I know Adobe is aware of this, but I’m going to say it again. Embedded fonts is just plain screwy. There is no reason it should take an entire day to get a font to rotate and actually appear on the screen. I can rotate fonts all day long in every major browser with just a few lines of CSS, but making the same happen in Flashbuilder is like standing on one leg while walking a tight rope. If you want to rotate a font it MUST be embedded. To embed a font in an Actionscript only project you use the embed tag: [Embed(source='/fonts/times.ttf', fontFamily="FooFont")] … more

One of the new features in Flashbuilder 4.5 is that it can publish to Android, iOS and Blackberry. We are still waiting on the iOS update to build Flex iOS projects, however you can build a strictly AS3 project and publish to iOS. That all sounds great, until you actually try and do it. The steps necessary for me to publish to my Iconia tablet were 2 – Configure the IDE and Install the USB driver. From that point on I can publish to my tablet and I can debug on it. To publish to the iOS based tablet is a whole lot of steps most of which are not consumer friendly and frankly have so far have resulted in us NOT being able to publish, debug or even run on an iOS device. It would be easy to … more

So I bought an Acer Iconia Tab A500-10S16u 10.1-Inch Tablet Computer (Aluminum Metallic) tablet and have used it extensively for a few week now. For the most part I must say I like it better than the iPad with one big notable exception: Netflix and Hulu. Neither one of these work on my tablet which is a serious issue for the adoption of Android based mobile computing. Let’s face it, the tablet is the best form factor for consuming both of these video sources and not being able to just sucks. more

This is the second article I’ve read about this and I have to say that the bias in both is appalling. I would expect that some reasonable fact checking and detail verification would take place before writing and posting inflammatory garbage like this: http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/05/27/arizona.marine.death/index.html?hpt=T1   You might think I would be on the side of the Marine, after all, he was apparently innocent… The fact of whether this man was innocent or not isn’t actually all that relevant. The focus on both articles has been: Marine, Vet, SWAT, Excessive force (71 shots fired). Let’s take a look at a few of the pieces of information: The SWAT team announced themselves … more

I was driving home on Friday and as I stopped at a light the car behind me turned to the shoulder and came to a stop next to me. I looked over and the young guy driving nodded, his passenger window coming down. So I pushed the button on mine and he goes: “Were you a Marine?” Gee what gave it away? The veteran plates or the big Marine Corps sticker on my back window? “Yeah,” I answered. “Would you do it again?” The light went green, but there were still a few cars ahead of me not moving. “In a second.” He smiled nodding. “Should I join? I’m twenty four.” I stated to answer then stopped. Too many questions popped into my head. “You just said you’d do it again, right?” He said when he … more

Amazon does so many things right. I swear I send a large portion of my income there way, yet after every single purchase Amazon insists on showing more items that I might want that I would never ever consider purchasing. This is a company that has so much analytical data, yet they can’t do simple marketing… I don’t get it. Here’s a perfect example: I purchased a shower curtain and liner a few days ago. Now, when I log into my Amazon account what do I see: If I just purchased a shower curtain what are the odds I want another? Yes, you could argue that I might have more than one shower, but what about a Kitchen aide Mixer… Do I really need two of those? Or two red toasters that match? more

I’m looking to start a project that will be hosted at Rackspace on the cloud. It will also likely have at least a partial component that uses E2C at Amazon. The cost of a Windows platform is just silly at these places so I’m going with Linux. The question is Mono.NET vs. Ruby and Rails. Now I tried a simple MVC2 project on Mono.net both on Windows using VS2010 and their plugin. The site compiled, but refused to run. I then tried using Mono IDE and it failed to even compile a simple MVC app. I don’t have the patience to fight the IDE before I’ve even got the site running so I’ve switched to VMWare Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails. I’m thinking of using JetBrains IDE RubyMine. Anyone got any better … more

I recently launched a new site: www.tjweaverbooks.com using Microsoft Orchard CMS. So far I’m pleased with what Orchard can do. I haven’t spent a lot of time configuring the site yet, however those thing I have done all have worked well. The one thing I wish it did, is allowed links in some of the widgets. It’s annoying that you have to do that manually. My new site is focused on my fiction rather than technology. more

Check out my new book: THE DESERT WAR available in Kindle edition and Nook edition. This is the first of at least three novels set in or around the desert kingdom of Oasis, though none of them are direct sequels. One of the things I’ve always wanted to write is a body of books set in the same place, but not necessarily the same time; think Marion Zimmer Bradley’s DARKOVER series of books where one or two are a series, but for the most part they jump around in time and place. more

For a while now I’ve needed a dirt simple way to push a set of files/folders to a number of specific locations. Now there are a lot of utilities out there that will sync folders, files, even entire drives, but what I needed was some simple. Powershell is one of those things I’ve been meaning to get my hands dirty in for some time so I figured this was the perfect opportunity. I wanted to have an infinite number of targets. So I created a simple text file with each target on its own line: \\server1\d$\temp\finish1 \\server2\d$\temp\finish2 This was placed in a file called push.txt, which sits in the same directory as the powershell script. The script itself is dirt simple: #Read the … more

The idea of a NoSQL database is something that I am very attracted to. I've looked at them before, a few years back and they just weren't at the point where I thought I could leverage one, but recently I took another look. I have a use case that falls within a NoSQL database sweet spot so it makes sense to investigate the options. I decided to try out CouchBase (formerly membase) http://www.couchbase.com/. There is a .NET memcached / CouchBase client library so I downloaded that, membase and started a new project. Reading through the configuration of EnyimMemcache client library I thought I had everything setup fine, but I kept getting: Error: Factory must be defined My configuration … more