TheMadPeacock On The Sofa

As this is created using Gamebryo I am going to be FORCED to play it a lot…. its homework…. its part of my job!! what can I do?

Warhammer Online Gets Release Date | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A moderate earthquake occurred at 11:42:15 AM (PDT) on Tuesday, July 29, 2008. The magnitude 5.8 event occurred 3 km (2 miles) SW of Chino Hills, CA. The hypocentral depth is 12 km ( 8 miles).

We even felt it over here in Calabasas over 50 miles away as the crow fly’s. It was more of a roller than a shaker but still the biggest I have experienced in the 4 years I have been in LA.

It was probably the launch of MobileMe and a comment from a friend about how she uses it to run her business that got me thinking about this..

IT has evolved, has your business evolved with it?

More and more of the IT services a business needs to function are moving to SAAS (Software As A Service). These SAAS providers offer everything you need to run a system, the servers, the storage, the software, the IT staff for support, maintenance and upgrades.. you name it and someone probably does it.

In a recent IT overview presentation to the Exec team here at Emergent it was a surprise to myself and others that although we have traditionally hosted every part of our business internally and are culturally very security sensitive (its a competitive market) we are already relying on several SAAS solutions to manage some of our MOST critical data.

• Development is internal, it is the core of our business and we feel safer hosting it internally (for now)
• Salesforce.com is used by almost every department, we hold market data, customer information, prospect information, marketing analysis data, product documents, company documents and much more up in that particular cloud and it has been rock solid.
• We use SAAS systems for our accounting, payroll and HR systems.
• We host our own Exchange servers, a policy that has been problematic up to now with frequent and prolonged email down time. We now have all new servers and a new improved network. IT promises much better performance but part of me wonders if any 3 person IT team can deliver 99.9%+ up time to rival even basic SAAS email solutions like Google Apps? That’s less than 9 hours down time a year!
• Project management can be run through basecamp
• Intranet is available through Google Apps, ZoHo and others
• Blogs, Forums and traditional corporate web site hosting is probably the one service area most company’s already outsource and is available from thousands of vendors.

And the list goes on and on…

With “3 nines” (99.9% up time) products (like Google Apps) being seen as sub-par, “4 nines” a normal level of service to expect and some vendors now boasting “5 nines” service contracts, that 5 minutes of down time a year! can an IT team of less than 20 people possibly offer safer more reliable service?

I am interested to hear how your company gets on with SAAS, horror stories and successes.. Please post your experiences and thoughts below.

Over on Gamasutra they have an interview with Mel Guymon, Google’s 3D operations director and in it he is kind enough to give us a shout out… thanks Mel!

He suggested the application, which runs in a webpage plugin using elements of Emergent’s Gamebryo game engine, could be compared to existing applications such as Second Life and Scenecaster

You can read more here - Google Announces Lively Online World

Over on the Emergent Asia blog there is a fun post and video on a recent event we sponsored.
A Hoot of a Fun Time in Shanghai
Hooters in China! does anyone else find that amusing? Or is it just a symptom of the global economy?

As fun speculation/rumors go this is a dusey!

Image from Bagelturf.

Over on Bagelturf there is a post that Apple is (should be) interested in purchasing Tesla Motors. Bagelturf - Apple To Buy Tesla Motors
I am propagating the rumor simply because perhaps wishing will make it so…

Pass this on, link to it, digg it, whatever you need to do.. with luck we will be driving iCars before the American car industry completely implodes.

So I have a week at home with my new baby and between feeds I am getting some time to sleep and catch up on some of my hobbies.

Music is something I love, I played violin as a kid, (I wanted to play electric guitar but my parents made me play violin; don’t know why) so my interest in playing died early.. but not my interest in music.

One of my challenges in life is finding new music I like, I don’t have time to stay up to date and as I follow several genres of music what I really need is someone to recommend new music to me. iTunes tries but it is a very weak system.

Pandora to the rescue! I just Stumbled onto Pandora, the free radio station that uses the music genome project to take one song or artist you name and create an entire radio station of similar music! Its amazing.

For us nurds who like to know how things work here is an extract from Wikipedia

The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.

A given song is represented by a vector containing approximately 150 genes. Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300-500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, and fractional values are allowed but are limited to half integers.[1] (The term genome is borrowed from genetics.)

Given the vector of one or more songs, a list of other similar songs is constructed using a distance function.

A nice feature of Pandora is that if the system picks a song you like but do not know or own you can directly purchase it from iTunes so you can play it when you are offline.

You can create as many “stations” as you like, I have a New Rock, Rap and Old Rock station so far and I am discovering new music all the time…

Thanks Pandora!

I get asked that question a lot, and I have tried to explain it… a lot…

Over on GameCareerGuide.com Jeff Ward from Orbus Gameworks as taken a stab at answering the question What is a Game Engine?

I find it interesting that he categorizes Gamebryo as a Mostly-ready game engine, its an interesting categorization, definitely food for thought..

I am a big LinkedIn pusher.

I see tangible benefits of membership every day and the more I put into my network the more I get out. If after listening to me babble on about LinkedIn time and time again you still are not using it (you know who you are) then perhaps this post on the new LinkedIn Learning Center will succeed where I have failed…

If you bother to follow the link!!

if you dont do it NOW I will perhaps give up on you and talk about something else… you have been warned!

What is LinkedIn? - LinkedIn Learning Center

Her name is Skye and she arrived today!