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Published a game

aidan — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:06:50 +0000

My buddy James and I came up with a game last year, and with the help of our friend Chris we formed a games company and published it. It’s called Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot and we’ve made an online version that we’ll be releasing pretty soon too.

Saskatoon Open Coffee Club

aidan — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:05:38 +0000

I’ve decided to start an Open Coffee Club in Saskatoon. You can read more about Open Coffee on their Ning site. We’ll be meeting at Broadway Roastery on Tuesday Feb 9th at 8pm. If you’re interested in chatting about startups, maybe as an entrepreneur, a developer, or just someone with an interest in the topic, feel free to come along and bring anyone else.

I’ve got an Upcoming.org event for it too.

Mo day 20

aidan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:54:41 +0000

New role

aidan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:07:10 +0000

I got promoted to CTO today. Exciting stuff.

Moving day

aidan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:35:33 +0000

The movers are here. Packing is on-going. Everything will soon be in a container heading off the island and across the ocean. My wife and kids are flying to her mother’s tonight, and I fly out in a couple of days (we got tickets on different flights due to some cancellations).

Thank dog we’re going.

Wordpress hacking

aidan — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:40:49 +0000

Anyone using Wordpress should beware some nasty hacks, like that recently suffered by my good friend. Creators of malware should every bone in their hands broken. Twice.

Green fields and how to sow them

aidan — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:30:51 +0000

Here’s the scenario: you’re writing a green field web application. This application will be used to power more than one e-commerce site, which means that it must be easily tailored. You can use any toolset you like, and the requirements are fairly standard (e.g. exporting data to CSV, modern UI, payment gateway, etc.). What do you choose?

Off-the-shelf e-commerce engine
Open-source e-commerce engine
Build your own

So, it seems you’ve got three options (anyone think of a 4th?). Of course within each of these options there are any number of competing solutions, especially in “build your own”, where you could potentially use any language, web server, etc.

I think with any software developer, the preference is to build one’s own. That way you get ultimate flexibility and intimate understanding of the code, which makes it easier to expand and customise. The downside is that you have more work up-front in order to get running.

Off-the-shelf (i.e. commercial) software tends to have a lot of features that your accountant and fulfillment department would like, and often gives you the ability to customise using one of a few popular languages or their own pseudo-language. The real advantage is that you can have a store quickly, or so you might think. Often, shoe-horning your data into their proprietary and closed-source format makes this option longer and more expensive than building it yourself.

All of which leaves open-source engines. You can be up and running quickly (like with commercial apps) but you have access to the source code if you decide you need to change things the way you want them. Potential downsides are lack of support and lack of particular features you might need (e.g. a particular payment gateway).

So, which would you choose?

Ironcoder 7 date set

aidan — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:09:31 +0000

The 7th Ironcoder contest was announced today (for some definition of today – damn those pesky time zones). I think this year I actually feel confident enough to take part, even if I accomplish not very much For those who have no idea what it is, each contest selects a theme and Mac OS X API, then gives you 48 hours (real time) to write an app that has both theme and API centrally featured. Check out the Ironcoder site for more info, or take a look at the entries for Ironcoder 5.

syntax error before ‘AT_NAME’ token

aidan — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:56:08 +0000

If you happen to be using Xcode and get this somewhat baffling error message when building:

syntax error before ‘AT_NAME’ token

The problem is that you are missing an @end in some file that you’ve #imported, probably a header file. This error also shows up as “parse error ...” in some versions of Xcode (took me a while to track down with Google as a result).

Firefox phishing protection

aidan — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:40:51 +0000

Like anyone who has had the same e-mail address for 10 years, I get a lot of spam. Most of it gets filtered, by one mechanism or another. Occasionally the odd bit gets through. Unlike most people, I like to do something about it. For example, when I see Adobe CS3 for $99, I forward it to piracy@adobe.com.

This morning I received a phishing attempt for a Merrill Lynch trading account – ironic considering I work for one of their competitors (in my day job). So I clicked on it and it brought me here. If you’re using Firefox 2.0, the screen will go dark and you’ll get a big message warning you this is a phishing site. That didn’t happen this morning, so I reported it (which is horribly simple: while at the site go to the Help menu and select “Report Web Forgery …”. I set ReloadEvery to work, and within about an hour the site was now tagged.

The downside of this is that the people who report these sites use Firefox and know what a phishing site looks like anyway, but the people who need the phishing protection use that other browser.