September 2009 – justinmchase

Puerto Rico Expansion Update

I just got an email response from Jay at Rio Grande Games to my query regarding the availability of the planned reprint of the Puerto Rico expansion. Here is his answer:

It will be included in the Treasure Chest scheduled for November. Jay

So that’s right Puerto Rico fans! Get your wallets ready for the expansion coming out in November. I haven’t played with it yet but I have been looking at it online and it looks really cool.

How can you tell if you’re running in FullTrust (WPF)?

I’ve been binging all for naught, I need a simple boolean true / false so I can do or not do something that requires full trust (private reflection for diagnostics). Will this do it?

var perm = new ReflectionPermission(PermissionState.Unrestricted);
if (!perm.IsUnrestricted())
{
    yield break;
}

Does anyone know the secret recipe?

Pew Research Science Poll

This quiz was surprisingly easy for the results listed below. How much do you know about some of the most current science topics?

These results are very interesting. The question on Stem Cells seems to have the worst success rate overall. I find it interesting that women out score men on questions about over the counter drugs (#1 & #10) but not on any of the other questions except stem cells. Also, I’m really surprised about people Ages 65+ not doing much better than this. The results of #9 are also very surprising, that one sounds like a no-brainer to me but it seems a lot of people have no idea how lasers work.

Xbox speeds up research results

There is an interesting article on the BBC today about some researchers using the Xbox GPU for parallel processing.

This would actually be fairly easy to do with XNA, though I would be really interested in seeing the types of HLSL they write for the algorithms. The only difficulty, as I see it, is that XNA doesn’t have a generalized API for data transfer to a server. The networking API’s allow you to communicate between other clients in multi-player games but they do not let you upload results to a server. They might let you upload top scores and a few other minimal stats but certainly not the large datasets these researchers are looking for. It would be really cool if the XNA team created a complimentary server client that would allow 3rd party indie game developers to create server software to enable this type of application as well as ones that might involve persistent worlds and things like that.

I would be very interested in something like that.

Structured Procrastination

I was in a big argument on last friday at Pracna where I took the position “laziness is a virtue” (I’ll save that for another post).

This article on Structured Procrastination might be a better way of expressing what I was trying to say, or a least an alternate way.

Specifically:

“Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.”

haha!