Thomas Le

 

So a couple weeks ago I met a group of 5 other people at Panera Bread in Mira Mesa, CA and we discussed working as a team for this Ludum Dare competition. Ludum Dare is a competition that is held 3 times a year and does not have a cash prize at all. The object of the competition is to create a game in 72 hours as a group or if you enter individually 48 hours. This time at Ludum Dare 22 there were 891 entries combined with the Jam(group) and Compo(single). Only 174 were Jam entries.

We discussed the types of games we liked to play and our skills we could bring to the group and it turns out we had 3 programmers and 3 artists. The competition took place over a weekend at 6pm PST Friday evening until 6pm that Monday evening. We decided to go with a top down game and we used Unity 3d as the engine for the game using c# as the language. Our artists used Maya and 3ds Max for the art assets.

Keep in mind I had only met this group a week prior and then spent just about 60-72 straight hours with them in the same vicinity. We, of course, took sleeping breaks and ate because there’s only so long you can go without sleep before you are useless at anything you might try to do.
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Have you ever wanted to sign up for something that is ‘free’ but didn’t want to be subjected to the spam that might accompany that membership? There is this service called mailinator which let’s you use any randomly made up email and then check that email instantly, for free and without a password.

For example if I want to sign up for a free service of some kind, say a newsletter or something to see if you really will like it but don’t want to give away your real email. You simply signup with an email like dontspamme@mailinator.com (you can literally use that email address, but it might be a commonly used one too). When you sign up and it says that they sent you an email simply go to http://www.mailinator.com and type in dontspamme in the username box and it will check that email.

Keep in mind that anyone that knows the username can check that mailbox. There is no password required. You could use a random sequence of letters like ertyuiop@mailinator.com and just check it right away not having to worry about remembering it later.

 

 

A little over 17 years ago I started working with computers. Like most people when they first start with computers I was clueless with all these terms and acronyms accompanied with using computers. If you are a newbie or maybe even low-intermediate user I hope to enlighten you of at least one new term covered in this article.

OS: Operating System. The essential piece of software to use any type of computer. Whether it be a graphing calculator to the computer you used to get this article there is an OS instructing the computer how to turn the information it receives into something you understand..

Tech Fact: Microsoft DID NOT steal the idea of a GUI (Graphical User Interface) from Apple, in fact, they both got the idea from Xerox who developed the GUI and the mouse. Microsoft just released their product a little before the Macintosh was released and a lot of people hate them for that.
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Backing up your data is an extremely important part of using your computer. With the threat of computer viruses, spyware, and other things that can go wrong with your computer it is a very devastating event when your computer crashes and you lose all your data. This is remedied by having a current backup of your data. You can be sure that your precious pictures or that important report for work or school is safe if you use a backup system.

I personally use Mozy. Mozy is a piece of software that backups your data in the background without you having to think about it. You get 2GB for free and the prices start at $3.95/mo + $0.50/GB so it scales with how much data you actually use.

 

I logged in today and saw that WordPress is updated. This brings up the issue of backing up your database. It is good practice ANYWAY, even if you are not upgrading the script, to make backups of your precious data. I learned the hard way when my server crashed back in April and I lost my WordPress database completely. I found a link to a site that gives you information on how to backup your database using a cronjob. Basically, a cronjob is a scheduled task that can run at given intervals. This can be setup via a control panel or via an SSH terminal.

http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/cron/

I ran into the problem on my VPS. I didn’t have mutt installed by default and because of this I thought about modifying the script to allow for daily backups to be made and the previous one to be deleted. If you are interested in this script contact me and I’ll be happy to give it to you.

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