Erik Novales

By way of this Coding Horror article discussing recent CAPTCHA breaks in Yahoo, Hotmail, and Google, I stumbled across the Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) project at Microsoft Research. It’s a CAPTCHA system that uses pictures of cats and dogs, taken from Petfinder, to filter out bots from real people. I decided [...]

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While I was cleaning out and throwing away some old junk, I came across some old promotional stuff for iSmell scent technology which I guess I picked up at the 2000 GDC. I saved it for humor value. The company (Digiscents) met its demise in June 2001, to no one’s surprise. I thought I picked [...]

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I saw on Rock Paper Shotgun that Capcom has released a free Flash demo of the upcoming Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney game. As someone who recently played Phoenix Wright: Justice for All (my introduction to the series — I haven’t yet played the other two installments), I find this demo interesting for a few reasons: [...]

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So I decided, on something of a whim, to replace the firmware in my trusty Buffalo WBR2-G54 router with OpenWrt, a modular Linux distribution for embedded devices. (I actually used the X-Wrt packages, which have a better web interface for configuration but are based on OpenWrt.) The WBR2-G54 is based on the Broadcom 4712 platform, [...]

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I finally got around to installing the release version of Visual Studio 2008 on my machine. Fortunately, I checked around to see if there was anything special that I needed to do when uninstalling the beta, and found this article listing the recommended series of steps to uninstall the beta. I seem to remember there [...]

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“Size is the Enemy” is a Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) article that has made the rounds lately. It’s a response to a rambling rant by Steve Yegge about how large code bases are unwieldy, and how language choice affects the viability of software projects beyond a certain size. Early on, Jeff calls out a quote [...]

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For all the grief that Microsoft has taken in the past about the bugginess (real or imagined) of Windows, they have definitely put in a huge amount of effort to try and erase that perception. Readers of Raymond Chen’s excellent The Old New Thing blog will no doubt be familiar with the many tales regarding [...]

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The gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently ran an article mentioning the next project of the developers of the 2005 PC game Boiling Point. That upcoming game, however, is not the real focus of the article (nor of this one). There’s a bit of pointing and snickering at part of a bug fix list for [...]

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Having recently started to get more serious about development at home, I decided to install a couple of different revision control programs and give them a whirl. First, I installed Perforce. Perforce is a commercial version control system, but it’s free to use for up to 2 users and 5 client workspaces. I was already [...]

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Having constructed the Potemkin villages that are game environments, game developers just don’t see games the same way that the general public sees them. Every game developer I know has, at some point (and usually, often) sat around with co-workers, playing the latest and greatest game and critically ripping it apart for problems that are [...]

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