Eric Cosky

I recently felt the urge to view some PDF documents on my Playstation Portable. If you've wanted to read PDFs on a PSP, you already know there is no built in support for this. If the PDF is converted to a series of PNG files (they are more clear/smaller than JPG for this), the PSP's photo viewer can be used to read the converted PDF. It's not perfect, but it is a functional way to accomplish this.

For the technically inclined, this article describes a way to do this conversion using free software resulting in readable images on the PSP.

You will need the following:

Every now and then it's important to pull ourselves out from whatever code-dungeons we work in and look around at the world of computing to see what we've missed during the last couple crunch cycles. When I do this, once in a while I am surprised by the appearance of a new technology that has potential to make big changes in the way we make games. I've had some downtime to do research lately, and I think I may have discovered what may be the most significant improvement to browser based gaming to come along since Javascript. By discovered, I really mean I finally noticed something that people out in the world beyond game development have done which is pretty cool and worth talking about.

This article attempts to provide a concise description of the steps required to install Ubuntu LAMP server on the Virtual PC with the goal of providing an environment with minimal, but appropriate, services for hosting and developing web content using Linux. By the end of the article, the reader will have a virtual machine configured that has apache, mysql, php, phpmysqladmin, samba, ssh and webmin installed and operational. In short, a fully functional linux installation that can be accessed from the LAN via Windows explorer, serve pages to a web browser, and maintained via SSH to "get stuff done" under linux with the convenience of running it within a virtual machine. This can be a daunting task for someone not familiar with the process, and if you think you would benefit from having this kind of virtual machine just follow the instructions and I expect you'll be done in about 30 minutes or so.

The target audience is people who are not an expert in Linux configuration and would usually find it faster to reinstall from scratch with the correct settings than dig around looking for a way to correct bad settings.

I'm not usually one to get terribly excited about Microsoft Office (and that's an understatement), however the next update to this suite of applications is perhaps the most significant one ever. I think it may have the potential to affect developers who may not have expected Office to provide any functional benefits to the application development process. While there are many new features, far too many to list and I am sure there are more than I realize, there is one change that has the potential to have a significant impact to developers. Specifically, the Office applications are no longer just client applications. As I understand it, the Office applications are now capable of providing services, much like a web server or other back end application where there is no visible user interface and instead provides support services for other applications that build upon the functionality. Of course, the applications continue to provide all the features you expect from a client standpoint when used in that manner - you can still edit documents, spreadsheets and so forth just like you always have. However, with the new services features, it now becomes possible for developers to programmatically take advantage of all the abilities of the Office applications in the context of a UI-free server application. This is a fundamental change in the way office applications can be used; by separating the user interface of the client from the logic of the underlying application services, the office applications can now provide their functionality as an API to any managed code application.

There is another parallel to be made between the games industry and the film & television industries. Much like how film & television coexist peacefully and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, so will MMO and single player games. In each case, they both serve different needs. To say they serve different audiences is only partially true; it’s more correct to say they serve different content which provide different expectations (and limitations) which suit people in various degrees depending on their mood.

The expectations that MMO players have for the content and evolution of the games they play are similar in ways to what I think people have for television series they enjoy. A certain amount of comfortable entertainment is to be had when a person can expect a familiar yet slightly new twist on a familiar story or game. There are limitations to how far from the original story, character development and so forth that a series viewer will tolerate before they lose that comfortable feeling. For instance, if a character on the series "Friends" suddenly switched from being such a nice person into a mean person, nobody would believe it and many people would simply be annoyed that one of their comfortably defined personalities suddenly became something other than what they had grown accustomed. Along the same lines, if you take a well defined, long standing game mechanic or game storyline and arbitrarily change it from what players have grown comfortable with, you will risk the same kind of effect. Players are not amused when the rules suddenly change for the same reason they do not like sudden character changes, it breaks the connection with the content and they are then forced to decide if they still like the content before they will commit any more time to the experience. The risk of alienation is increased.

I know I’m not the first person to notice this but I’ve been saying for a few years now that the video game industry is in the same sort of situation that the movie industry must have been in at some point. From what (little) I know, sometime around the 1920’s the tools of making movies finally started to stabilize. I see a similar thing happening to the games industry. The process of making games is starting to be fairly well understood, including the tools, processes and even the social dynamics of the people involved. At some point the filmmakers stopped building their own cameras, developing their own film, and found a system that generally worked for making and selling movies in a reliable manner. Something much like that is bound to happen to videogames.