December 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Android Game Reviews
When I had an iphone there were at least 10 game review sites that I could hit up on a daily basis to find a good game to buy, but that’s not true for android. There are a couple, but two good websites is not enough for me to form an opinion on what to buy next.
So instead of waiting for someone to launch their own version, I’ve made one myself.
Say hello to Droid Blimp
I’ll...
Slicer - Now the best window manager for the Mac.
I was always a big fan of the shift-it and size-up window managers for the mac, but they were never quite flexible enough.
Enter Slicer. It’s seriously awesome. You should buy it now because it’s only $3.99 and it’s better than competition costing $15.
Here is a screenshot of my desktop organized by slicer, notice the top two windows are 1/3 and 2/3 width. Awesome:
BUY IT...
How to have page numbers start on page 3 using MS...
This works if you want your page numbers to start anywhere after page 1. In my example I want to start numbering on page 3, but this would work even if you wanted page numbering to start on page 57 (for example).
We do this by breaking the document into sections. In this example I am using the following structure:
Page 1 - title page
Page 2 - contents page
Page 3 - real document starts <= I...
6 tags
Android game download stats for GeoPop, 7 days...
I’ve always found download statistics articles by other app developers extremely interesting and useful when trying to get insight into download and revenue rates for mobile applications. I thought I’d share the love with some stats on my very first android game GeoPop.
GeoPop
The game is very simple: tap shapes in the order specified as fast as you can within the time limit. The...
6 tags
Santa Says? An xmas game that doesn't suck
Last weekend I found myself drawing Christmas characters, so to capitalize on the idea I built a game:
Santa Says? is a simon-says style memory game where the goal is to repeat the pattern shown to you on screen. It gets really hard (my highscore is 19), and it’s really fun.
To go along with the hand-drawn graphics I also added funny voices to each of the characters (it’s more fun...
November 2011
1 post
4 tags
GeoPop - My First Android Game
I just clicked publish on ‘GeoPop’, my first Android project.
GeoPop is a puzzle game where you have to pop geometric shapes as fast as possible before the timer runs out. It gets pretty frantic pretty quickly, so you need to have quick fingers to reach that elusive high-score :-).
Click here to download it from the android market
PS - I would really appreciate any feedback, so...
October 2011
3 posts
[link] Beginning Android Game Development Book →
I totally recommend this book, which I read over the weekend. I went from fumbling around without being able to accomplish anything, to approaching game development in a totally new way (which is much better).
Kudos to @badlogicgames
Adding JARS to hive without using ADD JAR
Say you’ve built some library you want to use in Hive, or even in Hadoop. If this library is a UDF for use in hive queries you can load it like this:
ADD JAR ‘s3n://matthewsbucket/superudf.jar’;
CREATE TEMPORARY FUNCTION super as ‘com.matthewrathbone.SuperFunction’;
If you’re creating a bunch of these you don’t want to have to ‘ADD JAR’...
The start of an online puzzle community?
I’m a long-time fan of The Master Theorem. The puzzle-master (M) posts pretty difficult to solve puzzles on a weekly basis, but lately something interesting has happened, user submitted puzzles have started being posted.
Is it just me, or does this look like the start of a really interesting (and self-regulating) community for puzzle fanatics (makers AND solvers)?
I hope so!
September 2011
1 post
Some fun Hadoop and Hive Bugs
If you’re running Hadoop 0.20 with Hive 0.7 here are a couple of bugs that it’s useful to know about:
NullPointerException
If you have an external partitioned table, this could mean you forgot to recover the partitions before running the query:
ALTER TABLE sample RECOVER PARTITIONS;
MR jobs hanging on 0/0 completed map tasks
Creating an external table that points to an empty...
May 2011
1 post
2 tags
“regular expressions are “WYSIWYG” - the language described is the language that...”
– Matthew Might and David Darais : “Yacc Is Dead”
(I know it’s a very dorky quote, but it really is awesome)
April 2011
2 posts
Google should buy this website →
This is the missing tool in google-docs, I use it everyday. Its the sweet spot between a full on document and a piece of paper.
If they added their collaboration features it would be an amazing product that I would happily pay for.
3 tags
A Warning About Apache Thrift's Asynchronous...
By default if you use the asynchronous client for thrift it will be using a FRAMED transport layer, even though there is no mention of this in the code / docs.
You’ll know this is happening because your server will give you the following error message when it receives an rpc:
org.apache.thrift.protocol.TProtocolException: Missing version in readMessageBegin, old client?
If you have no...
February 2011
2 posts
It has been a good week
So over the last week I’ve been doing some pretty awesome things.
I went to the Wollman Rink in Central Park to skate with NYR players
I went to the Metropolitan Opera to watch Armida
Then on Saturday I was at BAM to see Diary of a MadMan (with Geoffrey Rush)
Finally yesterday (Sunday) I went to see the Rangers play at Madison Square Garden
And tonight I’m going to the...
Kindle store prices
Am I the only one who thinks the kindle store ui (on the kindle) should have the book prices next to the books when you search? How else do I know what snap purchases to make?
December 2010
1 post
3 tags
NullPointerException when performing a join with...
If you get this NullPointer exception when joining two tables in hadoop hive, the problem may be that in one of the two tables the join key value is “” (blank string).
For example, if you’re running this query:
select users.id, locations.address from users left outer join locations on users.location_id = locations.id;
and users.location_id happens to be “”...
November 2010
1 post
Remember stuff easier →
I have trouble remembering a lot of things like birthdays, so I built this tool to help me.
Check it out.
October 2010
2 posts
Mini Squadron - my favorite android game of the...
I’ve been hunting for some good android games recently and this is one of my favorites. Put simply you have to kill all the other planes using your one weapon. It sounds simple, but you can get a range of different weapons, about 100 planes, and lots of different levels (which get quite challenging). In addition, the animation and artwork is lovely and really makes it fun to play.
Check...
Samsung Vibrant as a Modem for my mac!!
I actually got my phone working as a 3g modem for my mac, first time ever that I’ve had internet on the train. Love it.
September 2010
1 post
3 tags
Ruby JSON Serialization sucks for Time objects
This is something to be very careful of if you need to transfer data between two ruby-based systems using JSON. If you serialize a Time object it will serialize as a string, this means on deserialization it stays as a string
Let me demonstrate:
test_data = {“time” => Time.now}
json = test_data.to_json
# the timestamp looks like this in json “Tue Sep 28 14:37:37...
July 2010
3 posts
Multitasking sucks on the iPhone 3g
I have an iPhone 3g (from the UK) and I live in Brooklyn, NY, so to allow me to use it I had to jailbreak it. In doing so I figured, “Why not enable multitasking?”. I’ll tell you why: I did, and its terrible, it makes the phone crawl at a snails pace. Simply loading the sms window takes a whole minute if you have a couple of applications in the ‘multitask window’. If...
3 tags
Announcing couponize.me
No one loves a good deal more than me, so I find it really frustrating that I can’t coupons for the local bars, restaurants and services around where I live.
Its clear that managing a successful coupon campaign can be a lot of work, so unless the business is the size of Macy’s, or you’re lucky and get picked for a groupon it’s pretty hard to make all the effort...
Goodbye old blog, hello new blog
I’m finally saying goodbye to the old matthewrathbone.com/blog .
I built the site back in 2008 using ASP.NET (which I was working with at the time) and its become a total pain to maintain, update, and style. It is with that in mind that I have moved my blog to http://tumblr.com.
I’m not sure whether I’ll be importing my old posts into this new blogging system, perhaps I will...
November 2009
1 post
5 tags
Operation Algorithm: Quicksort in C and Scheme
This is the first post in my quest to be a better programmer. Quicksort is one of the ‘standard’ sorting algorithms. Its fairly easy to implement, and normally runs fairly quickly. I’ve implemented quicksort in both C and Scheme, although I think my Scheme implementation is more of a pseudo-quicksort due to a reluctance to break from the functional style encouraged by Scheme...
December 2008
1 post
6 tags
Be Careful of Data Obtained From Bloomberg using...
The RTD / BDP functions provide real-time data from bloomberg directly to an excel sheet. However if you’re subscribing to fields which Bloomberg hasn’t designated to be ‘real-time enabled’ you have to manually refresh bloomberg data for it to have any effect.
Let’s look at an example
FUT_CTD_PX (Cheapest to deliver price) is a static FIELD for a real-time...