www.enchantedage.com

I like watching Anime. Netflix has a lot of good things, many of which come from the American importer/distributor Funimation. But Funimation has started not making everything they have available to Netflix; instead they have a subscription service specifically for their own site. This service is about as expensive as a Netflix streaming subscription (I think one dollar cheaper?) I'm afraid this is the future of streaming video, unless someone can come up with a $30/month all-high-quality-programming streaming video service. But I digress.

I recently saw this ad:

A whole 60 dollars a year? That's cheaper than outsourcing to Congo! (the poorest nation on Earth).

Job recruiting scam pro-tip: Proofread your ads!

Here's a number. Anyone care to guess what it is?

2003529930406846464979072351560255750447825475569751419265016973710894059556311
4530895061308809333481010382343429072631818229493821188126688695063647615470291
6504187191635158796634721944293092798208430910485599057015931895963952486337236
7203002916969592156108764948889254090805911457037675208500206671563702366126359

In my previous blog entry, I talked about cross-shard transactional integrity for key/value stores, and how SQL databases have solved this problem. I also poked fun at some of the best known key/value stores for not quite solving all of my problems for me, for free. Go read it, it's fun times!

I've been looking at NoSQL data stores for online transaction processing lately. Yes, related to work :-)

The basic model of a key/value store, where the value is a JSON object or similar, only gets you so far. The bonus with it is that it is very, very easy to horizontally partition ("shard" or "federate"). The draw-back is that you really can't do any online queries on anything other than primary key values. If you're trying to do a query on, say, "any foobar created between 2011-01-05 and 211-01-06" then you're screwed -- you have to traverse the entire data store to find that.

There are a bunch of things that are systemically broken in California, and the state would do a lot better if these could be fixed. The problem is, the far left and far right aren't much in agreement about how to fix it, or even what it is that is broken.

I've been thinking about two separate products that I'd want to purchase if they existed, but they don't. For an enterprising entrepreneur, this might be the point where you MAKE one of those products, and see if there's a market. However, I'm already enterprising within IMVU, and as they say -- ideas are a dime a dozen, it's execution that counts.

I'm taking some time to learn how to actually use Unity3d.

Here's a screen shot of my initial set-up for "space invaders in a browser" (or probably more like "galaga" or "galaxians" or something). Btw: I'm sure those are all trademarked names of games, and they are only used for comparison in this article.

In my career, I've dug through a number of scene graph renderer internals. Almost always, they claim to be "hardware independent" by abstracting the hardware, and then they go ahead and expose functions like "bindSecondTexture()" and "setAlphaBlendFunc()" to objects, and have objects "render" themselves by calling those functions.

I'm taking the XNA 4.0 beta for a spin. I don't have a Windows 7 phone (who does? :-) so I can't get motivated to start porting things like kW Animation / X-port to it, but I thought I'd check out the new and improved render target and effects APIs. Here's a little screen shot: