Janko in a Jar

This is the new screen-shot of Ask Robi. Now I need to get a new VPS so I can install it there and give it to few beta testers to trash it a little.

If anyone wants to be a beta tester write me to janko DOT itm AT gmail DOT com.

btw: Ask Robi is not a chatbot. I made a chatbot years ago and in my oppinion they are basically usseles. This is more like a sort of wikipedia that communicates.

I was deploying FotoLOAD to the first customer/beta tester. It all worked on some of my test servers but it threw some exception at the end of uploading an image on some of mine and it gave me same exception on this customer`s server.

The fact that you can’t print out the returned response at ioError didn’t help. I dug out that you can set up an event listener to http status so I at least found out that it was returning me 403 (forbidden). I had no idea why it does this as I could contact that file and upload in any other way without any 403.

disp.addEventListener(flash.events.HTTPStatusEvent.HTTP_STATUS, onStatus);

With proxyTrace and a lot of googling I came to this explanation (ctf+F for 403) and solution.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

It works. I also made the admin part for FotoLOAD midi and this is the screenshot:

I always think that programmers that hide what they code because someone is gonna steal it! People are evil!* aren’t totally up to date. But I was hiding this too… I was hiding it for long time and I felt stupid every time when I thought, “uh I mustn’t write the name! I must write ’something I am making’ or ‘project xxx’ or ..”.

I was hiding that I am making “Ask Robi”, yes ASK ROBI. I couldn’t dare to say ASK ROBI because I was amazed that for once the primary domain I want is not yet taken and askrobi.com wasn’t. So yesterday when I made the askrobi do a fullround client server trip, I bought the domain and now I can nag you about it! This is the first ugly screenshot of the client

Client is made with Adobe AIR and server and brains with Factor. They communicate via STRPC. I will post more about it soon.

Not that I don’t think that no-one can steal ideas. Just look at casual games market. The thing is that most people think their ideas are cool and ideas of others well aren’t so why steal them. There are also exceptions but if someone is so stupid that it has to steal ideas I feel sorry for him anyway.

Včeraj je bil Dan Iger na FERI v Mariboru. Predavalnica je bila skoraj polna in vzdušje je bilo super. No, rekel sem da bom objavil predstavitev online:

| View | Upload your own

Priporočam vam da malo po-googlate in preskusite kakšen demo igre ki jih naštevam, kakšen “engine” ali pa si pač ogledate kakšnega razvijalca…

Rekel sem tudi da bom objavil linke do mojih iger in cel intervju z Andyjem (saj dosti ga tuki ne manjka).. To bom naredu danes zvečer ali jutri dopoldne. Kr neki linkov do mojih iger pa lahko najdete na Janko’s “products”. Rekel sem da ne delam samo iger za otroke, nekaj takega je WATERISK samo na njem še delam..

This is the presentation from talk at “Day of games” about indie game development at FERI faculty in Maribor.

I never thought I will say this all in one sentence. My >50y father came to my sons 2y birthday party with his 600cc Honda bike, and left it here for a while (it was night and cold when we were done) .

And I am not complaining, I luckily had a business meeting today and of course I didn’t use the car to get there. If anyone thinks to meet with me he/she is very welcome for the next few days, I finally have the time for meetings!

I had an enduro (off-road/touring) bike when I was too young to have a car, but then motorcycles started looking impractical and quite dangerous too me. Well but I have to admit now (not that I do it because of danger), as with kayak, the more dangerous it is the more alive you feel and I didn’t feel as alive as today in a year. And I wasn’t speeding too-much but sitting on a little bike that has more horse power than my previous 1.6cc car, feeling the air the surroundings and the road directly.. it’s just 10x more involved than “couching” in a car.

Image via WikipediaI was just making STRPC server in Factor because I need it for something I hope I will be able to release (very early version) soon. I made it work, but it’s still patchy at certain places. I have to write the Htmlize serialization and de-serialization in Factor, and add error reporting and input type checking and then it’s done.

STRPC itself is still very experimental (read crappy) right now, I used it at 5 projects but nobody else used it otherwise. And it does not surprise me. Who would use a nightly brain-dump of a XMLRPC frustrated coder that writes and changes it as he goes…

Well, I think I got the clearer idea of what exactly I want STRPC to offer now and I will update the spec, examples and libraries when I find some time. I have used it from PHP, JavaScript, Haxe, AS3 and Factor now.

The biggest change will be that it will now be serialization independent so the server could support any serialization (or many of them). Every server will have to support Htmlize serialization so if you write a client you can be sure that this one is supported. But besides it it can also support any number of other types. For example, why not use python’s (or php’s) native serialization if you have server and client written in python. The other example is Flash. AMF binary serialization is said to be much faster for flash and is natively supported so why use something that you have to parse by yourself in AS3. The same with JavaScript and JSON. Each server will be able to provide their clients with a list of supported serializations so client can programmatically choose the most suitable method…

Posts are boring if I don’t add some code so here is how you make a STRPC server in Factor now. This one adds and substracts two numbers and returns the result.

: strpc ( -- return )
    request -> query>>
    {
      {
        "math" "sum"
        { { "a" number }
          { "b" number } }
        number
        [ + ]
      } {
        "math" "sub"
        { { "a" number }
          { "b" number } }
        number
        [ - ]
      }
    } serve-strpc ;

: start-server ( -- )
  [ drop strpc ] fuj-def-responder set-global
   main-responder set-global
  8080 httpd ;

more readable version

You will put the words you want called instead of “+” and “-” . These words (functions) have NO rpc specific code and are totally general words.

I gave a talk in front of around 70 secondary school headmasters and teachers a month or so ago. It was about technical side of some e-learning project that I work for. I didn’t have that good feeling during the talk, but people said it was very OK. And (f*** it) I am OK with the OK

Then after a week (unrelated to the previous talk) someone contacted me if I could talk about indie game development on a game-dev event that they are preparing (there will be some AAA companies talking about their side, and I will represent the indies) at FERI (University in Maribor).

It sounded more fun than the previous talk (and previous was cool too) so I said yes. It will be on 15. may. I have 8 more days to figure out what I will talk about, make the slides.. etc.., then I want to record few answers from some known indies from abroad, so I have to find smart questions and find a way to record them somehow without stealing too much of their time, my son has a 2 year birthday and I have a bunch of work for multiple customers. tick.. tack.. tick.. tack.. tick….

As an sidenote… Slovenia seems to be such small country that if you make few games you are quickly amongst the “most productive” game developers in it.