dx13 Recent Posts

Copydogs

2012-02-14T14:02:44

I still find the amount Zynga copy game concepts mind-boggling. Related to this, it looks like Zynga employees love the game they shamelessly ripped off:

When Zynga came knocking and wanted to buy up NimbleBits, developers of Tiny Tower (which Apple recently named one of their games of the year), it didn’t take a genius to figure out that if the deal didn’t go through, Zynga would rip-off NimbleBit’s games anyway. And — shocker — it turns out thatâ€™s just what happened.

Checkout the beautiful open letter from NimbleBit to Zynga congratulating them.

Link: Open Web FTW

2012-01-28T20:08:00

Open Web FTW

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, on the future of the web.

I worry about the independent web. I worry about the content creators, and I worry that if 100 percent of the distribution of everything starts to go through just a few websites, that kills the vibrancy.

The Raspberry Pi

2012-01-26T21:09:40

The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little device. It’s a tiny, cheap yet reasonably powerful Linux PC. Having seen the recent videos of the system running XBMC and an AirPlay client, I’m convinced they are not merely toys.

The aims of the project are laudable: the founding aim is to provide a perfect device for teaching programming and other computer skills on a very affordable device, particularly for a school environment. I think they’ve succeeded: the cheaper variant of the device is just $25.

At this price I’m almost certain to buy one to try out — almost certainly the $35 version, however, as the $25 version has no ethernet connection (though can connect to wifi via a USB dongle).

So what am I going to do with my Raspberry Pi? I’d imagine that to begin with, I shall be playing with the media centre possibilities. Running a bare-bones install with XBMC atop it seems like it could be a great system. Low-power, silent and with the power to drive HD h.264 output, the system sounds ideal for this kind of thing. The community forming around the device seems keen on this idea too, so hopefully the support will be there from those more experienced with this kind of thing — and working out which remotes work well is something best crowd-sourced.

Another dream I have is Raspberry Pi Colo, along the lines of Mac Mini Colo, though whether the hosting could be as affordable as the device I don’t know. Imagine a dedicated server for $35 + hosting. I can imagine that would keep this site going.

The power available in such cheap systems continues to amaze and inspire me. The Raspberry Pi is a fantastic acheivement.

Link: MG Siegler: Why I hate Android

2012-01-12T11:24:07

MG Siegler: Why I hate Android

So that, ladies and gentleman, is why I hate Android. It has nothing to do with the actual product (which continues to improve every year and is quite good now). It has to do with a promise that was broken and swept under the rug.

You’ll have to read the full article for the reasons—and a fun Harry Potter analogy.

Solr, text encoding and unhelpful error messages

2012-01-06T10:06:24

I was getting an error loading any pages in the Solr admin UI:

Error 404: missing core name in path

What this is supposed to mean is that you have a multicore Solr setup and have not included the core name in your URL used to load the admin UI. However, I don’t have more than one core; a single one is fine for my needs right now.

It turned out that the problem was quite a far cry from that which the error message implied. I had a solr.DictionaryCompoundWordTokenFilterFactory filter loaded with a dictionary text file that was not UTF-8. The filter assumes UTF-8 and so was choking on my file.

The solution was to use iconv to re-encode the dictionary file, but not before a lot of head-scratching. Even the traceback in the terminal wasn’t great, about an error in STREAM, though at least the “stream” tipped me off that it might be an issue with loading a file—once I’d figured out that if I disabled my filter the Solr admin UI would load.

Update: Looks like this happens for any configuration error; check your solr logs to see what the failure is.