The CyKho Blog

Today I bought a Mac. After spending the week with the good folks of Graphing Social Patterns East (aka Apple Fanboys) - I had to see what all the hype was about firsthand.  So, today I took the plunge with a friend (and fellow Microsoftie). Walking...

I'm sitting here listening to Ro (Rogelio) Choy of Rock You give the basics of social networking for marketers.  Most of the talk is fairly simplistic (we learned how to set up a Facebook profile) - however, one point he made was was fairly poignant...

Back in the end of April I took a trip down to lovely North Carolina to make school visits there and talk with the local Microsoft campus.  On the academic front - there was an academic dark horse - Central Piedmont Community college blew me away...

While making one of my periodic visits to the mothership back in Redmond I had the opportunity to see the latest version of Microsoft's surface - a new was to interact with computers with human gesture alone.  Essentially, this technology is designed...

While reading the good ol WSJ I found this great video of Steve Ballmer on stage with Bill Gates.  The hosts gave him some gentle ribbing about being know as "the maestro of the whiteboard" and they wheeled one out for all to see. ...

Late late at night, I noticed that Google has given rise to a new site icon. Big G -> little g.  Not sure what that's about.  I definitely liked the original better.  The new one is backwards, mal proportioned and monochromatic. ...

Microsoft just released the Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 (see Pablo Fernicola's blog post .  This enables the author of an article to store their writing in a format predefined by the journal they wish to...

Sam Lee - one of my redoubtable colleagues made the following observation: So far dispute it's popularity, Facebook has yet found a sustainable, high growth business model... Part of the problem is the fact that the new paradigm of web 2.0 business -...

Advertising in the corporate world has largely been spit into "family safe brands" and the risqué. The family safe contingent peddles their good citizen status by association with environmental and child safety.  Your beer companies...

Browsing through the web I found an ad for a search appliance from Microsoft.  This I think has some potential.  Microsoft as a company has always excelled at enterprise engagement - making software for big business. One of the chief problems...

Due to HUGE user requests, an AI has been added to this new XNA Game for Zune.  It's a but buggy (Paul noted the AI can sometimes shoot itself).  But hey - now you can play with yourself! Get started by downloading this Zune game for free here...

While many have had the chance to play the N.A.M.E game, some creative seeds have been sewn.  I'm getting several questions coming through about how to create a Zune game. To build your own Zune game, there are several points of optimization unique...

Recently N.A.M.E hit the front page of the GameGirl Blog !  GameGirl is a HUGE gaming blog with an all female cast of contributors - providing a fresh take on the world of video gaming.  The article - written by Chastity (aka NuyoRiquena ) contains...

Now that Legendary Studios has completed N.A.M.E - their first xna 3.0 game for the Zune - Paul's guest blogger series on How to Make a Zune Game have come to an end.  You can download the free zune game: http://codeplex.com/Name/ To modify it simply...

Just Two Weeks after the Community Technical Preview Release of XNA 3.0 : We have completed our conversion and have uploaded everything to http://codeplex.com/Name/ Run over and download the source so you can deploy it to your Zune! Hopefully everyone...

Gameplay @ 240 x 320 One of the bigger problems with any game development is how do you make the game "easy" to play. With a game like the one were are making the biggest challenge is identifying where your player is and where all of his opponents...

One week after the Community Technical Preview Release of XNA 3.0 : After playing around with a Zune and getting our code base running on XNA 3.0 we start the "real" work. 1) We decide on a control scheme [although we have yet to work it out...

As far as the performance tips, the following disclamer should be added to a few [anything referencing per-pixel collision or render targets]. This data is based on performance test done in debug/release with visual studio debugging. After doing further...

Paul Oliver is the founder of Legendary Studios and an experienced XNA developer.  His Guest blog posts will chronicle the development involved in converting a small existing Xbox 360 game to be Zune ready to coincide with the full release of XNA...

I spent last weekend in San Francisco attending Makers Faire - an annual festival for people who make...stuff...  Really this is the matrimony of the free thinking idealism of San Francisco and engineering - odd but wonderful.  While there I...

Recently I saw an article on MSN Money Central about the potential thread mobile phones present to Google (and other online advertisers).  The basic premise was that less space available on a mobile device screen represents lower inventory and therefore...

Ok - regular readers know already I LOVE Popfly - it's just an amazingly cool idea for a platform with great UI.  But the team has just outdone themselves with Popfly Game Creator the Popfly way to make games!  Just like with the GUI for making...

I spent a couple days this week visiting Waltham MA - and stopped by Bentley College to see Mark Frydenberg.  Mark is one of the first teacher to use Popfly to teach web services.  He teachers a couple week of content based on Popfly in an Introduction...

Ever wonder why companies like to offer so many fun free services?  Well we all know paid search (a company pays to be the first on the list when you search for "technology" makes the lions share of the money.  So why not focus on...

One of my unnamed developer damsels linked me to a GREAT article from good ol Dr. Dobbs.  The article consists primarily of an interview with Bjarne Stoutstrap - engineering chair at Texas A&M regarding the applicability of C++ in education. ...