A View from Elsewhere

Though we decommissioned Popfly last Monday, Ben Anderson from the (former) Popfly team worked his magic (along with a lot of help from others, including our legal team) to get the Popfly Game Engine code on Codeplex under the MS-PL.

Give it a look.

This post started as a collection of thoughts on the AP’s decisions around how they want their content handled on the web. Somehow this lead me to thinking about the FTC’s proposal for guidelines about full disclosure.

But as I was writing it, I had this persistent itch at the back of my mind: memories of some of the things I was involved in when I was in the computer trade press where the Chinese Wall between editorial and advertising bled over. 

The first occurred when I was working on a review of a class of desktop software. I’m going to leave it pretty vague since many of the people involved are still in the business. This was well over a decade ago, so don’t try to go figuring out which magazine or what the companies were. We did the testing in our lab based on a set of criteria (speed, ease of use, and so on) and I wrote up the article. Company A won the review, mostly based on the fact that it supported a fairly complete implementation of the relevant standards and was fast. I can still recall being called into an editor’s office and having him help me with my conclusions until company B won based on ease of use. Post facto, I found out that there was some strange advertising thing linked to the conclusion that helped guide the result. Nothing too obviously nefarious, but it was my first experience with the idea that sometimes the product I felt really was the best doesn’t necessarily win. Perhaps I’d lead a sheltered life until then.

The second occurred when I was asked to review UPSes. This was fascinating because we weren’t reviewing those little UPSes that you have in your basement at home: we were reviewing UPSes that could deliver 10+ kVA – enough to power a dozen or more computers for quite some time. The memories of this review stand out because it wasn’t about the software that they ran or anything that I had any expertise in: we called in a commercial electrician to set up a test bed with a mixture of resistive (light bulbs) and variable loads (power supplies) and a variety of volt meters and so on, then we practiced cutting the power over and over, watching how long it took for the units to switch over, how long they could run, how quickly they recharged to full capacity and so on. After years of reviewing shrink-wrapped software and laptops, it was refreshing to work with something that I could walk up to and kick without worrying about doing significant damage. Since this review, by the way, I’ve always bought APC UPSes. Post facto, I found out that we’d done the review because UPS vendors were good advertisers and we never wrote about them.

All of which is to say that when the reader isn’t the one paying for the content (which is the case with most newspapers and magazines), there always exists the opportunity for the insertion of other interests and biases.

Gidget, the chihuahua best known for her role as the Taco Bell dog, has died. While sad news (I grew up with Gidget on TV) I couldn't help but smile at this image:

"But, she said, Gidget had been the victim of typecasting, which limited her career choices..."

The mental image of a chihuahua meeting with groups of Hollywood execs, pitch men, and agents, and browsing a pile of scripts brought one final smile to my face.

When I announced that we were closing down Popfly, one of the biggest questions I got was how users could save their content. For the most part, that's not really feasible, but over at Coding4Fun, Dan has posted a link to a tool that was written by two folks from the former Popfly team (Ben and Adam) that enables you to download and run your Popfly games locally. All caveats about software apply, but this may help many folks.

A couple of years ago, a group of us decided to try something different: to create an online service to help people learn to program. Along the way we learned a lot about operating a large-scale web service, about the interesting legal and privacy situations that come into play when you’re running a service that talks to other services, about technologies like JSON and AJAX and Silverlight, about the frustrations of targeting multiple browsers, and about how to have a great time.

As you’ve probably read by now, we’ve made the call to shut Popfly down on August 24.

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about passionate response and kind words we got from our users when we announced we were shutting down the beta. I’ve tried to reply individually to everyone who wrote asking questions or saying how sorry they were and am sorry if I missed anyone.

Some of the most common questions were:

• Why are you shutting Popfly down? The economic situation today isn’t anything like what it was when we started Popfly. You’ve probably read about Microsoft’s layoffs and how every business group has been asked to pare back and focus. Popfly, though it was interesting, entertaining, and different, was hard to justify even for me (one of the people to started it) to management at a time when we were freezing salaries and laying people off.
• Can’t you open source Popfly? We’d love to, and spent many weeks looking at what it would take to do it. But  the source code to Popfly is pretty heavily enmeshed with Microsoft-internal services and source code that we cannot open source. If we figure out a way to release some elements of the source, we will, but no guarantees.
• Can’t I save my game/mashup and run it myself? The way games and mashups work, they need a lot of the Popfly services to be running for them to load. For example, mashups call into the Popfly service to request all their data (Popfly is basically a proxy server for them), and games require our game engine to be running. For games, Ben and Adam did come up with a tool that will help you run games offline, but you don't get the game creator itself.
• So are you guys out of jobs? What are you doing? Everyone on the Popfly team found a new position in Microsoft. A bunch of us stayed together to take our learnings from building Popfly to work on the next generation JavaScript engine and tools and you’ll be hearing more about that as we can talk about it.

As part of our remodel, considerable work was done on the front porch. Unfortunately, that work didn't include putting up the railings. This weekend has been the weekend for me to replace them. This has involved purchasing 4x6s and 2x4s to create the classic Craftsman heavy look, then assembling them, which has involved tracing the contour of the house's siding so the 4x6s are notched to fit, and mortising the 4x6s so the 2x4s will sit in them. Yesterday it took me about 8 hours to build 4 feet of railing. I'm hoping today goes faster.

Popfly, which we opened to the public last fall as a web mashup tool, has come a long way. Over the last ten months we launched an add-in for Visual Studio (Popfly Explorer) so people could create and open projects on the Popfly site from VS, a lightweight structured data storage system, we worked with Mark Frydenberg at Bentley College to design mashup curriculum, and we launched a game creator that puts the creation of casual games within the reach of people who don't have CS degrees.

Yesterday we moved from the alpha release of the game creator to beta in time for the PAX conference here in Seattle. Ben Anderson from our team will be at PAX giving demos, so if you're there drop by and harass him. Or just post on his Popfly profile page.

By the way, the title of this post is an allusion to two movies and the fact that Popfly now supports achievement badges -- for example, if you play a game late at night, you get the Night Owl badge.

About a month ago my wife and I attended the Seattle Luxury Chocolate Salon. With a name like that, I had no idea what to expect. When we showed up we paid our $20 admission (<cough>) and walked in. When we arrived, it looked like a miniature version of every computer trade show I've ever been to -- vendor tables with flyers and brochures and lots of people in variously matching polo shirts. You know what I'm talking about -- everyone looks a little bored after giving the same shtick a hundred times to semi-interested people wandering around.

Except this one was with chocolate. And they were giving out free samples.

So Amy and I worked our way around the room. It was surprisingly hard work -- the room was over 90 degrees in places, which meant not only that everyone was sweating, but that the chocolate was mostly the texture of mousse. Of course, mousse is good, too.

We tasted, I think, everything there. Four stood out for us:

• Claudio Corallo Chocolate. A single origin chocolate and cacao producer -- they make raw chocolate. The flavors were unlike anything I'd experienced before. I know it was meant to be used as an ingredient for other confections, but I could have eaten it raw. They have a store in Ballard.
• Kekau. A range of interesting flavors, including things like black truffle honey and Thai curry made these folks stand out -- they'd really done some interesting things. I've had many chocolate flavors before (curry chocolate, lavender chocolate, etc.) but they'd done them really well, including -- get this -- olive oil chocolate. Sounds awful, tastes great.
• Intrigue Chocolates. Truffles were the order of the day from Intrigue. Again, they had the standard flavors, but the ones that stood out for me were basil, and tequila-lime.
• Fiori Chocolatiers. These folks truffles also, but with an Mediterranean twist -- olive oil, fig liqueur, lavender and raspberry blossom. If you want a chocolate that you won't get elsewhere, try them.

By the end of the couple of hours we spent there I was thirsty, dehydrated, and tired. Oh, and buzzed on sugar.

A customer noted yesterday that the patch for "big VS" (that is, Visual Studio 2008 Standard, Professional, and Visual Studio Team Suite) doesn't patch Visual Studio Express. We did this because of the patch size: in the past Express customers would download one of the Express products (probably 50-60MB) and then have to apply the full VS patch (typically over 200MB). So we decided that we would do what we call a "major release" of Express 2008 with SP1. Effectively, rather than creating a separate service pack, we added the features of the service pack to the full Express SKU -- we used to call this "slipstreaming" but I've been told that's not quite the right term. Most Express users will just download the Express SKU of their choice: if they already have a VS Express 2008 RTM SKU on their computer, we'll upgrade it. If they don't, they get the full SKU without having to install a separate service pack.

Have you created a really cool Popfly project? If so, we want to hear from you!  Click here to send us your story and you may be featured on our site!

Created by students. AlfredTh has the list.

A coworker who is teaching Popfly to his daughter just asked me,

I'm working with my daughter who is working on a game and she wants to import a picture to be an actor.

How does she do that? And is there a wiki or other site to get these kinds of answers?

For once in my life, I have answers to both.

If you look in the upper right (next to your name) you’ll see the integrated help. That will open the Help window.
From there, you’ll get context-sensitive help. If a topic isn’t covered in the sidebar, you can click on the more help section on “How Do I…?” which will take you to the online documentation on http://www.popflywiki.com.
The page you’re looking for is linked to from several places – it’s called “How do I use uploaded files in my game?” and it’s here http://popflywiki.com/GameCreatorUsingUploadedFiles.ashx.
Once there, you’ll need to read the instructions, but they go like this. First, create a game (you’ve done this) and save it. Then upload the image. Go to the Game tab and on the right you’ll see the “Files” section. Click to add a file to your project, either from the web (e.g. from Flickr) or from your computer. Once it’s uploaded, save the project again.  I’m uploading john.PNG.
Now click on the Scenes tab and click on Draw. Then click on “Switch to XAML.” The screen should look roughly like the one on the right.
Next, add the XAML to include the file between the two <canvas> tags. In my case, I’ll add john.PNG. <Image Source="$base$/john.png" Canvas.Left="191" Canvas.Top="324" Width="200" Height="150"/> The Canvas.Left, Canvas.Top, Width, and Height control where the image will go and how large it will be. You’ll have to experiment to get it to the right position.
Save the game and run it. My “game” looks like this. I’ve saved it as http://www.popfly.com/users/johnmont/wonk.details, but we have examples in our tutorials of how to do this as well – the Canada Quiz in particular.

My wife has had a houseplant for the past ten years. It's one of those plants with huge leaves that thrives on being ignored. Despite ridiculous underwatering and one notable experience where we left it in the sun for a couple of days and it started to turn brown and crispy, it has done exceptionally well.

Unfortunately, it had outgrown its pot. So over the weekend we bought a new, bigger pot, roughly large enough to serve as the cauldron the three witches use in the beginning of Macbeth. Last night I attempted the transplant. Today, though all the leaves are leafy and green, the plant is canted to one side much like a well-known tower in Italy.

Should I try to re-plant the plant, or leave it and see if it decides to straighten up?

Plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task. Today I tried to repair the drain in my mom's front bathroom. The pop-up wouldn't go up and down. Based on this and all my previous plumbing experience, I have come up with John's Rule of Plumbing: All plumbing work takes three trips:

• Trip 1: Get the parts.
• Trip 2: Get the right parts.
• Trip 3: Get the parts you forgot in trip 2.

Oh, and at the end of this I should add the optional trip 4 to replace the parts from trips 2 and 3 that are defective out of the package.

Have I mentioned that plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task?

The toilet in the bathroom I was using in my mom's house was running. Not a "jiggle-the-handle" kind of running -- more like an "unstoppable-gallon-an-hour" kind of run. I lived with it for a couple of days, thinking, "If I were back in Seattle I'd go to the hardware store, buy replacement innards, and install them." But my mom's tool collection is a bit sparser than mine (no pneumatic tools, no table saw. Imagine! And her an 80-something year old woman!).

Then the light went on: hardware stores also sell tools. Two pairs of pump pliers and a couple of hours later, no running toilet.

Oh, and the review on Amazon of the Fluidmaster 400AK doesn't reflect my experience. I've used them several times on different toilets and they've always worked.