James Wynn

Recently the local Fox affiliat approached me about helping with an article about the new game controllers that use mind control.  The device we reviewed is the Neural Impulse Actuator or NIA by OCZ Technology.  It works by sensing the electrical signals given off by your brain and facial muscles.  Its a fantastic piece of technology, though rough around the corners, and I think in another couple of years we may see wide spread use of such devices.

Cool though they may be, I don't see technology like this replacing current mainstays like the joystick and keyboard/mouse. More likely, they will fall into the "add on" category like the gaming keypads and 6 button mice. 

That said, it is truely a piece of interesting technology and I look forward to playing with them in the future.

Now not only does FileWatcher support Win32 and Linux, but it supports OSX/BSD/anything else using kqueue. This should cover 90% of the cases where this functionality is needed and I'm planning on a fallback mode that will just use directory scans and file timestamps to determine changes.

Get the new version here:
FileWatcher 2009.03.04

I recently got a cable TV package when I switched my service and decided to try it out. Mind you, I never watch TV and haven't watched it regularly since I was a kid. After playing around with the service for a few minutes I became convinced that the product is faulty and here is why.

1. There are over 500 channels listed, and I only have access to around 50. This is fine in itself, but there is no way to determine if I have access until I try to view the channel. There is no option to filter out the channels that are inaccessable
2. There is no way to search through the shows except manually. Scrolling through pages upon pages of listings just to find one thing to watch is extremely tedious, especially when trying to relax.
3. Once I finally found a show, I had to watch it from somewhere in the middle. Why is it starting halfway through? Wait, I need an additional, expensive piece of equipment to fix this? Bad business. Sell a broken product, and then sell another product which fixes the original flaws.
4. Commercials are far too long, I have to watch about 5 minutes of commercials for each 20 minutes of show. There is something wrong with this.
5. Overpriced. I'm paying ~$25 / month for this service with all these failings and I still have to watch commercials.

How can such a service compete with the likes of Hulu, youtube, megavideo and sidereel? I suppose it will die off as soon as people realize how broken it is.

Spurred by an article a while back in Game Developer Magazine, I decided to write a little cross platform library for detecting changes in files. The library works in both Windows and Linux (tested in ubuntu 8.10, but should work in anything with inotify) with support soon coming to OSX. The library is great for automatically updating game resources during development. Most real game engines have this these days, and now everyone else can too!

The library comes with two samples. OgreDemo.cpp shows a simple example of reloading textures on the fly using the Ogre3D engine. SimpleDemo.cpp just watches a directory and outputs the file names when a file changes.

Some example code:

// Create the object
FW::FileWatcher* fileWatcher = new FW::FileWatcher();
 
// add a directory watch
FW::WatchID watchid = fileWatcher->addWatch("..\\media", new UpdateListener());
 
...
 
// somewhere in your update loop call update
fileWatcher->update();
 
// where UpdateListener is defined as such
class UpdateListener : public FW::FileWatchListener
{
public:
    UpdateListener() {}
    void handleFileAction(FW::WatchID watchid, const String& dir,
                                    const String& filename,
                                    FW::FileWatcher::Action action)
    {
        std::cout << "File (" << dir + \\ + filename << ") has event "
                        << action << std::endl;
    }
};

Download version 2009.02.17