Midnight Ryder’s Blog has been abused and ignored for too long now. One of my New Years resolutions is to start updating this at least every two weeks. Not only am I going to update it, I’ve decided to throw my hat into the podcasting ring – every update will have an associated podcast with it. Or at least that’s the plan at the moment. If I don’t like the podcasting quality, or just plain get bored with it, I might quit doing it. I won’t know until I’ve tried it for a while.
Midnight Ryder's Blog
Business, Technology, Software Development, and Games – the things that affect our culture.Apple understands a great many things. Apple understands hardware, Operating Systems, Interfaces, and how to make Hardware / Software sexy. I mean, to the point of nearly being a cult sexy.
I am a huge Apple fan. I’m writing this on my customized MacMini (which I should throw some pics up of someday – it’s a portable with a 20″ screen), and make part of my posts on here on my iPhone (and all my Tweets are done on the iPhone – I never bother loading the webpage anymore.)
Apple even understands developer tools. XCode rocks (in my opinion. Some people’s opinion is different, but ya know this my blog, so my opinion is the one that counts. So there! 
What Apple doesn’t understand is developers.
The iPhone shipped as a locked down device – you couldn’t use it on other networks, and you couldn’t add your own software. Developers quickly created the Jailbreak techniques to load your own software on ‘em. Petitions were set up to call for Apple to open up the iPhone for development. Apple finally released the App Store, which allows you to purchase software and load it on the iPhone.
Great! Developers can use XCode to develop for the iPhone. Except… that pesky Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that says, well… the first rule of iPhone Development is don’t talk about iPhone Development. This resulted in at least one book being canceled on developing iPhone applications (and I’m sure more than one was probably put on hold), since developers couldn’t say anything about the internals.
Then that changed finally…
You hear about businesses closing all the time, and usually you get a little recap at the end about what happened from some outside or low level person at the company.
Gamer Zone was one of the businesses I was involved in – starting out as a PR guy and eventually being the captain of the sinking ship. It happened nearly two years ago, but, I felt it was time to sit down and tell the story, in all it’s glory. It’s fun, sad, pathetic, and educational all at the same time. There’s a hell of a lot of business lessons to be learned from someone else’s failures.
New episodes are released once a week (I’ve written episodes well ahead of time, incase I have a time crunch for some reason. There’s four waiting to be published every Monday morning, and since the story flows very easily for me, I’ll probably be 6 to 8 posts ahead each week
I don’t usually laugh at most people’s misfortune. OK, that’s a lie – I do. But I don’t usually laugh with such glee!
Jack Thompson has been disbarred. Ok, if you don’t know who Jack Thompson is, then you might find this a little less funny. Lemmie give you the highlights…
Jack Thompson decided there was a link between video game violence and real world teen violence. Except that whole bit where some studies show there isn’t a link. At all. I have no problem with his belief though – I have a belief there isn’t a link, and some studies show that I’m probably right. But who knows – maybe it’s a delayed effect, and when this current generation of gamers turns 60, they’ll all be mass murderers because of Grand Theft Auto XXVI: Old Age Home. The long term sociological effects won’t really be know for quite a while.
I’m a fan of Open Source / Free Software licenses. I’m a REALLY huge fan of them in development tools.
So what am I bitching about here? Developers who fail to understand licenses, but insist on using them without really knowing what the hell they are doing.
I’m going to give two examples – both of them are more common than they should be (hey, just follow any Slashdot conversation involving the GPL or LGPL license to see how common it can be.) And I hate seeing them – it means the developer in question has never considered closely what they just licensed their software as.
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Other Projects
The Story Of Gamer Zone -
Explore a business from it's inception to it's death, and beyond. And along the way, learn how to avoid failure, or at very least reduce it's impact on your life!
And coming in April:
The Horror Game
After years of playing the game with friends, the author finally turns the game into a book for others to play and enjoy. Death was never so much fun!
