Life has a funny way of sneaking up on us. Since my last post several months ago, many things have changed in the world; thankfully, only a handful of those changes have actually been in my personal world. I have moved across the country with my family, gotten settled in what is perhaps the most beautiful area of our great nation, transitioned to working from home and even made several new contacts in both the gaming and internet industries. One of my only regrets through all that is that I have not had time to make even a single blog entry.

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I have always been a fan of Google’s products as I have been made aware of them, and on very few occasions have I had anything negative to say about them. I recently have started using yet another assistance provided by Google that is, in my opinion, one of the single most helpful and creative tools to be offered free of charge to the development community. I speak of none other than the Google Web Toolkit. This Java application allows you to build quite extensive AJAX utilities from within the tool itself. What I find very interesting about it is that you literally write your application in Java (using a GUI that is provided with the Toolkit, if you choose), and the Toolkit then generates your markup and JavaScript for the final product.

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Well, those of you who know me in the least are aware of my passion for video games. I have, quite literally, been a fan of console and PC gaming for as long as I can remember. My parents will vouch for the fact that, on my fifth birthday — before I could read — I was situated in front of our living room TV set with our TI-99/4A on my lap, an open code book next to me, pecking character by character until I had basic animations appearing on the screen. I vaguely remember those details, although I can remember playing games like Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus, but the passion for gaming is still there to this day.

My focus, however, has shifted from simply being a placid gamer to wanting to delve more into the inner workings of the game development process and the gaming industry in general. Choosing web development as a career path has given me more of an insight into the principles that make games work, and I greatly admire those with the knowledge and fortitude to stick with it during the grueling development process, but I still have that burning desire to be more actively involved in the industry in some way.
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Those of you who work on client side scripting to any degree (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc) are probably well familiar with some of the more common JavaScript libraries available. I have looked into different ones to some degree, and I have used a handful of them extensively before settling on one that best fits my needs. You see, as a developer, I love to conceive of my own patterns and objects to do things within my page, but I also don’t like having to delve into the innermost workings of the DOM unless absolutely necessary for optimization. This being said, for large scale applications like Content Management Systems (CMS) or administration panels, I like to use a themed, all inclusive solution like the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) or ExtJS (an extension of YUI); however, when working with basic DOM manipulation or personal projects that require a lightweight solution, I have become enamored with the jQuery library.
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Well, I suppose it is high time to write my next entry. I never intended to take a two month lapse in writing, but then again, when does anyone plan to leave their blog unmanned for that length of time? Holidays, children and work all combined over the new year to make for a rather hectic time. I’ll address each of these throughout this post, so if it gets to be a rather lengthy read, I apologize in advance.
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Well, I suppose this has been a long time in coming, but I have recently been in a circular debate on one of the forums I regular: attempting to reason with an inexperienced developer that embracing the need for compliance and accessibility within our design process actually frees us up to expand our web presence. The argument spawned from the simplistic inquiry about how to lock a font size down to the degree that users were not able to increase or decrease font size. My initial response was to gently chide the user in question by reminding him that we are dealing with an end user product with web design, and we need to create our product to give the user the most flexibility rather than forcing them to adhere to rigid guidelines defined by our lack of creativity. Upon receiving a very juvenile and My-way-or-the-highway-esque response, I decided to take a big step back and review the big picture behind the need for accessibility and compliance in web.
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Well, it never ceases to amaze me how much I don’t know about the technologies I use every day as part of my job. No, I’m not saying that I don’t know how to do my job, but I’m rather saying that there are realms of possibilities the likes of which I’ve never imagined could be accomplished with such ease. I have always enjoyed learning bits and pieces of *NIX command line, shell scripting and other functionality that lies beneath – or rather, behind – my everyday web work, but I have never really looked into writing command line scripts.
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This year has proved to be the year of birthdays in our family. Not only is our third child’s due date on the same day as our son’s third birthday, but we have also had a rush of ideal gifts given. Starting out the year, my wife surprised me with the gift of a Nintendo Wii in February when most stores were still struggling to keep even one unit stocked on their shelves. While not the most expensive of birthday presents available out there, it has definitely been one of the most entertaining ones. Read more

Project Top Secret is an absolutely astounding venture that I happened upon a few weeks ago. After spending a few days doing some research, I discovered that this was no new discovery. In fact, this project, spearheaded by renowned video game director David Perry and Acclaim, has been going on for several months and has been featured on sites such as IGN, The Inquirer and Joystiq. From recent readings I have done, it seems that the consensus of the gaming community, driven by the announcement of the genre of the game, is one of skepticism. I must admit that skepticism has haunted my thoughts at times and the community driven discussion has at times seemed to be a bit out of order, I am reminded that nothing worth doing is ever easy. This game, in a nutshell, is to be an entirely community driven venture; no, not simply the character creation and story input, but everything from the world design to that of community development teams doing the final programming themselves.

After my initial research on the project, the desire to be a part of the game creation process in some way that has smoldered in me just about as long as I can remember began to be fanned to life. Ever a fan of the RPG genre, I fell into the same assumption that so many people who have read about this project were also guilty of: this game, obviously, is going to be some sort of MMORPG. In fact, while this game is an MMO, it is going to be following the racing genre! Read more