OUYA IS F-F-Fun(dead)?

OUYA project raised some $15M from their new investors. They are excited of course. This is probably good for a company financial success. However is it good for a mission that OUYA originally started? I don't know, but I surely know that original founders are now not own 100% of the share. They could probably own 90%, or maybe 50% depending on how much company price was estimated at the moment of the deal. And that new shareholders can, in some future, have some other vision about what OUYA console should be. That's the facts part.

The ethics part is probably even more interesting. See, backers are, naturally, the real shareholders of the company. They have taken the real risk of funding the project on early stages. Yet thay will have just a console box as a revard for that. Now some big guys, which brobably wasn't happy to fund project at early stages, come in and skim the cream. I know, backers take what they have been told, but still they funded OUYA and their founders, not OUYA and NVIDIA et al.

I actually think that can be called some sort of abuse of crowd funding idea. The crowd takes highest risk at the start of the project and takes some product for that, then real investors are safe to take share of the company. That's really nice trick. Nobody probably like to fund a project that will use that to find some more funding.. or I'm wrong?

Using Google Analytics for desktop apps?

While searching for an answer to that question I found this SO topic which, at the moment doesn't supposed that Google Analytics can be used for desctop at all, searching, in fact, for an alternative.

But as it turned out in my continued search, it's now possible to use Google Analytics on desktop applications (and actually anywhere) with it's new Measurement Protocol which is, however, currently in beta.

Format a drive larger than 32Gb into FAT32 on modern Windows OS

IIRC Windows was restricting usage of FAT32 since Windows 2000, in favor of NTFS. And it is actually a good thing. NTFS is far superior than FAT32 in almost any aspect.

However, this activity come beyond reasonable amounts in my opinion. Simply put, you just can't format a drive larger than 32Gb into FAT32 using any modern Windows OS (Windows Vista/7/8, maybe even Windows XP). This is very, very annoying. I'm fine then you can't do something using standard approach, but I want be able to do that I want somehow, even if this is sounds unreasonable.

Now, users must fix that Microsoft must do itself. This utility (click on image to download) by fine fellas from Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd. do the thing. Since it's very valuable tool and "teh internets" fail us sometimes, here's a copy in the SkyDrive cloud.

Running Apache on Windows 8: port 80 occupied by System

If you are using Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012, and Apache service won't run (you have something like make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80 immediately after installation) what means that something occupies port 80, which is Apache is trying to use. You can use Tcpview tool to see what occupies port 80. Then I did that I saw that is was a process called "System". While "System" can actually refer to many system services, it seems that there are two common cases present:

1) Web Development Agent Service (MsDepSvc);
2) World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC).

If disabling any of these servies does not help you can use some other tools to dig deeper in your quest of finding service responsible for port 80.

P.S. There is of course other solutions to that, most simple of which is changing port to which Apache will be listening.

XNA the end

This entry at Promit Roy's blog finally confirmes that any last hope of XNA should be left. This is, probably, better than nothing, however it was almost obvious with release of Windows 8 SDK with DirectX merged into it. Yet they gained some little respect at least from that point. This is, probably, the only point from which respect can be given.

First they they should say that earlier. Second, they should not drop XNA at all. Despite some negative aspects XNA was extremly intuitive and easy to work with. It was a huge success, enormous attention from developers of wide range of expecience, from novice to professionals. Terraria was written in XNA, a 1.5+ million sells title. They don't need even to add support for WinRT. Just a mere bugfixing, support and Visual Studio 2012 integration.

Enough rant. The question is, should you continue to use XNA? It, of course, depends. If you amateur or just started to learn game programming, it doesn't really matter, you can safely continue to write your first games. However, you can try to port your game to MonoGame to be ready for Windows 8. Last option is also to consider for writing your first more or less serious game, which, most probably you want it to evolve and live in future. Professionals can decide for thenselves I guess, but I guess XNA is no longer a valid option for pro game development.

jQuery "No Transport" error solution

If you get a "No Transport" error then making AJAX request using jQuery in Internet Explorer, then solution is as simple as adding:

$.support.cors = true;

before making your calls to

$.ajax(...)

For some other possible options take a look here.

Console isn't a box that run games

An interesting article called Why Xbox failed in Japan is worth reading despite it's pretty long.

Not only it describes Japan game market specifics, it's also pretty much shows that console market is very different from a PC, and a console is not just a computer which can run only games. Also it reveals much of "behind the scene" activity in console game development, some info on popular studios which are dedicated themselves to console game market - just as I said, it's worth reading for anyone interested in games and games market.

P.S. BTW, I think this article pretty much fails in answering it's main question, a lot of 'in American/Japanese way' references doesn't always mean a lot, really. But, still it's an excellent overview article.