Where Is Joel?

A few days ago I attended Launch Party, a Startup Edmonton event which celebrated the young technology companies in our city. I thought I’d quickly chat about a few of the companies and my thoughts and excitement levels about them.

Beamdog: These guys want to distribute games online.  So they’re Steam?? If anyone from Edmonton has the clout to try and take on Steam it’s probably Trent Oster. I’m excited about beamdog because I think it can be so much more.  The model for distributing software that is based on walking into a store and buying something is eroding. Steam, the iphone app store and xbox live are all amazing demos of how successful an online software distribution model can be.  Making software easily accesible actually makes it cheaper as well because more people buy it so developers don’t have to  charge as much per copy to make the same profit.

If beamdog could become a windows app store that would be amazing. Right  now it’s a pain to find applications I want and I never know if the application I find is actually good so I have to ask all my friends if they’ve tried it. Managing software on your computer can also sometimes be a hassle.  Fingers crossed for beamdog!

Empire Avenue: Empire avenue lets you trade your friends like stocks. It seems like the final goal here is to create some kind of ad network that pays based on your “stock’s” value on empire avenue. If a lot of people read your blog then more people will buy your “stock” to get a piece of your advertising earnings driving the price of the stock up and ads on your site. It makes sense to use market forces to drive ad prices, and this is a really innovative way of doing this.  Despite this the site mostly feels like a gimmick because you can’t advertise with them yet so all you’re really doing is trading people stocks for no reason.  And doesn’t pay per click already solve the problem because if more people see your content online more people click?  Not sure how to feel about this company, but there is a *ton* of money in online advertising and if they execute this properly then they could be very successful.  On the other hand I already feel alienated because there really doesn’t seem to be any point to being on their site right now.

Seek Your Own Proof: They make an online sciency carmen sandiegoy game for kids.  It’s awesome and I’ll fight anyone who says it isn’t. In an age where we are moving more and more toward graphically intensive arcade games it’s refreshing to see someone making something fun and educational for kids!  Good work Ken & company.

Lots of other local startups were there.  To see them all check Mac’s blog post on the event. I’m not fully sold on Edmonton ever becoming a “silicon valley north” like some of the startup crew seem to be around here, but this kind of effort is at least helping raise awareness about good local companies and there is always room for good companies making good products in any economy in any location.

All my macy web developmenty friends can never seem to get over the fact that I do all of my initial development and testing of site in firefox.  ”It’s so clunky compared to safari”, “It’s so slow” etc. etc.  And I have tries safari.  I have tried using it many many many times.  I would use it.  It feels nicer and slicker like they mention, but am I the only one or is the safari debugger bugtastic?  It is actually absolutely stunning to me that it ever made it through QA.  I find about 50% of the time when I put a breakpoint into my JS in Safari I get the following:Safari happily breaks, wags it’s tail and asks for a pat on the head, but it completely refuses to show me my code!  Where is the code paused?  I have no idea, somewhere in this blank screen.

So then there’s the webkit nightlies.  People swear by them up and down and promise they will do all the fancy things firebug let you do like edit css inline.  So on a few occasions I brave the nightlies.  The problem is they always work even worse than my vanilla Safari. Sometimes they don’t even show the JS files as existing.  The last time I tried webkit the debugger did the following mysterious thing basically making them totally unusable.I can’t read that!!!  That’s two files in one window…  It seems like you would have to *try* to make something that bad happen.

So for all the safari developers out there.  Am I missing something??

When I was in Vegas there was an interesting story on the TV about a falling cat. The cat had fallen from some ludicrously high height (11 stories I think) and survived the fall. The cat was dubbed miracle cat, I mentioned to my fellow travelers that I was surprised it could survive a fall from that height and I forgot about it.

When I got home however I got to thinking about how different heights of falls must be different for different species. When I was just a tiny munchkin I make the assumption that what matter primarily was the size of the animal, for example a hamster could not fall from very far whereas we could fall farther. This is *quite* obviously wrong (I’m picturing dropping an Elephant off a building and seeing how it does), I had not thought to come up with a new hypothesis however. I went in search of answers.

The first thought is that the heavier an animal is the greater the force that would be exerted upon the creature when hit the ground. I was happy with that postulate as it explained why insects all survive quite high falls whereas we don’t. When I went to confirm it I came upon another variable I had not considered. The surface area of the animal as it falls also has an effect on the animal’s terminal velocity. This led me to a particularly interesting article on the falling cat I heard about in Vegas.

Apparently the most lethal height for a cat to fall from is around 7 stories, then as the height increases cat fatalities decrease as well. This seems at first counter intuitive. What happens is as cats fall they right themselves, then they spread their legs apart to increase their surface area and decrease their terminal velocity. The process takes some period of time. Before hitting the ground the cat must accomplish this process and slow any velocity above it’s terminal velocity to maximize it’s chances of survival.

If this interests you then you should check out this cool post on the use of tails in geckos. After watching hopefully you never try to catch a gecko and accidentally pull it’s tail of in the process again, They need that tail!!!

Joel out.

Sometimes this is more like my personal notebook to look back on. Something that I have in the past had trouble googling for perl is how to find the location in a string of a regex match. It’s actually really easy. The variable @- and @+ contain the start and end of the match respectively.

ie.

my $string = 'abcdefgabcdefgabcdefgabcdefg';

while ($string =~ m/abc/g) {
print "Start: '@-', End: '@+'\n";
}