It's nearly time again, the Java 4K 2009 Competition is just round the corner (it starts in Decemeber). In this epic battle the residents of the Java game development community come together to test the mettle by creating gaming masterpieces in JARs that come in at or less than 4,096 bytes!

The contest runs for three months and is judged by a distinguished set of judges (normally also from the community). In past years there have been awards for different facets of the games (technical, visual etc). It's not quite clear whats happening this year yet but I'm sure it'll be the normal crop of varying quality with some incredible gems.

And yes... I'm hoping to actually enter the year. Woo Hoo!

I recently got asked why I always ask for a test case when I'm presented with a bug on the Slick forums - is it a diversionary tactic or is there an actual reason? Well, first, yes, diversion is key. If someone really can't be bothered to create a test case it's not that important to them - I don't get much time so need to prioritize :)

More importantly, it's how I work when trying to solve bugs. I tend to try and boil the faulty use case down into a single class that demonstrates the issue. Then start tweaking the implementation and adding debug (or debugging) to determine whats going on.

So.. yes, it really is useful to have a test case. However, the more complicated the test case the less useful it becomes.

And.. so far... it's working out pretty well. Most people are happy to give a test case and it nearly always makes it pretty quick to solve the problem. Thanks all! :)

For various reasons I've been pretty stressed lately, unfortunately meaning I've not been sleeping more than an hour or two a night. Apart from being extremely unhealthy, it's made me pretty non-functional in the day. So.. I went to the see the doctor who as they tend to do, provided me with tablets to solve the problem.

Unfortunately, they don't work very well. I'm told the way they're supposed to work is to relax you before sleep, to quiet the mind as it were, allowing you to drop off naturually and sleep through. They worked pretty well for a day but since I've just been stuck with the mind spinning, stomach churning restlessness in bed... waiting to fall asleep.

I've tried warm milk, I've tried sleeping downstairs, I've tried tiring myself out playing with Meg - but to no avail. Maybe I need to go back to coding all night.. talking of which...

Got this at work from a friend, looks pretty interesting. If you're in the South Wales area and interested in technology at all I'd pop along:

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only had 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world, web enthusiasts, creatives and entrepreneurs have been putting together Ignite nights in answer to this question and now Cardiff Web Scene and Nocci are bringing Ignite to the UK. Join us at Sodabar at 6.30pm on Wednesday 3 December. Entry is FREE and you don't need a ticket. Thanks to Skillset Cymru, there will also be some free nibbles so why not come along? If you want to take part simply send an email to hello@cardiffwebscene.com letting us know what you want to talk about and we'll get back to you if your submission is successful. For more information about the event please visit www.cardiffwebscene.com or www.noccinet.com. The Ignite community is sposored by O'Reilly.

This article (and it's subsequent parts) make interesting reading no matter on which side of the fence you stand. It fits in with some of the stuff I'm experimenting with at the moment - flash/flex development.

It's all pretty exciting to me at least. The last time I posted about Flash vs Java my attitude was pretty much if you want to write simple web games with loads of accessibility use the right tool (i.e. flash) rather than spending a lot of extra time trying to make things work.

That was, of course, based on just thought. I had a very limited experience of flash development. I've got a little bit more (still not much) but I have at least released stuff to the community and tried to sell stuff on. So far, it's much easier experience.

I posted this over at JGO and it's stimulated some pretty interesting conversation. The most poignant comment to me was this:

Pick your goals and market, then pick a technology that fits.

Right now, it's all just still an interesting experiment.

Classes that are called AbstractExampleThing that arn't actually abstract.

Uck.

Three weeks now, of coughing, aching and feeling lethargic. This sucks. I've never had a cold thats lasted so long. So far, lots of pain killers have kept me in work and getting on with life but I'm starting to feel pretty sick of it all.

Work is actually going ok, we seem to have moved past the paralysis and are finally getting on with things. Lots of things kicking off and lots of meetings. Looks like there are actually decision being made, woo hoo!

Family wise things are about normal, though Meg is a little under the weather and Cath is generally worked up more than normal.

I think things would be pretty good if I could just shake this sickness.

Unfortunately just recently I've been the vicitm of credit card fraud. They've not taken much as yet - just bought a few bits and pieces of WoW - but it's still depressing and inconvienient to have someone else spending you money. I'll get the money back of course and the card in question is already cancelled but still.

Being the geeky IT bloke that I am I can't help trying to solve the issue, so here it is, the solution.

Assumptions

1) The internet is considered a prominent part of credit card fraud. This is mostly because once card details have been stolen and/or skimmed they can be used on a wealth of online sites with little or no validation.
2) Stopping people using their cards is just dumb, it's inconvinence to the consumer and not to the fraudster. They win.
3) Everyone who uses online shopping, has an email address.
4) Banks, Vendors and Credit Agencys want to stop fraud. It's not productive or commercially positive for any of them.

Solution

The system would require some updates to online credit/debit card validation for online sites. Here's the use case:

1) The consumer signs up with the bank for a credit/debit card. As part of this they can choose to provide an idenitifed email address that can only be changed via the bank.
2) When an online card transaction is being validated via the bank the vendor's system is required to send a confirmation email to the address registered with the central bank system.
2a) Ideally the system allows the vendor to send the bank a confirmation URL and the bank forwards on the email to the registered address.
3) The consumer is displayed a message saying the transaction is pending until confirmation.
4) The consumer checks they're mail, clicks the confirmation URL and the transaction is completed as before.

I call it OPT - Online Payment Tracking. I'll even give you a slogan "OPT in, to prevent online fraud". The idea is free, no consultancy charge, just do it!

Why this is good!

1) This doesn't appear like it'd take much organisation or change given the online checks already have to contact banks to confirm credit status.
2) The email address is centralised, no more relying on the address that was registered for the [insert vendor name here] account.
3) The consumer gets record sent to them electronically of every transaction. It's just like the credit card reciept you get on top of the shop's reciept physically.
4) It prevents online fraud. The fraudster would have to get your email account details. They'd have to know where the email address was hosted to even start this process which has no visibility to the external user.
5) This doesn't reduce security. It's extra and optional. If the consumer doesn't care enough or is scared of technology, thats fine, don't use it.

So, please please please implement it.

EDIT: This could be made one step easier for the banks actually. Just send me an email with each online transaction on my card. Let me click a link to mark is as fraud. Vendors don't even need to care then.

Another attempt at a flash game. Check out Jelly Snake:

I'm starting to quite appreciate the simplicity or writing games in AS3. More than that though, it's wonderful to have such mature frameworks to get feedback, distribute and monetize your efforts.

Couple of new flash developments, check them out:

Patch Match - Collapse style game

Tricolore - Pattern finding game.

Instructions for both in game, one evening development for each. This isn't too bad going even if the games are essentially dross. :)