Thought I would do a quick blog post on what I have been busy with lately.
1. My first iPhone / iPod Touch game (released on Cydia for Jailbroken devices)
So this is something I have been busy with over the last few months – coding bits and pieces here and there whenever I get a bit of spare time on my hands. Its nothing special – just a simple Maze game. You use your device’s accelerometer to navigate your character through 5 maze levels. If you touch the walls you lose health. The longer you take to complete the maze, the more score you lose too. So the point is to get through in the quickest possible time without touching walls. I learnt the basics of how to work with the accelerometer, game loops, twitter integration, a little bit of PHP and mySQL for the Highscore system and a fair amount of general objectiveC code. There are a couple of bugs in the game at the moment (like the way you get a little stuck on walls – issue with my game loop) that I don’t really have time to sort out at the moment. But hopefully I’ll get more time in the near future to figure out my mistakes and fix these. You can check the game out in more detail here or you can download it for Jailbroken Apple devices on Cydia. Search for “Speed Maze”.
2. Moving
Well we’re moving house in the next month or so. We have found a place a little closer in to London that is going to offer far more room, an awesome garden, park across the road, and to top it all off, its in a nice quiet cal-de-sac. As such, I have been taking the opportunity to eBay some surpluss hardware and gadgets I have had lying around for a while. This includes various PCs and bits of hardware I have had lying around, plus around 20U worth of Dell PowerEdge servers! (See image above).
3. Other
My home VMware lab – I have also been building various ESX and vCenter labs here at home to play with in a non-production environment. This is great as it allows me to test all kinds of crazy things I really don’t want to try out at work! I have chopped and changed the hardware, but finally have two different labs going. One is a nested set up of virtualized ESX 4.0 hosts, running under a main ESX 4.0 host if you see what I mean. The other is running on a PowerEdge 6850 server at the moment – 4 x Xeon 3.16GHz CPUs and 4GB RAM. The issue I have here is that there is no Intel VT (hardware virtualization) support on these processors. So although ESX 4.0 runs OK, I can only run 32-bit VMs for now. Exchange 2010 and other 64-bit VMs will have to stay on my main gaming PC for now then. I also found this great WordPress plugin by lynxbat on Twitter. Once set up, it displays statistics from your VMware ESX host or vCenter Server. You can take a look at my current lab stats on the right in the sidebar. Get the plugin over here: WP-vSphereStats. Apart from that, we have also been planning one or two soon to be taken, well deserved holidays. We’ll be off to France soon, after which we’ll be taking a nice long holiday in South Africa. Excited to see friends and family again soon!