After the Flood

No, there hasn't been a flood; I'm just being hyperbolic in my post title. The process of selling and buying a house, and moving the family, the cats, and all our stuff to a new state has felt kind of Noachian at times. (I just read a book in which I learned a new word, "Noachian", and I've been dying to use it somewhere. You like it?)

But we did it! We are here, in our new-to-us home, and it really was worth all the effort and misery of getting here. We are loving the house, the neighborhood, and the Oregonian scenery and culture. We are well settled in (a few things to do yet, but not much and the urgency is gone), and even the cats are happy.

Part of the view from our deck.

I didn't expect to have much time for anything fun until we reached this point in the unpacking-and-settling-in process, and to a large degree I was right. There've been a lot of seven-day-weeks of 14 hours a day of hard work: building and moving furniture, shifting boxes around, and all the rest. (Factoid: we bought something like 20 bookshelves for the library, the game collection, and our offices! We let Ikea build most of them but we built a fair number ourselves.) But we did make time at least for "scheduled events", like seeing Helen's folks on a fairly regular basis, hosting Nat when he could come up from UCSC, and going to boardgame nights at the Lucky Labrador in Portland.

And also music. This was a surprise, and a very pleasant and rather heady one. I was sad (and still am) to leave all my friends in the Bay Area jazz circles, and I was worried about finding places to play up here. I thought I might find myself a bit stranded, since nobody here would know me. But quite a few of my Bay Area friends are known up here, and they did an absolutely amazing job of introducing me to the Portland, Salem, and Eugene trad jazz scenes. Within a week of the move I had made some friends and had a place to go and jam every Tuesday night (Libbies in Milwaukie, if you're ever in the neighborhood). Three Sundays in every month I can go to one of the monthly jazz club sessions and do more jamming; I did so and made still more friends. These people have been incredibly warm and welcoming, not just about jam sessions but even inviting us to parties and such.

Within weeks, friends and jamming led to some actual paying gigs. And then I was asked to play a couple of gigs with the excellent Black Swan Classic Jazz Band, one of the finest groups in Oregon. When those went well, I was accepted as a member of the group, a very happy moment for me. We just played a concert in Tacoma, and I'm looking forward to going with them to the Pentastic Hot Jazz Festival in Penticton, B.C., Canada in September. So thanks to my friends old and new, my worries about music have been groundless: I'm busier than ever, and having tons of fun.

All that was leading up to the present, when we are finally finding some time to "do as we please". I've resumed working on Solitaire Till Dawn after an enforced hiatus of half a year, and last night we finally got around to watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which had the ill grace to hit the theatres shortly after we became too busy to even think about going to see it. I've even owned the Blu-ray for weeks, but only now have had the time and the home theatre setup (thanks, Helen!) to watch it.

In other news, Nat did stop and visit us this past weekend, en route to Pune, India where he will be taking a summer course at the University of Pune, the "Oxford of the East"! Pune is near the west coast of India. As I write, Nat's actually in Mumbai, waiting for a bus to take him and the other students in his group to Pune. We're looking forward to hearing about his experiences when he returns in the fall.

Almost There

I see that I haven't posted since I retired, last November.

There are two reasons for that. One is that I've been terribly busy since then. The other is that I generally prefer to post upbeat things, but the stuff that's been keeping me busy mostly hasn't been fun.

Retirement sounds great: a day off from work, in perpetuity. Now I can do whatever I want with my time! Turns out, it's not like that, at least so far. In my darker moments, I worry that it may never be like that.

Retirement means I can't afford to live in Silicon Valley any more. No problem, we'll move to Oregon, a step we've been thinking about for years anyway. But when I retired, we realized that we had to move immediately, or as close to immediately as we could manage. We were instantly embroiled in complex plans to find a new home, put ours on the market, and rearrange our nest eggs appropriately.

But it was mid-November then: the start of the holiday season. That slowed things down quite a bit, while doing nothing to relieve the pressure. Then in January, we realized that Helen's knee surgery could not be put off until after we'd moved, which slowed things down even further while adding more pressure. (Now I sound all whiney. See, this is why I usually only post upbeat things.)

Helen deserves a medal of some kind: she's persevered through all this, often through great pain, and with great success. I do my best to be helpful, but she's the one in charge, and she's amazingly good at it. As I write, we are (in theory, at least) less than 24 hours away from taking possession of our new Oregon home, and everything looks to be on rails—although we'll be watching intently for any signs of last-minute trouble.

So! Are we done now and can I have some free time at last?

No, of course not. We haven't moved out of San Jose yet; we haven't moved into the Oregon house yet. There will be months (at least!) of unpacking, furniture rearranging, and furniture shopping, not to mention home improvements: paint this, fix that, replace those appliances, remodel this room. Ugh. (Sorry, more whininess there.)

Still, I think there's light at the end of the tunnel and cause for optimism. Oregon seems like a great place, and the house does not really need too much spiffing up. Eventually there'll be time to relax. I'm looking forward to that.

But first, we've gotta move the cats 600 miles. Augh!

Retirement!

Solitaire Till Dawn fans: Please see the new Solitaire Till Dawn blog for news about the game. Posts about Solitaire Till Dawn will now appear exclusively in that blog; I am returning the focus of this blog to matters of interest to myself, my family, and my close friends.

I have retired from my day job! No more 40 hours per week of working on other people's projects; no more way-too-early alarm clocks; no more wasting 8+ hours per week on commuting. Hooray!

So what now?

Actually I have lots to do. I expect to be extremely busy, even short on time, through the holidays. Sometime early in the new year things should settle down a bit. When I can get a routine going, I still expect to be busy, but no longer hurried.

We are going to move house, and fairly soon. That, along with the usual holiday fuss, is what will be keeping us extra-busy for a while: selling the house, finding and buying a new one, preparing to move, settling in to the new place. It will take time, but we expect to really enjoy our new digs and new location once that's done.

Aside from that, I plan to spend several hours per day (most days) working on Solitaire Till Dawn. This will be more time per week by a factor of ten than I've been able to devote to it for the last few years. That's going to be fun. Most of the rest of the time will go to my more serious hobbies: music, boardgame design, and playing games with Helen, friends, and the kitties.

I'm looking forward to it!

Solitaire Till Dawn: The Last 90%

I am nearly at the end of a three-week "working vacation", time off from my day job which I have spent working full-time on Solitaire Till Dawn instead. It has been both productive and fun, and although Solitaire Till Dawn for Lion (and beyond) is still not done, I've made a lot of progress.

In these three weeks I've accomplished the following:

• Made the animation system sane and well-behaved
• Implemented a full preferences system for saving your settings and scores
• Created the "Players" feature, so you and your family can keep separate, personal settings and scores
• Implemented automatic saving of your game when you quit, and automatic resume when you start again later
• "Sandboxed" the app, to obey Apple's new security restrictions
• Wrote the code to import your old scores and settings into the new version
• Created a half-dozen new cardback images, with high resolution for modern screens
• Implemented the Décor panel, so you can choose royalty, cardbacks, and background images
• And made loads of miscellaneous bug fixes and user interface spiff-ups.

So where do we stand?
Fair question, especially after all that gloating and bragging. I'm afraid there's still a lot left to do.

Some wag once observed that the first 90% of the job takes 90% of the time; and then the last 10% of the job takes the other 90% of the time. He was right. At this point, nearly all of Solitaire Till Dawn's major features are basically working. There are a couple of time-consuming items left to do: for example, I still have to implement the "extended statistics", and I have to write all the built-in help pages. But most of what's left is just a whole lot of tedious testing and bug-fixing.

At this point, I expect some of you are wanting to volunteer to help with the testing. I'm grateful for all the offers, but I'm still not accepting testers (not even a waiting list, so please don't clog my in-box with requests, thanks!). Managing beta testers is itself a big, time-consuming job, and I'm not going to start it while I still have a big list of bugs I've already found and can test myself.

When testing is complete and I think the product is ready for release, I will submit it to Apple's App Store. This will require getting my descriptive text and screen shots ready and packaged up, which is another task that will take some time. I've never done this before, but from friends I know that acceptance may take weeks, especially if Apple find problems they want me to fix.

Will there be anything missing in the first release?
Yes, a few features from the old version will almost certainly not be in the new version. I am deliberately leaving some things out in order to get the app done as quickly as possible. The list of skipped features may include:

• Magnetic Mouse
• "Cheat" features
• Custom cardbacks from your own photos
• The clock timer
• "Save Game" and "Open Game" menu items (but your current game will always be auto-saved)

That list is not final. And if one of your favorite features is on it, please don't worry. If it isn't in the first release, I will add it in a later update.

Enough, already! We just want to know when it will be done!
Sorry, I don't know! Testing, bug-fixing, and submitting to the App Store are all things that will simply take as long as they take, and I can't predict how long that will be.

My vacation will be over in a couple of days, and I'll be back to having only evenings and weekends for this. I've used these full-time weeks for the "big ticket" items, stuff that really requires hours of uninterrupted concentration and a mind that isn't end-of-the-day exhausted. Those items are now finished, and most of what's left should not require such deep focus. I'm hoping I can be reasonably productive even in those late-night snatched hours. I'll continue to keep you posted on my progress, of course.

What about Mountain Lion?
I won't release Solitaire Till Dawn until it is compatible with both Lion (OS X 10.7) and Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). That won't delay things much, I think.

I had originally intended to keep this release compatible with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) as well. That may yet happen, but if it looks like it would seriously delay the release, I will abandon that. Snow Leopard is now out of date by two major OS X updates, and the old version does still work in Snow Leopard if you install Rosetta.

Midsummer Fair Winds

The title of this post is kind of lame, but never mind. I was trying to draw a contrast with my previous Midsummer Doldrums post. Very shortly after I posted that, unexpected events changed my situation quite a bit.

I am now, unexpectedly and suddenly, on vacation (or what I will try to call "vacation" without falling down laughing). It's really just a break from my day job, a couple of weeks off that I will mainly spend working on Solitaire Till Dawn.

This means that instead of trying to snatch an hour or two in the evenings, when I'm bushed and can't think straight and have a zillion distractions, I can instead work a full eight-hour day on solitaire. While I don't expect to finish the project during this stretch, I do expect to make a metric ton of progress.

And here's the first fruit: on my first full day I have already finished off that architecture issue I was moaning about! It's another redesign of the animation subsystem (I think this is at least the third time I've done that), and it's working better than it ever did, with much simpler code. Tomorrow I have a bit more cleanup to do on that task, then it's back to real forward progress again.

P.S. Unhappily, the "unexpected events" I mentioned were not all good for all concerned. That story isn't mine to tell, but I wouldn't want those who know the story to think that my only reaction was unalloyed joy. As for me and mine, we're okay; we're just feeling sympathy for friends and trying to find a silver lining or two amongst the clouds.

Midsummer Doldrums

It has, once again, been too long since I've posted any kind of an update. I am starting to see signs that some of you are worried that I am dead, or tired of working on Solitaire Till Dawn—that, in short, the project has been abandoned.

This is not so; I'm still here and still working on it. But it is true that progress has been stalled for some time. This has not been a good year for the general health of my family: nothing life-threatening, but there have been a succession of events that have taken up a good deal of our time and attention, and that have prevented me from focussing on software.

Also I have been stuck on a design issue. I was dismayed to find, at this late date, that some lingering bugs weren't just a matter of tracking down a minor problem and making a fix. Instead I have had, once again, to re-think some core matters of Solitaire Till Dawn's architecture. I haven't been posting about it because it's not the sort of thing that can be simplified down into a paragraph or two. I haven't known what to say about it; that, plus the general lack of progress, have left me silent for too long.

I apologize for that silence, and I'll try to do better. I am finally starting to regain the time I need each week to work on this, and I am starting to make progress again on the architectural issue, although it is certainly not done.

I can only plead with you all, once again, for faith and patience.

(Nearly forgot: some have been worried that Solitaire Till Dawn, when it is finally released, might support Lion but not Mountain Lion. I don't think that will be an issue.)

The Mummy's Curse

Nearly a quarter of a century ago I wrote Scarab of Ra. Scarab was my first Macintosh game program. It was written for the Macintosh Plus, a machine with a very small black and white screen. In it, you become a "lowly undergraduate student in archaeology", and you are exploring the unknown and hazardous interior of the newly-discovered Great Pyramid of Ra.

Scarab of Ra was fairly advanced for its time. It offered a 3D adventurer's-eye view of the pyramid's interior, complete with some cheesy graphics tricks to make it harder to see details of items in the dim distance. It wasn't animated or realtime, but it kind of felt like it: every time you pressed a key to take a step, a little time would pass and certain hazards including cobras, monkeys, lions, and the horrible Mummy would change position to sneak up on you. The Great Pyramid was laid out as a series of mazes, each one larger as you got deeper in the Pyramid. In every game the mazes and the arrangement of traps and treasures was different.

I released it as shareware, which made it the very first product of Semicolon Software. This was all back before even the World Wide Web (man, that makes me feel old), so Scarab's distribution relied upon the kindness of strangers. People would upload it to their phone-in bulletin boards for others to find and download; they would give copies to their friends (Scarab's copyright notice explicitly allowed this), and Macintosh User Groups would put it on floppy disks along with other sharable programs to hand out to members at their monthly meetings.

This made for slow distribution and a fairly small audience, especially since there were not many Mac users at all back then. I charged $10 for it and left it to people's honesty to pay me if they liked it. I probably sold a total of a few hundred copies. That was nice, back then: it was just a hobby for me, and the proceeds from Scarab helped pay for new development software and Mac peripherals.

About three years after introducing Scarab I launched the first release of Solitaire Till Dawn. At first that too sold only slowly. But at about that time the Web appeared I coincidentally gave STD a major facelift, and its sales really took off. As a result, I continued to concentrate my efforts on Solitaire Till Dawn and never got around to updating Scarab. As chronicled elsewhere, changes in Apple's choice of CPUs and operating systems, coupled with the abandonment of the development software I'd used, left Scarab unable to run on modern Macs. It became "abandonware".

So you may imagine my surprise when, a few years ago, I began to run into evidence that Scarab of Ra is regarded in some circles as a "classic of Macintosh shareware" and that many people are nostalgically longing for its return. I do get the occasional email asking about it, but that's a trickle compared to the flood I regularly get about STD. But Scarab is featured prominently on web sites about classic Mac OS software, and a few months ago I discovered that it has a Facebook page of its own with several hundred "likes". Today I dropped in there (a vanity visit, I admit it) and discovered a link to another Facebook page which was an even bigger surprise.

The Revive Scarab of RA page documents a project to recreate Scarab of Ra. They are writing all-new code in Javascript so that you will someday be able to play Scarab of Ra in your Web browser. This also means that you will be able to play Scarab on any platform: Mac, Windows, Linux. That's pretty cool!

You might wonder how I feel about this: somebody else "ripping off" my product without so much as a how-d'you-do. I'll admit it makes me feel just a little bit itchy; but I'm going to rise above that and wish this guy and his collaborators all success. For one thing, it's not illegal to clone somebody else's product, so long as you don't violate copyright by stealing or copying the original product's code, graphics, or text. The code is no problem since they're writing theirs from scratch. They have not gotten as far as adding test or images yet, but the page's author has made it plain that he understands the copyright law and intends to provide new images and text, and produce something with an updated look and feel.

And I have to admit: in the past, a few people have asked me for permission to create new versions of Scarab. I've told all of them that I have no objection so long as they honor my copyright. This fellow (I don't know his name, it's not on the Facebook page) may well have been one of them. And even if he wasn't, I have no reason not to give him the same answer.

So more power to him! If he brings it off, it will be quite a tour de force—and I will be very stoked.

I even clicked "Like" on the Facebook page!