Which Christmas Carol is your programming language?

On the other hand, this is pretty frustrating.

Game developers live in a different kind of world from enterprise/business developers and IT shops, so it’s not particularly surprising that he’s being so melodramatic. Based on his writing, I suspect that he is the type of person who thinks that people like him are the only people who really “get it”. You know, the classic “everyone else is just a sleepwalking zombie – we’re the only people who are truly alive!”

Which again, isn’t particularly surprising – game development takes a special kind of single-minded dedication and passion, and I suppose that if you already love what you do, changing your process is not, generally, going to make it better.

But it is as good a starting point as any to address some issues:

• Yes, there are kinds of programming where Agile techniques are not ideal
• Yes, some of the processes are pretty common sense
• On the other hand, some of them are very, very difficult. That’s why many of the originators have consulting gigs. Because sometimes things that sound easy are pretty hard.

We’ll have to watch what happens with agile development in game shops. Perhaps Mr. Halliwell is right, and there’s no use for the kinds of techniques we recommend. It will be an educational experience either way.

A thought-provoking article about agile development.

Setting up a Hudson slave on Windows

First, if at all possible, install Hudson on the windows box, and get the job running properly with all the correct configuration. Once it’s running properly, in the proper directory, etc, copy everything to the real server, and do the following to connect them together.

1. Install sshd (the ssh server). This will require admin access and a fair amount of time and disk space.

• http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html

2. Set up ssh authorized_keys so you can ssh into your Windows box without using a password

• http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/no-passwd.html

3. Copy slave.jar from Hudson/WEB-INF into a directory on the Windows box

4. By hand, attempt to launch slave.jar over the network using ssh:

• ssh user@windows_machine java -jar /path/to/slave.jar
• But the path will probably look more like this:
  C:\\path\\to\\slave.jar
• You’ll see some minor response from the slave.jar if it is working properly. To me it looked like it was telling me what ssh client I was using.

5. Set up the Hudson slave configuration as normal.

• Create/Identify the directory for where the builds will execute, be stored, etc.
• Add an extra set of backslashes to the path for slave.jar:
  C:\\\\path\\\\to\\\\slave.jar

6. You should now have the slave working and available within Hudson.

Commercial software – when covering your ass is more important than the financial stability of your employer