I read a nice interview with Harold Ryan from Bungie in this month’s Develop, about their decision to split from Microsoft.

In it he says:

“so we’ve chosen people to balance that out but who understand that the primary aim of the company is to make the best innovative, creative entertainment possible. And if that means we’re a break-even company instead of a massively profitable company, then that’s where we’ll go. <p>We’re going to make the games that both gamers and us ourselves would want to play. If that makes us successful from a financial point of view then awesome, but we’re not going to do it the other way – target being profitable and see what kind of game we could make to do that.”</p><p></p>Suffice to say that this spoke to me. I wonder if they’ve got any jobs going :)

Tags: bungie.games, development

From a recent quote about QPR’s new manager, from Gianni Palladini (QPR chairman):

“If you’ve met a lovely women, do you really worry about what she did before she met you?”

Could have come straight out of the Ian Holloway book of quotes that one…

One thing I would say about Leopard is that if you use the Last.fm, you’ll want to get the latest beta build - version 1.3.2.15.

Previous versions had a few problems, but this one is working fine so far.

See this forum thread for more details.

Actually, I’ve been using Leopard for a few months at work, but when we got hold of the real thing I finally got round to cleaning off both my development machine and my laptop and doing a full re-install on both.

So far, I have to say, my reaction to it is very positive. I haven’t discovered many revolutionary changes yet (I haven’t played with Time Machine, although I think it could be just what I want), but I’ve found lots of small improvements and nice tweaks.

The interface changes are a bit dour, with the whole thing feeling slightly more corporate and less glam, but on the whole they have improved consistency which can only be a good thing. And everything feels a little bit slicker and smoother. It might even be faster, although sometimes that can be caused more by the overall spring-cleaning than by the new OS, so I’m not certain.

The biggest improvements so far are in the general area of networking. Integration seems to be a lot better, it’s much easier to just find and use network devices. Finally, all the PCs on our office network just show up instantly in the network browser, as do printers etc. The user and network administration has had some nice tweaks: single-use guest logins and sharing-only users are both neat additions.

Best of all, they’ve actually put a feature into Mail that I asked for! You can now choose a smart folder that Mail will use when calculating the unread count to put in the little red badge it shows in the Dock. This is excellent for me - I tend to have a lot of unread mail but I have one or two smart folders which filter out the stuff that I actually need to deal with right now, so having the red badge show only when there is something to look at in one of these folders is really handy.

Early days yet, but so far, so good.

We use a VPN solution called SecureClient at SI, made by a company called CheckPoint.

Unfortunately we’ve had all sorts of hassles with it’s Mac support over the years. Now, surprise surprise, MacOS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) comes out, and what do you know? Checkpoint doesn’t work!

This is despite the fact that as registered developers with Apple we’ve had access to pre-release versions of Leopard for months and months, and so, presumably, have CheckPoint (if they wanted).

Luckily, there seems to be another option. We’ve discovered something called IPSecuritas. This seems to work with our VPN hardware, supports 10.5, and best of all, it’s free.