The Business Plan is a pain that entrepreneurs have to suffer, at least if they want to raise venture capital or other kinds of funding. To geeks, writing a business oriented document sounds just about as exciting as room temperature Jolt with no gas. Oh man! Budgets, risk assessments and silly attempts at future prediction that everybody knows are not going to hold anyway. Oh well, as we need funding if we’re going to make AAA games, we have been writing our business plan with all of those things in it. And for a while, I found it quite frustrating that whenever we spoke with someone with business savvy, they would tell us that we had to describe the problem that our product solves, the demand that it meets. How does it enable? That’s great, but how did we fit in there? The biggest problem a video game can be said to solve is boredom. Obviously, people are making money from video games already, as with movies, music, theme parks and what not, so perhaps the guideline should be extended to this: a company should either enable or entertain. Seems reasonable to me. So instead of focusing on solving a problem, we have now shifted towards how we are going to ensure quality. Quality meaning fun - entertainment.

Recently, it occurred to me that there is actually a third thing a company can do - it can protect. And this is an interesting area because, it seems, the upper boundary to required safety is vague and liquid. I bet Microsoft would be able to release Vista as nothing but a number of security updates. Essentially, protection is of no direct value to the user. In fact, in the best of cases, protection merely causes the user no additional inconveniences such as keys and codes or the loss of processing power. When people are scared, they will pay for protection with their money and by tolerating inconveniencies.
The problem here is obvious: a company that sells protection has an interest in scaring the population. Currently, the story about bump keying is traveling across Europe. It was recently described on national Danish television and the Danish lock smiths have since sold enormous amounts of bump-safe locks. I am not accusing the lock smiths of having spun this campaign but it demonstrates the concept perfectly. As does the strategies of the US Republican Party that seems to be heading for a crash in the mid term elections today.

A behavioral pattern that can often be observed in office environments. When two or more persons look at a third persons monitor, everybody else in the room will come and join the audience. I think this happens even more in companies developing video games – it is definitely common here.

- when will we start seeing them?

With all the sites that feature Google Earth sights and the quality of the images, it can only be a matter of time before companies start targeting ads at the satellites in the sky..

If you know what the word kusse means in Danish, this site becomes quite amusing.
“No cane rod I fabricate ever leaves my shop without my complete inspection and satisfaction”

..on Reddit:
http://reddit.com/info/j30d/comments/cj38o

startguiden.dk is a site for startups featuring lots of valuable resources for entrepeneurs. Martin and I were interviewed for “portrait of the week”, about Flux Studios. It’s in Danish.

This article on negotiation topped on reddit this morning. The article claims, as it is often heard, that you should avoid making the first offer, along with some other tips.
This is a wrong negotiation tactic.
The reasons given are that you may find yourself stating a lower figure than what you actually wanted, and that the other part may in fact be willing to offer you more than you expected.
As this article explains, you are better off by making the first offer. Obviously, if this means that you “find yourself stating low numbers”, you have some confidence issues that you should deal with first. But if you know what you are worth and you feel comfortable with the given price, you will be the one defining the range within which the negotiation takes place. Of course, you will be discarding the possibility that the other part was prepared to pay much more than you expected, but this will be less likely to happen if you actually know what you are worth.
Of course, starting out high (and you do want to start out high – there is no working yourself upwards) can be scary and you might fear that the other part will refuse to deal with you out of offense. I think that this is actually very unlikely to happen. Either the other part is an experienced negotiator and will accept the fact that negotiations have to start somewhere, or he is not which will mean that he is probably just as insecure as you are.

At one point, I was to set up a continuous integration server at BestBrains. The servers we had ran Linux which was fine for file sharing, subversion and web stuff, but we mostly developed Windows products and the CI server had to run Cruise Control.NET. Although that might actually have been possible with a Mono setup, we decided that it was not worth the trouble and that we would invest in a new server. I suggested that we used a laptop and we laughed about it a little because laptops don’t really feel like server machines. But after thinking it through a little more, we actually ended up doing so. Laptops, we found, have a number of advantages:

• They have low power consumption. This is a good thing for a machine that is always on.
• They’re small. You can close it and put it into a drawer.
• They have built-in UPS’s. Not only does this make them immune to quite long power outages, you can unplug your server and bring it to your desk without shutting it down, if you need to maintain it.
• They don’t make a sound. If you don’t have a dedicated room for servers, this makes all the difference in the world. We did, but we ended up having the CI server in the office, simply because it didn’t bother us at all.

Obviously, I wouldn’t advice you to run a heavy load server on a laptop, but for lighter stuff, it’s really great.

As you can see, I gave the site a minor face lift. The design is more or less intact but the WordPress engine offers a better comments interface and there are nice plugins allowing me to embed syntax highlighted source code very easily.
The old site is still up and it will remain up for some time.

Well well, finally old DIKU is getting some credit. Peter Naur, known at Copenhagen University for his efforts in computer science as well as his aversion for philosophy has won the ACM Turing Award. Congrats, Peter! And to you too, DIKU.