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07 Nov

Posted at 15:45h in Coding, Tech by
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Amazon launched the Amazon Elasticsearch Service less than a month ago to enable their clients to spin up scalable Elasticsearch clusters directly from the AWS Management Console and forget about about managing these clusters by themselves. While you can spin up and use an Elasticsearch cluster in several minutes, this ease of use comes with a small disadvantage: as opposed to a classic Elasticsearch setup, the Elasticsearch service only exposes the publicly accessible client gateway, making it impossible for Hadoop applications to connect to the nodes behind this gateway using discovery mechanisms.

Hive and Elasticsearch

To connect to the ElasticSearch service from any popular Hadoop applications (Hive, Pig, Spark etc.) you need to use the Elasticsearch Hadoop connector. This can be imported into your Java/Scala application using build tools such as Maven and sbt respectively. To use the connector in Hive though, you need to download the standalone jar package available on the Elasticsearch website.

26 Feb

Posted at 23:12h in Coding, Tech by
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Enabling AspectJ support in Java is a bit of a "love" story in itself. But making sure aspect weaving works for Amazon Simple Workflow in the Maven context (in which, I might say, any developer that operates in a production environment lives and breathes) is a challenge on its own. I'm sharing this article as a result of several days of research, sweat and hair pulling. In short, I am going to explain how to enable compile time weaving for the AWS SWF Flow Java Framework in combination with IntelliJ and Maven. So here goes...

09 May

Posted at 08:50h in Coding, Tech by
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This October, through the DADIU initiative, I had the chance to do a Unity related  internship at Multiverse ApS, the small studio responsible for KoGaMa. Before you start jumping around and arguing that this is a Minecraft clone, hear these guys out, because the idea behind KoGaMa is actually a great one. We're faced with a digital LEGO world in which each user can build their own games with their own rules. If everything goes well, KoGaMa can become a sort of "YouTube for video-games". The purpose of my internship was to explore some proof of concepts of  interest-bearing assets that can be put into the game. Needless to say, I teamed up with a cool geezer and we chose to explore the idea of a dragon NPC (to keep the cool-factor high up, you know). This is supposed to be a short post-mortem of what was learned and discovered.

09 May

Posted at 08:46h in Coding, Tech by
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Little Brothers may not be much for most people that visit my portfolio, it being a very rough sketch of a prototype  of a game (a seed of an idea, honestly). But it has a special meaning for me. It's the first attempt at a 'serious' game in Unity, while collaborating with a team of people that share more or less the same passion as I do. It's that landmark that you feel weighs hard in your decisions, you know, to realize if you want to do this for the whole rest of your life. So it only seemed fair for me to talk about how Little Brothers got to be.

06 Feb

Posted at 22:56h in Coding, Hacks by
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There has been a whole lot of talk on how to implement code syntax highlighting into Zendesk, both into the forums frontend and the ticket system. While the intergration of Markdown into the backend now offers a decent solution for tickets, the same cannot be said of the frontend forums section. As suggested in this angry post, the only method in which you can get away with it for now is by using PasteBin or Github. This is of course not a viable solution for professionals who boast to offer custom solutions and honestly, I'm not a big fan of it as an individual either.

08 Jan

Posted at 17:34h in Coding by
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During the development of the HOTAH game under the DADIU initiative, I found myself flirting with Unity shader programming. More specifically, the art direction suggested we should have some nifty looking water which reminds of the milky water in Limbo. Limbo being a pure 2D game and us working in 2.5D, I got away with developing a custom blur shader.

25 Oct

Posted at 21:06h in Coding by
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This October, through the DADIU initiative, I had the chance to do a Unity related  internship at Multiverse ApS, the small studio responsible for KoGaMa. Before you start jumping around and arguing that this is a Minecraft clone, hear these guys out, because the idea behind KoGaMa is actually a great one. We're faced with a digital LEGO world in which each user can build their own games with their own rules. If everything goes well, KoGaMa can become a sort of "YouTube for video-games".

03 Oct

Posted at 18:51h in Coding by
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If you are a starting game designer/programmer like I am you'll most likely want to be able to showcase your creations easily on your personal blog or website. Since I've been using Unity a lot lately I wanted to make publishing my Unity Web Player demonstrations as easy as possible. It turned out to be quite a tough combination, if I added my Wordpress blog into the equation. So I decided to write a guide on how to smooth the road from a published .unity3d file to the final Wordpress post.