The other day, I came across a great writeup by
Thomas Brox Røst on how to set up persistent storage for a Django environment with Amazon's EC2. It's an excellent and informative article, but I preferred to set up my environment with a number of differences, such as Ubuntu and MySQL instead of Fedora and PostgreSQL, as well as an apache2/mod_wsgi environment. The instructions are very similar, and I mostly recorded them for the sake of personal repetition, but I figured I'd share them in case anyone else finds them useful.

I've lately been paying a lot of attention to the cloud computing offerings from Google and Amazon, but the more you learn about them the more it seems like you really have to program for them. My dilemma is that I've developed a mostly complete application that I'd like to explore migrating into one of these solutions.

Running the ticket sales system for Playa del Fuego has presented some peculiar challenges I don't face in most products. Primarily, there's the issue of dealing with a thousand or more simultaneous users during opening sales but very little traffic over the rest of the year.

I just came across Cleverbot the other day, and found it pretty intriguing. When I got my first PC (an IBM AT 80286), a friend gave me a floppy with a little program on it called Eliza.

Just thought I'd share the final functions I settled on for isometric coordinate calculations. Unlike most of the others I've seen around the web, these account for:
* Origin offset
* Tile-based position offset
* Varied scale
* Any aspect ratio (not just 2:1)

I've found that in more complex 2D games, I end up maintaining several "boards" containing 2D arrays of objects. Generally I have a base board to hold the floor, a terrain board for walls and other structural objects, a feature or object board for smaller items, and an actor board. The feature and actor boards are generally kept in parallel with flat feature and actors arrays, as a convenience to either access them with an iteration or by board position.

While ZedZed required only simple directional pathfinding (zombies are stupid, so advanced pathfinding is not needed), Demon Keeper required some more advanced techniques to facilitate targeting.