I had to hack it. While I don’t control the query or the timeout duration I do control the paging. My solution was to query for half of the result set, then the other half and combine the two. /barf

A coworker once told me “if it’s documented, it’s not a hack” so I suppose writing about it disqualifies it’s hack-status. Regardless, the future may hold enough time and money to go back and do this correctly, as if that ever happens.

From here on out, the apk posted on this site might not be the most recent version. I highly suggest using the market version if at all possible.

This is a Beta build and will, eventually, become a paid app but I’ll give at least two weeks notice before it stops working. I expect beta to last at least a month.

I’m really interested in what features you’d like to see, general impressions on usability and how much you’d be willing to pay for the app.

From here on out the existing KSheet (the one on the downloads page) will be referred to as KSheet Classic and will remain open source. The new KSheet will be referred to as “KSheet”.

I’ll post my progress on this blog as I go. Currently, I’m researching the marketplace to see what’s been done with android 4e character sheets and the character builder web service.

Stunts are improvisational actions every player make once per turn to assist another player. You cannot perform the same stunt twice within a combat. To perform the stunt declare what you want to do. Then the game master decides what trait is most appropriate to the action. Finally you roll the action dice you wish to devote to the stunt plus an appropriate amount of trait dice. All of your hits are awarded to the action you wish to modify.

Because the bonus you give is related to your traits players want to leverage their highest stats. A strong character will stunt to knock enemies off guard by throwing chairs at them or shoving them while a wise, magical character may use their magic to set an allies sword on fire for the attack. This creates very memorably combat that encourages role-playing and the fact that Flex is extremely deadly unless players work together with stunts encourages the roll-players.

Overall, I love the stunt system and I’ll probably find a way to get it into every other tabletop system I play.

If a player is 100% sure he’ll win there is no tension. It doesn’t matter if he already swallowed the poison and will die in 2 hours. If he doesn’t know about the poison he’ll just feel cheated by the game master when she smugly announces the players fate.

On the other hand, if there is no chance of failure but the player doesn’t realize this, via deus ex machina, the player still experiences tension. For example, the player learns they may have been poisoned and might die in 2 hours. The game master knows their fine but the player experiences tons of tension as she desperately tries to find an antidote. The downside of this technique is is that if used too frequently the player expects it and you wind up with a player who is 100% sure he’ll win.

With Flex, I’ve been trying to balance the system to the point where using the assumed difficulty (players with X character points vs npcs with X character points) there is very little chance of complete failure and yet, there is still tension in combat. Ideally, I’d like to see one player out of three be defeated in every combat, baring excellent teamwork. Given that defeat usually doesn’t mean character death in Flex. I think this is a pretty good goal.

I’ve learned that I’m a fairly effective manager. I’ve also learned that I don’t like manage. I prefer to focus on my job and know that at the end of the day, regardless of the success of the organization I’m in, I did my job as best I could. When forced to manage my sense of accomplishment isn’t so neatly tied to my personal performance  but the performance of others. When other people have a bad day, as everyone does, it’s difficult for me to not feel like I could have performed better, even when it’s totally out of my control.

I’ve also learned a truism of economics. Supply and demand and basically meaningless. People will pay as much as they feel something is worth. The cheaper, the more people will pay, but the lower your profit is. Thus the goal of any successful money making undertaking is to find the point where you can optimize your total profit by finding where customer base * profit per customer is the highest.

Ironically, I’ve learned very little about typical game stuff from WoW. Things like reflexes, spacial reasoning, etc are better harnessed in other games but the things WoW teaches are fairly unique to MMOs.

Thesis is a theme framework for WordPress that offers some standard SEO functionality and it has a nominal charge associated with it. There are two key parts here: theme framework and SEO functionality. Since I’m developing the theme and I’m fluent with PHP, HTML and CSS using a framework will just slow me down and waste my client’s money. I brought this concern to my client and the guru sent a large email touting all the benefits of Thesis for SEO.

Thesis handles meta tags, integrates with twitter and feedburner and a few other SEO related items. For a theme, this is actually pretty cool but not revolutionary. Everything Thesis does can be handled by a free plugin. If you search the internet for Thesis, however, you’ll find blog post after blog post describing how amazing Thesis is for SEO without actually saying why it’s so good.

Thesis will not help your site rank better in search engines any better than the top free WordPress SEO plugins. It won’t make it any easier and it’s not even as full featured as free alternatives.

I voiced my concerns again, was overruled by the guru and ended up having to charge the client far more than it should have to make a WordPress theme.

Blogs for SEO are asinine. I’m only referring to blogs that are tacked onto a site simply to keep the home page fresh and provide more copy for search engines to consume. As a consumer, they’re annoying and as a developer they’re dishonest.

If you want a blog to post periodic updates about your company/service/product then fantastic. Blog your face off. If you want a blog to create more copy for search engines to consume then please go die in a fire.