The Daily Downer

App is now available in the iTunes App Store!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-daily-downer/id452553822

Cloud Nine

Looking for an easy way to cook up a web app, without having to worry too much about costly hosting, and the security and scalability problems that come with it? The Google App Engine (GAE) seems to do just that, and it's pretty slick. Develop your app in Java or Python in the cross-platform GAE SDK and deploy. Your app is now accessible by millions. If the app gets a surge of users, instances are distributed across the many machines that make up the GAE cloud. If you need a database, a permanent Datastore and a temporary Blobstore are both included. If you need to authenticate users, access to the same Google sign-in process that is used in Gmail, etc. is conveniently available.

The downside to GAE, as perhaps most other platform-as-a-service architectures, is that the selection of leverage-able technologies is far smaller than in the mature desktop computing world. For instance, if you would like to use a spiffy open source library written in C, better roll up your sleeves and start porting -- wrappers are not supported and automated solutions for converting the vast repository of C to Python are slim pickings, for now.

Buy One, Get One 50% Off Back at Amazon

You may have already stocked up on video games at the recent Amazon and Toys 'R Us sales, but the buy one get one half off is back on quite a few games and accessories at Amazon.  This includes many PS3, XBox 360, and Wii games and accessories.

Take advantage of this great deal for all your Chrismahanukwanzakah giving.

Suggestions for a new XBox gamer?

I recently purchased an XBox 360 largely on a whim.  After all, it was only $80 at Target after all of the discounts.  I just finished my second game, Risk: Factions, after finishing Deathspank.  By finished, I mean that I completed the campaigns and completed every achievement.  I know they're both small XBLA titles, but they were fun. I've worked my way through other games, but haven't reached the 100% mark on any others.

Now to the important question: What game should I play next? I enjoyed Civilization Revolution, but the balancing wasn't quite right.  I am enjoying Forza III.  Plants vs. Zombies was fun, but I don't know if it was better on the iPhone -- even without the survival mode. I tried Gears of War and Alan Wake, but they weren't for me. Despite all of the sales records, I don't think I'll be playing CoD BlOps any time soon.

Comment here or hit us up on twitter @boondoggl.

Getting OpenCL to work on an ATI card in Ubuntu

OpenCL is an enticing platform to use -- especially for developers wishing to speed up performance of their code or do intensive graphics computation. With Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid) or Ubuntu 10.10, the install has never been so much easier. So, how do you install OpenCL on an ATI card?

Step 1: Install ATI's device driver. The version built into Ubuntu is pretty much all you need. To install, select System->Administration->Additional Drivers  (for 10.10)

System->Administration->Hardware Drivers (for 10.4)

Select the ATI device driver and click Activate (if you have not already done so).

Step 2: Install the OpenCL libraries:

Go here and download the appropriate driver:

http://developer.amd.com/gpu/atistreamsdk/pages/default.aspx#five

Also, make sure you download the "OpenCL ICD registration configuration files". It's on the same page, or if you don't see it:

http://developer.amd.com/Downloads/icd-registration.tgz

Step 3: Install the ICD files

cd /

sudo tar zxvf path/to/icd-registration.tgz

# Make sure you set path/to/  to the proper path containing the icd-registration.tgz file.

Step 4: Install the libraries and includes.

a) Un'tar the stream sdk file you downloaded:

tar zxvf ati-stream-sdk-*.tgz

b) Either update your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include your ati-stream-sdk-v2.2/lib directory, or copy (or symlink) the contents of the lib folder to /usr/lib

e.g.

sudo cp ati-stream-sdk*/lib/* /usr/lib

And that's pretty much it. The rest is just testing to see if OpenCL works.