I’ve found an cute Android game template in the Unity3d assets store: Droppy Dot by App Advisory: These guys have lots and lots of assets in the store – most of them low priced and are used to promote their more expensive assets. Back to the template, I’ve noticed that there are a few exact … Read more
Once again, I’ve tackled the process of gathering enough data in order to create a new trivia Android game. And once again, I went for a music-related them – Aerosmith Trivia – America’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band. You can download the game here: This game was quite hard to gather the data for – … Read more
With the success of The Beatles Trivia, I’ve decided to try implementing an additional music-related trivia Android game – 3 Doors Down Trivia – after the American rock band. The game is based on 7 albums, 73 songs, hundreds of lyrics, 9 people (past and current band members), and events, and has 9 different types of questions. … Read more
This is another post in my TV Shows Trivia game serie. In our last post we used TvMaze to retrieve information about various tv shows. After retrieving around 1600 shows, I came to the conclusion that the data was a bit too much – it’s not enough to have the data, we need to be able … Read more
In our previous post we discussed representing TV shows data as a graph using objects and their relations. In this post, we’ll see how to gather the information needed for our trivia game. There are a few websites that allow you to follow up on the show you watch, such as Rotten Tomatoes and TheTvDB. I’ve … Read more
Following my trivia games, I’ve decided to start working on a TV shows trivia. The first step of creating a trivia game, is to make sure I have enough data, and that I can represent it in a way that my engine can generate questions.Representing the data for TV shows as nodes in a graph … Read more
RavenDb provides a push notifications mechanism, named Changes API, that allows you to receive messages from a server about events that occurred there. This mechanism makes is extremely simple to create a ChangeMonitor class that can be used with CacheItemPolicy, in order to expire cache items when something happens on the server (such as a document being … Read more
Background Over the last several months, I’ve been playing around more and more with web development. Until now, I’ve spent most of that time reading blogs and tutorials. I’ve decided that now’s the time to start actually writing something. For one of my ideas, I wanted to allow users to create a tree diagram dynamically. … Read more
Marc Gravell is a valued associate in StackOverflow, so I make sure to follow his blog – thisguy knows what he’s doing (he’s the main contributor to Dapper.net, StackExchange.Redis and protobuf-net). Over the weekend, Marc wrote about a project called Cap’n Proto – a new serialization protocol, implemented by the same guy that developed Protobuf at … Read more
I am using Windows Azure Mobile Services to manage the Leaderboard of my Movies Trivia and Geo Trivia. Due to the nature of the data, I’m using 3 tables: Users: to maintain the users’ Id and Name Leaders: the list of players, ordered by their position in the board Results: the scores that are submitted … Read more
As I did my research on HyperLogLog, I used the built-in MD5 HashAlgorithm.As I was running my tests on larger and larger datasets, the running time grew too much to my liking. A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values. The values returned by … Read more
UPDATE: My implementation is no longer updated. I strong suggest you take a look at Microsoft’s CardinalityEstimator project, which implements the HyperLogLog algorithm, along with a few optimizations Over the last several months I’ve been immersing myself further and further into the big data world, and into developing and operating a SaaS. I’ve been trying … Read more