Hello everyone,

First of all, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!brSecond, I would like to thank everyone for supporting us (specially with our newly released game, Hacker Evolution: Untold).

I rarely post photos of myself, but you can see me above, a few hours after the New Year’s midnight. I have spent the New Year in Budapest (Hungary), a city which I highly recommend everyone to visit. It’s absolutely beautiful in the winter.

2008 was a very challenging year for me. I had to rebuild my entire personal life from scratch, and find a new direction in life. It eventually turned out to be great, and things got back to normal. I have been a bit slow with development and work, but eventually I got around to release a sequel for Hacker Evolution, to keep the fans busy until we are ready to take the next step in our games. 6 years have passed since our first game release. Through this years, with the tremendous support we received from everyone of you, we managed to refine the original hacker game idea and turn into a great game.

There won’t be a new hacker game release (in the style you are familiar with). We will follow 2 separate directions with our games. We are currently busy with porting Hacker Evolution: Untold to the Mac and Linux. Also, I am planning to release an online multi-player version. As much as my time will permit, I will rolling out some (free) expansion packs with new levels and content. There will be plenty of stuff coming to keep everyone entertained.brThe second direction will be the development of (another) brand new game. We will take the hacker game idea one giant step ahead. The game-play and implementation will be an absolutely new addition to the gaming industry.

Also, I am planning to devote some time to research and explore new ideas. Some will come out as new products, while some will come out in the form of white-papers.

Stay around … we are heading into an exciting new year!

Some definitions:

While roaming, the granularity at which your data traffic is charged, is larger than usual. (I get rounded to 1Kb in my home network, and to 25 to 100 Kb while roaming).
Basically, every data “session” is rounded to the granularity amount.
What happens when you are roaming, is that your phone switches networks and bands (from 2G to 3G and backwards) a lot more often since it can connect to virtually any network available in that country. Now, if you have been on a network for an hour and your BB session transferred 5 Kb of data, and the phone switches over, you get billed for the entire 25 to 100 Kb granularity chunk.
You can easily figure out how this will drive up your costs. You end up paying 5-10 times more data traffic that you use, at a price which is 5-10 time more … basically, you can pay up to 100 times more!
What you can do?
Simple. Set your phone to manually select a network. Select the network manually and voila, things are better (also, don’t allow your phone to change from 2G to 3G automatically). Stick to non-3G and you will be fine, as it has wider coverage than 3G, anywhere in the world.

Proof:

To prove my theory, when I went in my vacation (abroad), I left the phone to automatically switch networks for 3 days. Then I put it to manual and when I got home, I requested a detailed invoice.
And boy … was I right. In the first 3 days, I had about 5-6 data sessions closed and rounded up, daily. In the last 4 days … I had 5 sessions in TOTAL. The cost difference was HUGE.
Keep in mind that I have spent most of my time in the vicinity of my hotel, and the swimming pool. The 5-6 sessions were when I went out for walks and the phone switched networks or switched to 3G and back to 2G.
Give it a try and feel the difference for yourself.

- Ericsson cell phones which we used to connect to a slow Internet (9600 bps). It was only Ericsson back then, no Sony
- Grayscale LCD powered cell phones and PDA’s we used for email. (there wasn’t any spam back then. You couldn’t include links, html or images in an email)
- Infrared connections (and the 10 minutes spent on figuring out why it doesn’t work, just find to out the coffee cup was in it’s way)

I just remembered a couple of things I did (over) 10 years ago:
- I coded a piece of software in assembler language to record and compress 7 seconds of music and play it back. We didn’t have any iPods back then and being able to use a delta algorithm to compress the music sounded pretty good. The code was written on a small computer which had a Z80 CPU and about 30Kb of memory to store data.
- I also coded a poker game under CP/M. The computer was only able to display texts, so I used some nice tweaks to draw the cards with *’s and other funky characters. It was the first game I have developed, about  4-5 years before I wrote my first PC hacker game. I didn’t know what marketing and selling games was back then, but all I know is that the 2 computer running CP/M back then, were mainly used to play my Poker game. It was an awesome feeling.

Those were the days when technology was used at it’s best. It was amazing what people could accomplish with tiny amounts of memory, slow CPU’s and very slow Internet connections.
I first started browsing the Internet using Lynx. I used to read my emails with Pine. Using telnet to connect to the college servers for some Internet access was the only way to go.

This things are pretty much like a Zippo lighter. They never get old fashioned

One of my many projects that still lie around on my desk, is to create a small virtual Internet, and allow people to connect to it through telnet or dial-up.
Bring back some of those old days and vintage technologies we so much miss.