Last night, I had the chance to attend a fascinating talk about female characters in film and television. Geena Davis was one of the speakers and she talked about an early catalyzing experience, which inspired her to start an institution. From their web page:

Five years ago, while watching children’s television programs and videos with her then 2-year old daughter, Academy Award winner Geena Davis noticed a remarkable imbalance in the ratio of male to female characters. From that small starting point, Davis went on to raise funds for the largest research project ever undertaken on gender in children’s entertainment (resulting in 4 discrete studies, including one on children’s television).

The research showed that in the top-grossing G-rated films from 1990-2005, there were three male characters for every one female – a statistic that did not improve over time.

It gave me a lot to think about and it’s a sobering thought that it hadn’t improved in the fifteen year period of the study. But at least it’s better than the Smurfs, which had a ratio of 100 to 1…

So … I got an email the other day from someone at Microsoft. He was like, “Hey, you’ve got a nice dice app! What do you think of porting it to Windows Phone 7?” And I was like, “What? I don’t know anything about it.” Then he proceeded to tell me all about it and offered to help me get started.

As it happens, there’s a one-day workshop in learning how to write an app for Windows Phone 7 this coming Saturday in my general area. So I’m going to check it out.

Do you know anything about the Windows Phone 7? Are you thinking about getting one? If Mach Dice was available for it, would you buy it?

I recently pushed out a little update for Mach Dice that added one of the most often requested features: Fudge Dice. It was simple to do and it gave me a chance to add a couple other feature that were easy to do as well (iOS 4 app switching and rounded dice). I was also curious to see if it would give me a slight bump in sales and the answer is … no.

As you can see from the graphs (the bottom one is a zoomed in version of the top), several thousand people upgraded to the new version but my sales stayed around a dozen or so each day.

On the one hand, it’s too bad that the update didn’t actually make a difference financially. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that thousands of people still have Mach Dice on their iOS devices! Also, I’ve gotten a few nice emails from people who like the new Fudge Dice.

Morale of the story: updates may not help you make more money, but it makes people happy. Fortunately, I do this as a hobby so I’ll probably do a few more updates in the future.

I was having problems with one of my PCs giving me a “Limited or No Connectivity” error after I switched around some cables to try to get my WiFi to work better. Normally, my wife handles all the computer hardware issues, but since I broke it by switching around some cables, I felt responsible for fixing it.

Fortunately, the first hit on my search turned up a web page that was pretty helpful. In my case, I just had to set my network settings to 10 Mbps and Full duplex.

“But Mach, why write a blog post about all this?” Well this way, if I run into a similar issue again, all I have to do is remember that I blogged about it and search for “troubleshooting”. Brilliant! Right? Of course, if I’m having network issues, I might have problems reading my blog. Hmm, maybe not so brilliant…

This may be obvious to most of you, but I am not Jamie Cunningham. Sadly, this is not a universally known fact. Let me back up a bit. The other day, some guy decided to fill out a loan application under the name “Jamie Cunningham”, giving out a fake phone number. How do I know this? Because the fake phone number he gave out happened to be my cell phone number.

Ever since, I’ve been getting calls for him from people who want to give him money. You hear that, Jamie Cunningham? People want to give you money, but can’t because you gave them the wrong number. Why would you even fill out a loan application if you didn’t want a loan? What, were they giving out free toasters?

So now I’m subjected to a bunch of calls and text messages all because this guy wanted a free toaster. I hope you enjoy your free toaster, Jamie Cunningham. Also, you owe me a dollar in cell phone text messaging charges.

Do you like playing Yahtzee? Then check out Spicy Dice, a new iPhone dice game from Enginuity Game. It also happens to use Mach Dice for the dice physics.

Spicy Dice are six-sided dice with one number colored red. But each of the six dice has a different number colored red. If a die comes up red, you can use it as a wild card or you can use the red number for bonus points. You can roll the dice up to 30 times and you can score in Yahtzee-like categories like “all the twos” or “sum of all the pips” or “a run from one through six”. There are also advanced things you can do like score a set but hold some of the dice for the next set.

The game is free (it lets you play once a day but you can upgrade for unlimited plays if you like it) so if you’ve got an iOS device, check it out!

I downloaded the new SDK a while ago and recently decided to recompile Castle Tiles, the action game that I made for the iPad. Much to my chagrin, the screen went completely black after the load screen! After some digging around, I found the solution. (Oh, interwebs, what would I do without you?)

It turns out that they added a new flag for nib files in the new SDK that specifies whether its visible at launch or not. Why add something that totally breaks your previously working code by default?! I have no idea. But to fix it, open up your main nib file (probably “MainWindow.xib”) in the Interface Builder, select the window item, and under the attributes, turn on “Visible at Launch”.

Hopefully that’ll save someone a couple hours of panicked searching through their code.

One of my friends was telling me about this theory that people are attracted to certain other people based on their scents. Something, something, pheromones, something… I don’t know. Anyways, I thought, “Hey, let’s take that one step further and set up a dating service based on smell!”

It’d sort of work like speed dating. Blindfold five guys in a line, blindfold five women in a line (maybe mix up the genders a bit, depending on sexual orientation), have them smell each other, and then rotate one of the lines. Repeat until everyone’s had a chance to smell each other and record their experiences.

Unconventional? Sure. But it’d be a heck of a story for the kids. “How’d you and mom meet?” “She smelled real good…” Who’s in?!

I do what I can to help prepare Baby Mach 2 for the harsh world out there. With any luck, he will avenge my inevitable death at the hands of the shadowy multinational corporation bent on world domination, which I am in the middle of investigating right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMEm9jYdiOU

Hmm … I think I might need a better contingency plan.

The latest update to Mach Dice has just been approved on iTunes! Here’s what’s new:

• Fudge dice!
• rounded edges for d6!
• fast app switching for iOS4!

To use Fudge dice, simply type in “d3” (because each die has 3 possible values). For example, to roll 4 Fudge dice, type in “4d3”. You can also add Fudge dice to other rolls like, “2d10 + d3” to add a bit of unpredictability to your normal rolls.

The rounded edges for d6 was another big request. I like the flat edges because they look more professional, but lots of people wanted a bit of rounding so I put it in there.

And fast app switching means that if you switch between Mach Dice and another app, everything will stay the same when you switch back. That makes it handy to use Mach Dice to make quick rolls even if you use another app most of the time.

If you’ve already got Mach Dice, get the free update. If not, go buy it on iTunes now!