February 2006 - Posts
Rik Robinson recently started blogging and posted
this gem about how to get Google and MSDN searches inside of Visual Studio. I'm a month behind in blogging about it, but this info really deserves to be spread around. Great job Rik!
Last night was the February installment of the Atlanta Dot Net group, this time featuring
Paul Lockwood giving us a rundown on unit testing. Paul took an interesting approach and rather than just show us a tool and tell us "Unit testing is good" he walked us through nearly 15 years of personal history doing testing and how things have change and improved. We saw several demos of unit testing and code coverage in Visual Studio Team Suite. The presentation was quite good and Paul announced that he's sharpening it up so he can take it on tour to several area code camps in the upcoming months. I'll be honest, I've seen Paul present possibly a dozen times and the improvements he's made in style and presence when in front of a crowd are extremely noticable. Practice really does make perfect and Paul's a perfect case study as to why everyone should try presenting to the user group crowds. It's a great way to build your skills as a presenter. Great job, Paul!
On the way out of the Microsoft building, I saw a coyote walking across the road in Sanctuary park. He (she) walked across the side road the MS building is on, turned right and walked across the main road to stop in the median area and just watch me for a while. I stopped and watched him for a while, until there were cars behind me. He looked like a medium to large size dog with long slender legs, a thin body, grey fur, a long thinish tail pointed down, and pointy ears. Basically, exactly like this:
I didn't have my camera with me or I'd have actual proof (as no one else saw it despite me trying to point it out to the other cars).
I guess we may now know what happened to the wild turkey that used to live in Sancutary Park.
The game is a lot of fun. I've only been playing it for a few days so I really can't offer much of a review. If you want a real review, check
this one out at
GameSpot (my favorite games review site). Really, I just wanted to enter my one gripe with the game. It doesn't offer a multiplayer co-operative mode where you can work through the single player missions. That's really limiting because most of my friends don't own Xboxes and don't have the experience using the controller that I do. That means in all the shooter multiplayer games where it's me vs. them I win all the time and they're super frustrated b/c they never get a chance to learn. Another annoyance - when you ARE playing multiplayer in a deathmatch or team deathmatch, the machine doesn't spawn any AI bad guys. It's just me vs my buddy. That makes the game boring.
However, the single player and the Xbox Live games with 8 people in the game are fun. More players in the games are required. The original Xbox sported games which could host up to 32 players in a single online match. What's up with the ultra-powerful Xbox chaining us down to 8?
I won't mention names yet because I'm not sure this is supposed to be public information, but one of our own just got what is essentially his dream job (in large part because it's 100% telecommute) with
ASPSoft. I'm really happy to hear he had some good news this weekend because he also managed to wreck his car by sliding off rain-slick roads this very same weekend. Get this, he was literally driving his mother to the hospital when this happened. Both are fine, just a little sore. Insurance will cover the damages and he's waiting for the insurance adjuster's valuation to decide what to do about future transportation. Knowing him, if he gets to stay home from now on he'll probably just get a bicycle and we'll never see him at user groups again. Even so, congratulations!
Friday was a long day at work because my entire department was out for one reason or another. We're a smallish retail shop and I make up part of the MIS department, which means that not only do I get to create new programs and support old ones, I also get to support people who's printers stop working and whatnot. Having only one of me there meant I got nothing done on the programming task I was supposed to do, plus I had a good bit of shopping to do when I got home (food shopping).
Saturday started innocently enough - celebrating my co-worker's son's second birthday. The "cake" was actually a collection of cupcakes completely iced over the top with a Finding Nemo theme - very cute and very convenient to "cut" apart. Straight from the Publix bakery - all of you with small kids should take note. Plus it helps with easily managed portion control. Saturday evening, Kim and I drove out to BFE's west end - Kennesaw. We ate dinner with Brendon and Heidi and Heidi's mother at an
O'Charley's. The meal was actually a sort of comedy of errors - Heidi's fancy drink came in a glass with a big chip out of it, enough that she sent it back for fear of finding glass in her drink. Heidi's mother was at dinner too, and her steak quesodilla should have been more accurately called a gristle quesodilla. However, My fish sandwich was pretty good, and I don't think there were any problems with Brendon or Kim's meals either. After dinner we went to do something most of us haven't done for more than 10 years -
ROLLERSKATING. It was so bizarre to have a group of adults in the roller rink that the person charging admission asked us if we just wanted to go in to find some kids. Anyway, things were going along well until Kim tried to get all fancy on us (standing and moving at the same time) and fell down, bruising her knee. She spent the rest of the evening sitting out while Heidi, Brendon, and I made dozens of laps around the rink - dodging all the unpredictably falling children. Both Brendon and Heidi managed to fall down too - leaving just myself and Heidi's mother without injury. Still, despite the trauma, everyone had a good time and Kim and I left when the blisters on my feet forced me to take the crappy rented skates off. What is it with those skates? It feels like there are huge
hobnails inside the things. Note to self. If ever planning on rollerskating again,
Dr Scholl's insoles are required equipment.
Sunday I spent cooking up a storm. Kim invited twelve people over for dinner and we cooked up four whole smoked chickens, a huge fillet of salmon on cedar planks on the grill, roasted potato wedges, steamed broccoli and cauliflower, and we had brownie sundays and pecan pie for dessert. Everything came out great. I had a sea salt herb rub on the chicken (not as powerful as the paprika and chili rub I normally use but still quite good) and I smoked it over cherry wood. We had so much chicken that we only used three of the four - the extra whole chicken went home with one of our guests. The salmon was a huge hit with a
ginger teriyaki rub cooked on
alder wood planks. I must have had the heat in the grill up too high though because despite soaking the planks for four hours I kept catching them on fire and I eventually had to pull them out and cook the salmon right on the grill. I think the planks are salvagable though - maybe some steel wool on the charred parts... They're supposed to be good for several grillings. Good times were had by all, even the young children. In fact, I was told I was welcome to prepare Sunday night dinner every weekend from then on... Right at the end I tried to break out the Xbox 360 to show it off but we didn't even get past the game intro scenes before everyone had to take off. Oh well, next time.
-- Matt Ranlett
Have you watched latest
Code Room video yet? This is a "professionally" produced movie featuring the likes of
Keith Brown (who I met at Tech Ed 2005) as they have pretend hackers break in and then a security swat team fixing the holes.
Sweet sidenote - they shoot a scene at the Peppermill fireside lounge. I've been there!
Windows Media Player has a decent quality list manager built in but when it comes to looking for songs you like, looking at long lists of song names and album names is really boring.
Windows Media Center does things a little better with images of the album cover but you still have to have that cover art downloaded into the folder for this to be of any use. That and it still uses the folder metaphor so it looks pretty bad, spaced out, etc.
Want to see how it SHOULD be done? Check out this awesome (Mac-only) product,
CoverFlow, that lets you browse your albums by cover art. If you don't have the cover art already,
CoverFlow can
download the art for you. Now, this is a tech demo and will most likely crash on you, but this is still one of the slickest pieces of work I've seen. Excellent job by the nameless developer at
SteelSkies.
Watch a
Quicktime video of the tool in action (for all of us jealous Windows people)
Yesterday was my brother's birthday. Happy Birthday! He's just turned 27 and he's a single lawyer in Washington DC making nearly double my salary. I'd say everyone should send him gifts, but probably no one else knows where he lives and let's face it - he's 27 with a six figure income. Send him your address and ask him to mail YOU gifts!
Happy Birthday Kevin!
Taxes suck.
I got a small raise at work. A bump up of about $1,600. I get paid every two weeks so I just got my paycheck today, and I compared it to the previous one. The net increase in my salary is $35.79 per check * 26 checks = $670.54 for the year after taxes. I got a
$1,600 raise and I'm paying $930 of it in taxes. That blows.
Taxes suck.
(edit - I know there are also insurance deductions and whatnot, but it all feels like tax to me.)
Brendon and I drove 233 miles last night (round trip) to present to the Macon and Warner Robbins area Middle Georgia Dot Net User Group. We ended up presenting our Level 100 SharePoint 123 material to about 15 people. They all seemed very interested and gave us a great deal of feedback on our survey forms as we left. This was a great group and I hope they continue to grow and be successful.
It took me about an hour to get everything set up, but to be honest a large portion of that was me ripping out the old Xbox and my broken DVD player. Then I had to figure out where to put the Xbox. It's placement is constrained by the length of my digital audio cable, which might be all of four feet long. Where the original Xbox has the connection for the audio cable on the far end of the cable that plugs into the back of the Xbox (giving me extra length) the new Xbox plugs the audio cable in right at the back of the unit. This means my Xbox is sitting right up next to my TV for now. The only other setup issue I had was connecting the TV in cables to the right ports on the back of my TV. The cables which come with the 360 have two sections, an audio section with red, yellow, and white connectors (standard) and a video section with red, green, and blue connectors. My TV isn't HD so it doesn't have the blue connector. It turns out that for regular component video display, you need to hook up the red and white audio cables and plug the blue connector into the yellow receptical. It took me two tries to get it right. Not a big deal. I still have something wrong with the sound. I'm wondering if I've specified in the Xbox dashboard a more complex digital output than what my reciever can handle. I've got a DTS 5.1 receiver which worked perfectly with the DVD and the original Xbox. So either I've got something wrong pumping out of the 360 or I've managed to knock some wires loose from the back of the receiver when I was ripping out the DVD player (perfectly possible).
Once I had the hardware set up, I had to configure the Xbox to connect to Xbox Live. My only gripe is that they (Microsoft) continues to insist on using an alphabetic keyboard rather than a QWERTY keyboard for onscreen input. It just takes me longer to find the keys. Other than that the process of hooking up and converting my classic Xbox Live account to an Xbox Live Gold account was entirely seamless.
Next up - connect the Xbox to the Media Center PC so I can stream photos, music, and videos. I connected the two devices over a wireless connection without problems. Photos are flying through the air from my PC to my TV. Excellent. However, the music isn't working. I've got literally thousands of WMA and MP3 files on my PC which I can play through the Media Center UI on the PC, but the Xbox claims not to detect any music. The same thing is true for videos but I actually expected that. I've got some AVI videos I've downloaded, but to play them they have to be converted to a specific type of MPEG video. That's where the
Videora Xbox 30 Video Converter comes in handy. At least, I hope it comes in handy. I've set up my PC to convert one of my movies to MPG format while I'm here at work today. Hopefully when I get home tomorrow I can watch the movie on the TV without having the PC in the same room as the TV. That would be sweet, especially since I've got like a dozen movies compressed into AVI files.
Yesterday, before I even brought the 360 home, I stopped by Best Buy to pick up a game and an extra controller. One game + one wireless controller + tax = $118 @ BestBuy. That's right, $118!!!! Thank goodness I've got some gift cards to Best Buy (Thanks to Kim, Kevin, and Peggy!).
I always like to have 2 controllers (4 is better although rarely used) so friends can play with me whenever they come over. I didn't bother to take it out of the inpenetrable blister pack yet - I'll wait till I have a need. I did notice however that even though there are rechargable battery pack for the 360, it does take regular AA batteries. I've got an old school AA recharger and four or eight rechargable batteries. I'll just use that rather than the play and charge cables. Playing the game without a wired controller was simply awesome. I could walk around, play from the kitchen, whatever I wanted. Awesome. I did find myself moving my controller up and away from myself as I moved my feet out of long habit of using a controller with a cord.
The game I got was Call of Duty - the WWII shooter. Lots of fun in single player mode! I turn out to not be very good, but I'm getting better. I did try a few quick matches on Xbox Live against people I'd never met. The controls are great, the graphics are great. This should be a lot of fun. I also tested to see if some of my original Xbox games would play. The Tom Clancy games do, but none of the other games I wanted to keep did. I'll hang onto StarWars Battle Front hoping that Microsoft will release the emulator for this title, but I'm giving the rest away.
So what's happening to my original Xbox console, the four controllers, and the twenty games I've decided I don't care to try on the 360 (all togther worth at least $1000 on eBay)? Why, I'm giving it all to Brendon, of course. He'll have to buy a subscription to Xbox Live (which comes with the headset he'll need) and we'll have to get a game or two in common, but even without those he's got countless hours of wasted time ahead of him.
-- Matt Ranlett
Expect a drop in my online and real world performance. I've got a brand spanking new Xbox 360 on my desk.
-- Matt Ranlett
When I get a new device (get means purchase) I like it to replace two or more devices I currently have (or wish I had). Here is a great example.
Sony Ericsson is producing a line of
Walkman phones that compete with the
iTunes phones from
Motorola. The latest phone (not available in the US, per normal) is the
w950 - a 4Gb flash phone with a touch screen and stylus. It works as an MP3 player (4Gb is the same as an iPod Nano), video player (competing with the iPod Video), and a smartphone (running Symbian 9). The previous model from Sony Ericsson, the
w810, included a 2 megapixel camera. Maybe the next phone from them will put the camera back in. Either way, look at the devices you can replace with the w950:
- MP3 player (same amount of flash memory as a $250 iPod Nano - 4Gb)
- FM radio with RDS (RDS is the text broadcast with the signal telling you the song titles)
- PDA functionality - touch screen and stylus with handwriting recognition (I've used Symbian 6 for three years and have been very impressed)
- Blackberry-like push e-mail (just like the Blackberry but supporting multiple e-mail solutions)
- add the camera back in and you've got a poor but acceptable point and shoot camera
This is a great offer! Especially since you can normally buy phones at a discount with a plan. I'm not buying anything until my free
Blackberry isn't free anymore, but phones like this are very tempting.
Watch a video of the w950 in action
I like the listening to music (which can be streamed over BlueTooth to headphones) and composing e-mail. I also liked that the presenter dissed Mariah Carey!
-- Matt Ranlett
Popping up just in the nick of time as I work on a project dealing with unmanaged code, Jeffery Richter gave us a great presentation on threading and reliability. Among the things I learned...IntPtr is bad. Time to go rewrite some code! Stupid examples....
We had about 60 people show up for Richter's presentation. He was a great speaker, very dynamic and engaging. I know a lot of people who couldn't make it and I'm sorry that they missed such a great show. Jeff has a way of taking an extremely complex topic and turning it into something you feel like you've known about for a long time. It has something to do with the way he explains things in plain language. Threading, marshalling across app domain boundries, limitless app domains in a single process... All of this stuff just makes sense when he talks about it. It's a shame that he's not here now that I'm looking at my own convoluted code to ask questions. Oh well. Richter's new book on the 2.0 CLR comes out at the end of this week and it looks like something I'm going to have to run out and get (and read!)
After the meeting we all headed over to the center of slow restaurant service, Buffalo Wild Wings. I don't understand why the service at this place is so bad. There are like 8 people working as wait staff at 9pm. When my party of approximately 25 people showed up, there were possibly 15 other people in the restaurant. It took them over 20 minutes to get me my order of sweet tea and somehow my table got left out of the wings distribution until the very end (nearly an hour after we got there). However, the company was good and the conversations were engaging so time flew by and I didn't get home until 11pm
We gave away a dozen tshirts, some random books and notebooks, a copy of ComponentOne's Enterprise Studio 2005, a pass to the MIX '06 conference in Vegas, and an MSDN Team Suite license courtesy of James Shaw. Thanks to everyone who came out and I hope everyone had a great time!
-- Matt Ranlett
Ok - it's not even mine. But it is funny.
Brokeback to the Future-- Matt Ranlett
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