Apr 2008
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
I just finished reading another book: Lone Ranger and
Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. This
book is a collection of short stories about life in
and around the Spokane Indian Reservation.
There are 22 stories in all, and each one is a pleasure to read. They were the basis for the award-winning movie Smoke Signals.
I am also reading a book called Material World: A Global Family Portrait
This book is like an earlier book I read, Hungry Planet. In Hungry Planet, a husband wife team stayed with families and learned about the way they eat, taking photos of all the food they buy in a week. This book is pretty much the same thing, except that instead of food it deals with the families possessions. It's interesting seeing what the average family around the world owns. I find this book most interesting because since I have moved into this house I am renting I have slowly been getting rid of anything I no longer use. It's interesting the amount of junk we have. I donate a lot to Goodwill, but I still have a lot I can go through and get rid of.
There are 22 stories in all, and each one is a pleasure to read. They were the basis for the award-winning movie Smoke Signals.
I am also reading a book called Material World: A Global Family Portrait
This book is like an earlier book I read, Hungry Planet. In Hungry Planet, a husband wife team stayed with families and learned about the way they eat, taking photos of all the food they buy in a week. This book is pretty much the same thing, except that instead of food it deals with the families possessions. It's interesting seeing what the average family around the world owns. I find this book most interesting because since I have moved into this house I am renting I have slowly been getting rid of anything I no longer use. It's interesting the amount of junk we have. I donate a lot to Goodwill, but I still have a lot I can go through and get rid of.
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Mario Kart Wii
Apr 30 2008 10:17 PM Filed in: Video Games
I ordered Mario Kart Wii a while back, two copies in
fact, one for myself and one for Paige. Having played
Mario Kart on the Super Nintendo and also playing it
on the Nintendo DS, I knew it would be a good game.
It arrived yesterday and has lived up to my
expectations. Mario Kart Wii comes with a steering
wheel controller. It's not a big steering wheel, a
little bigger than the Wiimote. It took a few minutes
to get used to, but definitely adds to the
playability of the game. There are 32 race courses in
all, 16 new and 16 classic. This weekend I will give
it a try playing against Paige. She got a new 58"
plasma Hi-Def TV, should look really nice on it. You
can race against friends online, will need to try
that out too with some of my co-workers.
Moved to a new building
Apr 21 2008 09:38 AM Filed in: Personal
Turner Broadcasting, in Atlanta, is split amongst a
couple places. They have a main campus, which is very
nice, and they have a floor in a building in midtown.
For the past 4 years I have been working at the nice
campus, but that all changed, and now the department
I work for is in the building in midtown. When you've
worked at a nice private campus, it really sucks to
have to move to a building shared by other
businesses. We also went from having a personal
parking deck, to having a couple parking decks spread
out over a couple block radius. One good thing that
came from the move is I have started taking public
transportation to work. I should have done this a
long time ago. Driving in Atlanta sucks, I live 12
miles from work, and if I don't time it correctly, it
can take up to an hour to get to work or back home. I
live within 2 miles of a MARTA station, and it drops
me off within 2 blocks of work, so I will start
saving money on transportation and also not put so
many miles on my car.
Handling Sin - Michael Malone
I just finished reading a great book called "Handling
Sin", by Michael Malone.
The book starts off with the main character, Raleigh, finding out his father checked himself out of the hospital, bought a new Cadillac, and was last seen withdrawing a lot of money and driving away with a teenage black girl in his car. Later Raleigh receives a call from his father saying he would like Raleigh to come meet him down in New Orleans, they live in North Carolina, but he needs to do a couple things before coming. The bulk of the book revolves around those things he has to do. Michael Malone is a great writer; his characters are great, and he is very funny. This is a long book, over 600 pages, so it took me a while to read, but there was never a dull part in the whole story. I definitely recommend it.
The book starts off with the main character, Raleigh, finding out his father checked himself out of the hospital, bought a new Cadillac, and was last seen withdrawing a lot of money and driving away with a teenage black girl in his car. Later Raleigh receives a call from his father saying he would like Raleigh to come meet him down in New Orleans, they live in North Carolina, but he needs to do a couple things before coming. The bulk of the book revolves around those things he has to do. Michael Malone is a great writer; his characters are great, and he is very funny. This is a long book, over 600 pages, so it took me a while to read, but there was never a dull part in the whole story. I definitely recommend it.
Fixing Error 51 issue with Cisco VPN
Apr 11 2008 07:07 PM Filed in: Personal
Two new games for the Wii - Pinball Hall of Fame and House of the Dead 2 & 3
Apr 11 2008 06:55 PM Filed in: Video Games
I finished Tomb Raider Anniversary Edition. It was as
fun this time as the first time I played it through,
but a bit easier this time since I had finished it
before. I decided my next game would be the kind of
game I could sit down and play occasionally, all in
one sitting, instead of the kind of game that takes a
while to play.
I ended up getting two new games. First is House of the Dead 2 & 3. This game uses the Wii Zapper, and plays exactly like the game in the arcade. It's a rails shooter, like Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, but you don't save anywhere to play from later. I liked playing it in the arcade and enjoy it just as much on the Wii.
The second game I got was Pinball Hall of Fame, and I have to say that this is my new favorite game on the Wii. I love pinball, played it all the time when I was younger. Pinball Hall of Fame has 10 classic pinball machines, including two of my favorites: Funhouse and Black Knight. The games look and play just like the real thing, with all the sounds and physics. I played for a couple hours the night I got home and opened it. If you are a fan of pinball, this is definitely a game to get, and it's a bargain at $19.99.
I ended up getting two new games. First is House of the Dead 2 & 3. This game uses the Wii Zapper, and plays exactly like the game in the arcade. It's a rails shooter, like Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, but you don't save anywhere to play from later. I liked playing it in the arcade and enjoy it just as much on the Wii.
The second game I got was Pinball Hall of Fame, and I have to say that this is my new favorite game on the Wii. I love pinball, played it all the time when I was younger. Pinball Hall of Fame has 10 classic pinball machines, including two of my favorites: Funhouse and Black Knight. The games look and play just like the real thing, with all the sounds and physics. I played for a couple hours the night I got home and opened it. If you are a fan of pinball, this is definitely a game to get, and it's a bargain at $19.99.
Perfect work at home setup - a Mac, VPN, VMWare Fusion
Occasionally I work from home. I used to bring home
my work laptop and VPN into work off of it, but we
got new machines, and I opted for a desktop. I just
like having a desktop for development. It's more
powerful, and is cheaper to upgrade.
Since I got a desktop I started working from home a different way. I installed the Cisco VPN software on my Mac, and I also installed Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection. This way I could remote into my machine at work and just work off that machine. There would be an occasional flicker of the screen while it's refreshing, but all-in-all it worked well.
Since I occasionally have to work in Visual Studio .NET 2005, and other times in Visual Studio .NET 2008, I decided to just have those environments running as virtual machines. That way when we go to VS.NET 2008 full time, I won't need to perform an uninstall, I can just delete that virtual machine and start using the VS.NET 2008 virtual machine exclusively. It also helps in the future if my machine gets borked, I can just revert to an earlier snapshot of the VM.
Since I am running off a virtual machine I've found it difficult to work from home using my previous technique. Remoting into a machine, then running a VM on that machine is pretty painful in the lag that occurs.
I decided a better option would be to just get VMWare Fusion for the Mac, and load the virtual machine directly onto my Mac and run it from here. Since I am VPN'd into the company network the VM connects to the domain with no problem (except I have to remember to have my machine at work off the network or I will get an error because of the duplicate machine names on the network). I ordered a copy and just tried it out and it works great. I will try to work some this weekend on the WPF project, and if all goes well, I may just start bringing my Mac to work and working off of it. My goal is to only use Windows for development and Outlook, all other stuff I can just do from my Mac.
Since I got a desktop I started working from home a different way. I installed the Cisco VPN software on my Mac, and I also installed Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection. This way I could remote into my machine at work and just work off that machine. There would be an occasional flicker of the screen while it's refreshing, but all-in-all it worked well.
Since I occasionally have to work in Visual Studio .NET 2005, and other times in Visual Studio .NET 2008, I decided to just have those environments running as virtual machines. That way when we go to VS.NET 2008 full time, I won't need to perform an uninstall, I can just delete that virtual machine and start using the VS.NET 2008 virtual machine exclusively. It also helps in the future if my machine gets borked, I can just revert to an earlier snapshot of the VM.
Since I am running off a virtual machine I've found it difficult to work from home using my previous technique. Remoting into a machine, then running a VM on that machine is pretty painful in the lag that occurs.
I decided a better option would be to just get VMWare Fusion for the Mac, and load the virtual machine directly onto my Mac and run it from here. Since I am VPN'd into the company network the VM connects to the domain with no problem (except I have to remember to have my machine at work off the network or I will get an error because of the duplicate machine names on the network). I ordered a copy and just tried it out and it works great. I will try to work some this weekend on the WPF project, and if all goes well, I may just start bringing my Mac to work and working off of it. My goal is to only use Windows for development and Outlook, all other stuff I can just do from my Mac.
WPF - Thoughts on first week of use
I've been doing development on our prototype
application since the beginning of this week and
thought I would give my thoughts I what I think of
WPF.
Pros:
It's pretty easy to do things using WPF compared to doing the similar thing in traditional .NET WinForms development. Now, I don't know if this is a case of WPF being a great framework, or WinForms being a bad one; but I'll still consider this a Pro.
Cons:
The tools. Even though WPF has been out a while, the tools used for development still aren't up to snuff. I perform a majority of my XAML development using Expression Blend March 2008 CTP, and all of the C# coding using Visual Studio .NET 2008. In a way this sucks, because, even though Expression Blend is made for doing WPF development, there's no intellisense to be found. Also, it doesn't integrate with a source control system, like Team System, which we use. So I will modify a XAML file and go to save it, then find it's read-only and needs to be checked out. VSTS doesn't have a stand-alone client, I have to fire up Visual Studio to check out the file.
The prototype we are developing is modeled on Infragistics Tangerine example application. This sucks because we're shoe-horning our code into all this existing code. I actually scrapped all the code on the window I am modifying, and also scrapped using their overly complicated XamDataGrid for the built in and easily customizable WPF ListView. Hopefully once we get through with this prototype next week and they show it to the steering committee, and the buy off on it, we can scrap the whole Tangerine application and begin fresh. It's hard to learn a new technology when all you're doing is adding code to an existing application.
Overall I like WPF. I'm not exactly enjoying doing the current development we're doing with it, but it is a nice change of pace.
Pros:
It's pretty easy to do things using WPF compared to doing the similar thing in traditional .NET WinForms development. Now, I don't know if this is a case of WPF being a great framework, or WinForms being a bad one; but I'll still consider this a Pro.
Cons:
The tools. Even though WPF has been out a while, the tools used for development still aren't up to snuff. I perform a majority of my XAML development using Expression Blend March 2008 CTP, and all of the C# coding using Visual Studio .NET 2008. In a way this sucks, because, even though Expression Blend is made for doing WPF development, there's no intellisense to be found. Also, it doesn't integrate with a source control system, like Team System, which we use. So I will modify a XAML file and go to save it, then find it's read-only and needs to be checked out. VSTS doesn't have a stand-alone client, I have to fire up Visual Studio to check out the file.
The prototype we are developing is modeled on Infragistics Tangerine example application. This sucks because we're shoe-horning our code into all this existing code. I actually scrapped all the code on the window I am modifying, and also scrapped using their overly complicated XamDataGrid for the built in and easily customizable WPF ListView. Hopefully once we get through with this prototype next week and they show it to the steering committee, and the buy off on it, we can scrap the whole Tangerine application and begin fresh. It's hard to learn a new technology when all you're doing is adding code to an existing application.
Overall I like WPF. I'm not exactly enjoying doing the current development we're doing with it, but it is a nice change of pace.