I’m not complaining, that is just how it went down for me and it was great. But I bought this house, which again, I really do like. Feels very homey to me now, more so every day in fact. This morning I stepped outside with my coffee and realized I was too warm in my tshirt and hoody and had to take it off. If you know me personally, you’ll likely recall that I am usually cold and winter makes me cry like a little child :’(

At any rate. Last weekend, the garage was finally emptied of all boxes and we could park in there, which is awesome (thank you Rachel!) However, there is now a ton of boxes back in the house again. Its somewhat overwhelming.

I feel like I waste too much time winding down from a day at work. Don’t get me wrong, I love working and I love developing software of any kind on any platform. But being a person, I do have some personal preferences which I consider ideal. I find when they are not met it physically and emotionally takes a toll on the energy allotment I have to live with.

Well, this stuff is not going to put itself away, I guess I just wish I felt more like doing it. I’m sure when it’s done, I’ll feel great about it, just that damn motivation.

Anyway, wish me luck, tomorrow is looking like it’s going to be a busy one. Oh yeah, and then Boy Scouts at 7:30. Make that, it looks like it’s going to be a long, busy one

That being said, he’s a developer. And a developer who came to developing later in life after learning, living, and dumping a previous career. He’s been doing professional development (i.e. it is his sole income) for 6 years and of the many developers I know he’s a natural, learns quick and the “right way” and the why’s. I’d hire the man for a senior developer position in a minute.

However, the economy being what it is, he is currently working a junior developer position. By which I mean doing senior developer work for junior developer money. Hey, it’s beats unemployment, no doubt, however things could be better along the compensation lines. As I’ve said, the man does not play around and he’d be a bargain at 3 times his salary (straight up.)

Well like any sane person (well as sane as one can be and still want to be a software developer), he’s taking the initiative and looking around for other employment where the compensation will be more commensurate with his efforts, and the challenges will be developmental and not overcoming ridiculous arbitrary management process (again, you’ll have to take my word that the problems are ridiculous and that he can not change them.)

So one of the places his recruiter is submitting his resume to is requiring he write a small windows console application that satisfies the following requirements:

Ok, fair enough. I love that they asked for a code sample. At the end of the day, writing the code is part and parcel for software developers and I feel that the trend of those “what did you have to do”, “what were the results of doing it”, and “what could you have done differently” interviews… Sure you need to make sure the person is a good fit for the team as far as socializing, personality, not an asshat, but if they are a good fit, can they design and/or write the code.

Well, I’ll say you have to at least consider it for a second but the above is not that challenging. Basically it will show you know how to nest/cascade if’s and perhaps know about the modulo operator.

I would have been more impressed if they asked for a super and derived classes using interfaces to model a car, motorcyle, and airplane. But, I don’t know the company’s true needs so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, good luck my man!

Below is what I did… I feel it could be more performant but is pretty readable and gentle enough on resources for most stuff (I had to take a swing right?!?) …

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    StringBuilder valueBuilder = new StringBuilder();
    for (int counter = 1; counter <= 100; counter++)
    {
        if (counter % 3 == 0) valueBuilder.Append(“One”);
            if (counter % 5 == 0) valueBuilder.Append(“Two”);
            if (valueBuilder.Length == 0) valueBuilder.Append(counter.ToString());
            Console.WriteLine(valueBuilder.ToString());
            valueBuilder.Clear();
        }
    }
}

If you’ve been reading along at home, you’ve noticed that spurred on by a friend of mine’s experience migrating his web hosting to Amazon.com Web Services, on an Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2); that I have started a EC2 of my own using their Free Tier services.

My feelings on the service are quite positive, it’s pretty darn awesome to have the ability to go from a single small server with a website to a enterprise size data-center and web-farm on demand. I don’t use it for such but, that’s worth something. Personally, I love having a root ssh available and the ability to run whatever service I deem fit, feels good; real good!

However, what had happened was, I popped on over to check my account activity and was greeted with this:

What I’d like to draw your attention to is the “AWS Data Transfer (excluding Amazon CloudFront)” group. This section contains four items:

1. Data transfer out under the monthly global free tier
2. Region data transfer under the monthly global free tier
3. Data transfer in per month
4. First 10 TB / month data transfer out beyond the global free tier

And of those items, #4 is the little devil. Good ‘ole First 10 TB / month data transfer out beyond the global free tier.

I’m not going to complain about the price, $9.95 sounds reasonable for the transfers. The thing is, I’ve had this account for 20 days, and even if I did use quite a bit during the “load up” phase of server configuration, I’d say honestly it would have been under 10 GB. I did have a game server running for a week or so of that. I don’t believe the bandwidth use would have been in 60 GB. I could be wrong about that.

And there you have it, I have no idea because, I don’t know what I need. At least when it comes to pay-as-you-go computing platforms and web-enabled services. Well at least I have something to think about. I’m not really quite sure where to begin to map out my needs on this.

I’ve turned my instance off until I can sort it all out, I have time for a free experiment, but sadly not the funds. I do have an email into Amazon Web Services Support, in particular asking how I can tell if the charges are valid and identifying where my usage was to/from. Hopefully they have the capabilities and it’s just unpreparedness on my side.

Either way, the service is excellent and I highly recommend it. I probably wouldn’t run a game server on it without getting far better bandwidth usage scenarios.

As I like to do, before I get into the Amazon.com win, I’d like to provide a little background

Amazon’s description of their service is (ref: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) :

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

EC2 is Amazon’s version of Virtual Private Server hosting which in a nutshell is renting a an actual server computer that is located and run by the hosting provider and they give you an administrator account to that server such that you can use to install and maintain any software the server can run, such as web servers, DNS servers, source control, even video games. The advantage to a VPS hosted environment over traditional web hosting is that you get to decide exactly what services the server runs. Traditional web hosting generally provides you with a web server and usually an FTP server, and sometimes SSH access to a remote command line. You can then upload content to and not what web server software you’d like to use, or install any additional custom services.

Currently (1/15/2010) Amazon has a Free Tier which, if you are eligible for, you can get a linux based micro instance free for a year. This tier comes with a limited but what I feel is a generous amount of bandwidth and storage use.

From Amazon’s AWS Free Usage Tier product page:

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
• 10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

* These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.

** These free tiers do not expire after 12 months and are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely.

The price, is Free for the limits above (assuming you are eligible). Were you to exceed any of the limits, you will be charged the normal fees for a linux micro instance (generally under $.20 USD an hour for the exceeded limit.) For full pricing structure see: Amazon’s EC2 Pricing page.

The eligibility requirements may be found on Amazon’s AWS Free Usage Tier Offer Terms page, and as of this writing, are as follows. (I high-lighted one in particular for it’s relevancy to this post) :

Terms and Conditions

• Only individuals who have not previously created an AWS account are eligible to participate in the Offer. You will not be eligible for the Offer if you or your organization create(s) more than one account to receive additional benefits under the Offer or if the new account is included in Consolidated Billing. You will be charged standard rates for use of AWS services if we determine that you are not eligible for the Offer.
• You must create and maintain an AWS account in good standing (including a valid credit card) to participate in the Offer. Your participation in the Offer and your use of the AWS services is subject to the AWS Customer Agreement. The Offer is a Special Pricing Program under the AWS Customer Agreement.
• Only accounts created after October 20, 2010 are eligible for the Offer. The Offer does not apply to any use of the AWS services prior to November 1, 2010.
• You will be charged standard rates for use of the AWS services prior to November 1, 2010 or after the Offer expires. You also will be charged AWS’s standard rates for any use that exceeds the free usage amount provided under the Offer.
• If you have not used the AWS resources provided under the Offer during the previous 3 months, we may reclaim those AWS resources after giving you 30 days notice. Even if your AWS resources are reclaimed, you may continue to participate in the Offer using new AWS resources.
• You may participate in the Offer for one year from the date you first sign up for any of the services provided under the Offer.
  Unused usage amounts remaining at the end of the month do not roll over to subsequent months.
• When calculating your use of AWS services under the Offer, we will aggregate your use across all AWS regions.
• We may stop accepting new registrations for the Offer at any time.
• Existing free tier offers for Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service, and Amazon Simple Notification Service are subject to separate terms and conditions described on the pricing pages for those services and the AWS Service Terms.

So, as I stated before, I was pretty excited about the offer to check out what Amazon had to offer, especially in that I am a software developer that frequently works with web services and internet connected applications and Cloud Computing is a Big Thing in my world these days. So I grabbed my credit card and signed up immediately!

Well as it turns out I completely forgot that I did in fact already have an AWS account that I had gotten a number of years ago to play around with some of their web API’s. This made me ineligible for the Free Tier.

I proceed to load the server up and get it running the way I wanted to and two days later I checked back at the billing page to ensure I hadn’t messed anything up during the sign-up process. I found the process to be slightly confusing. The way what you are ordering is clearly defined and great, what was not intuitive was if what I was ordering was eligible under the micro account. You can absolutely get a Free Tier instance and purchase and pay for anything above and beyond what’s in the Free Tier, no problems. Which is great, but I found myself wishing for a way to limit the products and services to those only included in the Free Tier.

And they may actually be, I am not certain because I was not eligible at sign-up and the UI may very well have been tailored to that of a long time user. I’m certainly not going to slight them much for that, but if that was the case, it would have been nice to know before I pulled the trigger.

At any rate, I ended up being charged $.71 USD for 2 days of the service. Completely no big deal but if money keeps adding up and being budget wise is never a bad thing. So I quickly filled out a customer support form asking about it. This was a Friday evening and I heard back on the following Sunday morning.

Below is a portion of the response:

Hello John,

I’ve researched your account and it appears your AWS account was created before October 21, 2010. This would ordinarily make you ineligible for the Free Usage Tier Offer.  However, because of your limited use of our services, as an exception I have manually signed you up for the free tier services of EC2 and S3 effective January 1, 2012.

I was completely satisfied with the outcome. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, I was not aware that I was ineligible. I figured, worst case scenario, I pay the $.71 USD and cancel the account. And I feel that Amazon would have been completely within their right to rigidly stick to their terms. But they sure surprised me!

Amazon’s customer service is simply excellent. It’s one thing that, I feel, sets Amazon apart from its competitors. Their commitment to making their customers happy is truly one of the reasons I keep giving them my business. I’ve had to contact customer support a few times for my regular shopping using their site, and have always been happy with the outcome. It really is nice to see a company provide the same great service across all their product offerings.

Tip of the hat Amazon.com, thank you!

“If I am going to be spending time reading anyway, I may as well read something that will help my career.” –Timothy Flory

“If it took you ten hours to write a program, and you make $20.00 / hour at your day job. You’d be better off spending that ten hours earning $200.00 and spending $85.00 for an app that does it.” –Craig Lubitz

Well, pretty good advice, that’s for sure. Nothing bad ever happened to anyone for doing either or both of those. More likely, and I can attest first hand to some degree, that both of these has helped me out over the years.

<rant type=”tongue-in-cheek”>

Every damn time I am in a bookstore, or browsing Amazon.com and I come across a tasty fantasy (I’m looking at you Elric of Melniboné) or some sci-fi gem (take a bow Mr. Asimov (mmmm, old school baby)) I am inevitably plagued by Tim’s voice and it honestly makes me feel a bit guilty.

Likewise, every time I feel a little urge to write some not for work code, I think of Craig and feel a bit inefficient.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is completely my own idiosynchrocies, and I have no problem doing things just because I want or need to. They both need to be applied, like anything, with moderation and it’s all good. I guess I’m just surprised that it still happens.

</rant>

Thanks fellas

I just purchased my first home. It’s pretty exhausting and umm just really a general pain in the ass. However it is also pretty damn exciting. I’m relatively late to the game at 38 for a first home. I’ve been making enough money to get the job done for quite some time now but due to a marriage, child, divorce. I ended up doing some moving around and really grew to enjoy the freedom of being able to be where ever I really needed to be, if I really needed to be there.

My general first time home buying view is not as great as it could have been. But it certainly was an interesting learning experience. The home that I purchased was the second home I brought into the underwriting stage. Which, for the uninitiated I’ll just say is pretty far into the “buy it” portion of the game. All the inspections, appraisals, repair work, documenting repair work, re-repair work due to lack of work permit originally had already been completed it was simply the act of jumping through the lender’s financial hoops for final thumbs up.

The annoying part is that the financial guy should have caught the problem the second he had all the financial numbers. In a nutshell, since the whole housing market collapse debacle, the mortgage industry does a lot more due diligence (as then damn well should have been doing all along!) which basically results in many small rules changing every week. Well, absolutely your financial guy should be on top of every nuance of it. That’s his job. However in this case, since I earned my income though contracting, I had to prove a years worth of uninterrupted employment instead of a standard six months, for you average permanent employee.

Make no mistake, I am happy to abide by any laws / rules that guide this process, but this was something that could have saved a whole lot of people a whole lot of time. In the end, the sellers did not want to risk not selling their house on the hopes of my employment not being terminated (which was never an issue, but how do you really prove that anyway.) I can’t blame them, though sadly, their house is still for sale and I live in a larger house around the corner for the same price. Sometimes gambles don’t pay off, or maybe they just didn’t care.

It was tough getting that far invested into a house and then have it unravel. It all worked out for the best and my financial guy did in fact come through come close time, which I really appreciated and totally helped out at the exact second I needed it to!

The second house, the one in I did in fact buy, really felt like home the second I walked into it, and the seller was great and easy to work with. I like to think I was a good buyer as well. After negotiating the price that is

It’s just almost a surreal feeling to sit in my basement in front of my computer and bang out a post in my own home. I honestly thought I would never buy one. It’s amazing how much life changes, and how good it can turn out being despite hard-times, penny-pinching, and life’s not-so-little obstacles.

Overall, the whole experience is a must have. +1

The default opening tab is “Processes” and the CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network throb a darker yellow then there is notable activity

Then the “Performance” tab which has sub views for CPU, Memory, Disk, and Networking

The “App History” tab follows and shows you how your applications are using your machine’s resources

The “Startup” tab details the applications that automatically run at startup and tries to assess the impact on start-up (which I assume to mean startup time during a boot or log-in)

The “Users” tab breaks down the currently logged in users and the processes they have spun up and their resource usage.

The “Details” tab is the Old School Task Manager’s “Process” view

And finally the “Services” tab which details your currently running services

And while we are at it, here is a screen shot of the Windows 8 Preview’s “File Copy” dialog

 [Update: 11/16/2010]

I just stumbled on a Task Tray icon that indicated my Location has been accessed. Apparently that ends up in the Event Viewer with Windows8, not terribly fancy but handy. All of the ones in the screen shots below are from Desktop Gadgets, I’m not sure which one which I find disappointing, but maybe I’m missing an easy way to correlate them.

And here are a few of the event viewer. “Sensitive” data has been erased, but it is there if you were doing this yourself.

You see, programming for me, since the age of nine, has been my hobby. I just happen to be one of those guys that actually gets paid to do what he loves to do, and would be doing anyway. For the time being, I will ignore the downsides of that as it’s a post and then some in it’s own right  

What got me into it was really two things. The first is learning things. That “Eureka” moment when moments ago a bunch of mumbo-jumbo clicks in and make sense is an awesome feeling. The other draw was making some machine do my bidding. Again an awesome feeling which I can’t put into words if you’re not a programmer, I’m sure there are analogs in other disciplines, however I’m not familiar with those disciplines.

Well that is all fine and good, but I’ve been a professional (e.g. my sole income) programmer for seventeen years. I’ve got a lot of experience at a lot of levels of business types (differing in both type of industry and company size. Size may not be the right phrase, I’m trying to speak towards the level of “enterprise” processes an organization may or may not embrace)

Every now and again I get lucky and a new relatively self contained technology emerges that I’d like to toy around appear (I’m thinking Linq, jQuery, WebService, etc) Things that are big enough to have a challenge but small enough to not require a massive underlying framework.

The latter is really the problem, if I’m going to spend any of my not very often free time to writing code, I need to be getting something out of it. I need it to genuinely teach me something and therefore enhance my skill-set, and thus my career. Or I need it to be fun enough that it’s worth the cost.

An example of fun to be worth the cost, I will cite my work on the Quake3 Arena III mod, ReactanceUnlagged. (sorry the site is really nothing more then where to grab the latest version which is a few years old.) But working on this was a blast! At one time we had a number of people running the mod on their servers and a fair amount of the very waning quake3 community (it was a 10 year old game when I started modding.) It was written in plain jane C which is my favorite play language, mostly because while it’s possible to blow off your foot, it’s really rewarding when you don’t and it works right

Now the down side to that project was the ramp up, learning their API’s and their virtual machine you coded to.

So the other type of project I’d be drawn to for learning experiences is something more enterprise level, where I’s need to design and implement a database, a data access layer to access the data, and a back-end to process the data, not to mention the ui to work with the data (I’m not really a UI guy, but I can make something clean and jQuery is fun) So that’s a lot of ramp up to. A lot of the work I already know how to do and to do well, but implementing it again just to have something to work off to learn something is rough.

The same applies to open source projects, the ramp up is rough, while the rest is rewarding.

I seem to be having a problem picking where I want to invest the ramp up time, and while I believe in supporting and working on open source projects, I also feel that if I have something unique to contribute to the world (even if it’s just my own immediate world) I’d rather do that.

And the more time passes as I can’t decide, the more time I’m not ramping up and wasting.  Most likely I should just pick something and go, worst case I find something else that rips me away which must mean I was more interested in it than the other, so be it.

First, a disclaimer, this is basically some prototyping I did to discover how feasible this stuff is in reality. It is not an attempt to provide any sort of framework for consumption of others, but arguably the concepts could be used to that end. Feel free to appropriate any of it at will in any way you see fit. All shout-outs accepted

For the sake of having some context around what I am doing, I have a Data Layer provided by the Microsoft Entity Framework running against an existing database. My MVC application only currently deals with a Client model which is related to the Clients table in my database (I take no responsibility for database naming conventions here, I worked with what I had.) I have a Client Controller, a Client Model (very simplified First, and Last Names; Id, and ClientCode properties relating to columns of similar names in the database), and various Client Views (not surprisingly, an Index, Detail, Edit, Create, and Delete views.)

With the above in place I decided to make a simple Client Picker that would work by the user typing the Client’s Last Name into a textbox and it would autocomplete and narrow the choices as the user typed. The final picked Client should be rendered in the Textbox as “Lastname, Firstname, [ClientCode]“

Well first things first, below is the code for the JsonMarshaller class which wraps calling DataContractJsonSerializer. Basically, you pass it a class that is adorned with a DataContractAttribute and it spits out the contents of the class as a Json encoded string.

using System;using System.IO;using System.Runtime.Serialization;using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json;using System.Text;using System.Xml;

namespace MvcSandbox.Library.Helpers{    public class JsonMarshaller    {        public static string CreateJsonString(object objectToSerialize)        {            var dataContractAttribute = Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(objectToSerialize.GetType(), typeof(DataContractAttribute));

            var output = new StringBuilder();            var json = new DataContractJsonSerializer(objectToSerialize.GetType());            var ms = new MemoryStream();            XmlDictionaryWriter writer = JsonReaderWriterFactory.CreateJsonWriter(ms);

            json.WriteObject(ms, objectToSerialize);            writer.Flush();

            byte[] buffer = ms.GetBuffer();            var bytes = new byte[ms.Length];            for (long l = 0; l < ms.Length; l++)            {                bytes[l] = buffer[l];            }

            return Encoding.Default.GetString(bytes).Trim();        }    }}

At this point let’s wire the JsonMarshaller into an MVC web application. For the sake of argument, I created a Controller to handle this. There is no reason it could not have been handled by the existing Client controller, and to be honest this is where I feel it should be for a consistent URL scheme. But when I started I wanted something slightly different from the standard Client views this was a case of me fighting what MVC was trying to give me by default, structure based on what it did (working with a client) then how it did it (being a data service).

To illustrate, to view a client detail the url would be
http://localhost/Clients/Detail/45

and I wanted to get a list of clients with last names starting with “Min” to look like:
http://localhost/Services/Clients/min

In the end I would have rather it be:
http://localhost/Clients/min

In it’s current state I ended up with:
http://localhost/Services/GetClientsByLastName/min

Routing semantics, do what’s best for your app, I just wanted to explain what I’ve got going on here to avoid confusion as MVC is a big believer in naming by convention.

Below are the Client Model and the Services Controller:

Client Model

using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Runtime.Serialization;using MvcSandbox.Library.DataAccess;using MvcSandbox.Library.Model;using MvcSandbox.Library.Repositories;

namespace MvcSandbox.Models{    [DataContract]    public class ClientModel : ModelBase    {        [DataMember]        public int ClientId { get; set; }

        [DataMember]        public string FirstName { get; set; }

        [DataMember]        public string LastName { get; set; }

        [DataMember]        public string ClientCode { get; set; }

        public ClientModel() { }

        public ClientModel(int clientId)        {            LoadFromDataEntity((Clients)Repository.Get(clientId));        }

        public ClientModel(Clients client)        {            LoadFromDataEntity(client);        }

        public static List GetAllClients()        {            return (from Clients client in new ClientRepository().FindAll(20)                    select new ClientModel                               {                                   ClientCode = client.ClientCode,                                   ClientId = client.ClientID,                                   FirstName = client.FirstName,                                   LastName = client.LastName                               }).ToList();        }

        private void LoadFromDataEntity(Clients client)        {            DataEntity = client;

            if (client == null)            {                ClearModelFields();                return;            }

            ClientId = DataEntity.ClientID;            FirstName = DataEntity.FirstName;            LastName = DataEntity.LastName;            ClientCode = DataEntity.ClientCode;        }

        public override void UpdateDataEntityFromModel()        {            DataEntity.ClientID = ClientId;            DataEntity.FirstName = FirstName;            DataEntity.LastName = LastName;            DataEntity.ClientCode = ClientCode;        }

        public override void ClearModelFields()        {            FirstName = string.Empty;            LastName = string.Empty;            ClientCode = string.Empty;            ClientId = 0;        }    }}

The Client Model Base Class

using System;using System.Data.Objects.DataClasses;using System.Runtime.Serialization;using MvcSandbox.Library.Helpers;using MvcSandbox.Library.Repositories;

namespace MvcSandbox.Library.Model{    [DataContract]    public abstract class ModelBase : IModel        where T : EntityObject        where TU : RepositoryBase    {        protected TU Repository = Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(TU)) as TU;        protected T DataEntity;

        #region Abstract Members

        public abstract void ClearModelFields();

        public abstract void UpdateDataEntityFromModel();

        #endregion

        #region Virtual Members

        public virtual void Save()        {            UpdateDataEntityFromModel();            Repository.Save();        }

        public virtual string ToJson()        {            return JsonMarshaller.CreateJsonString(this);        }

        #endregion    }}

Services Controller

using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Text;using System.Web;using System.Web.Mvc;using System.Web.UI.WebControls;using MvcSandbox.Library.DataAccess;using MvcSandbox.Library.Helpers;using MvcSandbox.Library.Model;using MvcSandbox.Models;

namespace MvcSandbox.Controllers{    public class ServicesController : Controller    {        public ActionResult GetClientsByLastName(string id)        {            var clientLists = new ModelList();

            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(id))            {                ViewBag.Output = clientLists;            }            else            {                string lastName = id;

                var entities = new it01_FSC1Entities();

                var cls = (from client in entities.Clients                           where client.LastName.StartsWith(lastName.Trim())                           orderby client.LastName                           select new ClientModel()                                      {                                          ClientCode = client.ClientCode,                                          ClientId = client.ClientID,                                          FirstName = client.FirstName,                                          LastName = client.LastName                                      }).Take(20);

                clientLists.Items.AddRange(cls);            }

            Response.ContentType = "application/json";            Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;

            ViewBag.Output = JsonMarshaller.CreateJsonString(clientLists);            return View();        }    }}

Nothing really magical there. I would like to go on record stating that calling the data access layer directly in my Controller was an ugly time-saver, I haven’t moved it over to my ClientRepository where it belongs. The Repository insulates my front end / model code from being tied to the database structure. It uses the Entity Framework classes to populate models for me. The Model Base class illustrates some underpinnings of it which aren’t really relevant to the point of this post.

So basically, the Controller grabs the data, populates a class with a DataContract so I can use the JsonMarshaller to Json encode it. Of note in the controller is where it set’s the Response’s content-type to “application/json” and content-encoding to UTF-8. jQuery love’s it some UTF-8.

Once we have the results Json encoded, it sets an item in the ViewBag for use by the GetClientsByLastName View to pump the Json out to the client.

@{    Layout = null;}@Html.Raw(ViewBag.Output)

Heh, so little code on that last piece ‘eh

At this point we are ready to consume the HTTP GET enabled data provider with a ClientSearch partial view. Which, is essentially a blue bar with a autocomplete enabled textbox on it to search for a client by last name.

This was the difficult piece. In retrospect, not because it was difficult but because with jQuery, if you’re not writing it everyday, you are forgetting how to write it everyday. And it’s been a while since I’ve been living the jQuery life, however, like a bicycle, you just get back on and pour through docs and examples until it sticks again.

Without further ado, the ClientSearch partial view:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">    var clientSourceArray = [];

    function GetClientData(searchTerm) {        var url = "http://localhost:1909/Services/GetClientsByLastName/" + searchTerm;        clientSourceArray = [];

        var jqxhr = $.ajax({            url: url,            type: 'GET',            dataType: 'json',            async: false,            success: function (data, status, xhr) {                $.each(data, function (i, clients) {                    $.each(clients, function (i, client) {                        var clientValue = client.LastName + ', ' + client.FirstName + ' [' + client.ClientCode + ']';                        clientSourceArray.push(clientValue);                    });                });            }        });

        return clientSourceArray;    }

    $(document).ready(function () {

        //set up the autocomplete form        $("#ClientLastName").autocomplete({            source: function (searchTerm, callback) { callback(GetClientData(searchTerm.term)); },            delay: 100,            minLength: 2        });

        //set up the watermarks        var watermark = "Start Typing a Client's Lastname...";        var inputElement = $("#ClientLastName");        if (inputElement.val() == "") {            inputElement.css("color", "#555555");            inputElement.css("font-style", "italic");            inputElement.val(watermark);        }        inputElement.focus(function () {            if (this.value == watermark) {                $(this).css("color", "");                $(this).css("font-style", "");                this.value = "";            }        }).blur(function () {            if (this.value == "") {                this.value = watermark;                $(this).css("color", "#555555");                $(this).css("font-style", "italic");            }        });    });</script>

<div class="client-search-bar">@Html.TextBox("ClientLastName", "", new Dictionary() { {"class", "client-last-name-input"} })</div>

So now a few comments about that, first, I’m looking for a code highlighter that works better and easier then the one I have…

Well the actual “html” portion is pretty easy, 1 div that uses the MVC HTML helper class to generate a textbox. I’ll also ignore the Watermarking code because it’s unrelated short of making a nicer looking textbox (arguably.)

The bulk of the work is done by the GetClientData() function, it makes an asynchrounous AJAX call to get the Json encoded data for the autocomplete control and the setting up of the actual autocomplete. Which in the end being pretty trivial as it can take a function that takes a searchTerm and a “Add an item to the list to be searched” callback function. The way it is written here, it works but it could be more succinctly done had I truly been in the jQuery zen place. As demonstrated on http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/how-to-use-the-jquery-ui-autocomplete-widget/ in particular, Step 4: “Attaching the Autocomplete”

//attach autocomplete$("#to").autocomplete({  

    //define callback to format results    source: function(req, add){  

        //pass request to server        $.getJSON("friends.php?callback=?", req, function(data) {  

            //create array for response objects            var suggestions = [];  

            //process response            $.each(data, function(i, val){            suggestions.push(val.name);        });  

        //pass array to callback        add(suggestions);    });}

Yeah, well I’ll clean that up later. In the end it wasn’t that bad aside from my jQuery rustiness.

Hope this helps you, I know the journey has helped me!

So using Microsoft’s Entity Framework with .NET 4 as a data access layer, I select some entity Client objects properties that meet my criteria and take 20 via linq. Something to the effect of:

var clientList = (rom client in entities.Clients where
client.LastName.StartsWith(“min”) select new ClientInfo() { LastName = client.LastName, FirstName = client.FirstName}).Take(20)

So far so good, nothing magical here. I then assign add it as a range to a new List<ClientInfo>

var clientInfos = new List<ClientInfo>();
clientInfos.AddRange(clientList);

When the DataContractJsonSerializer hits that list, it correctly does it, however it manages to add in quite a few \0 characters (that’s a null character) into the string which prevents it from properly being parsed by the built in jQuery JSON functions.

Scratch that, I’m likely reading an entire memory stream in instead of just the used portion.

Well, in the end, it’s a good idea to double check your thought process lest you be missing the real problem. I had hacked around my initial noticing of the \0’s by replacing them out of the string so I could move on and come back later and figure out what was wrong. Done and done. I’ll verify it of course but I bet you a dollar that’s it. Funny how things come to you out of the blue, like when you’re trying to complain about an oddity. Chances are, the oddity is you

The scenario is, you want to provide application data to a browser-side UI (for use with auto-complete textboxes, asynchronously updating UI controls (no server-side post-backs, things you use jQuery or AJAX for.)

You’ve got a few options:

• ASP.NET Web Service
• ASP.NET Web Page (.aspx)  that returns raw data with an appropriate content-type
• ASP.NET HTTP Handler (.ashx) that returns raw data with an appropriate content-type
• WCF Web Service hosted under IIS
• in fact there are a ton of custom solutions you could use as well, I’m going to ignore them and stick with the Microsoft family of solutions.

First, I’m going to throw out the ASP.NET Web Page option. Sure you can do it but it’s exactly the same the HTTP Handler but more efficient and only require the “code-behind” portion of a page, not the .aspx portion as you are returning raw data in whatever format (Json, Xml, csv, whatever.)

Now you have to consider your system interaction a bit. If you have multiple applications consuming the data, WCF is most likely the way to go. It supports multiple protocols (http, tcp/ip, msmq, etc.) If you have a native client and a web application consuming the data. It’s the way to go.

A standard ASP.NET Web Service would also be usable by both but would only support HTTP, but since you can get that functionality with a WCF service, it’s the way things are moving in Microsoft Land. Having said that, configuration of the services, behaviors, end-points is a pain in the @$$! From experience I can say it was easy to use the proxy classes generated by the service proxy but I am having a very hard time getting it to accept HTTP GET requests. If this was any of the other of the options, it would have been a no brainer (due to their limitations.) Complex problems take complex configuration solutions, nature of the beast.

It’s worth mentioning that native client’s can also consume http web services relatively easily, so if you have a lot of knowledge investment in standard web services and you only need to support web based clients then this isn’t a wrong choice at all.

If you find yourself in a situation where only your web application is going to be consuming your application data you can fall through to the simplest form. Make a Page or Handler in your application and directly serve it. Tapping in to get or post variables, cookies, session, it’s all there at your fingertips. It’s my favorite when I only have to worry about feeding the UI due to it’s ease of use.

Enter the land of MVC

First let’s just get it over with, you absolutely can use a .ashx page in a MVC web application on ASP.NET. You will need to add a new route to send it traffic but after that it works the same.

But since that flies in the face of MVC’s “do it this way, you’ll be happier in the end” (as some like to call “Best Practices” ) How can you do it the way MVC wants you to.

Simply as it turns out!

Well, first you make a new Controller and give it an Action. For my case I made a DataServiceController with a Action of “GetClientByLastName”. That does the work of fetching the data.

My model is a string containing a List of Client POCO classes which has been serialized to Json (through the magic of .NET 4.0’s inclusion of DataContractJsonSerializer.) so I don’t need a custom model.

Then make a view with no format and not strongly typed and simply @HTML.Raw() write it out. You’ll also want to set the page response’s content-type to reflect what you’re be outputting. I did this in the Controller, I’m sure there are more way to do it.

Anyway, in the end, using easily coded, standard MVC stuff, I am able to get a Json fromatted list of client’s to work with from my UI simply by fetching from:

[warning, this link won’t resolve] http://mydomin.com/clients/min

And I get a list of at most 20 client’s whose last name begin with “min”. Slick enough for me. Anyway hope it helps, I’ll update this when I have some code samples but the concept is easy. I’m embarrassed it took me so long to put two and two together.

But first, a little background. For the past 3 years I have been a contract developer (with the exception of a six moth stint at a marketing company that was a bad fit for me.) Some of that time I did some Independent contracting, but the rest is W2 work from various consulting companies in the vein of temp work (e.g. I was not an in house employee, there was no bench, I was on site at a client for them or I was in the unemployment line looking for the next opportunity.)

It’s not a bad life, however it also isn’t awesome. It used to be, most jobs in my field were full time permanent employee jobs and contractors were called in for special skill sets or to help out with important things that were time sensitive. You might only work eight out of twelve months, but you would charge a premium rate to hold you over when the contract ran out. With the economy as it is these days (years?) many of the permanent positions were removed and replaced with contractors. Of course this flooded the contracting scene and it’s hard to ask for $100 / hour when there are 20 other guys who want to eat and will do it for $30.

Don’t get me wrong, there are specialty contracting gigs that pay very very well, however you need to be a specialist in whatever sector that is. Specialization can improve your bottom line, but can also remove a lot of options because you only do one thing, albeit you do it very well.

I am what I consider to be a Programming “Generalist”. I know a lot of programming languages and technology and can get the job done across the board. Having said that however, I am not the guy you call when you want a security system for million concurrent users architected (although I could implement it given a designed system )

At any rate, very recently I received not one, not two, but three different offers from three different employers, and get this, all on the same day. I have never been in this position before. Hell, I have never been in a position with two offers in the same general time period that would have been close enough for me to actually pick one over the other. I have been very fortunate in being able to keep my unemployed time low, but never have I had to choose. I tend to work a job until I’m fed up and quit or downsized.

Well at first I was quite thrilled, it’s nice to have options. So I did what any analytical person does. I fired up excel and ran the numbers. So far so good, there is a clear winner.

Then came the hard part. The non-financial pros and cons lists. The creation of the lists is not really that hard. The difficulty is really having to weigh and prioritize what is important to your happiness and well being and then deciding the risk value of having to take up a con or give up a pro.

For example, maybe you need time flexibility to be able to get your kids where they need to be, maybe their mother could pick up the slack and it’s a non-issue. Maybe you like a longer commute to allow you to decompress after a day of working, maybe you would rather work from home.

Sometimes when comparing two pros and cons list, some of these items cancel each other out. When they don’t you have to decide what makes it worth while to you to overcome the risk of not having it.

And finally, the hardest part of all, actually picking one. I guess that I had come to rely on not having to make a choice and accepting whatever came my way because I have responsibilities I need to honor, and obligations to keep and it is easier accept what you need when you need it then it is to blame yourself for making a bad choice.

In the end, making a bad choice is fine, it happens, it is how we learn. Don’t be afraid of it, do the math, make the lists, make a call and move on. Maybe you’ll need to change course at some point down the line, but that is life. Rest easy knowing you’ve done your due diligence and did the best you could. The rest is the adventure!

I think my friend George hits the nail on the head with this blog post OODA Loop

In a nut shell, the site allows you to pick events supported by various web applications (the This portion of IFTTT) and push information from said event to other various web applications (the That component).

For example, If I post a new blog entry here Then tweet the URL and title of the blog post to my twitter account. If you saw this post on twitter, that is in fact how it got there, it was my first test of the IFTTT.

It supports many web applications such as Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, RSS feeds, LastFM, Craigslist, SMS messaging, the list goes on an on (No Google+ yet, but I assume it is because the API has not been formally released yet). It’s like playing with legos and you can build exactly what you need.

So far, the best treatment of how it works and examples I’ve seen has been from Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman, his blog post on the matter is terrific: Scott’s IFTTT post

I strongly urge you to investigate ifttt.com!

The downside of not writing your own publishing platform, various systems do things differently and some are more flexible than others.

I’m using WordPress here now and it was pretty easy to switch on the Google analytics, but it did essentially require me modifying the Theme’s code, and I was very surprised there wasn’t a built in way to add custom scripts to headers / footers.

At any rate, I will affect what I can but here’s my site’s report card as of now, it ranked a C with a 97 score, I inadvertently cut that off the screenshot. It breaks down below. Overall, could be worse.

I will follow up with some tweaks over the next few weeks as I experiment with the SEO and Caching modules WordPress supports.

My blog's score, passing but could be better

I can’t really do justice to the feeling of watching a rocket you’ve built with your own hands take take off in a small blast of fire and smokey thrust and the unadulterated sound of speed as it flies off the launch plate into the sky after you’ve done the countdown and press the launch button. It jets up quickly and then hangs for a moment before the engine fires again to force the nosecone out which brings the parachute with it. There is a moment of worry before it happens, will it actually pop it out, where will the wind take it? And all you can do is watch and wait for it to lazily drift back to earth for you to retrieve it. And the the thrill of picking it up off the ground (or out of a tree) and seeing it’s just fine and wants to fly again. It’s awesome and it makes me wonder what the folks at NASA used to feel before money and war became more important then science and exploration.

My son and I have been building model rockets for a few years now, it’s something we can do together and it also requires a bit of precision and working with tools so it is a good opportunity to demonstrate teamwork and longer project skills as well. We like to build them and paint them, sometimes we use the right colors, sometimes we get artistic, it’s really nice and I love it (I’m pretty sure he does too )

He got four rockets for his birthday last year, which is in the winter, so it gave us a good amount of time to build and paint them. These are all Estes brand rockets, I assume they have competitors but Estes is the only name I can ever remember hearing. There was a Big Bertha, an Amazon, a Crossfire. There is a fourth, but we haven’t built it yet.

So today, my son, my friend, and myself went out in search of the perfect field to launch them from. My son and I have built and launched a number o9f rockets in the past, but all of my old launch spots are not around or can’t be used for that anymore and for the say past 5 rockets we’ve built and launched, we’ve only recovered one, that’s right 1 single successful launch and recovery. It’s all my fault in bad spot picking, but I tell you, sometimes you just gotta take a chance. Sadly, never worked out well for us in this regard.

My friend to the rescue! Recently, at a cookout, I had mentioned my dillema to my friend and he had two spots that sounded like prime locations, and they were in my area, always a win with that.

So my son and I picked up my buddy and off we went. On the way to spot 1, an old polo field, we came across a potential field to try, but on closer inspection, the brush was too high, we’d never find the rocket once it touched back down.

As we are pulling up to the old polo field, a police car pulls up and sets up shop for a speed trap, it was a damn good spot for the police, but I felt a little nervous about walking past him with ordinance (the rocket engines)  as well as the rockets. I am not sure of the laws in the are for launching model rockets and we decided better to play it safe than sorry.

Spot number 2 is an abandoned small airport. Well I’m not even sure the building are there anymore but the runway is. However, to get to the place you need to park in a local metro park and hike through the woods. The only parking area however was closed and gated up today. Very disappointing, I was actually hoping we would be able to launch here for the coolness factor alone.

Going deep, my friend pulled one more spot out of the air, but cautioned it is usually pretty busy, but at this point my son is getting antsy, and darn it, I want to fly a rocket, so we give it a go.

The place was absolutely empty, huge field, no trees in the area, everything you could ask for! It was on my friends! I built the launching pad while my son prepped the first rocket, the Amazon, we were pumped. It launched like a dream! The wind had picked up slightly since we first set up the pad, so it did drift a bit with the parachute on it’s way down and of course landed in the only tree around… Fortunately we found a long piece of 1 inch PVC  tube that we were able to poke it out of the tree with.

I mostly had A engines (which are the weakest and meant for small and light rockets) so we tried the Big Bertha and the Amazon again with an A engine. Don’t do this, it is sad, they are way too damn heavy for A engines. Don’t get me wrong it’s always cool to launch a rocket but they barely got high enough of the ground to eject their parachutes before touching back down in a very unflattering low arch. They really should have mid grade B engines at the least, and C’s worked great!

We launched the crossfire a twice as well. The A engines worked great there. The second crossfire launch (and last of the day) did encounter a problem, the shock-cord (a fat rubber band that hold the rocket to the nosecone) was damaged in the building process and got caught during ejection with the nosecone, this caused the flash paper to burn and also burned the parachute. Now these things are thing plastic parachutes so it’s not a big deal at all and at least it can be repaired, unlike a rocket you never recover

Anyway, it was a great day thanks to everybody involved. Can’t wait for the next time, hopefully I will have some pictures to post soon!

[Update: 9/4/2011] My friend uploaded his pictures and video, Thanks! http://blog.vec.com/2011/09/04/love-and-rockets/

First, a little about myself. I’m a 39 year old male software developer. I live in the greater Cleveland area of Ohio.

I have a pre-teen son who is the light of my life and truly an amazing little guy (bias aside, I swear ) He and his mom moved back here from being out of state for 9 years and he just started his second new school in under a year (albeit with a summer off in between) and he’s doing great, I am so proud.

I am divorced and have a very good relationship with my ex-wife, through much work on both sides (believe you me, I can be annoying )

I live with my girlfriend and her two teen children. Well actually one, as the other is off to college.My son splits his time between his mother and I.

I am also in the process of buying a house. Something I have been quite not interested in for, well, as long as I can remember. There just wasn’t a point until I lived in the same location as my son. Plus I guess I always felt like I wasn’t “Adult” enough. Total cop out, I know but I’ve gotten past that.

I’ve spent the last 3 years primarily doing contracting work in the greater Cleveland area. Times have been tight but me and mine have been making it. The one saving grace it really has is though, no matter how bad a gig might be, you know sooner or later you are done, which makes it not as bad. And when you do actually come in to a nice place with great people, it’s wonderful, but sadly sooner or later, you’re gone.

I play video games (mostly on the PC), and sometimes with an XBox 360 controller (Arkham Asylum 4TW) I primarily enjoy first person shooters, though I can’t stand FPS War Simulation games (like Call of Duty, etc…) It’s a game, I don’t want to be dead after being shot once. I already have that, it’s called Real Life, and the respawn sucks.

There you have it, so anything else you come across on my blog is coming from me, in this place (which I love and would not trade anything for).

I primarily started this blog because I don’t write enough or talk enough about things that are on my mind and I would like to change that.

What about you?

I just now passed over the Ohio river entering West Virginia. Pretty cool bridge, sadly I did not get a picture.

Things feel somewhat surreal to me now, well this past week. Heck, who am I trying to kid, the whole damn year. My family has had a rough transition from 2010 into 2011 and I am so proud of them for pulling together and getting us all through it.

Things have really been coming together the past few weeks and all the hard work we have all put in is paying off. Truly I am blessed!

I can’t help but somewhat feel as though I am waiting for the ‘other’ shoe to drop, but every day that it doesn’t, is one more day of confidence in the future. I suppose what feels so odd to me is, actually having the confidence to feel the comfort it brings. Truly my friends, you can NOT put a price on that!

And I’ve been noticing it more the older I get, big shocker there… It’s amazing that sone things, when told to you, make so much sense, but you really can’t fully grasp it until it happens to you.

I would like to thank my friends and my family for making my life possible

Much love.

I distinctly remember grasping the concept of multi-dimensional arrays under my friend’s tutelage while writing a character generator for Dungeons & Dragons on a trusty Commodore 64. It was a rush to which I am at a loss to put into words.

He got me my first paying programming job at 16 converting a dbase database to delimited text.

He got me my first career job in an industry I have been faithful to for 17 years, though sometimes seemingly  it not wanting me at a small Internet Development Company, mostly B2B but some consumer sites. 6 years there I learned and poured my heart and soul into my craft. To this date, this was my favorite job. The people were amazing, the talent, again, amazing. Management, well not so much, at all really.

A number of jobs later, he again reached out and helped pull me into a online auto insurance comparative rating company. Again, amazing people, the talent could not have dreamed for a better sampling of professionals and expertise. Hands down, the #1 platform I have developed on, EVER. And I’ve done a lot over the years, ‘nuff said. This is my second favorite job. Again, management could have been better, and when I say that, I mean at the board level. Best developmental management I’ve had the privilege of working for, hands down. Oh sure, there are always room for improvement, but truly, very solid, balanced, and supportive.

That company has recently been acquired by a marketing company (whatever that truly is.) I have mixed emotions, on the one hand, I feel awful for the 150+ people, most of which I knew on some personal basis, even if in passing in the break room, are now out of a job in a poor economy.

On the other hand, for many, this is a great opportunity whether having just felt stuck or having the opportunity to move with the purchased company back to the new mother-ship in much sunnier locales then depressed Cleveland. To say my friend was lucky enough to have been offered a position, doesn’t really do it justice, he earned every last bit of the opportunity.

I wish them all luck, but in particular to my friend, without whom my life would be greatly diminished.

From: http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php?c=kb_vcs
[May 25th 2010]

TORTOISESVN

Diff

1. Select Settings from Explorer's TortoiseSVN submenu.
2. Switch to the Diff Viewer tab.
3. Change the radio buttons from TortoiseMerge to External.
4. In the path edits, enter:
   "C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 3\BComp.exe" %base %mine /title1=%bname /title2=%yname /leftreadonly

To use Beyond Compare for image comparisons either replace the file C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoiseIDiff.exe with a copy of BComp.exe, or click the Advanced button on theDiff Viewer tab and add each image type's extension with the same command line as above.

3-Way Merge (v3 Pro)

1. Select Settings from Explorer's TortoisSVN submenu.
2. Switch to the Merge Tool tab.
3. Change the radio buttons from TortoiseMerge to External.
4. In the path edits, enter:
   "C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 3\BComp.exe" %mine %theirs %base %merged /title1=%yname /title2=%tname /title3=%bname /title4=%mname

2-Way Merge (v3 Std, v2)

Use the same steps as above, but use the command line:
"C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 3\BComp.exe" %mine %theirs /savetarget=%merged

Here are some screenshots of the UI, from the Start button or Context menu, then the settings screen for diff and merge

What I ended up with is creating a “Widget” content directory, and a directory within for each widget that I am backing the configuration with the results of a Smartform instance. So, I created a Smartform per Widget, and assigned that widget to be the default and only Smartform for that directory, and requiring only Smartform content in that directory. The net result is, I can now hook into the existing  way to simply call that directory with a “add” command via http request, and popup the authentic CMS400 smart form content editor, my widget just needs to create the content and persist the new content id.

That way, when the widget is dropped on the page, in edit view, you can create the configuration Smartform, and then subsequently, you are displayed the XSL representation with a Ektron Edit “button” to bring down the standard Ektron contextual edit options. Downside is having the right named controls to receive updates from the Ektron Editor Add New form closing. It’s a little messy but there is precedent reference code to look at in some other widgets (hint: ContentBlock).

Additionally, I still need to create a page that will render a widget dynamically, actually, each widget will need a default template such that when the content itself is referenced alone (like an embed link) it will provide an appropriate rendering. The default behavior is to pass it though a rough xml render with nodes and elements and attributes, in a digestible format.

What you really need is what this page looks like alone, which doesn’t exist without the context of the widget, which needs to live on a page. Attaching it to a template with a dynamically populated Smartform of the correct type will yield a stand alone page for that Smartform instance. Complete with master page support at the .aspx level.

One could provide a pretty XSLT to render the Smartform’s configuration XML more attractively then the default, but for design / content author mode the default is passable, just not that pretty.

All in all it feels pretty right. It is an odd situation though, I’m providing Widgets to Content Authors, so since they are exposed to these Ektron built in editors, the consistency greatly affects the end result. Typically the widgets are meant to interface with external systems or provide relatively autonomous functionality and configuration wouldn’t be content. But my audience is a technical staff that will put the pages together using these widgets, and their customers will add the content in the pre-created locations and widget sets, so a more in depth configuration methodology was required. Turning out pretty well.

All in all, I like it, while it has some room for improvement. I think they should create a community edition.

So great, I have a Audio Player widget, that takes has a resource selector smartform input control, which allows the user to pop up a graphical Content Folder browser, which can be limited to certain types of content and allow the user to pick. His choice is persisted when the new instance of the smartform is titled and saved.

Now I need to build 2 jukebox widgets, “Jukebox A” that has requires a audio resource and a body which is a standard HTML content resource (in ektron); and “Jukebox B” that just takes the audio resource. So, I can make a “Jukebox Item” Smartform, which has both an audio resource and a body resource and create 2 new smartform instances, based on the “Jukebox Item”. Roadblock… Since A requires both, and B only needs the one, the smartform allows us to require it, but we can’t put the same requirement on the body, because not both widgets will use it. Leaving you with the sad solution of spreading validation (and persistence) over the underlying items and the final widget edit UI. Custom HTML can be provided in the smartforms so custom javascript validation and manipulation could be performed, but doing that is the exception to the rule, not the standard way of doing it in Ektron.

Another problem using the smartforms are the when the resource picker control is used, it presents itself in terms of the CMS system’s content, where you’d like to restrict a resource to another smartform instance in particular such that if you have a Image Carousel Item and a New Item, you could restrict the content shown to contents that use that form as their base. Having said that, the content chooser is part of the workarea code, so it could be modified. The WorkArea is the code for the CMS system. It can be completely customized, the question is how far out of the box do you want to go, especially if you need to upgrade to a new version down the road.

It just seems like these would not be new complaints. I’m no SharePoint expert but this is why they have content types that can be created and treated like first class citizens, the less customizing of the actual CMS system, the better.

It’s not terrible, but something to consider.

Disclaimer: I do not work for or represent Ektron Inc. in any way shape or form. I simple am a developer tasked with creating custom components that work within the client’s installation of the product and in general the entire client customization and implementation. I do have experience with a number of Content Management Systems on a variety of platforms, but I am in no means an expert and I am delighted to learn new products and platforms.

Let’s start with a little background. Ektron CMS400.NET is developed by Ektron Inc. (http://www.ektron.com/), located in Nashua, NH. Their flagship product is CMS400.NET and it’s a pretty light-weight and pretty powerful Content Management System. Ektron hosts a set of developer community for forums and blogs, etc. And they have a ton of documentation (literally, if you  printed it out, it would likely weigh a ton) and videos, as well as tutorials. Essentially everything you’d hope to be in place for an indication of a well kept software project, and it’s here in spades. It’s relatively affordable when weighing it’s features and price with it’s competitors.

Now for the nitty grity bits. CMS400.NET is a .NET 2.0 Website project (ala Visual Studio 2005), it survives an upgrade to 2008 and 2010, I’ve tried them both with little to fix up. It’s written predominantly in VB.Net though does have a vbcode and cscode folders in the site’s app_code directory to allow extensibility in either. And of course custom class libraries can be written in any managed language and referenced from the website. The installation comes with a few Install Ektron Site options such as “CMS400 Developer Site”, “CMS400 Minimum Site”, etc. And will install the site into IIS, SQL Server (and it will offer the option to install SQL Server Express during the installation if it isn’t already present). The Developer site comes with a main Ektron Developer Documentation site, and a demo site for some medical company. The Minimum set up simply installs an empty Ektron installation, fully configured and ready for complete custom content. The Api is pretty extensive, I will give them that, hands down. I will complain about their documentation, they have a ton, and maybe every single piece of the platform is documented, it is literally too much to take in and there isn’t a homogenous set of documentation for it. But it is fully loaded. There are some CMS / Ektron specific words you may need to know if your not familiar with the syntax of the documentation (i.e. taxonomy, cms, smartforms, etc). Ramp up time getting familiar with the platform while creating a useable Ektron widget to personal spec was about two weeks, which I don’t think is unreasonable).

My primary dislikes are the Website Project visual studio application over the Web Application project choice. Now it comes as a fully functional website CMS web system. So classes typically sit in the app_code directory and are compiled but their source code is never published. So you drop your business objects in there and proceed to code some widgets. For ektron to recognize widgets, they must be in the root of a widget directory in the website folder hierarchy. So you discover you need to touch up the base class, your change recompiles the app_code, which the entire rest of the site relies on, so then it is recompiled. If you can stay out of the app_code you can recompile the website in a much shorter time. However, I’m a back-end guy so most of my time is in the plumbing that causes the nightmare recompilation. Ok, it’s maybe 3 minutes, but damn… feels like forever.

Beyond that, I have no gripes, it’s supports pretty much everything you want, in context content editing, metadata customization, easy widget infrastructure (they’re literally .ascx web user control files) and it’s a website, so you can fine tune the entire site. You don’t get the source code to the API but at that point you’d be adding your own so it doesn’t matter, but would have been a nice touch. Maybe I just missed that piece of documentation

Anyway, I’ll end it on a 2 thumbs up. I would recommend it to a company that couldn’t afford SharePoint, could customize the asp.net site, had a content editor plan in place.

Apparently, Microsoft has released, for free, MechWarrior 4, here is the press release (at least as of the time of it’s posting) http://mektek.net/projects/mw4/index.html

[Click on image to enlarge]

The downside is, the delivery method. You seemingly can only get it via the MTX client, which is comparable to Valve Software’s product: Steam where you simply choose from a list of games that are available for you to download, click on the Game and press the Install button:

[Click on image to enlarge]

Unfortunately, the UI is very unresponsive and seems to go out to lunch for 30 seconds or more. Now to be fair, I am running 64bit Windows 7, so maybe 32bit or other OS's will have no problems… The UPNP doesn’t seem to work out of the box, nor was I able to get the torrent method of transfer (the default) to work, well period, I couldn’t get anything to actually download. Good theory, Valve has shown it, but this application needs to be a lot more stable or just go away and license steam. I’m open to distribution venues that are the easiest to use out of the box. No one is interested in punching wholes in firewalls manually when every other app can do it no problem… Frankly, shouldn’t have shipped as is. And even then it’s a beta version. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time but….

I could be playing it now, if only it would download … sigh

It makes my heart swell to hear this! I’ve been a gamer (Console and PC, primarily PC) for well since my dad brought home our first Atari around 1978 (I may be a year or two off, I was 5 or 6 at the time) and I was hooked. Games are most likely the reason I chose Computer Programming as a career. I’ve been involved in game development as well. Not enough so that I work as a game developer, but enough that I do understand what it takes to get a game together (I am not a marketing guy, so I’m specifically talking about the Development portion of the process here.) You may have even played something I created [perhaps a later post will include some elaboration].

There are three types of Game Development companies in the world. One type that creates Game Engines and Game Content, ones that just creates Game Content, and ones that just create Game Engines.

Let me define Game Engine and Game Content

• Game Content is  3d models, 2d sprites, sound effects, music soundtracks, story lines, characters, character dialog, etc.
• Game Engine shows the content to the game player and interacts with the player to turn his actions into what he is doing in the game (so the engine controls rendering to the computer screen, reading the game controllers, sending force feedback commands to the controller/joystick, tracking player and enemy health, move everything around using the in game version of the laws of physics, etc.

All game companies create Game Content, that is their Intellectual Property that they hope will sell enough copies of a game to pay them to make the next version of it. Some companies employ development staff that also creates the Game Engine that handles all their Game Content. These guys hope to sell enough copies to pay them to make the next version of it as well, but they hope so many copies are sold that other Game Content companies will buy their Game Engine and create their own Game Content for it and sell you another game. Finally, the companies that just create Game Engines hope to entice a Game Content company to buy their engine and use that for their content.

And this completely ignores the Hardware level of games which is really in the Console gaming realm. As one might suspect, these guys make hardware that can run Game Engines, so they try to sell their hardware platform to companies that make Game Engines.

The landscape has not always been like this. It used to be the Game Company would make the engine and the content, shop it to a publisher who put it on the store shelves (remember, this was back before the Internet.) What happened was, these guys actually started to make money selling games and more companies wanted in on the action. Eventually some suit figured out that it was cheaper to buy the license to use/modify an existing game engine and just pay employees to make content, and they were right!

I’m not trying to say that making content is easy, and I’m not saying they don’t have development staff to customize the engine to suit their needs and to also implement the rules the game runs under as they are completely different from one game to another. This is the code that gives you health when you get the mushroom power-up, or makes you jump higher and float to the ground when under the effects of a high jump spell.

This, in my mind IS the game, the Game Engine itself just runs it all as a platform. It is a pretty delineated and sensible distinction. It is this distinction that has allowed for the the different types of game companies to exist.

So as you can see, Id made both the content and engine for Doom3, and the Engine for Quake4, that’s three revenue streams, and that’s just one game that uses the Doom3 engine. You get the point here.

Now what we are seeing is companies springing up that just create Game Engines and not an underlying title to showcase it. This is because more and more people are in the gaming industry to create content for these games. And they can undercut Id on the price which lowers the cost of getting into game development, which lowers the cost of games you and I buy.

Except, like the Apple App Store, more choices are just that more choices and it encourages shovel-ware because if you have five titles for sale you’re bound to sell more then just a single title, and it’s easier to make five titles by buying an engine then writing one. It is also good in the way if fosters competition at the top of the chain which means better engines for everybody!

At the very least the modding communities pleased to be able to actually get the hands into the engine itself rather then just the game functions it exposes. Very exciting!

·         Enthusiastic personality, Career motivated, Team player, Over 11 years of technical experience.

Experience

2008 – Present                Insurance.com http://www.insurance.com                      

                                            Solon, OH

Application Developer IV

Hired to fill a senior level developer position in the expanding Communication business unit. Primary responsibilities include design and implementation of various forms of customer contact primarily email. Maintained and enhanced the stand alone custom email queuing and sending services written in C#. Also maintained the email content testing system for use by the QA department. Additional responsibilities included enhancing the Quoting Interview application to support and modify queuing logic for the various customer contact types. All development used formal development procedures such as design documentation and implementation plans, design and code reviews, and included the creation of new and maintaining of existing application unit tests using the Nunit testing framework. Also aided in the development of stored procedures and data structures to accommodate new functionality to the system.

2003 – 2007                     Progressive Insurance http://www.progressive.com     

                                            Mayfield Village, OH

Application Developer Lead

Originally hired in to the Server Based Rating Platform Team to design, develop, and maintain applications and on-line services to facilitate the quoting and selling of vehicle insurance, primarily in the agent channel of business. Application development used C++ with the standard template library as well as some windows COM components. Created and maintained tools to support the creation and testing of internal applications. Participated in creating the new motorcycle product for use with Progressive’s Comparison Rater initiative piloted with Harley-Davidson/Buell in Florida, then deployed for all quoting states. I also functioned as the group liaison to the internal Tools Team to influence design and development as well as training and support for the maintenance of existing and the creation of new support tools. Joined the internal Agency Tools Team in late 2005 where I developed and maintained various tools to support IT tasks throughout the Agency Channel using C# for both Windows Forms and ASP.NET web services and intranet sites. Additionally, I helped with platform infrastructure development such as optimizing our in-house rule engine and converting the C++ code-base from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 in preparation for moving to a new server operating system environment. Currently I am the Technical Lead on the Automated Testing application development using C# Windows Forms with a ASP.NET application for viewing division wide test results to support our 70+ in-house Quality Assurance analysts and testers, as well as consult to the Progressive Enterprise Tools Team on automated testing efforts for use company wide. Completed the following in-house training sessions for Progressive's Application Developers: Conducting Reviews, Targeted Selection, OO Principles, Software Development Methodology, Estimating, Claims Overview, QA for Developers, and Introduction to Insurance. Development consists of primarily C# / ASP.NET (using C#) as well as some legacy application maintenance on older C++ applications.

2003 – 2003                     Cobb Community Collaborative http://www.cobbcollaborative.com            Marietta, GA

Consultant

Converted existing site to a database driven website to ease future maintenance. Developed Microsoft Access database to fit the client’s lower budget grant-based not-for-profit environment.. Added a web enabled calendar to hi-light community events that can be maintained by the Collaborative and their associates. Provided training for their employees on maintaining the database as well as updating their site with Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia DreamWeaver. Recommended new site host and migrated site to the new host.

2002 – 2003                     Spellbuddy.com http://www.spellbuddy.com                 

                                            Canton, GA

Consultant

Designed and developed XML based website to showcase the client’s products. The site features an easily maintained news system, secure software delivery system, customizable user forums, as well as xml driven emailing subsystem. Database design in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 environment. Produced in-house Visual Basic 6 and C#.NET tools to update content as well as aid in development of XML systems. Additionally wrote data import and export tools in C# .NET.

2002 – 2003                     DrTango, Inc. http://www.drtango.com                             

                                            Roswell, GA

Web Application Developer

Developed XML based replacement for the general payment server involving MS SQL Server 2000, in a load balanced clustered environment. Participated in the process to add multiple language capabilities to the flagship product. Documented existing procedures and internally developed components. Participated in switching T1 providers for both the site connectivity and the VoIP phone system. Participated in the design and implementation of the network after a second remote site was added. Administered multiple MS SQL Servers, and load balanced IIS clusters as well as internal development IIS servers. Created documentation for developer’s of the application as well as documented the various components that make up the application. Re-Developed HTML Newsletter mailer in C# .NET.

1996– 2002                      NetForce Development, Inc. http://www.nforce.com  (no longer in business)

                                            Beachwood, OH

Senior Systems Analyst

The company was relatively small (15-18 employees) and most of my duties were that of a Senior Systems Analyst, though technical policy also fell on my shoulders.

Active Server Pages scripting for websites including pulling data from and storing data to databases, NT network administration (installs/setups, configuration, Exchange Server, SQL Server, MSDNS, IIS, MTS), Custom applications using Visual Basic 5 and 6, Server Side Com component creation for use under IIS in VB and within administrative scripts. I also lead development efforts for Client Systems Analysis and Database Design. Aside from development, I also performed the following duties: Project Management,  tutoring junior programmers, Security policy, Backup policy, Corporate Email Usage policy, devised / documented  / implemented and trained staff in Programming standards and Best practices. I advised management in Company growth planning, procedures for client problem call tracking, virus scans, client contact tracking, backups, technology research and selection plans for adoption into production environments, and wrote client technical proposals.

Some projects I lead the development at used Project Plan and Timeline creation, deliverable schedule, and team member coordination as well as documentation for all stages of the development cycle. And  include E-Commerce site for the Sewing Machine division of the international company Husqvarna Viking (http://ordering.husqvarnaviking.com/). An E-Commerce site which links authorized HV resellers and their customers to products available directly from Husqvarna. Integrated online sales with an AS400 at the Cleveland headquarters for order fulfillment. Initial project only made sewing machine embroidery files available for purchase and download. I was also the Team Lead on “Phase 2″ which added selling of traditional shipping products.

Team Lead during onsite project at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cardiology Department to develop a Clinical Study Tracking and Reporting System for internal and subscription use. Using a 3-Tier Architecture model and COM / DCOM on the Microsoft Windows platform.

Team Lead on in house development for commercial release of OLLA (OnLine Learning Academy (http://www.olla.net)). A Department of Defense funded research project of Lockheed Martin. My company took rights to the source, and repaired for production in D.O.D. schools. The Resource Center was redeveloped into a subscription type service for schools providing Internet resources ranked by curriculum. Also developed backend prototype for the “phase 2″ system suited to Enterprise Education / Training and College level education. Exposed data services through COM objects in the form of an API.

Team Lead on Extranet for Crystal Internet Venture Fund. A internal website for clients authenticated to their network to view status of venture capital considerations currently pending.

1994–1996                       Cyberspace Construction Company                                       Cleveland, OH

Programmer

Conversion of data and databases from DB2 to MS Access and flat files using the C programming language. Additionally automated routine repetitive (such as newsgroup processing, email sending) tasks with scripts and programs.

Education

1999                                                    Develop Mentor                                                          Torrance, CA

“Building Distributed Applications Using Visual Basic and COM”

1994 – 1996                             Electronic Technical Institute                                              Cleveland, OH

Associates Degree in Electronic Engineering

1993 – 1994                               Cleveland State University                                               Cleveland, OH

1 year of core college education with an un-named major.

Interests

·         Music (both listening and playing). I play guitar, bass, drum machines, and a little keyboard.)

·         Computer games development.

·         Reading.

Recommendations available upon request.

References available upon request.

My company is pretty choosy about the hiring process and it’s personnel, and truly, there is no chaff at all to cut. It seems that the only logical choice would in that scenario would be people with the least amount of connectedness which to me suggests “Last In, First Out” (pardon the programmer humor)

At any rate, a great bunch of guys and a very viable company, I hope they do well and that I continue my employ.

Cross your fingers for me folks, I’ll know July 2nd.

–Regards!

What the h#ll is BDD you ask? Behavioral Driven Design. So what does that mean? It is development that is driven by the required behavior of your application(s). For example, if you need to write a online slot machine game, and the app you write behaves as an online slot machine game, you have successfully developed an online slot machine game. Ok, no duh! So what? How is that better then TDD where you would have written tests that would pass when you successfully written an online slot machine game?

Oooh, so go ahead and re-read that last question. Notice how it suggests that your artifact of the entire development process is a set of tests (and the implied working application), whereas the BDD version leaves you with a working application (and the implied tests).

That is the difference my friends, they are essentially the same but their terminology differs to emphasize what truly is important in the development process. The creator of BDD states that BDD is just TDD done right. And that's relevant to the effect that when using TDD it is too easy to fall into the trap of focusing on the tests. Not to imply testing isn't important, but they are a required evil in that if we never made mistakes, we would never need to write a single line of test code. As that's pretty much impossible (being human) testing and QA aims to mitigate the risk of the human factor.

So I still haven't really explained what the deal with BDD is, so here goes (and I apologize, an expert on the topic I am not.) To cite http://behaviour-driven.org/GettingTheWordsRight:

As far as using it, there are a few implementations ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_driven_development) for writing tests using BDD. The most popular is rSpec ( http://rspec.info/ ) for the Ruby platform. There are severl for Java, two (mostly dead) for MS .Net Framework, and vaious others (python, PHP, scala). There is a Google Video by the rSpec creator which is quite interesting: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8135690990081075324&q=behavior%20driven%20development&total=27&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1

I haven't had the opportunity to do anything with BDD, nor does it look like I will with the state of BDD as it stands today. I believe what has happened is that TDD ate it and we just have to make due. The tests we write should be behaviorial based even if the syntax of the testing domain language leaves us asserting like we're writing procedural code instead of the OO stuff us enterprise type developers eat all day :-/ Please rSpec guys, port your code to .net )

Now, here's where it really gets ugly. Due to how we have our name-spacing and library hierarchies, I have to move my subsystem completely out of the main project library and add it to the library code it interfaces with. And later I will have to move it back. The sub-system isn't huge, but that's a pain. 

And why didn't we see this coming? Because we are implementing from what the tests dictate we need, not what we will need for the entire project. Some may argue that the tests apparently were not complete and I agree. But I think it's a little unreasonable to know that from the test perspective until it's discovered by actual implementation. And these happen late in the game so a change is not only a change to the implementation but to the entire underlying tests which defeat the purpose of starting with the tests.

I guess one might further argue that TDD is not a replacement for detailed design. But I have to wonder, if the design is indeed so detailed as to reveal this issue before any coding (and I have seen designs that would fit the bill, as well as designed some of that ilk for prior employers) that one would not need to start with the tests as testing techniques would have been built into the requirements and design. Of course if you can , why not as it prevents people from getting time crunched and not implementing tests at all. But isn't the point of TDD to speed up and allow for iterative design (as well as pushing testing to the forefront, which I praise it for) ?

Regards!

Sounds good in theory doesn't it? Unfortunately, I don't live in Theory (houses are far too costly…) Why only in theory you ask? Well, as I sit here writing some tests so I can actually code the logic at some point, I'm looking at some diagrams of system interaction and whatnot and I frankly have no idea what the hell the tests are supposed to do… I have nothing to test, and using TDD, at best, I'll have tests that work and they will dictate what I build, unfortunately, the business wants me to build something particular. Depending on how well I do it, I could end up with something that is what they asked for, OR I could end up somewhere completely different if my understanding is off or I get pulled into the cadence of test code (vs. application logic which may be optimized for performance or maintainabililty, or whatever).

Basically, what I am getting at is, TDD is helpful when you don't know what you are building. However, if you don't know what you are building, why the hell are you building anything? Your time would be better spent fleshing out the requirements and the design. And before you say it (because I KNOW you're thinking it), “But the business doesn't know what they want, just what they think they want and I need to deliver what they NEED!” Well, I agree, so wouldn't expectations be better managed by working through requirements with the business so everyone is on the same page, wouldn't you know better what you are trying to build? I think so.

So where did it all go wrong? To put it bluntly, <flameShield on=”true”>Inexpereienced Developers are the majority of the workforce, and they often make mistakes (as doing is the only way to build experience, this is expected, and natural (albeit problematic)) TDD is just another way to homogenize the programming workforce to reduce the negatives.</flameShield> The downside is it also reduces the positives of having an “All Star” team. People also cite “quicker to market” reasons as by the time development is done there is something to deliver. This is just slight of hand to avoid the problems of managing business expectations. Cough up more frequent milestones and vi'ola, it looks like things are getting done. Unfortunately in reality, the same time is spent, and I propose, MORE time is being spent with TDD refactoring every pass and of course the final refactoring to align the new code with the existing code (which to be fair mostly amounts to renaming of classes, functions, etc, not so much new coding)

To me it just sounds like an excuse to not have to learn more formal documentation and requirements skills. I think knowing what you have to build is far more important then delivering it quickly. The old adage goes, “You can have it done Fast, Right, and Cheap. Pick any two.” This technique addresses the disconnect between the developers and the business that employs them who know very little about software development (think Business Programming here, not so much Software Development shops ) I firmly believe a much better approach is to teach the business what they need to know to manage software development projects, because we as developers don't have that skill, our magic is programming and archetecting, management is for the pointy haired boss types.

 Ok, I'm done. My apologies to anyone I've offended! Please feel free to correct me, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I should probably mention Martin Fowler's book, “Refactoring. Improving the Design of Existing Code” as it's pretty good, although seasoned developers will likely know a lot of the items in the book, other books seem to reference this one (for example, “Refactoring to Patterns” by Joshua Kerievsky”)

-Regards!

 The team apologizes for the inconvenience and offers a reminder, “No good deed goes unpunished”

Regards!

What happened to 1.3b6 you ask? Well, it actually never happened. It wound up fixing the bug in offhand-grapple, but was no where near the real solution :-/ (they all can't be gems folks…) So, it was sh!t canned in 1.3b7 was born.

Here's a snippet from the ReadMe :

2/28/2008  -Monkk: Fixed broken off-hand grapple. Thanks Evolution for
                 aid in locating the problem and R@ncid Me@t of CL2 for
                 finding it (bastard   sorry it took so long to fix...). While I
                 was in there I added 2 grapple related cvars (server
                 controlled): mod_grappleDistance and mod_grappleSpeed.
3/2/2008    -Monkk: Completely redid the offhand grapple to not force
                 the sound on the weapon itself, but instead on the hook
                 that is being fired. When one is attached to the wall with
                 the offhand grapple, the grapple continues to make the
                 sound. You will also notice the sound originates from the
                 hook missile. This is due to having no weapon actually firing
                 it. The normal q3 grappling hook weapon gun acts the same
                 as it always has. Also added cvar for
                 mod_ambientWeaponSound which will disable the sounds of
                 the RG, LG, and BFG

http://www.reactanceunlagged.com to grab it =]

Regards!

Version 1.39Beta6 Released. Head on over to quake-revolution.com for a full list of changes

Additionally, they've added 3 new developers: Duality, Whinger, and donvito. Duality and Whinger have volunteered to help with the Quake 3 mod, whilst donvito is going to help Lucron and I work on a Quake 4 mod.

Quake4 Mod eh, Hmmz I say

The Quake Revolution Tournament needs at least 3 more teams to sign up for participation, so, dust off that Railgun, hop on over to the Quake Revolution Project Forums and sign your team on up!

Now, PlayNC is the same guys who brought you Guild Wars and Dungeons Runners. All 3 of these games are VASTLY different. Though I believe they all run on the same 3rd person based game engine.

Once you buy the game online and download it (it can also be purchased in stores and activated online). It hooks to your exising plaync account and while the client is a hefty 2.4 GB of download, the servers seem to be pretty responsive. A few hours and you're good to go.

When you login, you create a character and pick a server. Each server seems to be named for various virtues like Liberty, Freedom, Gaurdian, etc. It also seems that you have 12 character slots per server. Apparently there is a way to transfer between them at a $9.99 USD. cost.

At any rate, the character designer is pretty damn AWESOME!! You could seriously just make heroes or villains all day in whatever depth of customizable skins and powers as you can dream.

Of course, you start with just a few powers and as you progress through the game more and more unlock and are available to you.

I've only created a single hero and am just getting used to the interface. It differs from guild wars. It is themed well for a super hero type game, but it seems more… N00bish, if you will. I guess I can't say thats a bad thing but it has a ton of features and I find them pretty difficulat to find wheras, Guild Wars seemed much more intuitive. Although, I have played many Fantasy themed RPG's in the past so maybe it's just more of a mature and demanding market.

Any way you slice it, it's a fun game. I probably will not extend the original month much past 1 perhaps as I have an erratic gaming schedule and would like to allow myself the chance to find something new.

Anyway, I recommend it, it's fun. You know you've always wanted to be a super hero and villain, you know it!

SpAzy has donated 3 months of Quake3 server hosting and the fellas over at ClanTeamWork.com have donated a years worth of Web hosting for the winner!

Get that railgun polished up and swing by www.Quake-Revolution.com for more details !

Heres a little excerpt:

“Sev3n of the XCM clan came to me the other day and asked about Revolution, notified me that he and quite a few others thought Revolution was much better than IU, especially for cross-Atlantic play. During our discussion he asked if there was a way to limit cg_railHum without the use of PunkBuster.”

The Quake Revolution team has gotten together a little Christmas Release for ya'll in response to some Euro gamers requests. Hop on over to quake-revolution.com and check it out!

 Hop on over to the site and forums, and certainly try out the new Team: Work Team Fortress 2 server:

http://www.clanteamwork.com

Regards!

At any rate, I think it will be a great fit, as I am coming out of a large auto insurance company in northeast Ohio, and into, what I think, is the natural progression of selling insurance via comparative rating. Which is a big phrase for giving the consumer options without making them go to 16 insurance web sites and give their information again and again and again. And the development staff is much smaller which I think gives the people doing the work an incredible sense of involvement and ownership which you just do not get in companies with multiple divisions of 300+ IT staff.

I want to thank all my friends who were so supportive, and Insurance.com for giving me an opportunity. thank you all so very much!

Regards!

So it downloads and I install it, which takes freak'n forever, and then it starts up. I won't speak to the graphics, suffice it to say it's a modern game and looks good.

Let me begin with the one unpleasant item in the game. Like a lot of new online multi-player games, you log in to an account to play which allows the game manufacturer to track you playing for the online stats. I'll leave the debate about privacy out of the picture, but what can ya do… My issue with the account concept is, apparently, UT3 uses your gamespy account which is fine, until you realize you made a gamespy account years ago and never use it anyway. So you must EXIT the game to fill out a form on gamespy web-site so it will email you your account information so you can start the game again and use it. I realize this is a (hopefully) 1 time thing but, if you're going to go the distance and allow account creation from the game, DON'T MAKE ME LEAVE THE GAME TO GET MY ACCOUNT STARTED. That's just lame, and as a matter of fact caused me to not even bother for about a week and a half…

If I had any kind of integrity I'd have left it at that, but my boredom brought me back. I have not played the multi-player, just the single player with bots. Why? Well I forgot I had to look my gamespy account information up and I realized I could start a single player game with out it. What can I say, a bad idea once, is a bad idea the second go round. Having said that, I will try the multiplayer and look-up my account info due to my enjoyment of the single player game. I wonder how many customers this will lose.

Single Player give you 4 game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Dual, and Vehicle CTF. It additionally has Campaign style paly, but that is not available in the demo. I immediately went to Vechicle CTF being a HUGE Capture The Flag fan!

So, its exactly what the name says, CTF with vehicles. Riding a vehicle is not mandatory, the periodically spawn in your territory and you can hop in and drive or hop on and use the turrets for multiple players. The maps are pretty large so the vechicles come in handy or you're walking for a while to get to the action. The maps could easily handle 32 v. 32 players maybe more. Giving it a sort of Battlefield 1942 feel. BUT it's CTF .

The Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Dual are what you would expect: A free for all most kills wins, Red Vs. Blue most kills wins, and of course the boring 1-on-1 dual.

I'm not going to talk about the weapons, they seem to have kept it in the UT franchise, I assume they are updated looks and graphics, etc. Suffice it to say, they have cool guns to kill people with. What I can say is, it's a TON OF FUN to play! Feels like a game in all aspects (if you've read some of my other gaming rants, you know what I mean.)

In my eyes, Unreal Tournament 3 picks up the legacy of fun competitive gaming where Id dropped it 8 years ago after Quake3. My only real gripe is that I will have to learn a new set of console commands. I suppose there are worse problems to be had

Regards!

Anyway, I think I have made a 180 on this one. I really have to say it's über fun!! Which has increasingly been a problem in modern games. What do I mean? Well I'll tell ya! The 3d rendering engines of today are all beautiful, some may handle shadows better, maybe lighting in another is better, pretty particle effects, smoothed high poly-count models. To even be a FPS game today, visually stunning graphics must be included.

But what has happened to the fun? So now that worlds my battles take place in look almost as realistic as the one I live in. Now i'm left in a combat simulation. And while I agree it's “cool”, it's not fun.

Team Fortress 2 has brought the fun back to the FPS! It's cell-shading leaving the game environment rendered somewhat like a comic book is the perfect touch to remind us that, “hey you're killing time playing a game, ENJOY IT Asshat!”

The sound samples and music and announcer voices are sheer genious! Over the top campy sound bites really make the characters feel real. And when the Pyro lights a Soldier on fire, and the soldier is screamming, “fire, Fire, FIRE”, I almost fall outta my chair everytime.

I still am not a fan of class based games, I prefer and equal ground for all players, but it does allow for people to play to their strong points, and enforces team work (which in my opinion shouldn't be required but definitely is in the highly immature world of online gaming (no offense, but ya gotta call a spade a spade.))

Compare that to “Enemy Territory:Quake Wars” offering using Id's latest greatest. Visually stunning, awesome sounding guns, and boring as hell. Not any better then any other Battlefield 1942 style of multi-player combat, just using Id's licensed characters and content. While neat and pretty, just leaves me bored. Quake3 was their crowning achievement, a perfect balance of fun and combat. Big floaty power-ups, smooth movement, fast respawn, perfect. And then they stopped making games for the gamers. Sad, I hope they come to their senses soon! Until then, Team Fortress 2 is it!

Regards!

So, to make a short story long, I am in search of a job and hence the less frequent updates. My apologies, if any of you wanted to put me on your pay-roll, I promise to get back to more frequent rants

Where to be begin, the graphics I guess. Stunning, just stunning! The lighting, the foliage. I honestly felt like I was there. Those guys programmed one helluva beautiful rendering engine. You better believe you need one heck of a rig to run this bad boy to any of it's credit.

For the sake of a frame of reference, below are the specs to my main machine, this is where all the magic happens, especially the gaming, and it by far is the *baddest* box I own currently. Not a God system by any stretch but it does ok for me:

RAIDMAX RX-630A ATX12V / EPS12V 630W Power Supply
2 x BFG Tech BFGR88320GTSOCE GeForce 8800GTS 320MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor
ASUS P5N32-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
2xCrucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit
2xAcer AL2016WBbd Black 20″ 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 800:1
2xSeagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
GIGABYTE 3D Aurora 570 GZ-FA1CA-ASS Silver 1.0 mm Aluminum body ATX Full Tower Computer Case
ZALMAN CNPS9500 AT 2 Ball CPU Cooling Fan/Heatsink

For what it's worth, Vista's “Game Explorer” cites the recommended rating is 5.0, with a required of at least 3.0:

My system above gets me a 5.4 (in non-sli mode):

I should mention when I play it, I switch on SLI mode (what a waste of cash that is, do yourself a favor and just drop the cash on a sweet single card). Crysis auto-determines that I should use the “Medium” setting. And it's pretty playable, but oh lord beware of cranking up the options. They look awesome and cost a ton in terms of performance. Don't even think about Anti-Aliasing.

I kinda wonder what these fellas are developing these games on. But my guess is by summer of 2008, your average high end system ($3000+) should run it pretty well.

That said, the game is brilliant. And I've only run through the demo a few times. The UI enhancements are genious. And by believeably handling the not needing to pick up health pellets along the way, removed a HUGE stumbling block of scalable difficulty settings. How many times have have you found that making the game harder simply removes hald the armor and healthy pellets? Far far too many in my book my friends!

Like it older brother FarCry, there are sneaking elements of the game whereas one might need to eviscerate a small platoon of enemy soldiers and not get heard whilest one sneaks. Generally, I find these scenarious to be an annoyance in games, regardless of how realistic it actually is (i.e. I would expect to have no clue of the natives when thrown from an airplane, it still pisses me off to have to stumble on them.) but it felt liveable in Crysis, which I attribute primarily of not having to follow the path explicitly so that I may gain my health pellets… Brilliant I say.

I can't wait for the full blown version to come out, better yet when I can own a machine that lets it sing in 16x AA

-Regards!

In two convenient ways, download the source .rar archive, grab it with svn or simply just browse the code-base via web browser.

RAR archive
http://www.quake-revolution.com/downloads/source/Revolution-1.38-source.rar

Subversion
http://quake-revolution.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/quake3/

Ah nastalgia, if you look hard enough you can find some code I wrote up in there And I will cop to thefting the unlag railjump concept from t3h Evolution, just made good sense.

As always, mad props for your efforts and releasing the source instead of just letting it die on the vine (*cough* IU1.2B *cough*), plus who knows what Quake:Zero will cause?

Regards!

This has been fixed, if any of tried to stop by, please try again   [http://www.quake-revolution.com]

This episode felt more like HalfLife2 then 1 did. Now, I'm not saying anything against 1, and excellent game in and of its own right, but somehow, 2 fells more like “home” and I do like the tie in to Portal's Aperture Science.

I think the folks over at Valve really have a vision, and I hope they make it!

Regards!

http://forums.dbzclan.com/viewtopic.php?t=575

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, hop on over to: http://www.quake-revolution.com

Mad props to Evolution and Lucron! Writing and maintaining a new mod for such an OLD game really is difficult, at best. It's a relatively thankless job and the community so small these days, it's hard to ever gain (or god forbid, regain) momentum. It's a time consuming process and of course, we've all got day jobs… Anyway, I can't speak for them, but I understand.

I regret that things didn't happen differently, some of you know what I mean.

Anyway, I can't wait to see what they rip they're hands into next! Thanks for the effort! And I must say,releasing the source is a classy touch.

q3.reactanceunlagged.com:27960

First, let me say Peggle is an unbelievably fun game, unicorns, rainbows and all! A ball to play while you wait for the rest of your games to be finish downloading.

I used to hate the Steam delivery engine. A complete 180 for me over the past couple of years. Effortless game buying and loading. Ok, the download on a fresh computer if required takes a while but EASY!!! And much much much to my delight, I can now “gift” my version of HalfLife2 andHL2:Episode 1 to someone as Orange Box comes with them. Sheer genius I say!

The star of the litter, in my opionion is “Portal” ! Every review you've read that calls it brilliant and amazing is absolutely true. This is the only title I have ever seen that I would consider a First Person Puzzler. 19 Test Chambers of movement puzzlers plus a gripping antagonist! I was 110% invested in this game within the first 3 chambers. If you are unfamiliar with the game, you have 1 “gun” and it can shoot two portals. An Orange portal and a Blue portal ( i am unaware of any specific technical name for the color differentiation of the portals). Basically you shoot a portal at a surface that allows that and you can walk through one portal and come out the other, regardless of their placement or orientation. I.e. one may place a portal on the wall and the other on the floor and you will go through the floor and come out the wall or go in the wall and pop out the floor. And you use this technique to maneuver around the test chambers and complete the goal. Hop on YouTube.com and look for some videos, I can't do it justice. Worth every penny of the $20.00 USD, I promise!

TeamFortress 2
I gotta say, I love the looks of this game. The character models with a more, cartoony feel, really make it feel more like a game then war simulation. Which, is why I play games, if I wanted war simulations, I could join the armed forces. The class based concepts are very nice. I personally can't stand them. I hope someone mods TF2 to remove the classes and let all weapons be avaaliable all characters. Also, the players should be move the same speed. I realize that is not how class based games are supposed to work, and I will again mention that I do not like class based games. If TF2 and Quake3 could have a twisted love child, I am all about that!! Great work on this game, wish I would be getting more use out of it.

HalfLife2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2
I'm not going to recap HL2, it's a stunning great game! So nice to being able to see the maps then the near pitch black of some other FPS games (which I love!!) A great continuation from HL2. I really enjoy the storylines. I don't have much to say here, if you liked HL2, you will like E1, and most likely E2. Though I have not had a chance to crack it open yet. I am not allowing myself to until I finish Episode 1. (Yeah. sorry, tough year, was sorta busy )

All in all, the guys at Valve are doing an amazing job and some amazing work across the board from game development, content delivery, and game playability. Hats off to you fellas, if you're ever in Cleveland, Ohio, stop by, dinner is on me!

Regards!

–
Monkk

monkk@monkk.com

Enjoy, and as always report bugs , questions or feature requests to http://www.reactanceunlagged.com forums.

Regards!

–
Monkk
monkk@monkk.com