Guinea Pigs at Last

I just realized that the byline of this blog has always carried with it the promise of guinea pigs and that so far I have delivered very little content pertaining to the little guys.  So here you are.

Butters

Oreo

Copernicus

These are my 3 little piglets.  Butters and Oreo are brothers, and Copernicus is their proud mother.  She was sold to me under the false pretence of being male, and hence the gender confusion in her name.  But it turns out the name suits her just fine and her babies couldn’t be more fun.

And there we have it; the occasional guinea pig.

Can’t Update My iPhone Yet

I was looking forward to writing up a review of how cool/crappy/whatever the new iPhone software is.  Looks like I’ll have to keep looking forward.

iTunes let me download the update just fine.  Considering the software was just released within the last couple of hours, it downloaded extremely fast.  But I can’t update because, “the iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable.”

Its crap like this that makes me hate organizations like Apple and MS and anyone else who has the ego to mandate that my stuff be contingent on their stuff.  Think about this:  I have an iPhone and I have the new software downloaded and I have the means to put the software on the iPhone… except I can’t because they have a server down.

This is a prime case of x+2=3, but not being able to determine x because you don’t know y, even though y isn’t in the equation.  Y isn’t in the freaking equation!

Imagine a world in which everything worked this way.  Like I can’t start my car in the morning becuase GM is bankrupt and they’re down.  Or I can’t play single player video games because my game console temporarily lost its Internet connection.  Or I can’t watch a movie on my DVD player because the planets are out of alignment.

Okay, maybe that last anology sounded absurd, but was it really?  Here I am with all the hardware and software I need, all of which was legally acquired, and I can’t use it because some server out there somewhere is down.  That server might as well be a planetary misalignment as far as I’m concerned.

My First Week Owning an iPhone

It is important for you to understand up front that I am 28 years old and spent roughly 27 years loathing Apple for a wide range of reasons. I could list those reasons out but most of them are fairly predictable for anyone who is on the PC side of the PC vs. Apple war that has raged for seeming eons.

But here I find myself for the first time in life, a proud owner of an Apple product, and only seldom cursing its name the way I have traditionally cursed other products of the same brand. Truth be told, I love my iPhone so far and can only think of a small handful of changes I would make if I were Apple.

First and foremost it is my phone. That’s its core competency and it functions quite smoothly. No better or worse than any other decent cell phone on the market right now so far as I can tell. If it had somehow gotten this part wrong, while succeeding at everything else I would have call it a failure (or possibly an iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone, camera, mic).

But I keep finding myself using it for so many other things. It is a means of keeping the Internet with me as I walk around and do whatever it is I do in life. The potential power that comes with having Google in my pocket at all times still hasn’t quite set in mentally for me, though I have been taking lots of advantage of it. The voice-recognition functionality of the Google search app is wonderful.

I also find myself more readily willing to check up on Facebook, or MySpace, read the tweets of my Twitter followees, search Amazon for product reviews, or just plain old play a handheld video game.

The iPhone excels at all of these things. It certainly feels like the generic portable information-giving device that has been on display in so many Science Fiction works.

Now it does have a handful of negatives. Copy/paste functionality has been promised for a future update, but as that is the future and this is now I sorely crave that ability. Also, multitasking apps would be amazing. The device isn’t broken without it, but as I become more adept at traversing my phone’s capabilities this omission has become more and more glaring.  Being able to “alt-tab” between a Google Map to a restaurant, a web page of its menu, and the half-complete text message I’m typing to a friend who needs directions would be wonderful.  Additionally, it wouldn’t kill them to make certain well established file-types readily readable (PDF anyone?) without having to download a poor but functional free app or a decent but non-free app.

Hopefully some of these things can come in the future with updates and app releases.  In the meantime I’ll enjoy all the terrific functionality it does have and encourage others to give it a try.

One more thing!  I’d just like to throw in that my friend Scott Brown wrote his own iPhone game and its a blast!  I highly recommend checking it out- Tic-Tac-No! is harder than it seems and only $1.00 for the full copy.

Hamachi Gets You All On The Same Network

Hamachi has to be one of the coolest apps I’ve seen in a while. It lets you establish an externally hosted psuedo VPN server that any number of clients (behind firewalls, mind you) can connect to and share resources.

I came across this while trying to figure out a way to use LAN gaming in Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 rather than using the online component. I had two computers on my own LAN and one friend across the Internet from me that I wanted to get into the same game. Due to limitations of my network, I couldn’t get both systems on my LAN to connect to the built-in Gamespy online component. That’s when I decided to use a VPN to get my remote friend to dial-in to my system.

Unfortunately, even though the Windows-based VPN allowed my friend through to see my game server, we ultimately could not play. Apparently Red Alert 3, as well as many other games surely, broadcast their packets when in LAN mode rather than route them when in Online mode. Once the game should have started, it kicked my friend out because his routed VPN connection wasn’t providing him with the broadcast packets that a bridged VPN would have provided.

Enter Hamachi. The app itself is an offering from LogMeIn.com and allows users to all join a remote network. It is free for non-commercial use, which made it perfect for our situation. We installed the client on all three machines, connected to the same virtual network, and suddenly we were all playing Red Alert 3 as if we were sitting right next to each other. It was truly a wonderful experience.

The implications of this application go well beyond gaming though. It is basically a bypass around NATed firewalls. You could install it behind your home or corporate firewall to allow remote access to specific clients, or get at their shared files/folders, or maybe connect to your source control server.

There are obviously a slew of security concerns here and I honestly haven’t taken the time to fully investigate them. During install and configuration you are asked if Hamachi should disable Windows services that could be exploited through its VPNish connection. So far I haven’t played with that feature enough to know which services are disabled exactly, but it is probably smart to allow them to be disabled and then make sure your system is still operational and useful for its original purpose.

Enjoy the software, take care regarding security, and please send me feedback if you learn anything interesting!

Karecards.com Now Open For Business

Over the weekend I got to aid in the deployment of the site Karecards.com with the site’s owner, Karen Sudduth.

Karen is a cancer survivor, but more importantly she is a strong woman with an amazing talent for all things artistic.  While going through her treatments to overcome her illness, she turned to painting as a means of relaxing and expressing herself and her feelings.  Her paintings are beautiful and she has turned them into a series of 16 “get-well” themed cards which can now be purchased on her site.

She donates a large portion of the money made from card purchases to the Wings Cancer Foundation.  At the time of this writing, the Wings website has a story featuring Karen and her incredible artistry on the front page.  The foundation is a non-profit organization whose mission is to “provide hope, education, research and support without charge to anyone touched by cancer.”  In short, this is a noble organization doing some very important and wonderful work.

Please visit her new website and consider contributing to this very worthy cause!  The world will be a better place for it.

Dell, AMD, SQL Server 2008 Promotional Video

I recently got to be minorly involved in the shooting of a promotional video for Dell, AMD, and MS featuring the small company I have been a part of for the last year.  Big thanks to all those involved in producing this film!!

Mega Man 9 is Harder Than Crap

I’ve loved the Mega Man games for nearly 20 years now.  I collected all six original NES Mega Man titles.  I have beaten them all, along with three of the Mega Man X series games.  But right now, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I may never beat Mega Man 9.  

I purchased it yesterday afternoon for the Xbox 360.  Probably a poor choice since the 360’s d-pad sucks, but whatever.  Hindsight would have me purchase the game for the PS3, but then I wouldn’t be able to boost my GamerScore on Live.  Oh wait, most of the achievements that Mega Man 9 offers start with the phrase “Complete the game…” and then tack on something crazy like “…3 times in one day,” or ” …in under 60 minutes.”  

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game.  The 8-bit graphics and sound make me feel like a kid again for all the right reasons.  It is truly a wonderful accomplishment on Capcom’s part to have created so perfectly a new NES game.  

But the years of modern gaming have spoiled me on easier difficulty levels.  Games are just so much easier than they used to be.  I’m guessing its the effort of game designers to cater to casual gamers.  Few games live up to the default difficutly attached to most retro games.  Beat Halo 3 on legendary?  Done.  Beat Gears of War on insane?  Done.  Beat Resistance on hard?  Done.  Beat a single boss in Mega Man 9?  Whoa hold on a minute!  Give me an hour or so with the level and then we’ll talk.

In my one-and-a-half-ish-hours of gameplay I’ve defeated one boss.  One.  That’s it.  To be fair, I don’t remember picking up the original games and just blazing through them.  It took patience.  It took replaying levels.  Some I’ve replayed so many times over the years that if I close my eyes and concentrate hard enough I can relive large portions and even hear the music (I’m not even joking, the music has always been amazing in these games and 9 is no exception).  So maybe its not that I’m not used to a game this hard, but it’s that I’m not used to a game that isn’t designed to be intuitive on your first attempt with it.  

Regardless, the game feels hard.  Harder than any game in a long time.  But I’ve loved every second of it.  Go buy it now, on whatever system you can (beware the 360 d-pad though), and enjoy it.  Playing it will make you feel 9 years old again.  If only more things in life had that effect.

Tiger Woods 09 for Xbox 360 – I Can’t Copy My Player To Another Xbox!

Its been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted anything, mainly because I’ve been busy playing EA Sports’ Tiger Woods 09 on my Xbox 360.  Its a terrific golf sim and EA has out-done themselves on quantity and quality of content.  The real-time feedback on swing mechanics, added courses, improved graphics, improved chipping, alternate control mode, simultaneous online play, and dynamic player attributes are but a few of the improvements that all add up to make this the best Tiger Woods game ever.  But…

I want to take my awesome custom player (ChosenOne) from my home Xbox to work with me and load him up on the office system.  Three of my coworkers are wanting to do the same.  To solve this, I picked up an Xbox 360 Memory Unit (256MB) off Ebay.  I was easily able to copy my player to the memory card in the Xbox 360’s dashboard, but loading the player at work was a different story.

If I try to simply copy the file back to the hard drive off the memory unit in the dashboard, I’m told that it can not be copied across profiles.  Why is my profile attached to the memory unit?  I don’t get this.

If we go into the game’s interface and try to load the character from the memory unit, the game tells us that no valid users were found on the memory card.  This is most troubling.

At this point we deduced that there must be some means in the game’s interface to “save” off the player to the memory card or for exporting to a different profile on the Xbox… wrong.  There doesn’t seem to be any command for this.  

So now we’re stuck.  Not sure what the next move is, if there is one.  Searching forums has not proven helpful since it seems we’re the only people in the world trying to do this.  

Please let me know if you know the way around this issue!  This is a truly great game and I hate to see it suffer such an obvious shortcoming!

Little Brother Book Review

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s young adult novel, Little Brother, last week and wanted to post my commentary on what a fun book it was.  I first started following Cory Doctorow’s postings online at Boing Boing about a year ago.  He is a co-editor of the site and often posts items that jump out at me, such as how evil DRM is.  When he released this book, he did so using Creative Commons licensing, rather than Copyrighting.  This lets him give the book away online for free, while also selling hardback copies in common bookstores.

I bought the hardback for my girlfriend, but also downloaded the PDF version so I could quickly search and find what I wanted to quote later in this post.  Its handy having both versions.

The title of the book is a play on the Big Brother concept from that novel everyone has read, 1984.  The reason the adjective is changed to “little” is that the people in this story who are doing the real covert monitoring are teenagers.  They are fighting back against a corrupt Department of Homeland Security, and they are using some of the most fun technology I’ve ever read about to do so. 

The story is aimed at the young adult audience, but any adult who enjoys a good spy/tech novel will love it.  The characters are developed well and are generally likeable.  Doctorow writes this story from the first-person perspective of the main character, Marcus Yallow, who unwittingly becomes the leader of the resistance against the DHS.  Without giving too much of the plot away, Marcus “comes of age” and all that good stuff like most young adult novels get into, but he does so while launching a secret war against his own government, which is pretty exciting.

There is a lot of explanation of various technologies in the book, most of which are technologies that actually exist today and can be easily acquired.  One such explanation stuck out like a sore thumb to me because it was the inner monologue Marcus gives before an all-night programming session.  He explains what programming computers is like to him, and I thought Doctorow nailed it in a way that made me especially proud to be a programmer myself.  I’ve inserted a few paragraphs of that section below:

 If you’ve never programmed a computer, you should. There’s nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It’s like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a hinge for a door – using math and instructions. It’s awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

A computer is the most complicated machine you’ll ever use. It’s made of billions of microminiaturized transistors that can be configured to run any program you can imagine. But when you sit down at the keyboard and write a line of code, those transistors do what you tell them to.

Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will ever create an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city. 

Those are complicated machines, those things, and they’re offlimits to the likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times more complicated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can learn to write simple code in an afternoon. Start with a language like Python, which was written to give nonprogrammers an easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.

 

 If I weren’t already a coder, I would become one after reading that.

My only complaint with the book is the handful of places where Doctorow uses alternate spellings of words, which are popular memes online, to make his tech-savvy main character seem like a real 1337 d00d.  For instance, he describes a girl as being h4wt (hot) multiple times and it grated on my nerves a little more each time.  That’s hardly enough though to detract from the rest of the book, which was an enjoyable quick read.

I heartily recommend this to anyone who likes tech-ish fiction.  The link to the download of the free copy is at the top of this post, and the hardback retails at just about any bookseller.  Enjoy!

 

 

SQL Server Management Studio 2008 Gives No Intellisense for SQL 2005 Instances

A coworker of mine discovered today that in the RTM version of SSMS that ships with SQL Server 2008, Intellisense only works when you are connected to a 2008 server instance.  Point that bad boy at 2005 and you get nothing.

In the pre-release builds of SSMS 2008, Intellisense was available, however quite buggy.  It was basing all of its prompting on features and Transact-SQL syntax that is based on 2008’s version.  When writing tSQL for a 2005 instance, it might prompt you incorrectly or even highlight malformed code that actually is completely correct, however not correct for 2008.

An issue has already been opened and close for this in Connect.  It currently has over 200 validations, which are votes from users wanting the issue resolved, but its closed status seems to say that the issue will not be resolved.

Personally, I prefer buggy Intellisense to none at all.  The note I left when validating the issue was to that effect as well.  Does anyone else out there feel the same way?