Software
General software comments.
For those of you who are tired of City of Heroes posts and who haven't been tracking my technical blog, a bunch of posts there lately have been more thoughtful than technical. You might want to check them out. Is Microsoft Evil? Undercutting Your Own Argument On Being a Microsoft Shill Don't those titles alone make you want to check them out? Technorati tags: Technical, Microsoft
Our regular gaming group has recently decided to pick up City of Heroes for our regular Tuesday night games mostly because grouping requirements in D&D Online are simply too unwieldy. I had canceled my DDO account relatively early so I haven't been in the Tuesday night games for a while. Well, City of Heroes is another matter entirely and I foresee being a regular attendant.
Yay! CoH!
Now, you have to understand that City of Heroes is one of my favorite MMOGs and one I only stopped playing because I lacked a decent super group to play with. It's also one of...
I've been reserving judgement on Windows Media Player and the whole Digital Rights Management issue for a couple months now. I mean, when Microsoft updated to version 11 and people began complaining about how adding the DRM made it less stable and prone to lockup, I figured this stuff would be worked out and that at least it provided a baseline capability that people can use as a starting point.
Until today, that is. Judgement has been rendered and Windows Media Player is officially found wanting. Not just wanting. It is not merely inadequate. WMP 11 has officially, in my...
Well, I created a new post over at my new IT blog. If you're here for the IT stuff, pop on over... Yes, I am having a tough time adjusting...
For many significant events in my life, I remember when they occurred by where my family was living at the time. We were in an un-air-conditioned house in Phoenix, Arizona in the summer I first read the Lord of the Rings. I clearly recall both the library and the corner I'd sit in at home while I read it. I devoured the whole trilogy in a couple of days and I remember that it as a friend in an area where I had none.
It'll come as no surprise, then, that I jumped at the chance to play the new MMOG,...
If you have the eye of a good copy editor, you might have noticed some volatility in the ole Tag Cloud on the right. I made some changes at the request of people on the SubText developers list and reworked some stuff—most of which is completely invisible. The biggest visible change is that I decided that assuming an even dispersion around the mean might work in natural statistics, blog post tags tend to be more of a declining curve however.
What that means is that most algorithms for displaying tag clouds use a formula that allocates about half their categories...
I just completed some SubText hacking and the results should be visible now. In addition to upgrading to version 1.9.5 (which should officially release here shortly), I implemented a new feature: Tag Clouds. I'd had enough of my feature envy from all the cool kids who had them, so I went and rolled my own. If you're at my actual site (as opposed to a feed reader), the Tag Cloud is off on the right.
This was a non-trivial feature to add. In an email conversation on the SubText developers' list a couple months ago, Phil Haack (semi-benevolent project dictator) indicated...
Like many businesses, my current employer uses Microsoft Dynamics GP for our main accounting/inventory software. From a recent trip to Connections (the big convention for Dynamics), I learned that there were some cool data mining utilities available from Microsoft that we might be able to use. I love free stuff, and the opportunity to give our executives something to chew on for a bit (keeping them out of my hair) was one I couldn't pass up.
The Analysis Services install I managed to dig up (after much searching on Microsoft's Customer Source) went pretty easily. There are a couple of SSIS...
I like game systems and always have. They fascinate me. It started out with my generation's standard: D&D. I bought my first game manual in 1981 and haven't looked back since. This fascination manifests itself in a masochistic desire to explore new MMOGs when they come out. If a game claims to innovate away from the standard mob-hunt, monster bash level progression, I'm particularly interested. So when I read that Vanguard has three separate spheres for character advancement and that you didn't need to advance at all in the "Adventure" sphere (i.e. killing stuff) to advance in the others, I...
People have a lot of different reasons for posting blog entries. These reasons vary from financial, to personal, to professional, to I'm afraid to know more. For me, one reason I take the time when I could be doing something else is that I like to put my ideas out there to be tested. I don't really care if a majority of people agree with me so much as I want to see what other people have to say for or against certain things. The downside to this is that I'll sometimes find that an idea isn't as good as...
Have you ever hacked a product to do something it wasn't intended to do in order to "simplify" things for your users and have that blow up in your face? This is an account of my experiences doing just that with MS Reporting Services. If you've used Reporting Services at all, you'll know that there are two virtual directories that are created on IIS when you first install it to a server: ReportServer actually serves up the reports by passing the requested data to external applications via whatever protocol you have configured and Reports (aka ReportManager) which serves as a user...
I just ran into what has to be the buggiest piece of software... ever. Bear in mind that I predate DOS games and have had experience getting games to run in Win 3.1 and even Win ME--some of them games that push the limit of the "Minimum Recommended System Requirements". Maybe time has softened old wounds, but nothing in my memory comes even close to the horror that is Dark and Light. Seriously. Couple all those bugs with the worst "support" I can remember and you get an experience that is simply best forgotten. Or better, best never begun.
I mean, I've been...
In my response to Jeff Atwood, I mentioned the Technorati widget control that he is now using in lieu of Trackbacks. The Technorati widget is fairly simple to implement, but you have to be able to feed it the permalink for your post for it to be able to work. Since I already had a go at creating custom controls for use in SubText, I decided that now was a good time to see if I couldn't come up with a way to create one that has access to blog entry attributes like the permalink. For your edification, here's what...
Jeff Atwood has a recent post on why he finally gave up and disabled Trackbacks on his blog. My blog is the tiniest fraction of his and I had to disable trackbacks just for sheer spam volume back in October (inspiring an anti-spam rant of my own).
Jeff lays the blame for Trackbacks' demise on Six Apart--the outfit that created the standard in 2002. Ah, those heady glory days when you still had to explain to people what a blog was. Trackbacks were a great idea. They still are a great idea. But Jeff is right, the simplicity of the standard...
Okay, I've had SubText up and running for a week and some now, so naturally it is time to tinker. In poking around, I'm not as happy with SubText's integration model as I was with DasBlog's. DasBlog exposed a number of "macros" that you could use to insert certain internal values into your own stuff. I kind of liked their model because once you registered your own code, you could reference your macros from DasBlog stuff as well (bear in mind that I didn't actually implement DasBlog, so my impression could be off).
That said, as long as you don't need to...
More griping. I know! You'd think I were a negative person. I'm not really. I don't think. Anyway, this one is short. I've noticed a trend lately (okay, in two products that I sort of like) where developers are using a progress bar to indicate that the program is busy and will get back to you shortly. Now, to me, there's a reason that ye ole progress bar has a Minimum, a Maximum and a Value. You know, it has a task that starts at some value, that value "progresses" until it hits some ending where it can then stop. No doubt...
I don't mean for this to be a "gripe" blog. Not that gripe blogs aren't entertaining--I mean, I kind of like Mr. Angry, the Daily WTF, and others. That said, sometimes you just have to share in the hopes that you aren't alone in this whole frustration thing. I named names in a previous post about Arrogant Software, so I guess this is mostly adding to the list. Today's highlight is SpySweeper from WebRoot. Now, like all the software on my Arrogant list, I found SpySweeper useful. I even bought two subscriptions so that both our computers would be covered. Unfortunately,...
The tragedy of the commons is a well-recognized break-down in any free-market. To summarize brutally, any resource held in common ownership will tend to be overused. You don't have to go further than your own kindergarten experience to know that you eat the candy shared by the whole classroom before you eat what you brought for yourself. Well, candy is pretty straight-forward, but some resources are renewable if husbanded carefully (the name comes from common grazing grounds for sheep). Over-use will destroy the resource, but since nobody owns it, nobody has any incentive to cut back and a very real...
There's been an uptick in spamming lately. Some believe that it's a result of growth in the number of botnets out there (groups of computers that have been compromised by third-parties to run whatever the third-party wants them to). Personally, I think it's because the penalties for spam aren't stiff enough. After cleaning up my trackback backlog, I'm ready to consider anything. I'm ready to lobby for tar and feathers if that'll help. Judging by the amount of spam for drug suppliers, I'm thinking we can kill two birds with one stone and clear out the FDA's backlog with a...
Ever notice that software seems to have a personality? Some programs are desperate for approval, some eager to please, some like to show-off all their cool features, some calmly wait for their opportunity to be useful. And some programs are simply arrogant jerks. There are a couple of utilities that are useful enough that, like in real-life, you simply put up with their crappy attitude and count the days until a competitor comes along that will offer a viable alternative. I end up tallying my annoyances every time they crop up, keeping score for the day I can wipe them...
As you may have noticed, MSN Spaces has officially changed to Windows Live Spaces. The URL has changed and I notice that redirects are in place. I'm not sure how long those will remain valid, so update as needed (if you're using my Feedburner RSS feed, no worries--I've updated that already and nothing else will change. This is an unlooked-for bonus on using Feedburner as an aggregator re-publisher). Anyway, I like what they've done with the place. My favorite change (by far) is the addition of Gadgets. There are a couple of new modules available that I have taken advantage of...