Scott Miller

My summer astronomy continues. Although a cold front and the remnants of Gustav are making it cloudy for the next few days, last night was pretty good, even from my backyard in the city.

I spent about an hour watching the shadow of a Jovian moon traverse across the face of Jupiter. A moon will look like a star next to Jupiter until it crosses in front of it, whereas you can see the shadow on the face of Jupiter.

According to this Javascript utility on Sky and Telescope's website (with a good article), what I saw was the moon Europa. I couldn't see the moon itself against the disk of Jupiter, but I could see its trailing shadow:

I also used this ancient Java-web-based Jupiter moon calculator from 1997:

Here is my first attempt at Photosynth. I used the creepy Dreamer's Awake sculpture by Tom Oterness at the Wichita Art Museum.

Although I had a full 180 degree panorama, the right half was at a different zoom than the left half, making it disjointed. I wish Photosynth would have some better editing tools (like outline the order you want) rather than relying on the software to group them.

What do you do?

Many people, particularly men, have their personal identity defined by what they do for a living.

At a recent church picnic, there was the usual small talk, which eventually leads to the question, "What do you do?". And, even though people mean well, they may feel better about you or themselves, or even evaluate you differently, based on your response.

One of the guys was embarassed and avoided the question. Later, he said that he used to have a prominent job with a big office and large salary. But he got laid off. Now he is working at UPS and is waiting for his 6 month anniversary so that he can eligible for full-time work.

 

In American society, our jobs are treated as a defining point of our identities. Maybe it is appropriate since we spend more waking hours working than doing any other activity.

I have always found the response "I work at XYZ company" to be almost a statement of "I am owned by XYZ company". According to an article in Fast Company magazine a couple of years ago, they apparently agree. It was recommended that the correct answer to the question should be : "I am currently employed at... and I do xyz there". This is supposed to show that you are not defined by your current job, that you are not "owned" by the job/company, and it also supposedly shows that you are open (and available) to other opportunities, especially since the best job leads are from contacts.

What do you do? (geek style)

As geeks, the "What do you do?" question takes on even more levels of meaning - with the usual tech posturing and questions like "what tools do you use?", etc. Someone in this group of preening peacocks will always feel better about themselves after this exchange.

Who am I? I am a ...

I updated my resume this week. This inevitably leads to the question of "Who am I?", which is not much better than "What do you do?".

I am a Business Analyst, Project Leader, and Project Manager. And when I say that, you will filter that based on your personal and professional experience. I have had technical people immediately avert their eyes and mumble, "Oh...". I know. I saw you. Some have even quoted The Dilbert Principle - stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management. Such BS...

I used to primarily be a developer. I worked on some cool projects - but it was always someone else's ideas or directions. I am now more interested in IT strategy.

Oh no, I'm doing it again. "I am"..."I do"...

The funny thing is that I am much greater than the sum of my parts. And my potential is much greater than the "trail" I have left professionally, as evidenced in my resume. God knows I am under-utilized at my current employer!

Maybe it is more

Maybe we are not supposed to be defined by our jobs. So many of the GeeksWithBlogs bloggers are much greater than the sum of their parts also, and most are defined more by what they do outside of their current job.

D'Arcy, consultant by day, is an aspiring motivational speaker with his Ignite Your Life series.

Chris Williams, while being a Microsoft MVP, is just as known for his blogging, tattoos, and XNA presentations.

And George Clingerman is not defined by where he works, but by his XNA game development.

And really, my most enduring memories of the last two years have nothing to do with work, but are parts of life - bike rides, rock climbing, sunsets, vacations, bunnies (ok, I made that last one up). They make the other BS with the job seem pretty unimportant by comparison.

Google Maps has finally done the street level maps in Wichita. This is fairly impressive since they haven't even bothered to chart Seattle.

One of the funny things is the outcry that it is "invading people's privacy". A woman on the news was upset because it showed her kids in the pool in front of her house. She said that it will make her a target for predators. Of course, being on the local TV news would have more of an effect, I would think.

And the local paper took note of all of the cars in the local tittie bar parking lot. Too bad they couldn't have gotten pictures of license plates, which is a favorite pastime of snapping photogs around here, who take a pic of the license tag, look up the tags and e-mail a "shame on you" postcard to the car owner's house.

Google has gone through the images and blurred out people's faces and license plates, like this:

This must have been some technological feat to blur out faces and license plates, especially since it is one frame about every 10-20 feet on some streets.

My weekend wasn't as adventurous as Chris' jaunt through a storm drain, but I had the most fun and productive night of stargazing ever, last night.

I have an 8" Dobsonian telescope that sits in its own stand. It doesn't have a motor or computer to find sky images, and it doesn't auto-track to keep them in view. I used to have one of those but sold it to buy this one, because the longer focal length allows more magnification and the wider diameter allows it to collect more light so I can see those things better when I blow them up.

I have been very unimpressed with most star charts and astronomy books because they usually give more information than I need, and they show the pictures in color. Most dark sky objects, like nebulae, are not the pretty colors that you see in the books. In a scope they are faint and usually black and white. This is because it is faint enough that the cones in the center of your retina in the eye, which can sense color, need more light than what you see.

You also have to get away from city lights to see the dark sky objects, so I trekked out of town where I could have a clear view of the southern sky to explore Sagittarius and Scorpius, which are impoosible to see from my house, due to city lights.

I got a new book, Turn Left at Orion - A Hundred Night Sky Objects to See in a Small Telescope - And How to Find Them, an excellent book that shows good charts and what the area looks like in a finderscope, as well as what you can expect to see in a small telescope, not the false color images from Hubble.

Very impressive. I tallied several scope finds in the three hours that I was out, including the Ring Nebula (M57), the Swan Nebula (M17), the Lagoon Nebula (M8), the Dumbbell Nebula (M27), and many star clusters in both the southern sky and M13 and M92 globular clusters in Hercules.

In my previous post, I was focused on making One Game per Month. Well, that only works if you continue to work on it. I, on the other hand, got distracted on doing something else. Which is a problem, because when it stops being fun and I'm in the bowels of coding and debugging, it seems more like work.

This brought to my mind the nature of epiphany. We all want to get that lightning bolt from the sky that gives us the great idea. In fact, epiphany used to mean that you got the idea from God.

I am reading The Myths of Innovation, by Scott Berkun. In the book, he covers the myth of epiphany, that great ideas seldom come as epiphanies, unlike the story of an apple dropping on Newton's head yielding insight into gravity, which is likely a myth of story anyway (the apple, not gravity...).

Instead, ideas come *surprise* through hard work, practice, and failure. Often what is attributed as a true epiphany is really the ability to put two disparate thoughts together, noticing the possible connection. Discovering penicillin through mold could be an example.

I have a book on song writing and lyric writing that basically says that you only get better through practice and working at it. Getting that flash of a great song idea doesn't happen very often, which is also why most of the songs on the radio sound the same, because it is easier, and yea even advisable, to follow a formula.

Berkun's book on Innovation also has a funny story of a group of business people touring Google, and marveling at the amount of toys, games, bean bag chairs, etc. And they wondered how anyone can get that next great idea if the staff is sitting around in bean bag chairs playing games and talking to each other. :)

I read an interesting article on MSN about indie game-makers challenging themselves by creating one game a week/month for an entire year. Some are gems and some are crap.

One of the games was the super popular Tower of Goo.

They also have an article on Gamasutra about How to Prototype a Game in 7 Days. Their article is interesting and basically challenges the game designer to do the equivalent of random word association - develop a theme in a short period of time, and do small mini-game that may experiment with one idea, like a certain type of physics, or using the microphone as a controller. Interesting stuff.

So I am trying something similar, although I may not limit myself to one week or month. Now that I have a basic game framework to duplicate my XNA efforts (I call it my Bloink game engine), I am ready to begin.

My game is called MOO. It consists of a mini-game with a cow or multiple cows. (I know, the cow head looks like a deer). A farmer has to milk the cow and walk over to the vat and dump the milk, racing the clock and the ever increasing udders of the cow, which may explode. The cow has sprites of the ever-increasing udders and gradually larger eyes. The graphics are rudimentary, similar to George Clingerman's tutorials.

Here is the cow:

For the last six weeks I have been working on a Master of Orion clone called Sovereign - all in XNA.

Main screen

Intro screen

Menu screen

Planet info screen

All of these graphics were created with Paint.Net. All graphics, such as the logo, menu screen background, and planets, were created from tutorials on the Paint.Net forums.

 

 

Current Features:
• Intro screen has a gear animation that moves across the screen, cracks like an egg, and an Appsguild logo flies out, complete with Fade.
• Menu screen has a menu manager
• Main screen has planets that are dynamically loaded from an XML file.
• When right clicking on planets, a planet info screen appears with an enlarged graphic and planet info numbers

Download my current code from: sov06012008.zip

Still alot of work to go. I used example code for Fade and Screen Manager from George Clingerman's XNA Development, and some Screen Manager ideas from Domination for Xbox 360 by Focused Games.

I continue to mess around with XNA 2.0. I have been using George Clingerman's tutorial on selecting a sprite with a selection box. The tutorial is also on his XNADevelopment.com site here.

Basically, there are two sprites that you can select by left clicking on them:

or you can drag a selection box around them to select them:

You can then select one sprite in this manner and right click somewhere on the screen to move it, similar to a RTS game. Very handy. But I want something more.

I want to click on a sprite and have a selection cursor appear around the sprite.

And when I click somwhere else, I want the selection cursor to go to that sprite, or not appear at all if I don't click on a sprite.

And I want to be able to reference the sprite that I clicked on.

So this is how I did it:
I created a sprite manager class with a collection to store all of my sprites. It has lookup code so that I can drill down to the sprite that was clicked on. <

Here is the source code (spriteselection.zip).

And here are some of the planet sprites (planetsprites.zip).

These planet sprites were created with Paint.Net.

How to make planets with Paint.Net

How to make starscapes and nebulae with Paint.Net

 

In my previous post I talked about making my first RPG tutorial in XNA 2.0. One of the challenges was finding a sprite with all the animation movements in different directions.

I came across Charas RPG Maker site. Once you register, you can create sprites in all their cheesy, 8-bit glory. The sprite options are very comprehensive, and include hundreds of options for body, face, hair, dress.

 

Each animation cell is 72 x 97. To get the background to be blank in dotnet, I changed the background to magenta (R: 255, G: 0, B: 255).

Here are some of my samples:
Knight:

Wizard:

Zombie:

Medusa:

Greedo:

Wolverine:

After long last, I have started to mess around with XNA 2.0.

I really like George Clingerman's tutorials here on GWB, as well as George's XNADevelopment.com site.

If I make a game, what kind of game would I like to make? As I have said before, I spend more time playing old Nintendo games downloaded on the Virtual Console on my Wii - old Zelda and Metroid. So I think I will try to make an RPG.

I have messed around with RPG's before, using Microsoft's Crusader RPG starter kit, on the Coding4Fun part of the site, from the time before XNA. An RPG with ugly graphics.

Although the graphics are ugly, the game code does have a good tutorial and code on creating tile maps loaded from files (in this case they are csv and text files).

So I am on my way. Using George's sprite code from his tutorials, I want to create an animated sprite of a typical walking RPG avatar. I used Charas RPG Maker site to create my animated sprites (more on this site in my next post).

The resulting sprite has three frames of animation walking in all directions.

I quickly figured out that it is difficult to animate a walking sprite. If you have one frame per touch of the arrow key it is not too bad, but otherwise he flails wildly. I tried to use code from Crusader to add walking frame rates but Crusader treats each tile as an individual "hex", something that I was not doing. I finally found some sample code - Animating Sprite Sheets and Sprite Movement, which adds in a variable framerate that keeps the walking smooth, slow, and non-jerky. I put this code together with George's stuff and came up with this:

In the above frame, I have an animated, walking avatar knight (which responds to arrow keys) and an animated zombie that walks in place.

Here is the source code: rpgTutorial1.zip.

Also in my travels, I came across an excellent set of RPG tutorials by Nick on nick.gravelyn.com that include tile engines, sprites, NPC dialog windows, etc.

In today's news:
Wal-Mart stops selling Linux PC's in their stores. They sold the PC's for $199. Wal-Mart will still sell them through their website.

Not sure if this is because of Linux or the quality or marketing of the $199 PC. But overall not surprising. I'm not sure that the average customer would be geek enough to run Linux, or if Linux is mainstream enough for the general population. If I was going to run Linux (which I tried and disliked) I would download it or buy the CD and install it myself.

Working in corporate America, in a company that does not solely do software development as a product or service, has its challenges. As an example, hardware and software are always "good enough". I have seen Vista but have never used it. Every company I have worked for wipes the new PC's of Vista and installs XP.

And processes will inevitably gravitate to BDUF (big design up front). One of the comments was that we did not have enough documentation and project artifacts.

As my previous posts have said, we have been using lean/agile software development practices for some time. But recently the word came down from corp HQ To use a company-wide process, based on the PMI. So back to PMI we go!

I rented Idiocracy this weekend. What a great, yet disturbing, movie. Disturbing because it is so close to the truth.

While it is supposed to be 500 years in the future it instead seems like 15 or 20 years in the future. Much like the family tree scene in the beginning of the movie, today the "smart", educated people have fewer kids and the stupid hillbillies are having alot of kids.

People who speak and write intelligently are laughed at.

In addition, our public schools are already dumbed down and our colleges are being dumbed down because HS graduates can't read or write at a college level.

At a "good" suburban high school an English teacher lamented to me that she ultimately has to show a video for the reading assignments that she has given because the students either cannot read at the level necessary or simply will not do the work.

Also, the reality TV segments of Idiocracy are also very close to what we have today. Next we'll have real-time reality TV where the populous votes on who lives and dies, as well as votes on our politicians and each policy, much like the Doctor Who episode Vengeance on Varos, (which wouldn't be such a bad thing, at least in regards to politicians).

This isn't tech-worthy, but maybe you can get some benefit out of my experience.

November is benefits enrollment time again at most corporate jobs. This is when you choose which health plan you want for the next year, and they let you know how much the premiums went up this year. :)

Most companies are now offering Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRA's) or Health Savings Accounts (HSA's). I have had HRA's in the past, so this is my experience.

An HRA is a "consumer driven" health care plan, which is supposed to involve you in your healthcare spending. An HRA has three components -

• Your company pays a yearly amount, which can be like $500-1000. All of your medical bills are usually paid 90-100% out of this amount. If you don't use it, it rolls over to the next year.
• A high deductible catastrophic insurance plan that kicks in at anywhere between $1000 for a single person or $4000 for a family, depending on the plan. This is like an out-of-pocket maximum. After this the insurance usually pays 100%.
• The third component is the bridge amount between the amount your company pays and the amount where the catastrophic insurance kicks in. This is what you pay completely 100% out of your pocket.

Now this isn't too bad if you are young and you never go to the doctor. Many single coworkers in their 20's that I know never reach the company paid amount and they roll over every year.

So what's the big draw? HRA's have premiums that are much less than the PPO and HMO plans that most companies offer employees. And HRA's keep costs down because people use less healthcare when they reach their limit and have to pay the bridge amount 100% out of pocket. Also the logic is that if you involve the employee/patient as a consumer and they see how much is actually being spent on services, then there is the logic that the employee/patient will make better choices or leverage their doctors for better services or care.

So does it work? HRA's have been shown to keep costs down.

What is my personal experience? At a previous employer I had Definity HRA. I had a family plan. The base $1600 was paid by my employer. The catastrophic limit was $4000. I had to pay the bridge of $2400. Now you would think that it would be difficult to reach the $1600. Not so. The dirty little secret of HRA's is that you are on your own price-wise with doctors. They charge you full price for everything. You finally see how much BC/BS and those PPO's bargain for price controls and write-offs on your bills! Apparently the HRA's don't do the same thing. Prescriptions count toward the $1600. And prescriptions were two or three times what they were on the PPO or HMO for the base price (not the co-pay, the price that is listed on your statement). That $1600 was eaten up fast and the $2400 bridge was alot of money to come up with in big chunks every time we went to the doctor or pharmacy. This can be offset somewhat with a Flex account, but then you are paying alot up front.

Now I wouldn't have a problem with HRA's if the prices were fair, but its obvious that doctors offices, hospitals, and pharmacies are hitting the HRA consumers with the money that they are losing on people with no insurance, Medicare patients, and those with aggressive PPO's that limit the amount that they will pay for services.

So why go into this topic? Because many companies are offering HRA's/HSA's and then jacking up the PPO premiums to force you to go on the HRA plans. And Bush talked about moving more to HRA's/HSA's in the last two State of the Union addresses. I envision 20 years from now that we will "own" and fund our health care benefits much like we now "own" our 401K plans.