Early Frost of Our Discontent

This past weekend we finally saw “Avatar,” or as I like to call it “Dances with Smurfs.”  It was rather light on the story, heavy on the message, and incredibly well done.  The eye for detail is what blew me away, especially the visual distortion (presumably due to density) when the two atmospheres mixed.  The only thing I thought they might have missed was why so many (presumably) mammals had 6 appendages (4 arms + 2 legs) and breathed through passages near their clavicles, but the Na’vi (sp?) didn’t have/do either. 

Also, James Cameron just loves to telegraph upcoming events: Riding the big red bird thing has only happened 5 times before – Sully is on the job.  The tree is going to download dying Ripley to her avatar body – Sully is going to do that too.  I’ve seen worse foreshadowing, but not in a long time.

I give it 4 Papa Smurfs out of 5.

My work just started (a couple of months ago actually) allowing us access to our MSDN subscriptions.  This is totally cool.  I’ve been begging, borrowing, and stealing all these years to have access to Visual Studio and the other tools.  Now, I’ve got them all.  It is totally cool.  What’s even cooler is that I’m going to be installing them (along with a brandy spanky new Windows 7 installation) on a MacBook or MacBookPro in the coming weeks.  How’s that for most excellent?

Best. Blacksploitation. Film. Evar.

I’ve reimaged my home laptop.  I’m trying to populate it with as much free goodness as possible to see if the free way is as good as the old pay way.  Turns out, I’ve got access to Windows Live Writer.  I’m not sure where that came from, maybe with Vista Ultimate.  I don’t know.  Either way, it makes my blog posting a whole lot easier.  So, maybe, just maybe, it will make me more likely to post.  We’ll see.

Later.

I was horrible about blogging from PDC2008.  I did twitter and facebook a lot though, so I think I'm not too bad.

I just found out about Microsoft's BizSpark program though.  It's a lot like their Empower program in that it provides startups free development tools and MSDN subscriptions, however it's free to enter ($100 to get out though).  Information can be found here.  There are limits as to how long you can be in the program and how much your company can make, but it's supposed to be very easy to get in (sponsership from Network Partners, or by contacting your local Microsoft Champ).  I'm waiting for the local Microsoft Champ to contact me about a couple of questions I've got.  Firstly, I think I want in.  Secondly, I want to find out how to set up my local .NET user group (NJ .NET) as a BizSpark Network Partner.

I'm going to PDC2008 in Los Angeles.  I've never been before, but am told I will have a total nerdgasm.  Several coworkers are going too, so I'll have some guidance.

I will try to post what I can, as often as I can, but we'll have to see (I'm not very good at keeping up with my blog).

Dave

So, I'm writing a VSTO 3.0 Word application level add-in, and I want a custom task pane to show for some documents but not for others.  Should be easy to do, right?  Not so much.  First, I create an extension method for the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word._Document class that examines the properties of the document that I'm using for the show/hide behavior.  So far, real simple.  Then, I add an event handler to the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application.DocumentChange event in which I call the exention method on the current document and set the custom task pane's visibility appropriately.  Done, right?

WRONG!!!

This logic only works if the Application.ShowWindowsInTaskbar property is set to false.  Once Word is set to show all the windows in the taskbar ("Show all windows in the Taskbar" advanced display option checked), Word does something to the custom task pane.  Attempting to set its visibility throws a nasty COM exception.

I'm trying to work around this, perhaps by having my add-in recreate its custom task pane, but only time will tell.

Dave

Update - The throwing of the COM exception is not consistent.  :(

http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/07/happy-birthda-3.html

Babylon 5 was one of the best Sci-Fi shows EVAR!  Well, except for about half of the 5th season, and the Thirdspace and River of Souls movies, but hey, you can't win everytime.  Besides, they were still watchable, which is something George Lucas can't say.  Thank you J. Michael.  You ROCK!

Dave

So, all my friends are doing it, so I thought I would too.  Here is an arbitrary list someone came up with and (apparently) if you haven't read a goodly number of 'em, you're a moran [sic].

I've read (or listened to) the titles in bold, intend to read the titles in italics, and (here's a twist) watched those underlined. 

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Man (I've read many parts, even own The Brick Testament)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (unless it's in semaphore)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Why do so many of my friends hate this?  I totally dig it and there wasn't even any time-travel.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read a few, seen a few more.  btw, Olivia Hussy is by far the best looking Juliet.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (This is one that is one almost everyone's list of books to read.  NPR had something to say about that a short while ago.)
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (I think Rob asked this, "Who edited this list?!?!?")
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

That's 16 read or listened to, 28 watched, and several others that I'm intending to read or listen to.

My big question about this list is this: Why are there so many duplicate authors and books when there are so many conspicuously missing?  Where are Philip K. Dick, David Sedaris, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Mark Twain, Jack London, that guy that wrote that thing about the thing, Neil Gaimen, Edgar Allan Poe (Poe, come on, where's Poe?!?!?!), and so many others? 

Please discuss amongst yourselves.

Dave

So, as usual, I'm apologizing for not updating my blog for a (long) while, but I've got a lot on my plate.  So, here is what I'm working on right now.

I've been planning a D&D application for a long time.  I want to do something that no one has been able to do, capture ALL of the rules in code.  Several people have tried, with varying degrees of success, but I've got some ideas that might make it a reality.  I don't want to go into too much detail, but what I've started coding up looks very promising so far, it's just that there are so many rules and they have to be extensible.

For a start, I need to support the 3 core books, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual.  By the way, what's up with a "handbook," a "guide," and a "manual"?  Shouldn't they all be one or the other?  Either way, those 3 books are (for 3.5 edition anyway) covered by the OGL, the Open Gaming License.  All other material, by Wizards or otherwise, is not open source, so I can't release anything without express permission by its copyright holder.  However, I want to be able to support any and all material, so I have to make everything extensible; I have to develop an actual framework, which is a LOT of work.  Luckily, it's what I like to do.

So, I'm working on an extensible D&D framework in preparation for a player character management system, which will go on to be a DM's campaign management system, then a full-blown pencil and paper replacement, all on a shoestring budget of "free".

What do you think?

Dave

PS - I actually got comments (that weren't spam) from this post.  I think those are the very first comments I ever received.  Thanx!

Things have actually started to pick up at work lately.  Microsoft released a CTP of a new CAB replacement product called Acropolis.  I've been tasked (along with a couple of coworkers) to design a business entity and its user interface using our newest best practices and the MVP pattern (I'm still learning MVP though).  With the lack of new TV, I've been catching up on some TiVo'd over the last several months, and playing Disney's Cars on my Wii with my son.  I've been reading a book on WPF by Charles Petzold that I bought months ago.  I've gotten back into doing the New York Times crossword puzzles (Sundays only right now, but that's ok).  I'm getting back to the deisgn of my D&D software.  I've subscribed to 18 different podcasts, mostly NPR, that I listen to at work.  I have the idea for a series of short stories that I want to write, but I'm afraid they might be too cliche.  We'll see.

Whew, that's about it.  Later,

Dave

Well, yesterday I learned of something new.  Acropolis.  It's Microsoft's newest "toolkit for creating modular, business-focused Windows client applications" and it "enables you to build reusable, connectable components and assemble them into working applications that are easy to change."

At first glance, it's a replacement for CAB and some of SCSF, using WPF.  The downloadable help file mentions WinForms, but also mentions that the current CTP only supports WPF.  By the looks of it, it will never support WinForms, but that's just my guess.

Most, if not all, of the Acropolis concepts are the same as CAB, even some of the names are the same.  It would appear that they combined commands and events into a single concept though.  The WorkItem concept is now the Part concept.  Modules seem to have gone the way of the dodo.  Views are now Part Views, etc.

As I've said before, I will post more as I learn it.

Well, CAB really.  Not taxi.  We gave up on trying to debug the 3rd party control in C++.  It's something deep down in the control, and we ran out of time.  It'll keep though, that project is coming back around in a couple of months, and that bug will be reprioritized.

Now I'm doing a POC (proof of concept) on the ability of CAB (composite UI application block) to meet our particular needs.  So far, it's been a lot of fun, very cool.  I had heard from many developers that it is too complicated.  I find that it seems very complicated, but not overly so.  It seems to be just as complicated as it needs to be.  We'll see how my initial assessment pans out though.

I'll try to post whatever I can find time for.

"I'm still living with your ghost"
         Santa Monica
         - Everclear
 
How long has it been since I've had to debug code with MS VC++ 6.0?  5 years, maybe.  How long has it been since I've had to debug 3rd a 3rd party grid library?  Never, maybe.  How hard is it to debug a problem that appears to be a UI focus issue?  Pretty hard as the debugger keeps taking focus.  At least we have the source code for the library.

Dave