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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Wed, 30 Aug 2006

Read the FAQ
blog

If I had taken the time to read the Microsoft XNA FAQ (I'm too lazy to link to it), I would have answered both of my questions below: yes, you are in a somewhat-limited environment when running on the xbox360. It's not exactly the .NET CLR, but something similar to it. And, to answer another one of my questions, you do not have access to System.net on the 360 (but you do if you target windows). Bummer.

I got a few more demos downloaded to the 360 tonight. A game that looks awesome: Test Drive Unlimited. I was driving around the demo tonight and noticed that every now and then some cars had names above them. I figured they were part of the game... kind of like in Need for Speed where they'd challenge you to races.

It turns out... they were other people online playing the demo. Awesome. You can race them, just drive around honking at them, whatever. With the full game I guess you buy cars and houses and it's all persisted online. I think that might be game number three that I get.

Random bits
blog

Just some random stuff I've wanted to mention for a few weeks (or days)...

It sounds like Tivo might be releasing their much-anticipated Series 3 DVR mid-September. A few blogs and forums are talking about it, plus the following was in the latest Tivo Newsletter (from Tivo itself):

"Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks for a defining moment, oh yes. Watch your e-mail Inbox. Your TiVo Central screen. The twinkling eyes of your best TiVo friend. "

Hmmm... sounds like some sort of announcement to me. Most sites are saying $799 or so which is going to be a tough pill to swallow. That's about what I paid for my original 14-hour Tivo probably seven years ago. Yikes. The big news about this Tivo, of course, is dual-cable card slots which will allow high definition recording for cable. Cox cable better support this device...

In tech news, this article is a must-read if you're interested in emacs. It's a very nice intro to one of the new features that will be coming out with emacs version 22. I'm running it at home and work (courtesy of a CVS checkout) and have noticed some of the new features but I haven't drilled down as much as this guy. His site is a good read, by the way... add it to your feed list.

Another site I've been watching lately is dzone.com which is sort of a digg (or reddit, or...) for development articles. There's some good stuff on it every now and then, so add its feed to your list, too. I like how it puts a little snapshot of the site with each article... not that you can read it or that it helps out at all, but it looks cool.

Hard to believe it's almost September. Oh yeah, in other tech-related news... I finally convinced myself to just buy the Xbox360 that I've been obsessed with for the past six months. It's a lot of fun... so far I've been playing project gotham 3, which is a car-racing game, and some madden nfl 2007 which was released the day I got the 360. I'm pretty impressed by just about everything the 360 offers... the resolution is great (HDTV on my 24" Dell in the office), speed of the games is just dandy, and the Xbox Live integration is well done. Just like I said about the Nokia 770... everything just worked out of the box, including getting up on the network and even voice chat during games.

In related news, Microsoft is getting ready to release some game development tools for the Xbox360 for hobbyists. I think you can pay $99 or something and have the ability to develop and distribute games. I'm wondering if this will open up some other possibilities, though... like streaming audio or video, video chat, etc... I wonder if you'll be locked into a virtual machine running on the xbox and not directly executing. Maybe you're locked into using C#, I'll have to check on that.

Anyhow, that's probably just yet another thing I'd like to do but never get around to doing.
I have lots of those projects!

Wed, 23 Aug 2006

Back to PHP
blog

Wow, I'm all over the place with this blog... I need some new software, maybe with categories or tags or something...

Anyhow... so at work I'm on a new project with an aggressive deadline so I'm not able to explore the different languages with SOAP. I'm pretty much stuck with PHP now because a) it's known to work, and b) this is an actual product, not just some tools I'll be using. Oh well.

On the good side of things, though, I was able to switch us out from PHP 4 + nusoap to using PHP 5's native SOAP extension. That's nice because it uses libxml2 now for the XML parsing (rather than in native PHP). So far things have been fine... some of the new (to PHP) class stuff is nice, too, so using PHP isn't too painful. I'd still rather be working in something else, but I think that's just because I like new stuff.

Now on top of my list of things to look into is whether or not it's worth doing some class generation for PHP from XSD files. We're using XSD to define our services and it might be nice to have PHP classes for the web service parameters that we've defined. Now that I think about it, though, it's probably pointless. I get the objects "for free" when I consume the WSDL, so the only real reason to create those objects is if I want to do something with them before or without calling the web service. Hmm... ah, well, more thought is needed.

On another note... at home I started writing a web application using the django framework for python. I guess it's python's answer to ruby on rails (or is it the other way around?) It seems pretty cool so far... really haven't done much other than go through some of the tutorial. But when I think about it and when I watch someone at work use Visual Studio 2005 + .NET I realize how much development has changed even in just the 12 (eek!) years I've been doing it for a living. There are so many tools out there... frameworks, IDEs, drag and drop GUIs, etc... and new paradigms, not to mention platforms and OSes. Pretty amazing how things are progressing...

Anyways... no "five miles in snow" stories from me... heck, I'm using an editor that's been around in the business longer than I have. And while I'm at it... don't forget to keep up on your tools. By just investing a little bit of time into learning your tools your productivity can only increase. I remember watching some people at my old jobs doing development... it was sad. Tiny putty windows, not even resized from the original 80x24... squinting at the colors, shuffling windows around manually trying to find the one with your open file (in old-school 'vi' to boot... not even vim). Please. How can that be productive? Bigger windows. Learn bash (or better yet, zsh). Try emacs or (shudder) vim. Or, if you're unfortunate enough to be developing on windows... learn Visual Studio shortcuts. The editor in VS is extremely customizable, including emacs and (I think) vi bindings. Install cygwin so you can get a bash shell, or check out the new windows shell (msh? monad? I forget).

Alright, I'll stop... didn't mean to get up on a soap box. I'm done. Oh yeah, one more thing... still using ion3 at work. I've got it customized to using a prefix key like I want, which is nice, and I'm actually using some of its layout capabilities for one of my production-monitoring workspaces at work. Haven't quite gotten into too much lua customization, but that's next on the list.

Mon, 14 Aug 2006

Nokia 770
blog

So my awesome wife presented me with a Nokia 770 for my birthday a couple weeks ago. What a great little device. Everything just worked right out of the box. It even had the latest software update from Nokia on it, ITOS 2006. I was able to jump on my wireless connection (after selecting it from a list including four of my neighbors), surf the web, and even stream SomaFM without having to install a thing.

I really like the overall setup of the GUI. The maemo platform doesn't try to squeeze a desktop into a handheld. You don't see any remnants of the fact that underneath it all you're just running X with the GTK toolkit. What you see is a nice handheld UI with a nice dashboard interface allowing quick and easy access to a nice set of apps.

It looks like it'd be fun to develop an app on, so we'll see if I ever get off my butt and try doing something. I've got the development environment ready to go, just need to choose an app and put something else on pause long enough to write it.

Some minor nits (of course): it uses a different media card that I've seen before... it's basically a half-sized multi-media card, and it comes with an adapter that lets you use it as a regular MMC. Odd. It came with a 64mb card, but that's not enough for me, so I'll have to find a cheap 1gb card. The reason I really want a card is...

For swap space. This little guy chews up a bunch of memory if you load up maybe two Opera windows while music plays in the background. Swapping out to the card might not be the most ideal setup, but at least it won't cause the 770 to reboot.

That's it, mini-review over. I like the device a lot -- the screen's size of 800x480 is perfect for reading web sites, PDF's, text files, etc... the interface is nice and clean, and it was cool how things just worked out of the box.

Sat, 12 Aug 2006

Asus WL-700gE
blog

How cool is this device from Asus? It's a wireless router, file server, audio and video server (audio even supports iTunes), and printer sharing device all wrapped into one sweet little box. All for around $260. Nice.

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