Kevin's Musings

We spent a recent weekend in upstate New York. The first part of the weekend was spent in Rochester, NY with family attending a nephew’s college graduation (yay Nathan!). We had a good time, always good to see family and catch up. The second half of the weekend was spent at Niagara Falls (about 24 hours at the falls). We did touristy stuff on the USA side and stayed the night on the Canadian side. If you haven’t visited the the falls you should — it is really quite amazing. We did all of the touristy stuff. We especially loved the Maid of the Mist and Cave of the Winds. The aquarium is nothing to write home about (blog about?), but, the seal skeleton was kinda neat. Our Niagara Falls pictures are on Flickr.

We are all caught up on Lost and the Sopranos. Lost ended well and has continued to be a really good series. Sopranos ended their half season pretty well, but, this season hasn’t been the best, but, still worth watching, I think. Still need to finish up the season of Prison Break.

We’ll be visiting DC for an upcoming long weekend. This will be a first DC trip for us and we’re looking forward to doing the touristy DC stuff. We’re taking the train down, which should be nice.

Finally, we saw Mission Impossible 3 — we both enjoyed it. I thought it was better than MI:2. Probably won’t win any awards, but was a decent popcorn flick. I am looking forward to seeing the new Omen and Nacho Libre.

While I have fallen behind in playing Oblivion on the Xbox 360, I have made time to play the New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS. If you were a fan of Super Mario either in the older consoles or in the Arcade, you will *L*O*V*E* this game. The graphics are updated and fantastic, the gameplay is spot on, and the control is perfect. This is the game you remember and so much more. The world selection system is very much like like Super Mario World. The length isn’t huge but just right. My only complaint is the save points can sometimes feel a little far apart — I wish you could save after ever world, but, oh well. The really neat thing about playing this game on the Nintendo DS is the battery life on the DS really good and you can, at any time, just close the DS and it will hibernate the system; when you are ready to play again just open the DS and immediately pick up where you left off. Let’s see the PSP have zero boot time between gaming sessions like that.
I am also playing the new Half Life: Episode One. It is really polished and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it is a touch taxing on my system – it seems my video card is just a little out of date for the game, but, it mostly keeps up if I don’t put the resolution too high. If you are a Half-Life fan, this seems to be a worthy addition to the franchise.

I haven’t been able to post for a while because we have been in the process of moving and have been without much in the way of an Internet connection. That is supposed to be rectified today. Today we should get our slower “240kb/128kb” free service from the Apartment building. Next week, we should have the much faster Verizon FIOS internet (either 5Mb down or 15Mb down, I haven’t decided yet). It will be SO nice to be connected again. I have been having to use my cell phone as a modem, which is dial-up speed at best (and pretty laggy… I had forgotten how painful using dial-up Internet is).

One amusing thing happened that some of may have noticed… I had an email address that I used to post directly to my blog. It was a bizarro address that wouldn’t have been easily guessed. Well, it appears the spammers discovered it and were sending spam to it, so my blog got a bunch of spam messages. I deleted them and closed the email address. Oh well. If I am going to re-enable the email address for posting I will have to layer in some sort of security.

More soon…

Well, it took a week to complete (but I was working on some other stuff, too). It was a bigger job than I expected because of the “small” things. Primarily little things having to do with Javascript that are handled a little differently in Tapestry 4.0. There just happened to be a quite a few “little things” I had to do a bunch of research and a bunch of playing with to determine how to do them in Tapestry 4.0.

But, happily, the app seems to function as it used to. I am glad I did it, I am not sure I would want to do it with a huge application. If I was starting a new application I would definitely use Tapestry 4.0.

My impressions are these: The changes to the .html templates are pretty much non-existent (no surprise). The changes to the .page and .jwc files are all welcome and will making life easier for me and easier for new adopters (so, easier for everyone). The changes to how services work are nice because they handle parameters better, but, otherwise the changes are neither here nor there — you just code them a bit differently and figuring out the magic the first time was tricky. Overall, I would say Tapestry 4.0 is worthy the upgrade, but, don’t start it on a big existing application.

We are moving into our new place on Roosevelt Island in almost exactly one well and I actually think we will be all boxed up and ready to move. We have given away a bunch more stuff and made fantastic progress toward our packing. I think we had done a good job getting rid of stuff when we moved to the east coast, we have done a bunch more for our move to the city. But, the more stuff we get rid of the better we feel, It think.

Steve: what is up with no postings since Feb 26? Slacker.

The Tomb Raider Legend demo on the 360 that is available for download is well worth the download. It is a reasonable length to get a feel for the game, the graphics, and the control. If it’s representative, the game will be really good. The graphics were very nice, the control was spot on, and the gameplay was lots of fun. Definitely worth the download. One final note, the water in the river / waterfall was just gorgeous – probably the most photo-realistic water I have seen in a game.

I played Tomb Raider 1 and 2 back “in the day” and am somewhat interested to see how Tomb Raider Legend pans out. Happily, the demo of the game was released today for the 360 on Xbox Live. One of the coolest benefits to the 360 is the fact that Xbox Live has so darn many demos available to download. Download, try, and then delete when you have decided if it is fun or not. This is one of the best marketing tools out there… better than waiting for the next issue of Xbox Magazine to come out, just download what you want to try — and much easier than doing the same thing on the PC — no need to install, tweak drivers, configure, etc. The only problem is you cannot download in the background (which I hear is coming “soon”), so, when you start a download you have to go watch TV or something because the 360 is tied up downloading.

I started work converting one of my smaller projects from Tapestry 3.0.3 to Tapestry 4.0.1. Tapestry 4.0.1 seems like it will have some nice benefits, but, the conversion is non-trivial (especially the first conversion). It seems the process will probably take about one to two days worth of work (hopefully no more) to convert this small application and my one component library. Hopefully I will have it all up and running tomorrow — we’ll see. I am not completely sold on how it splits concerns between HiveMind and Tapestry, but, obviously Howard is (and the benefits are undoubtedly in places I am not yet looking). I will give Howard kudos for not trying to handle a ton of backwards compatible stuff – several things were just dropped and a lot of stuff is marked “deprecated, this will be gone in 4.1” — that takes guts (and a willingness to hear whining from the developer community).

Over the last week or so I implemented AJAX into a web application for the first time. I am pretty impressed that it was very easy to do, thanks (at least in a small part) to the Prototype.js (good info here, too) JavaScript library. Also, I was very glad I discovered JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) which made processing data coming back from the AJAX request very easy. While I still generally find JavaScript a real pain to work in, I am much better with it n.ow than before (since I have written quite a lot of it over the last year or so). I would highly recommend the JavaScript Shell and the document A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript.

I’ve had some time to play Oblivion for the Xbox 360 and it is definitely a fun game — I’m enjoying getting back into the RPG world. Back in the days of MUDs and the Eye of the Beholder games I was a big RPG fan, but lately they just haven’t had the same draw for me. I played the Diablo games and the Dungeon Siege games, but, those always felt more like RPG-lite, IMO. Oblivion is good, although not perfect. The flaws in the game, in my opinion, are (1) I spend a fair amount of time in “sneak” mode and if you leave it on “sneak” in non-combat areas the default is to pick-pocket, which I don’t want to do. They make stealing far to easy to do accidentally (and you will get in trouble for stealing) and (2) all of the enemies scale to your level, so, it doesn’t really matter when you do a quest. To be fair (2) can be good OR bad, I guess.

I did have one problem for a bit — my character got the Vampire disease and I didn’t realize that after three days you have to feed to be able to walk around during the day. Until I realized this I thought I had killed my character. SO, if you become a vampire, get cured within three days or feed every night (so you can walk around at any time). I will probably go on the quest to cure Vampirism this weekend (because feeding every night is kind of a pain).

All in all, I would say the game deserves the high ratings it is getting. It is a lot of fun to play and the graphics are pretty spectacular. Control on the 360 is about what you would expect — not as good as with mouse and keyboard, but, not bad after you get used to it (pretty much the same as any console FPS). The reason I got it on the 360 instead of the PC was due to the fact that it can be such a pain to get and keep PC games up and running where console games “just work”.

On a whim, I walked into a local Target (Linden, NJ) this evening. I wandered over to the gaming department and to my utter amazement they had at least two Xbox 360 Platinums in stock (no Xbox360 cheapies that I could see). I had the clerk grab me a system and a copy of Oblivion. The clerk told me they received a lot of systems in on Friday. I am glad that the systems are finally turning up so one can just walk in and buy one off the shelf. I got the system home, got it hooked up, and got Xbox Live setup. Everything seems to be working smoothly. I will post my impressions of the system and Oblivion when I have some real impressions.