thoughts to blog

I’m going to post this… it’s not really SFW but it’s not really NSFW either…

Something about the music makes me smile…

Windows Presentation Foundation

Wednesday, Dec 6, 2006 at 05:00 PM

The next generation of UI development is here. Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF for short, is Microsoft’s newest User Interface platform.

Designed from the ground up to introduce declarative syntax, graphics card powered, next generation experiences for users. This talk will walk through an introduction to WPF, examples of how you can take advantage of it right now in your applications, and where to get more information. There are plenty of tools and resources out there; and with the release of .Net 3.0 (includes WPF) right around the corner, you’re better off being prepared.

Jacob Good is a Ruby Developer for space150 and has been consulting and developing software in the Twin Cities for nearly 3 years. His development experience has been primarily focused on smart client development and mobile development. He dabbles in all kinds of technologies from Ruby on Rails to bioinformatics packages in Perl and of course .Net.

Location For Directions

Neil clued me in on this feature:

My Nintendo Wii has an email address:

w0323850882506712@wii.com

The bad part: is that I have to initiate all initial conversation from my Address Book on my Wii before I’ll get the email.

For example, I have to add your email to my address book… and in return it will send you a reference email to reply to… to allow us to be connected. For the first contact, then email can be sent freely… Lame.

The cool part: is that my Wii glows a soft blue when it gets a message… even if it’s “off”. WiiConnect24 is freaking sweet!

Today… I needed to implement multi-part emails to be sent out… (HTML and Text)

With ActionMailer it’s really easy…

RAILS_ROOTappmodelsuser_notifier.rb - your ActionMailer class and action

RAILS_ROOTappviewsuser_notifier

inside of here, just place *.rhtml files with the part (for multi-part) in the name…

so for example, I have an action called send_report, that has NOTHING different in it than a normal action for email…

I just create inside of our view folder (above)

send_report.text.plain.rhtml (containing your plain text version of the email, obviously)

send_report.text.html.rhtml (containing your html version)

And use normal ActionView means to an end…perfect All email clients I tested properly displayed the email in HTML and Text.

Today’s the show with zefrank was hilarious…

I’m kind of in a rut here… and I’m looking to my readers (all 2 of you) for advice.

I’m finding that I’m becoming to be bored quite often and I need something exciting and different.

Currently, my life consists of these activities: video games, movies, eating, sleeping, reading, spending time on the laptop, and drinking at bars.

It’s getting to be boring… I want some excitement, I want something new, I want to do things that I’ve never done before… Right now I have the time and resources to actually accomplish this goal, I’m just unaware of what I can do…

Help me figure it out… give me some ideas. No idea is too far fetched, the more interesting… the better.

har har har…

But yeah, I got a Nintendo Wii last night… finally. Had to flex my financial powers slightly but it was well worth it…

It’s a thing of beauty and here’s why:

• It’s tiny, holy crap. Small, white, neat blue color, wireless…


• The interface has the most pleasant UI ambient sound ever!


• It’s divided everything into channels, which I’ll explain below…


• The remotes are interesting to say the least…


• Classic NES, SNES, N64, TG16, SG … oh yeah!


• WiiConnect24 - kinda like an always on gateway to Wii land


• It’s cheap! I mean, granted it’s a lot less powerful than NextGen consoles, but that’s why I have an Xbox 360 :)


• It has 512mb of built in storage for games and saves… nice

Things I don’t like:

• The fact that it can only go to 480p, but that’s ok.. the games still look good.


• The fact that it didn’t come with component or AT LEAST s-video… and it’s impossible to get the component cables right now.


• Controllers and nunchucks are practically impossible to find… and why don’t they sell them together for cheaper if most games will use the combo.


• The fact that it’s this hard to get in the first place.

Here’s my two babies:

Ok… here’s the coolest part… the Channel system:

Essentially… all of the software and gateways into the world of Wii are controlled by “channels”, much like TV channels. As you can see, there’s an image representing each channel…
Right now, I only have 6 channels available: The game in the slot, the Mii channel, Photo Channel, Shopping Channel, Forecast Channel, and News Channel.

You can zoom in and scroll through channels like you’re really channel surfing and when you go into a channel, you execute the software and it starts. There will eventually be an internet channel with a built in Opera browser.

The Mii channel is interesting… Most online gaming systems have “profiles” that are small profiles and avatars representing you digitally… no big deal. Well on the Wii, you have a Mii… which is your online / gamesave avatar. You can customize it to no end and name it… The coolest part is the interaction with it.

When they did Animal Crossing, they came up with the idea that your little characters can roam out into the Nintendo Wifi world… hopping onto other people’s consoles.

You can now do that with your Mii… and if you have your WiiConnect24 on, other Mii’s will venture onto your system… It’s neat.

The one weird thing that they also took from the DS is the “friend code” idea. Instead of deeply integrating profiles and avatars, they decided to take your physical machine identity and your Mii to create a “friend code” which you can share. Instead of just playing online and requesting someone to be your friend, like in 360… by just using gamertags… Nintendo decided to use “friend codes”.

It’s a step up from the DS version though, where your friend code was different for each game and they really tried to keep you from giving it out to random people. The whole idea is to keep your friends list to people that were REALLY your friend or people that you trust. Not sure I’m so keen on it…

But against all advisement, here’s my Wii friend code:
0323 8508 8250 6712

The messaging system can even integrate with text messages and email, you keep yet another address book in your Wii to hold the info and send messages.

Have fun… and if you want, stop by and check it out! Time to play some Zelda! :)

So you’re using TextMate on Mac OS X… and you’re in a Ruby on Rails / Ruby project…

Before the infamous “Halloween Update” you were running your Focused Unit Tests quite easily within TextMate by hitting CMD + SHIFT + R.

A nice window pops up, tells you what the results of that particular test case was… nice.

Then the update came… you tried the same thing again… and you get this:

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RubyMate r6189 running Ruby r1.8.5 (/opt/local/bin/ruby)
>>> my_controller_test.rb

that’s nice
this is my important stuff
<strong>bad!</strong>
I am <at> the exit!

Boo! This sucks! What the heck is this? Well… using my handy dandy grep, I searched my rails project and could not find any remnants of the string… “I am the exit”.

So onto TextMate / RubyMate…

/Applications/TextMate.app/$ grep ‘this is my important stuff’ -r *

Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Ruby.tmbundle/Support/RubyMate/test.rb:at_exit { puts “I am the exit!” }

Bingo!

Seems as though test.rb is getting picked up into path and is being executed along with your focused unit test…

Easy fix, varies with mileage and I’m not responsible for your actions
/Applications/TextMate.app/$ rm Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Ruby.tmbundle/Support/RubyMate/test.rb

The real fix is coming… I’ve contacted the core team for RubyMate and let them know what’s going on…

Good thing that’s over… I def missed my focused unit tests…

This sucks… everywhere… well, at least the 10 places I visited/called, were out of Nintendo Wii Systems…

:: sigh ::

Oh well, I’ll get one soon enough. Unless someone out there can find one in their town… I’d be MORE than willing to handsomely reward someone if they could pick one up and ship it to me…

Just a thought. :)

I watched the documentary on HBO Hacking Democracy last night… and I have to say that it brought an obvious problem even more into relevance.

As a computer scientist, you always start to criticize the software that you see being made public, especially pieces of software that affect the entire nation and/or are of such high profile… like public voting software. When watching the film, I can just imagine every single computer programmer out there going… “What the heck are these developers doing?”

With a sharp eye, just WATCHING the documentary gives in to a lot of security problems with problems and assumptions in the security software, that aren’t directly mentioned in the program… for the obvious reason that most people don’t know anything about proper software development.

Here are some observations:

• The source code is proprietary and closed. This is an obvious mistake but unfortunately, the companies involved have a full right to keep it that way. The government should instantiate rules allowing ANY individual to look at and scrutinize the code. There are always debates on whether this gives hackers that much more information… but at the same time, allows the public to have ownership of something that ultimately decides their government’s fate.


• The workstations involved with counting the votes for all of the precincts, was definitely NOT secure in any fashion… they were roaming between these computers and opening showing them being unlocked and not secured in any fashion during the “off season” of elections.


• The governments sign-offs of inspection completely failed to recognize the single most important aspect of voting is a voter’s right to secure their vote and be counted. There was clearly a check missing from the certifications about penetration attacks and no tests for attempts at corruption of data.


• A full test suite including functional and unit testing should be present and publicly available… and also, the public should be allowed (and or at least 3rd party companies) to be able to run their own functional and unit tests against to the code.


• They had a poor choice of storing the data… yes I know this is personal opinion, but the data was stored in Microsoft Access database files in plain text columns. Holy hell


• There are obviously more higher abstracted problems that are involved… private company corruption, black box production/manufacturing, and human error factors.


• Rules around what is given out to the public for audit are not followed. The documentation given to the documentary was CLEARLY proven to not be the actual documentation. The votes on ONE precinct were off by over 300 votes… from the original vote print out to the copy they were given. Not even counting machine error and/or hacking.

The solution:

It’s not an easy one… otherwise we would have figured this out before. Every conceivable system will have it’s shortcomings, but the more variables you can eliminate… the better.

My choice:

Keep the votes to be paper ballots… completely audited, archived, search able, and open to the public for every single precinct and individual in the entire system. Two or more teams of randomly chosen individuals to count the votes at least twice before any sign off is done. Having more legal consequences to the individuals signing off and holding themselves responsible for certifying the votes and vote machines in use.

I tell you what… I’ve ranted long enough… and I know that any documentary is going to be somewhat biased and I could potentially be brainwashed… but in this case, the documentary was trying to prove that the entire system was wrong… not that Republicans bought the election or any other bias… though, due to actual outcome, there were some insinuations that Republicans were potentially buying their elections in certain areas…

Its just… I don’t know… disheartening that there’s soo much corruption and dishonesty going on along every part of the process… from the politicians, the companies who make the software, and even the people involved in the election process at the precinct level.

Wow.

Went to my first Packers game on Sunday… and yeah… we won!

Here are some pictures:

warmup:

during the game:

postgame win:

and of course, I had to chase these girls around:

I’m sitting here at Neil’s presentation at the Twin Cities Code Camp… and I realized that I didn’t upload any slide deck or code.

Well… I’m speaking on Integration Ruby and .Net … and I think I have a pretty interesting talk… it’ll be mostly code and I just finished up on the code (during his presentation… sorry Neil hehe)

At any rate, here’s the crappy slide deck and code that I’ll be talking about today:

Slides + Code

I’ll get to meet some interesting people and I’m wearing this nifty “presenter” badge thingy…

sweet one more speaking gig for the books!

[UPDATE] Yeah… I just gave my presentation and I want to apologize to the people who were there for my lack of preparedness… Yikes. That was a painful talk! Thanks for sticking out and commenting kindly, I really didn’t feel like crying. :) But yeah, I was suprised I had that many people! Packed the room.

[UPDATE 2] And you know… the best part of the code camp was meeting a lot of people that are really passionate about what they do. I always enjoy that. A few people that I ran into were Luke Francl, Jinesh Varia, Doug Nelson, Cory Smith, Charlie Nutter, Chris Sutton, Nate Schutta, Scott Yokiel, and many others… Thanks to Jason Bock for getting things organized as well!

Friends and Family:

Have you heard about the new team in town? It’s the Minnesota Ripknees! They are a new addition to the ABA - the American Basketball Association.

The Ripknees will be to basketball what the Saint Paul Saints are to Twin Cities baseball… entertaining, affordable, family-friendly and lots of fun. Check ‘em out!:

http://www.ripknees.com/kneetv.html

Their first home game is THIS MONDAY NIGHT, November 13th at 7:05 PM against the Toledo Ice.

The game is at Concordia University in the Gangelhoff Center, on the NW corner of Hamline & Selby in St. Paul.

General Admission Tickets are only $12 for adults and $6 for children.

Bring your friends and the whole family!

To get your tickets, go:

http://www.frontgatetickets.com/portal/results.php?terms=minnesota+ripknees&search=go

Hope to see you on Monday!

Even though Emergence Day is not yet here… I got my hands on a copy of Gears of War (one of the last in downtown Minneapolis… seriously) a little early.

and boy let me tell you, it’s flippin’ gorgeous

• The game is beautiful.


• Game play is different for a strategy/shooter… but its a nice take.


• It’s definitely has some really neat camera effects.


• Really interesting story line (so far).


• It’s nice that you can just run and shoot… with a very small amount of strategy (flanking, that’s about it).

Go buy it… NOW SOLDIER

I can’t believe it…

Jim Leach has been ousted!

That fucker has been in House since the dark ages of time, when they were just figuring out what fire actually is.

Congrats! Iowa has taken a few steps towards becoming blue! 3/5 House seats and the Governor!

One of the 5 seats being in there since 1976. He’s so frail, he can barely talk. I know… because I met and interviewed him back in Burlington.

Wow.

Go out… must buy NOW

After playing a few sets and coming upon a Encore chant by the audience… only to play

Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son…

I am smiling.

Right now… I’m using the MacBook Pro that space150 has purchased for me to do my daily work activities… and with the Twin Cities Code Camp coming up, I’ll be representing space150 talking about Ruby on Rails and .Net integration. But what does this have to do with wanting a MacBook Pro.

In preparation for my talk, I’ve been using laptop to do ALL of my preparation… including working with .Net.

The laptop is brilliantly designed, feels like a laptop… and Mac OS X is awesome!

Mix that with the ability to run Vista / Visual Studio in Parallels, you actually have the best combination for multi-language development.

I can switch over quickly to OS X for my more pure Ruby on Rails and back to Vista for my .Net development needs.

It’s really the best of both worlds. I’m going to save some extra cash here and get one of the newer Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros…a

tastey

w00t

Children of Mana (BOUGHT)

F.E.A.R.

Gears of War

Call of Duty 3

Rainbow Six : Vegas

Elite Beat Agents

Final Fantasy III

Nintendo Wii

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

:: yikes ::

Tom, am I forgetting anything?

[UPDATE] And of course…

Guitar Hero 2