Mr. .NET

or…what I’ve been spending my weekends and early morning hours working on.

If you’ve read many of the early posts on this blog you’d see that I’m an avid gamer, and that I like to write code for various things however the one combination that hasn’t appeared much has been writing my own games.  This is mainly due to the fact that I don’t have many ideas that are realistic for me to implement.

Enter Windy Garden, the first game I’ve written since my days on the TI-85.  The premise is simple; a bunch of seeds are floating around on the screen and your objective is to plant them by nudging them with a chain reaction of blooms created by tapping on the screen.  You need to have good timing and strategic placement though; as the blooms only last for a short period of time.

Inspired by a similar game on Facebook titled Chain Reaction, I felt the concepts in this game were simple enough to implement for my first foray into Objective-C and iPhone programming.

The screenshots below show my current progress on the app, using graphics that were all hand-made so they don’t look the best.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that in the end.

Currently the core part of the game has been implemented, but there are still a few tasks that remain including scoring, game over, etc.  And I have a couple tricks up my sleeve yet as well.  Look forward to future posts which will discuss how I went about writing the game and what I learned as I went along.

In high school, I used to be a voracious reader, going through books fairly frequently.  However, once I went to college and after I moved to my own apartment my reading dropped.  Lately, I’ve been wanting to get back to reading like I used to.  Not only for the enjoyment but because I felt like I was missing something.

Now that I actually have furniture in my apartment I also have a comfy place to read.  I almost bought a Kindle in October or November, but held off.  Would I really use it enough to justify spending $350?  Then in late January several of the people I follow on twitter kept mentioning the announcement/release of an updated Kindle.  I bit the bullet then, and placed my preorder for a Kindle hoping I would automatically get upgraded to the new one if it was announced.  Two days later it was publicly announced and I received an email confirming that I had been upgraded.

Fast forward to a week ago.  My Kindle arrived!  I was immediately impressed with the device.  You can probably find unboxing photos on various gadget sites.  The day before I purchased a few books and they synced to it shortly after I turned the device on.

Coming back to now, I’ve read three books on the Kindle; not counting the user’s guide or the thank you letter from Jeff Bezos.  Bad Astronomy by Dr. Phil Plait, Ur by Stephen King, and A Briefer History of Time by Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Leonard Mlodinow.  If anyone loves to read, I would definately recommend getting one.

I’m in the process of updating my laptop to .NET 3.5 SP1 and received the notification below.

Wonderful, I’m going to click Ignore and cross my fingers [Update: It did eventually install]

Here is the text of a press release I sent out this morning!

COLUMBUS, OHIO – June 3, 2008: Data Dynamics today announced the new Excel transformation extension for Data Dynamics Reports enabling report readers and developers to output report data into the familiar Excel spreadsheet format.

“The Excel technology we have introduced into Data Dynamics Reports is very flexible,” said James Johnson, Product Manager for Data Dynamics Reports.  “Thanks to the transformation technology we have developed, customers can export reports verbatim into Excel. Users also have the option to create their own templates to create an Excel spreadsheet that doesn’t resemble the original report at all.  I look forward to seeing how this functionality gets used.”

Transformation extensions start with the report data and using a user defined or generated template it transforms that data into a spreadsheet.   The output spreadsheet takes complete advantage of spreadsheet power including formulas, charts and pivot tables.   There are no limits to this technology and it represents a departure from export filters that are based on report layout.  The Excel functionality is currently in beta and is available in the latest release of Data Dynamics Reports, available at http://www.datadynamics.com.

Data Dynamics, Ltd., the developer of numerous award-winning products, is a software component development company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.

Luc announced it yesterday, and it was so hectic around the office and at home that I forgot to do the same.

Yesterday, Data Dynamics released Data Dynamics Analysis!  This product has been a blast to demo at shows, even if I’m not as slick at using it as Luc is.  Just like many applications have a use for reports of some sort, there are uses for Data Dynamics Analysis in many applications.  Any time you need to look at historic data you can use Analysis to help you pinpoint the answers to many questions in your data.

Whether you point it directly at your data or you feed it queries Analysis can handle them.  Built off of the same data manager used in Data Dynamics Reports, it’s ready to start handling data from the moment you drop it on the form and tell it what data to use.

When I moved to Ohio one of the things that I left was a side job helping a few businesses with their IT needs.  After I moved down I continued to help one of the companies however I could, usually that just meant running their e-mail server and a few other things, all that could be handled over the phone or through email.

Recently there was one I couldn’t issue I couldn’t solve over the phone.

Background: A few years ago I set up an OS X Server for a publisher to work as a file server and had all their systems (Mac and Windows) connected to it. Since then a few more systems have been added to it, but the server was going strong.  Until a few months ago.

The clients server went down, hard.  A somewhat local shop was able to get the system running again but they were left without the network shares in Windows or their OS X systems (although OS 9 was fine).  Spending a few hours on the phone I couldn’t figure it out either.  But I knew that if I were to sit down at the system I’d be able to figure out, I had set it up initially after all.  I know there are a ton of apps like VNC that would do what I want, but in order to set up VNC I’d have to walk them through setting up the router which would be difficult to do.

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Yesterday the interview with a couple of my coworkers, Issam and Scott, was posted to the .NET Rocks site.

I’m listening to it now and I’ve even learned more about the origins of the company.

Scott mentioned that the interview even drops some hints as to what the future is bringing from Data Dynamics.

Last night I was preparing my laptop to go to the office this morning and needed to copy a file off my windows PC desktop to my Mac.  Nothing unusual there, just connect to the share and copy the file.

This morning I noticed an additional file sitting on my desktop: .DS_Store and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to look for a way to turn off this behavior on my Mac.  I’m sure I’ve left quite a few .DS_Store files on the network file share at the office

A quick google turned up this article that describes the commands used to disable that behavior.

To prevent the creation of these files, open the Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

It may be necessary to log out and back in, or even to restart the computer (which is what the article states), for the change to take effect.

I’m sure the guys at work will appreciate me doing this.

I’m ready to say that the format war is over and HD-DVD lost. Engadget is reporting that Wal-Mart will no longer carry HD-DVD and by June will carry Blu-Ray and regular DVD only.

If director Michael Bay is to believed, prepare for the format war to move to another front as Microsoft will push downloadable HD content as the (non) format to use.

Update: Now Reuter’s is reporting that Toshiba is finalizing their plans to pull out of HD-DVD.  Via my dad who sent me this Engadget link.

On Friday we released another beta build of Data Dynamics Reports, this build fixes a few issues including several customer report issues and a regression introduced in a previous release.

I keep saying it, but this is likely to be the last beta release before we put out another production build; coming after the new year.