Scoville Units Unite

I’ve neglected to post here for a bit so will wrap up some bits and bobs together.

Films

Have watched quite a few films recently, the best being In My Fathers Den which was superb. I tried to find the book online but it was quite expensive.

Other recent watches included Sickle (appalling), We Don’t Live Here Anymore (great), Crow 4 (hahahahaha – kiss the bride mother fucker) and various others I forget.

Music

I got the new Spyamp album which was quite good and went to first gig in a while – Hazey Janes, Ian MacAuley Trio, Dropkick and Riley Briggs (guy from Aberfeldy) which was good fun.

Random Coding

Fannied about with a website for a bit, installed a CMS as a test – haven’t progressed very far. Spent £5 to verify account and got £80 of Google Adwords so I am currently experimenting with a week long campaign to see how much you need to spend to get clicks etc.

On Wednesday I went to a presentation to see a coding tool being developed at Dundee University called Code Rocket. It looks quite useful for using documentation more effectively and dealing with legacy code. Expecting details of the beta test through at work so hopefully can play about with it at home too.

Nerdiness

I have been reading through the advance copy of Dungeon Crawl again to help proof read it. It’s about 2 years since I last did so I think. Should be finally released soon though if Biff can stop flip flopping about what amazing stuff to include with this game to help smack the shit out of you.

There’s also a Hero Quest forum there for retro nerdness.

I also picked up two new adventures for Faery’s Tale seeing as my niece has been hounding me to play it with her again.

After my forays into the UDM drop-down menu I bit the bullet and decided the best thing for a site would probably be to install some kind of CMS and migrate the data to it. Means she can use a semi-decent HTML editor instead of raw HTML too.

I had heard great things about both Drupal and Joomla so figured they would be top of my list. Looked at the install for Drupal, looked simple enough. Tried to install on my machine and got no end of problems.

Hey let’s create an “install.php” but not make it do a complete install, sod that we want our users to learn loads of Unix commands to set it up, too hard for the authors to script.

Fuck that noise.

WordPress and Cubecart being the two other applications I have installed both had this facility. I don’t mind editing a config file or anything but that was a step too far. When I install an application on Windows you follow the options and click appropriate sections. You don’t have to hand edit the registry. Why? Because you shouldn’t have to.

I then downloaded Joomla, waited and age for it to upload to server and then went to the directory. Redirected to installation directory where it checks my requirements. It tells me I have a problem, the help file with the handy screenshots tells me exactly what I need to do to fix it. It then checks again. It asks for FTP and MySQL usernames etc. Installs and is all set to go.

I have no idea yet if it does what I want it to do but unlike Drupal it has passed the first hurdle of making it possible for me to find that out. It could be that WordPress would do but I think the option to easily integrate forums etc is a good bonus. I have to have her shop in it too which will be another hurdle.

Lesson: you may have the greatest web application in the world but if you make users jump through hoops in order to test it you will get nowhere. If I cared enough to look into it I would have managed to set up Drupal, I just didn’t give enough of a shit to. My time is too valuable to me to waste learning how to do stuff your install should script for me. How you expect Joe Bloggs to do so is a mystery.

Having checked whether it was man or swine it appears the parents both have swine flu. Both have been feeling totally run down all week, dad complained of his throat being agony.

I have spent most of this evening wrestling with the UDM menu on the root of my site. I can get it to import sub-menu items from an external file, but not the main menu items.

So with the menu:

• Home – static
• Menu Top – static
  • Sub Menu – loads dynamically
• Another – static

Very frustrating. It would mean doing a search/replace every time a new top level menu item is added, very annoying. I can’t see why it would be happy to load the sub items but balk at the top level items.

The reason for experimentation is a site. It started with a catalogue of around 40 pages and quickly grew to about 300 static pages. They then wanted some top level menu items added – argh. I figured if I can get this done I can change every page once and then update the external sitemap page when necessary. This is only a sop until I have the time and inclination to install a more appropriate site for what she is doing with it now. Spending spare hours here and there make an overhaul slightly difficult and drag over weeks though.

Edit:

The closest I could get was:

• Root – loads dynamically
  • Home – loads dynamically
  • Menu Top – loads dynamically
    • Sub Menu – loads dynamically
  • Another -loads dynamically

This of course means you only see “Root” on the page and the submenus when you select the menu. With the added bonus that it only works with JavaScript loaded. A colleague has it working on his Asp.Net site loaded into the MasterPage but plain HTML doesn’t have that luxury.

It seems a cocked up copy and paste job has broken the tags.

Bah!

Edit: Although my copy/paste of WordPress installs did bust stuff it was actually the latest version and plugins which did. All sorted after much hair being torn out – and I can’t afford to do that much more!

Going through an XNA tutorial I came across this:

[code lang="csharp"]
protected void CheckBulletHits()
{
// Check to see of any of the players bullets have
// impacted any of the enemies.
for (int i = 0; i < iMaxBullets; i++)
{
if (bullets[i].IsActive)
for (int x = 0; x < iTotalMaxEnemies; x++)
if (Enemies[x].IsActive)
if  (Intersects(bullets[i].BoundingBox, Enemies[x].CollisionBox))
{
DestroyEnemy(x);
RemoveBullet(x);
}
}
}
[/code]

Curly braces exist for a reason. (also WordPress displays code blocks crap, had to nest them, time to look for a plugin). Edit – found.

Having trawled through Jim McGoverns expenses I spotted some belters.

£658 for a computer desk.
£4360 to set up his 10 page website – surely not.
£123 for a trouser press.
£950 for a sofa bed.

As well as everything from cushions to bath screens he also claimed £2 for a knife.

His office expenses are equally bizarre with things as petty as 32p for a pair of scissors and 22p for drawing pins.

Almost every month he was putting down £400 for food (one month he tried for £500 and was knocked back), £250 for petty cash. How can you claim 32p for items in your office then £250 for petty cash, what the hell was the petty cash for?

Most amusing though was regularly paying a grand for leaflets then companies 4 grand to deliver them. Kind of shows the state of the Labour party membership in the city if they have to pay for leaflets to be delivered!

So given that the expenses cover council tax, rent/mortgage, food, household goods, phone bills etc.
The question remains: what is his salary for?

Mind you that is after the question what are the expenses for?. Well they are supposed to be essentials needed to be an MP. I don’t think cushions are essential. I don’t think a computer desk needs to cost over £600 and I am baffled as to why an MP from Dundee can claim for an overnight stay in a hotel in South Wales. Was that when he was visiting parliament or his constituency?

Jim Devine

Jim Devine is even more amusing a list of different dodgy expenses and every one of them was someone else cocking up in a completely different way. Occam’s Razor slices, it dices, it leaves it most likely he’s fibbing.

Eric Joyce squirming

Well I eventually gave up on SQL Server CE after suffering their install process again after installing Visual Studio SP1.

I did a review of most of the databases around and what I wanted to do with them. I spotted Firebird. Downloaded it and a GUI. A GUI with the only option to hand edit the SQL. I then downloaded two others, one of which had a trojan in it the other didn’t work. Ho hum.

Having tried to experiment I settled on Access and XML.

Before delving into the shell of code I have sitting there I figured it would be more worthwhile to make a couple of wee demo games to re-familiarise myself with the process. Downloaded Microsoft XNA and the RPG Starter Toolkit. I figure I can do a tutorial on a space shooter (the hello world of games), then a micro RPG with say one dungeon and a couple of baddies or something. I can then think of the best way to implement the wee isometric RPG. I haven’t looked at the RPG Starter kit yet so don’t know if I should also attempt something a wee bit more ambitious after the initial run.

I think Cliché Quest could be quite fun – making fun of most of the RPG tropes.

In other random code stuff, the best two snippets of code I have come across lately are as follows:
(Obfuscated but not changing what they did, and no they weren’t written by me).

[code lang="csharp"]
void Foo()
{
    int a = 0;
    a = a + 0;
}
[/code]

and

[code lang="csharp"]
String Foo()
{
    StringBuilder theBuilder = new StringBuilder("a" + "b" + "c" + "d");
    return theBuilder.ToString();
}
[/code]

This afternoon has been a bit of a battle with Microsoft.

Now bear in mind none of these installers actually mentioned these as prerequisites in the installation process.

I started working on a little game about 2 years ago. I dug it out, spewed when I saw the state of the code and upgraded it to .Net 3.5. Once it was all updated in content and style I looked at it again and realised I should really split up into a data layer to properly use as a demo/project.

I realised I had removed SQL Server 2005 and the 2008 developer pack came with a trial rather than a full version. I remembered about Compact Edition which you are supposed to be able to ship with your code.

I go to install it and it fails as I don’t have Windows Installer 4.5 installed. So I go install that, and then Compact Edition.

Still can’t do anything, need the tools for it.

I go to install the tools and it barfs complaining I don’t have Powershell installed.

I find Powershell and install it.

I then proceed in the 10stage or so install, it seems happy enough.

Fill in all Database account details, carries on.

Boom – you need Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 installed.

This wasn’t pointed out earlier in the requirements section? I also thought I had it installed as it doesn’t appear in Windows Update.

I download the Service pack or should I say the installer for it. Run it and it complains as I have no space. I only have 2GB on drive C. Drive D has about 20GB free. It is also where I have Visual Studio installed. There is no option to change the download location.

What the hell is this crap.

After installing 4 things when installers barf it is still barfing and refusing to install. It shouldn’t be this hard to install a sodding database server. I tried looking for what other databases are usable in Visual Studio but had no luck yet. I was hoping to use Compact as it is usable by the database tools I am used to using in work and I wanted to experiment with Linq a bit.

In work I have the full service pack on a DVD, may have to copy that if I can’t find it online.

Well I have just won my third competition in 6 months.

On the SSP site there is a monthly competition run with philosophy football.

I just won their International Brigade t-shirt.

Two wins in two months from this competition, enter it yourself!