One step closer to the dark side. (Originally Posted 8/8/05)

Posted on August 8, 2005 by Mel Grubb

I’m traditionally a Nintendo kind of guy.  I just tend to prefer the design decisions they make with their games and their hardware.  If Nintendo puts something in a console, odds are it’s because they know people will use it.  Not like the PS2 hard drive which I think has been used by about… uh… two games ever maybe?  Nintendo isn’t obsessed with the cutting edge, and as a result, they have a much higher profit margin than the other console makers.  A solid design with solid advantages.  Nintendo has patiently waited while XBox Live and PS2Online have done their R&D for them… for instance, now that the online market has hit critical mass, the "Revolution" console will be WiFi out of the box, so they say.  So, imagine my surprise at being the new owner of a PS2.  Whod’a thunk it?

You just can’t pass up a bargain though, and this was one mother of a bargain.  I got a call on Friday from the rest of my family who were at one of our favorite places (The thrift store).  On one of the shelves in the front of the store was a PS2 for $40.  "Must be something wrong with it" we all thought, but I said I’d go by and look at it on the way home.  So after work, I swing by the house, pick up my son, and head up to the thrift store to see the thing.  It was in beautiful shape apart from the missing expansion bay blanking plate.  A bit dusty, but no obvious signs of abuse.  We had brought an older PS1 game with us for testing, but the store had no TVs for sale with video input, so this would be a bit of a gamble.  And that’s when I had a moment of inspiration.  I ran over to the piles and piles of old boom boxes, and found a small bookshelf stereo with an AUX input.  Hooking up the PS2’s audio, we booted it up and listened.  The menu certainly worked, and after waiting for the obligatory timeout, the game began to load, and we heard the familiar opening cutscene.  EXCELLENT!  The drive and brain are alive.  We bought it and took it home with a quick side-trip to a GameStop for at least ONE game native to the platform.

When we got home, we hooked it up, and while it was willing to load the PS1 games we own, it wouldn’t read the PS2 game.  Nothing but disc-read errors.  We also tried a DVD movie, which oddly enough DID load.  I seem to remember hearing at some point that the PS2 discs were DVDs, but they were somehow very "Faint" as a means of copy protection.  While this may or may not be the case, I decided to try cleaning the lens.  Eight screws later I had the box open, and I was blowing something the size of a squirrel out with some canned air.  Another (Actually the same) eight screws later we had the world’s cheapest PS2 up and running.  Sometimes you just gotta love not being afraid to void a warranty (especially an expired one).

Which brings me back to my original point.  While I prefer the physical and game design of Nintendo, "cheap" has an appeal all its own.  Every GameStop or "EB(X)" in every mall has a bargain bin full of way cheap games, and they’re almost all for the PS2.  Some of them are there because they suck, but a lot of them are there simply because of the sheer market saturation the PS2 has, and the "trade-in" model they all follow.  I almost never trade in games myself because I don’t think the money they offer is worth it, but I’ll certainly pick over other people’s used stuff, and I have plenty of stuff to play.  It keeps my entertainment budget a lot more manageable which is good considerig all the other expenses I have.

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The sad but true story of Borland’s “Together for Visual Studio” (Originally Posted 7/20/05)

Posted on July 20, 2005 by Mel Grubb

I cringe to think of the damage this one product has caused my professional reputation.  Less than a year ago I was singing TVS’ praises from the rooftops of every client I met with.  This was the future.  This was going to change everything.  At last small shops could compete with the big boys using tools that while not exactly on PAR with the Rational Rose’s of this world, were certainly close enough to enable some real productivity without the gazillion dollar budget.

Yeah, there were some small bugs here and there, but surely they would be fixed in short order, and we’d pat ourselves on the back for adopting Together early.  Yeah, we couldn’t actually print out documentation in a truly meaningful way to give to the clients, but surely that would be fixed shortly, after all it was just a minor formatting issue, right?  Yeah you couldn’t use it with solutions containing such common elements as a simple Database project or an installer, but surely they’d HAVE to address something that bad, right?

After all, these issues were being ADDRESSED in the forums.  We were being TOLD that they were being logged in the tracking system.  They were being assigned ISSUE NUMBERS.  This was great, Borland was listening to its users.  There was great promise that progress was being made, and indeed it was.  Somewhere deep in the bowels of Borland’s secret underground "skunkworks" there were teams of highly trained mole-men hammering out those bugs, and making sure that the next patch was going to totally take the world by storm.  We could just FEEL the greatness coming over the horizon.  But it never came.  We waitied, and waited, and waited.  A few lost the faith here and there, and wandered off, but the truly faithful, the visionaries, the true desciples of Together-ness stayed where we were, waiting for that next patch that would make the world right again.

<biblicalTone>
Then the clouds parted, the sun shone through, and a new version of Together was announced.  But it was not a patch.  It was not an answer to the prayers of the faithful.  It was instead a mighty blow.  The promised version was indeed coming, but the faithful, having taken their vows of poverty, would not be able to afford it.  It was placed high in the gilded towers of the wealthy, now truly a tool worthy of (And priced for) kings.  And the faithful looked upon what Borland had wrought, raised their hands in gestures of admonition and said in unison "Up yours!".  And the forums fell deadly silent.  And the silence was deafening.  Here endeth the lesson.
</biblicalTone>
—

By the way, I looked for information about the new TVS.  In the downloads I found a link for the help file, so I thought I’d read it to see what was new…  Every page in the entire thing says the same thing:

The page cannot be displayed
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

What a freakin’ joke.
Let me know when I can start taking you seriously again, Borland.  In the meantime I’ll start trolling eBay for used copies of TVS 2.0.  We’ve learned to live with or work around the bugs by now.  It’s not worth thousands of our dollars to see them fixed for real.  I just don’t see how I can recommend a piece of software to a client ever again and be taken seriously.  I’ll forever be "That guy that thought Together was a good idea"

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Coddling their emotional well-being (Originally Posted 7/15/05)

Posted on July 15, 2005 by Mel Grubb

If we constantly compliment our children for everything they do, how devastating will reality’s slap in the face be when they finally emerge into the real world?  I’ve felt this way for a while, and every time some school system bans the use of red markers for grades because of the "negative connotations" it may have for the fragile minds of the future fast-food flippers among us, it pisses me off just a little bit more.  Schools have stopped having honor roll assemblies, and in some cases honor roll altogether because it makes the other children feel inferior.  Well ya know what?  It could very well be that your kid’s destiny is to serve the honor roll kids their lunch later in life.  It may also be that your kid simply hasn’t found their calling yet, and don’t your kids at least deserve the benefit of the doubt?

Speaking from personal experience, I did poorly in school.  Academic environments in the 70’s and 80’s just weren’t very open to learning on your own, or experimenting, or self discovery.  Back then there was no such thing as "self paced".  They just gave you your Ritalin, and told you to shut up and sit down.  It wasn’t until I was out of the academic environment, and allowed to study whatever I wanted whenever I wanted that learning finally became something I WANTED to do.  What does that have to do with this subject?  Nothing really, apart from illustrating that the occasional red "F" did not scar me for life, and apart from the occasional random emotional outburst and/or crime spree, I think I turned out just fine.

So recently I’ve been attending a lot of my kids’ baseball and softball games, and I’m being reminded all over again of just how many eggshells we seem to have scattered along the path to our own children’s maturity.  The coaches still don’t "officially" keep a score of any kind at the nine-year-old level, and their universal response to "Who won?" is "It was a tie".  Also, they seem to have some insatiable drive to compliment each and every movement the kids on their teams make.  Just yesterday, I watched as a batter unintentially "bunted" the ball.  It fell pretty much square onto home plate, and just sat there while the runner from third ran right over it.  The catcher didn’t even make an attempt to pick it up or anything, although she apparantly thought this lull in the action made for an ideal time to fix the straps on her shin guards.  Now I’m not trying to insult the player, after all, she’s only nine, and this is an "instructional league".  However, the fact that the coaches made a point of telling her "Good try" started my mind turning… she DIDN’T try.  How could her try be good when she hadn’t made one.  If this is an instructional league wouldn’t it be a bit more productive if the coach had taken this opportunity to instruct her that guarding home plate is the catcher’s job?  Also, it is worth noting that the batter, now on first base was complimented on her "Awesome bunt" which, as I mentioned earlier, was purely unintentional.

I’ve seen wild swings at crazy angles and all sorts of poor timings rewarded with a shouted "Good Cut!" from the coach… "Good Cut"???  What the hell is THAT supposed to mean?  I’ve seen batters stand still while the pitcher has thrown a strike complimented with a "Good eye!" from the coach.  WHAT?  NO… WRONG.  A "Good eye" would be allowing a BAD pitch to go past unmolested.  Allowing a strike to go by is not "Good eye", it’s precisely the opposite, it’s a "Bad eye".

Now I’m not suggesting that we should yell at, insult, or otherwise degrade small children playing sports, but if we compliment every misstep and mistake, how are they supposed to take us seriously when we say "Good hit" and actually mean it?  I personally don’t think there’s any shame in saying "Good try".  These kids are doing the best they can, and they really are trying.  Go ahead and compliment them for their effort, encourage them to keep trying, but don’t mislead them into thinking that they’ve achieved some goal when they missed it by a mile.  You are NOT doing the kids any favors, or equipping them for life in the real world here.

And if you think that nine-year-olds don’t see through our artificiality, know that I wasn’t even going to mention this except that on the drive home from the game, my nine year olds pointed it out to ME.  Yes, that’s right, the very nine-year-olds we’re so afraid of offending are already old enough to see through our crap.  As a society, we may think we’re "fostering their emotional well-being", but in reality we’re just teaching them to be cynical and jaded at a much earlier age than the generation before them.

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The sorry state of animation (Originally Posted 6/28/05)

Posted on June 28, 2005 by Mel Grubb

While I’m on the subject of entertainment gone pathetic.  Many people who know me know that I despise Anime.  I consider it the laziest form of animation.  I feel it grew out of a need to shovel crap onto our televisions as quickly as possible in the 70’s.  Think "Battle of the Planets" and you’ll know what I mean.  If you want a more extreme example, think "Speed Racer".  At least that had the added hilarity of trying to cram half an hour’s worth of Japanese dialog into half an hour of spoken English.  In both of these cartoons, entire conversations between characters could be animated with as little as four frames of animation because the characters only had two poses, one with the mouth open, one with the mouth closed, and if the budget was really extravagant you might have an occasional "blink" frame.

To some extent, you see the same thing in old Hanna Barbara cartoons of the same era, such as Scooby Doo.  Whenever anyone’s talking everyone has to hold very very still, and even then only the mouth of the person talking was animated.  But HEY, at least HB made up three or four frames worth of mouth poses.  The Japanese cartoons of the 70’s were far more basic by comparison.

Fast forward a few decades, and now Anime has become a "style", and "art form" of its own.  It’s been elevated to some lofty idealized sub-genre of animation to be revered and respected on its own merits.  I fail to SEE any merits.  If you were to perform a frame-by-frame analysis of a typical half hour Anime cartoon, and then put that next to anything produced by the cartoon network (Yes, including Samurai Jack… resolve THAT) I think you’d probably find that the Anime contains less than 50% of the actual animation of the domestic product.  And it’s that the point of animation… that it’s animated!  (By the way, I realize most of the "domestic product" is also produced in Japan, but we’re discussing style here, not production houses)

I mentioned Samurai Jack a moment ago.  Many people consider it to be Anime.  I disagree.  I beleive it’s what Anime should have evolved into.  Samurai Jack is Anime inspired, but it’s far beyond Anime quality.  With the advances in cell animation on computers the quality of all animation should be increasing, not decreasing as time goes on.  Using computers to do the traditional ink & paint operations means that a studio can build up an enormous library of character poses, walk cycles, and mouth positions, and then mix and match those with far more flexibility than was possible using traditional cels.  Say you have a right-to-left walk cycle, but you need a left-to-right… just mirror it.  It’s far easier than the equivalent photographic process would have been.  You can’t just flip a hand painted cell over and expect it to look right.  Also, you can scale, stretch, squash, rotate… pretty much anything you want using a computer.  Fred and Daphne wouldn’t have to spend their whole lives wearing the same clothes because re-coloring their line drawings would be a much faster process on computer.

So why is animation getting worse?  Case in point: Ghost in the Shell (Anime fans gasp.  "Did he just say that?")  Yes I did.  I tried to watch this crap over the weekend.  I really tried.  The stories weren’t that bad, but my God, they’ve dispensed with 90% of the talking now because the "Section 9" people communicate telepathically.  This now means that entire conversations were animated using TWO still frames of the characters involved.  What the?  This is the 21st century, people!  I want BETTER product than the 70’s, not worse.  The opening sequence promises animation of a quality that the show simply does not deliver.  It’s like the difference between the FMV sections of a Final Fantasy game and the actual gameplay.  The difference is simply staggering.  And what’s with the stupid blue robots?  Are you going to tell me that someone would invent killer military robots and then give them giggly 14-year-old mall-rat personalities?  And who decided to animate the most annoying characters in the whole series better than the rest of the characters combined?  It just doesn’t make any sense, people.

Several people have recently recommended that I see "Appleseed".  It’s supposed to be CGI that’s been rendered as cel-shading.  I could probably stand that.  It would have the look of traditional hand animation without the perpetually declining quality of hand animation.  And it’s not like hand-animation can’t be done well.  Look at any of the decades of hand animated features that Disney put out.  I’m not talking about script quality, fidelity to the original stories they appropriate, or the straight-to-video sequels they generate at roughly half the quality of the originals.  I’m simply talking about the animation of the features themselves.  It’s fluid, it moves, and people actually talk and sometimes sing without holding still.  This is big-budget stuff, I don’t expect Shaggy to hold a conversation while doing cartwheels, although that should be possible by this point too.

So call me a heretic.  I thought Akira was stupid.  I hated Lensmen.  I loathe Ghost in the Shell.  I gave them all a chance, I really did.  I gave them all a chance, and they all disappointed me.

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The atrophy of Rock & Roll (Originally Posted 6/27/05)

Posted on June 27, 2005 by Mel Grubb

While the heavy rotation period of Hoobastank’s "The Reason" has died down, I’m still surprised to hear this song being played on the radio.  At the very least I’m surprised it’s still being played on "men’s" radio stations.  You know, the kind of stations with crude 14 year old humor in their station IDs.  The kind of stations you don’t expect to have a large female audience.

Why?  Because this has to be the least manly song ever written, that’s why.

The song would normally fit my tastes in complexity.  It has lots of key changes, especially between major and minor chords.  It shows a decent adherance to the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/break/verse/chorus formula.  Finally, the singer’s voice does not make me want to claw my ears off by being too whiney or otherwise unpleasant.

So why do I hate this song?  It’s the lyrics.  These are the least testosterone-fueled lyrics ever penned by a male… or at least by a heterosexual male.  In all the time this song has been on the radio, I’ve never paid that much attention to the lyrics, having been caught up in the chord progressions up to this point.  This weekend, the song was on the radio while I was making lunch for the family in the kitchen, and it STILL made me feel more manly than normal in contrast to its mere presence in the air.  I listened to the lyrics for the first time, and I kept hearing a whip-crack sound effect in my head as each successive line of the song was delivered.  I certainly hope there’s a wedding ring involved in whatever relationship inspired this song because if you’re THAT whipped while still in the dating phase you can forget any plans you had to watch sporting event of any kind in the future… except figure skating of course.

(Actually I rather like figure skating, but in the same way I like auto racing… I’m just watching it for the crashes.)

The only explanation I can come up with for this song is that it was an assignment or condition of some kind of "counselling" session.  Yes, that’s right, I suspect that this song was an assignment handed down by an argyle-cardigan-wearing, Yanni-listening, Tofu-eating caricature of a marriage counsellor in a sentance that undoubtedly ended with the words "…if you are truly committed to making this relationship work".

Now I’m not saying that there’s no validity to making an effort to keep a relationship together, but that’s just not Rock & Roll.  Rock & Roll means hyper-masculine songs about using people up and throwing them away, even if those songs are written by the very same people attending relationship "workshops" in their private lives.  Keep that stuff private will ya?

Rock & Roll is about ugly guys getting groupies because they’re in a band.  Geddy Lee, Gene Simmons, Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Noddly Holder (Look it up), Ronny James Dio, do I really need to continue?  I think you see what I’m driving at.  Our "Rock" stations are playing music that more and more is starting to sound like boy bands for adults.  Make it stop, for God’s sake MAKE IT STOP!

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Tuesday humor (Originally Posted 6/14/05)

Posted on June 14, 2005 by Mel Grubb
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Is Michael Jackson innocent? (Originally Posted 6/14/05)

Posted on June 14, 2005 by Mel Grubb

So, Michael Jackson was found innocent… or rather not proven guilty a’la O.J.

Is our justice system totally failing in the case of celebrities, or is it possible that Jackson really is as weird as he claims to be, and isn’t "into" children the way the rest of us think he is.  I don’t know, but all of the people who claim to have first hand knowledge of any wrongdoings are exactly the sort of people looking to be paid off: Underpaid household staff, disgruntled ex-employees, and parents who let their kids go to Neverland even after the allegations started.

What if he really is just a big kid?  A creepy, mid 40’s, plastic-surgery-addicted kid.  I mean… it is possible, isn’t it?  I mean, it’s really reeeeeaaaly unlikely, but it is ever-so-slightly possible.

Or, have we degenerated into a society so politically correct that we can’t even take a hard stance on our own celebrity criminals because it might offend their fans?  Personally, I think that’s the more likely situation.  On the one hand you’ve got people who will blindly proclaim the celebrity’s innocence because they grew up listening to their music, or watching their team play.  On the other hand, you’ve got people with no vested interest in the celeb’s well being who figure "Hey, at least no-one will trust him with their kids anymore." and let him walk rather than spend the rest of their lives debating in a jury room with the fanboys who wouldn’t be swayed by security camera footage of the crime in progress.

But then what happens?  You just watch.  Assuming Jackson can buy it back, there will be a waiting list to get into Neverland now, a waiting list populated with evil, greedy parents looking to be the next to threaten a lawsuit in an effort to cash in on what’s left of Jacko’s money.  Suing Jackson will become a cottage industry in itself, and there will rise a special breed of lawyers that specialize in chasing him the way other lawyers chase ambulances.

…and what if he really didn’t do anything?

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Missed opportunities (Originally Posted 6/2/05)

Posted on June 2, 2005 by Mel Grubb

So I saw Star Wars Episode III, right?  Stop reading now if you haven’t seen it yet.

Anyway, it occurred to me that while Lucas was busy tying up loose ends, he left one dangling all over the floor, and it would have been terribly simple to have included it.  Ever since Episode I came out, I’ve been trying to figure out how Yoda can go from total badass to feeble old fart in the span of 17 years.  Up to this point I’ve just written it off by assuming that Yoda’s race just hits the wall extra hard when they reach it.  900 years of whoop-ass and then you trade in your light saber for a colostomy bag.

Well, that final lightning fight with Palpatine would have been the perfect excuse.  Hey, look what lightning did to Palpatine in the fight with Windu, and he was just PRETENDING to get the beat-down.  Yoda, on the other hand, truly got his little green heinie stomped.  But then he got up and crawled away.  Not an injured, dragging his limp, broken body away crawl, either.  This was a garden-variety "I’m gettin’ outta here" kind of crawl, and he would have been walking if he’d picked a larger escape route.  C’MON!  This was the chance to explain it.  Obviously SOME thought went into Yoda’s future or they wouldn’t have bothered with him talking about going into hiding.  All it would have taken was a shot of Jimmy Smitts picking Yoda up instead of just hovering there while he jumped into the car.

And furthermore, if the lightning fight had been in Lucas’ mind all along then he could have dispensed with the cane altogether for the forst two movies.  It always struck me as lame that Yoda walks with a cane until it’s time to fight.  You can say he’s hiding his prowess by pretending to be feeble to catch people off guard, and that may work on the random mugger in the alley, but even the StormTroopers figure it out when he throws the cane aside, ignites the saber and gives the "come get some" look.  The element of surprise is definitely lost by that point.

Blew that one, Lucas did, hmmm?
Other than that… Two thumbs up, Mel sez check it out.

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Compile time error good. Type name comparison bad. (Originally Posted 5/26/05)

Posted on May 26, 2005 by Mel Grubb
Technorati Tags: ,,

Here’s a little anti-pattern I’ve seen come up several times in different projects over the years.  Somewhere a project has a piece of code that takes a generic Object is supposed to branch out to different sections depending on the type of that object.  Since you can’t do a switch or Select Case on a type, the code usually ends up looking like this. 

Public Sub DoSomething(ByVal Thing As Object)
    Select Case Thing.GetType.Name
        Case "Thing1"
            DoThing1(Thing)
        Case "Thing2"
            DoThing2(Thing)
    End Select
End Sub

The trouble here is that the name of the classes have been hardcoded as strings.  First of all, this means that this code will be doing text comparisons each time it is used.  That’s bad for performance reasons.  Secondly, if the name or namespace of one of these classes were to change, the code would still compile just fine, but would throw an error at run time.  That’s bad because it means the end user is going to see an error that never should have made it to production.  Thirdly, while a switch or Select Case statement may look more elegant in your source code, it still compiles down to a series of if-then-else statements behind the scenes, so the motivation to use the switch or Select Case statement in the first place is flawed.

Next time, try this instead:

Public Sub DoSomething(ByVal Thing As Object)
    If TypeOf Thing Is Thing1 Then
        DoThing1(Thing)
    ElseIf TypeOf Thing Is Thing2 Then
        DoThing2(Thing)
    End If
End Sub

Not only is the direct type comparison faster, but any changes to the name or namespace of the classes Thing1 and Thing2 would result in a compile-time error.  Affected code would never make it out the door and into the customer’s hands.  Of course, a decent set of unit tests would catch this error as well, but it wouldn’t fix the performance problems with text comparisons.

Posted in Computers and Internet | 1 Comment

The Real World (Originally Posted 5/26/05)

Posted on May 26, 2005 by Mel Grubb
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After working in consulting for a long time, you forget what life in the "real world" is like.  In particular, I had forgotten how chatty middle-aged women are in the workplace.  In my first day and a half at my current client, I have heard more about American Idol than in the last year and a half of my normal life.  Just this morning I got to listen to an utterly fascinating discussion on the motivation, quality and authenticity of last night’s winner’s tears.

In a previous job, I got to listen to endless conversations on topics just as banal, that is until I bought a radio and some headphones.

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