Blog By Levi

Tonight on my way home from the office I had a few thoughts running through my head about some decisions I am being faced with right now. They were sparked by a local radio show hosted by Jim Goodman of the CEO Center here in Des Moines. I was only able to catch a few minutes of his show, but his comments gave me the "hey, that's me!" feeling. His topic was about how there are a plethora of ideas out there that people are just sitting on, and then went on to say that this time of year is a popular time for people to bring these ideas to light, and start to run with them. Hey! That's me! He also commented on how encouraging local business is not only good for the individual, but for the industry, the community and the state as a whole.  The discussion then went on to talk about Iowa's blossoming renewable energy industry, Google's decision to build a $660M center in Iowa, and how it would benefit Iowa as a whole to not only encourage the renewable energy industry, but to also encourage growth in the support industries around renewable energy. 

Then as I was pulling up in my driveway I received an e-mail from Nick with a "read this" subject. In the email was a link to an article by Jean-Paul titled "Dream Big, Take Some Risks, Reap the Rewards". I think what really hit home for me was his quote of Thomas Edison: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work” – Thomas Edison

After reading the article it left me with the realization I've been slow to act on a handful of my goals for the past few years. Mostly because without having them in my face day in and day out, they tend to be put on the back burner. And for a number of reasons; New short term goals get brought into the picture. Past successful goals allow you to rest on their accomplishments. etc... In addition to that, I have partially fallen into the "microwave culture" that Jean-Paul described. At my core I do believe that you should have to work for the things you want in life. However, I'm not sure that I have been acting on that belief.

I'm not one for New Years resolutions, however, I will be taking time to clearly define my goals for the future. By having a list of goals it will help me make those tough decisions in life, and should allow those decisions to end with a positive result.

And like Jean-Paul mentioned, "I am not afraid of the opportunity to fall flat on my face taking a risk, because I know that it is in the times of struggle/pain that growth happens." 

After a few roadblocks, the new blog is up and running, AND I was able to bring over the old posts. They aren't perfect, but the content's there. I'll spend some time cleaning them up as I put this blog to use.

Tonight's progress isn't much really considering it's all a step by step copy/paste job from the tutorial that George W. Clingerman put together*. However, it does create the base for my next 2D tech demo using XNA. It won't be anything special, but it should give me a better understanding of the XNA pipeline and a few best practices for working with it. Up until this tutorial I wasn't very clear on how to handle things like updating a characters display independent of other objects and stuff like that. This tutorial helped bridge that gap and now it's time to modify this code into something a bit more fun.

Here's a link to the demo so far: HERE

Remember, use IE for that link, and have the pre-reqs installed first.

 

* There was a minor bug with the code in the Game.Update method. The double gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds needed to be converted to a float.

//Update the Wizard

mWizard.Update((float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds);

That's right kids! You heard it right. My first version of Pong built on the XNA platform from Microsoft has been built. You can find it here: XNA Pong (make sure and use IE for that link. Microsoft apparently didn't have enough time for QA testing in Firefox.... )

Nothing special at all, but it made me proud none the less. I slapped together a few images for the game, built a very basic scoring system, and also added a bit random logic to force the puck to change directions on you (1 out of 5 times).

Controls:
Q and A for the left paddle
P and L for the right paddle
Esc to exit

Couple things to point out for all of you non XNA people (aka: 99% of the world). You will need to install a few things before being able to play the Pong game I created. It is possible to add these items to the installer, but since I am in tech demo mode right now, I won't be taking the time any time soon to do that. So, for now, enjoy a couple relatively small installs. Look on the bright side; once they are done, you won't have to do them again.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa731542.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2E136A1F-F187-478C-9DA5-AAEB0904782B&displaylang=en

I'm planning a couple more very simple 2D games before I move on to building a 3D game. I'm itchin' to move on to 3D so I can start to incorporate some of the work I have been doing in Maya over the past few months. Go here if you'd like to take a look at my dA gallery

This week I am in Boston for TechEd 2006. Other than my issue getting on wireless, the event has been really good. Every timeslot has 10+ sessions to choose from, covering a wide range of topics. I have been sitting in many of the Reporting Services and SQL 2005 sessions, but have also caught a few of the Architechure sessions.

Last night we had our .Net User Group BoF. Nick, Javier, and Eric were the main hosts and did a great job of discussing many of the things we did well with building our user group, and a few of things we could have done better. It was very interesting to hear feedback from some of the attendees. There was a guy who helps with the Iceland User Group who provided some great ideas for things to help build a user group. The one I liked the most was the book share program. The basic idea was that the UG would maintain a collection of books, and would let members exchange a book for one on the table. This is something I'd like to do with the IADNUG.

Welp, session is over. I'll post more later.

1^st Annual IADNUG Golf Tournament

Mark your calendars for Saturday, July 15, 2006 for the 1^st Annual IADNUG Golf Tournament!!

The number one goal of the event is to have fun with fellow user group members, and area business leaders. In addition to a fun game of golf, various sponsors will be hosting games at different holes throughout the course, each with their own set of prizes.

The second goal of the event is to raise money for the IADNUG. These funds will be used for things like pizza at our monthly meetings, bringing in new speakers from around the country, and prizes for our monthly meetings.

With 9 holes of golf on an outstanding course, golf cart, and lunch you couldn’t ask for much more. Well, you’ll get more! In addition to the golf and food, each registered member will receive an event t-shirt, three free drinks, and the opportunity to win many great prizes.

Details
Date: July 15, 2006
Time: Noon
Where: Toad Valley Golf Course
Cost: $50 per player

Registration
To register, please use the following website.

http://iadnug.golfreg.com/

Sponsors
TAC Worldwide Companies
Palmer Group
Microsoft

A couple months ago I stumbled across a series of posts on Steve Rowe's blog that I found to be pretty interesting reads. These fall into the self help category.

Becoming a Lead, Pt. 1

Becoming a Lead, Pt. 2 – Learning To Trust

Becoming a Lead, Pt. 3 - Delegating

Becoming a Lead, Pt. 4 - We Not I

Went to the office this weekend to snap some reference pictures and get a few of the major textures. The first one that I added was the plywood texture. It has made a huge difference in how this building looks. It is starting to look more and more like the real thing. I also added a carpet texture, ceiling texture, and a brick texture. Considering these are the first texture images I have created from the ground up, I'm pretty happy with them. The carpet and brick textures are a bit bright, so I may tweak them a bit in PS and re-import them.

I have also added a new static mesh that I created in Maya. The light fixtures that hang above the cubes. I have a ton of work to do with them though. Each one is over 570 polys. Considering how simple of a shape they are, I should be able to get them down to around 75 or so. My weakness here is lack of experience using Maya. As I continue to work through the training videos, hopefully I will get better  :-)

Here's a link to the latest screenshot:

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/12.aspx

Today I did some final studying for MS Exam 70-310 and then went and took the test. Final result, Passed!

I was actually quite pleased with myself on this one. I forgot that I had scheduled this exam for today until late last night. For preparation I pulled out the MS 70-310 book, and took the example questions. For the ones I got wrong, I researched them until I understood the answer.For me, this style of studying has worked well with the MS exams. Generally though, committing more time than a few hours works MUCH better.  :-)

One more exam before I achieve MCAD status.

Tonight I wanted to spend some time getting a skybox created for this map and then work on getting the bulk of the windows created. I have to say, mission successful!!

I found a tutorial on the web giving a very basic rundown on creating a skybox. Once I had the in initial skybox created I spent about an hour and a half digging for a good texture to use. It's pretty hard to find a non-dark, non-moon, non-mountainous horizon texture in the default texture packs. However, I did find a pretty good one in the Sky.utx file that gave me a blue sky with clouds. At some point I plan to take my camera to work with me and snap some of my own horizon pictures to use in the skybox. After all, if someone looks out the front door, they MUST see the muffler man! :-)

While creating the skybox, I ran in to a few issues with lighting. By default, a skybox produces no light. Back asswards, I know. So I started by adding a single sunlight actor to the skybox. After dinking with it for a bit I came to realize that to get a realistic amount of sunlight into the building, I would need more than one sunlight actor. In order to maintain a “sun is on the south side of the building” appearance, I left the main sunlight actor maxed out at a brightness of 255, then added additional sunlight actors on the other 3 sides of the skybox, but turned them down to about 128. This provided the additional light I wanted, however, the middle of the building was still very dark, unlike the building in real life. I did a bit more research and found the ZoneLight setting.in the Level properties. I set this to 64 and BAM! We's gots lights! So much so that I needed to cut the brightness of the sunlight actors in my skybox in half. The one drawback to this is that now my compile times for the map have almost doubled. Makes sense though when you consider the fact that UnrealEd is now rendering many more lights and shadows that it was with this setting turned off.

In the end I'm happy with what I have. The building now has the appearance of mid morning sunlight coming in to the building. I'll probably tweak it a bit more, but for now, it's good.

Here are a few screenshots of Dub Rivas with the lighting mentioned above:

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/10.aspx

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/11.aspx

* Please note that I will no longer be resizing these screen shots. I will only be reducing the quality down to 60%. This will cause some pixelation.

Spent some time tonight building the HVAC ducting in the Dub Rivas map. All of the HVAC pieces were done in Maya and imported into UnrealEd. Initially I ran into a few issues with shadows showing up at the joints of the HVAC pieces, but figured out that if you plan to but two or more meshes together in UnrealEd, you should try to not butt surfaces together. For example, if you want a tube, you would create a cylinder. By default, that cylinder will have a face on each end. Simply delete those faces before importing into UnrealEd and everything will look smooth.

Here are a couple new screen shots of Dub Rivas.

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/8.aspx

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/9.aspx

Tonight I spent some time working on the Dub Rivas map. I am now roughing in the mezzanine level. I also threw in some basic lighting and random textures to give a slightly better indication of what things are. The textures that were used are by no means the final textures. They are simply place holders for now.

Next on the todo list is to get the indoor windows done on the mezzanine level and finish building the support pillars under it.

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/7.aspx

Tonight after a long car ride home, I finally sat down and started building my second map for Unreal Tournament 2004. It will be based on the floor plan of the new building the company I work for recently moved in to. The map is called “Dub Rivas” and should prove to be a good place for me to fine tune my sub entry level Maya skills.For the time being, I am working in UnrealEd fleshing out the base floor plan of the building. Here's a screenshot of tonight's progress. (top view only)

http://blogbylevi.iveldesigns.com/gallery/image/6.aspx

Wanted to let all 3 of my readers know that I've finally submitted my first CodeProject article, Review: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Part 1 of 3

I would appreciate any feedback you may have, along with suggestions for parts 2 and 3.

Ever had one of those moments where you realized if you had stuck with a project you were working on in your free time, great things could have happened?

Well, after getting back from lunch today, I hit the Tech section of MSNBC.com to see this article: New Web software a challenge to Microsoft

It's great to see Jesse James Garrett getting some attention for coining the term Ajax. I posted a message here shortly after reading his article outlining a definition behind the term Ajax. I hope to see more and more web applications built upon the Ajax methodology. In the end, the more Ajax based applications we see, the better the user experience will be on the web.

First, and apology is due to Mr. Jeff Brand. For the first part of his presentation tonight at the IADNUG meeting, I totally ignored him. But for good reason!!

I was writing UI unit tests for our web framework using Watir. It has been quite some time since I was excited about something like this. Nick sent me a link to a tool the other day called WatirMaker, created by Scott Hanselman. I used it before leaving the office and it created a script for me in a matter of seconds. What it does is record your actions within IE, and writes them as Watir scripts. It's not perfect, but what software is in version 0.01??

Anyways, after getting that script up and running, I needed to add functionality to click OK in a javascript confirm box. After about an hour of picking through the Watir examples, I was successful. I will post the code at a later date.

Ok, ok... So September passed without a single post. I would like to blame it on the same things everyone else blames not posting on, but instead, I'll be honest. I've been very lazy and not very motivated to post what I've been working on. Not because it has been top secret or anything like that. Just haven't felt like it (especially when there's online poker to play).

So now with the bankroll withdrawn, time killing games uninstalled, lemon-aid cans removed from my desk, and the white boards behind me cleared off, I've decided it's time to get back to what I was doing at the beginning of the summer. Helping other people write code, with the goal of, helping other people write good code.

Recently I attended the Agile Iowa Users Group's first meeting. It was great to meet some new people from the Des Moines area who are interested in, and doing, what I enjoy most. Getting fun work done while at the same time pleasing the client. While at this meeting Tim from Gifford Consulting asked the question, “What tools do you use to aid in Agile development?” Various people mentioned some tools I have heard of, am using, would like to use, etc. But one was new to me, and sounded very interesting. Brandon from Shzam (i think) mentioned that he has used an application called Watir for web UI unit testing. My first reaction was much like some of the other members. I'm not worried about UI testing as much as I am about data, process, etc testing. But then I got to thinking. If it truly was as simple as clicking a button to run a script, why the hell wouldn't I add UI testing to my existing pool of unit tests?

So, the next day I installed Ruby and Watir on to my development PC. Once installed, I ran the Watir test test script. After about 3 minutes time and a whole bunch of automated browser interaction, 1500 tests had completed. I was speechless... So I ran it again. Same result. Verrrrry cool!

The next step from there was to create my first script that was applicable to our web framework (btw, expect more plugs for this in the future). So I created a very simple script that logged in to our testing site, and then confirmed that it was logged in. All in all, 10 minutes time equaled one new UI unit test. Bare in mind that I have never touched Ruby, downloaded/installed the syntax file for TextPad, setup a short cut to run Ruby scripts from TextPad, and wrote the script all in 10 minutes time. I expect future tests to go much, much faster.

All in all, I really liked working with Watir. I don't think the timing is just right for implementing this at the office just yet, however, I think it will come soon.

The current task at work is to implement a versioning system for our framework, and eventually an automated build system. We are in 100% agreement that we need to start versioning our product, and had our first meeting today to discuss what we expect to gain from versioning, and how we intend to do it. As of today, the goal is to have implemented versioning into our daily routine by the end of 2005. In terms of man hours, it won't take anywhere near that long, however, 4Q is projected to be very busy for us.

Couple other items:

• I will be attending HDC this year in Cedar Rapids. Drop me a line if you plan to attend and would like to meet up for a cold beer or... ten
• The next IADNUG meeting is this Wednesday, October 5. Jeff Brand will be presenting. There will also be a Pub Club afterward sponsored by Sogeti
• The second Agile Iowa Users Group's meeting will be held later this month at the ITA Group building
• After over 220 hours of online gambling spanning 2 months, 250 tournaments, and approx 38,000 hands, I ended it yesterday... in the black

Last night Keith Kmett, Eric Jacobs and I gave a presentation on DotNetNuke for the Iowa .Net User Group. Overall, I think things went pretty well. This was my first presentation in front of more than 30 people ever, so I started out a bit nervous. I just had to remember to breathe every once in a while  :-)

Everything we presented on was learned during our experiences building sites for area non-profit groups, so the presentations were very 'real world' experience based, and provided some great tips and tricks for people trying to build DotNetNuke websites for any purpose.

As promised, I have zipped our power points together for you to download. Here's the link.

I would like to thank the members of the IADNUG for giving us the opportunity to present for them. For me it was a great learning experience and gave me a chance to see what areas I need to improve on to better my public speaking skills.

In an effort to become prepared for using the latest versions of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, I decided I would try uninstalling what I had on my PC instead of just rebuilding it. So far, things have been pretty good. I used the Add/Remove Programs dialog to remove all of the components I could find for both applications, starting with SQL Server.

When trying to reinstall SQL 2k5, I kept getting prompted with a message saying there were still old components installed. I tried running the tool on the CD to clean up after old versions of SQL server, but would get errors with it. So, I decided to do some research. I actually found the solution on the Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 disk. Here it is:

1.2.21.   Setup has detected that previous versions of the listed product(s) are installed and need to be uninstalled.

Previous version of the products are still installed on the system after removing them using Add or Remove Programs.

    • Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta

    • J# Redistributable Package 2.0 Beta

 

. To resolve this issue

 

For .NET Framework 2.0 Beta:

    From a command window, run

        msiexec /x {71F8EFBF-09AF-418D-91F1-52707CDFA274}

 

For J# Redistributable Package 2.0 Beta:

    From a command window, run

        msiexec /x {9046F10C-F5E7-4871-BED9-8288F19C70DF}

I ran both of these lines from a command window, rebooted, and tada! SQL Server installed! I hope someone else finds this little chunk of information useful!

What are your thoughts regarding NTeam making a design change to use .Net 2.0 instead of 1.1?

IDE integration for both 2003 and 2005 would be supported, allowing developers to utilize NTeam for both 1.1 and 2.0 applications.

What are you general feelings regarding NTeam, its progress, its design, and its developers?

http://www.nteamproject.com/