Currently Gaming Halo By Microsoft UK Ltd (UK Software) see related

Miss Nevada

I'm a little confused by the Miss USA contest and some of the things that are and are not expected of the women who enter. I just saw on CNN.com that the woman who was Miss Nevada stepped down and relinquished her crown because some "racy photos" of her from a few years ago showed up on the Internet. She said that she didn't want to disgrace the state of Nevada any further.

I know i can be a little stupid sometimes, but i have some questions. I don't pay any attention to this contest, but i'm pretty sure that the main attraction to the American public is seeing these girls strut their stuff on stage in a bikini, right? I have no idea what these "racy photos" contain, but it seems a little hypocritical to get all bent out of shape over some photos taken before she entered the contest. When an organization promotes women for their beauty, nobody should be surprised if these women actually know that they look good and do things because of their looks. The outrage over these photos is outrageous. A hot girl has some sexy photos taken of herself? How shocking.

Also, Nevada will never be the state i go to if ever i find myself in need of a moral crusader.

Currently Gaming Call of Duty 3 By Activision see related

Game Annoyances

Call of Duty 2 and 3

I really don't understand why, but the CoD games are a big fan of infinitely spawning enemies as a means of forcing you to move on. These games are heavily scripted, so every move you make is setting off a trigger for some event to occur. At one point, i was at one end of a catwalk. There were many boxes, barrels, and assorted bits of junk to use as cover. At the other end of the catwalk are Nazis. They run out, take cover, and shoot at you. They always run out in groups of five from behind a tall stack of boxes. When you kill them, five more run out and take their place. You have a very small window of time in which to move forward to the next piece of cover before more enemies appear. Once you finally get to the other side, if you look behind the boxes where the Nazis ran out from you see that there's nothing there. No door, no alley, nothing from which one group of Nazis, much less many, could run out from. They just magically appear until you get far enough along on the catwalk to trigger the event that tells the game to stop spawning enemies.

With most games, there are a finite amount of enemies. If you kill them all in the area you're in, you can usually move forward to the next area without any problem. This seems pretty realistic to me. The only reason I can think of that the CoD games have for these infinitely spawning enemies is to force you to keep moving forward. It's almost like reverse psychology. As punishment for taking cover, sniping at enemies, and trying to kill them from a distance, they keep throwing enemies at you. Maybe they want you to feel the adrenaline of rushing into close range of enemies. I don't know, but it messes up the immersion factor. I want to feel like i'm a badass fighting my way through WWII, not playing a game, if that makes any sense.

Artificially Extending Game Length

I just got done playing a role playing game called Enchanted Arms. It's one of these Japanese anime type of games with a long, drawn out, convoluted storyline. You start out controlling just one character, then as the story progresses you pick up other people to join your party along the way. It takes around 50 hours to complete, which is pretty long compared to action or adventure games. The 50 hour number isn't even totally accurate. The game keeps track of your playtime, but if you have to load a previous game because you died, the game doesn't take into account the amount of time played until you die.

I enjoy long games, it makes me feel like i get my money's worth. However, i don't like it when you can tell that the developers are deliberately padding the game just to make it longer. In this game, there's a guy named Raigar who's a huge tank of a man with superhuman strength. At one point in the the game they showed him lifting a huge boulder out of a well. In the last fourth of the game, you leave a town, walk across a desert, and encounter a huge pile of junk blocking your way. Instead of having Raigar clear a path (which he could have easily done) you're told to walk back the way you came, go back to the town you were at, and find a CHILD who's supposedly good at clearing junk to clear a path. A child. Thankfully, once you find the child, the game transfers you back to the pile blocking your path instead of making you walk all the way back yet again.

There is a possible explanation for this. One of the basic gameplay mechanisms of a role playing game is the concept of leveling up. As you kill more creatures and do more things, you gain more experience and become more powerful as the game progresses. The level 2 rat that gave you such a problem at the beginning of the game isn't even worth looking at when you've reached level 50. Making you walk across the desert a couple times makes you encounter several fights that help you gain experience. I would have preferred, however, that they added new content instead of making me trek back and forth across the same place. I'm sure there are money and time considerations for the developers, but still.

That's all i can think of for now, but i'm sure there will be others later.

Currently Listening The Man Who By Travis Turn see related

Programming Escapades

Technical discussion ahead, so watch yoself...

Microsoft next year is unveiling a shiny new version of their Office suite of programs. Among other things, they're changing the user interface drastically. Below is how the current Word 2003 looks:

And below is how Word 2007 will look when it comes out:

Pretty big change. I think it looks pretty cool, but i'm always into new things. They're calling it the Ribbon.

So at work i've downloaded and installed the beta version of Office 2007 and have been using it pretty much every day. The program i use the most at work is Excel, especially when i'm working on Navy stuff. I pretty much live and breath Excel. The crazy thing is that i'm discovering new features and ways of doing things all the time. There's so much you can do that it's hard to know what all is there, and that's one of the reasons they're going to this new user interface. Apparently a large percentage of feature requests that Microsoft gets for Office are for features that are already there. People just haven't been able to find them easily.

I like the new user interface combined with the multiple tweaks and additions they've made this time around. It's a solid release, and i'm hoping we upgrade to it at work. It probably won't happen, but i can dream.

So i had some downtime at work and decided to play around with customizing the UI in Excel. If you notice in the Word 2007 picture, there are several tabs called Write, Insert, Page Layout, etc. Excel has a similar setup. I thought it'd be neat to add my own custom tab along with some buttons. I took a spreadsheet that i use to run one of our models and saved it in the 2007 file format. The reason i chose this sheet was because it has four macros that let me generate input for the model, load and save scenarios, and open output spreadsheets. It's really a control panel for the model. That's all done with Visual Basic code for the macros.

The first thing i had to learn was how to actually add the new tab and buttons. After it's saved to the 2007 format, if you add ".zip" to the end of the file name you can use WinZip or any other file compression program to open the file and you can see all it's various pieces. It's really just a group of compressed text files that Office knows how to format properly. Office 2007 uses XML to structure its files, and i have to use XML to create the new tab. It's actually pretty straightforward, and i got the new stuff to appear without much trouble. You create a custom XML file, add it to the file in WinZip, then take away the ".zip" extension and open the file in Excel. It was when i started trying to use the new buttons to run the macros that i started having issues.

For those that don't know, when you create a macro in Excel, it creates a set of Visual Basic code that does what you want. You can either record a macro by telling Office to record your actions in the program until you tell it stop, or you can manually write the code yourself. Personally, i usually start by writing the code myself. If i'm not sure how to do something, i'll record a macro, look at the generated code, then adapt it to my own needs. A macro in Visual Basic looks something like this:

Public Sub MyMacro()
     Code that does something
End Sub

The blue words are special words that Visual Basic reserves for itself, and it highlights them in blue so you know not to try to use them for your own purposes. If you want to run one of these macros using a custom button, you have to change the code to look like this:

Public Sub MyMacro(ByVal control As IRibbonControl)
     Code that does something
End Sub

What that new stuff does is send a copy of the button (with the name of "control") to the macro so it knows who's calling it. To be honest, i don't know why that's necessary, but it doesn't work without it so i'm at the mercy of Microsoft here. So i start running the macros, and everything seems to be going ok. I need to start working on some other things, so i close the worksheet. Or at least, i try to. As i close it I get a scary message saying "Argument is not optional." along with the Visual Basic editor appearing and helpfully pointing out where the problem is located. Ah, ok, i see it. I have a bit of code that runs when you close the spreadsheet. It checks if the currently loaded scenario has been changed, and asks if you want to save it if it has. If you do want to save it, it runs one of the macros called SaveScenario. The problem is that when i do that i don't send a copy of the button to the macro. Since the macro is expecting that button, it chokes when i try to run the macro without it.

Ok, well, let's try this:

Public Sub MyMacro(Optional ByVal control As IRibbonControl)
     Code that does something
End Sub

By adding that "Optional" key word in, i can run the macro without sending the button to it if i need to. Ok, cool, close the worksheet, everything works fine.

Later i come back to the sheet. When i open it, i get another scary message that says something like "Excel has detected that part of this file is damaged or unreadable. Would you like to try to repair it?" Well, i guess i don't have another choice, so i click "Yes." Unfortunately, Excel can't open the file. It's corrupted. I try adding the ".zip" extension to it and opening it in WinZip again. WinZip gives me the finger and tells me the file isn't in the proper format. So i guess i'm screwed. I delete the file, start over from scratch from the original (that i have NOT deleted, because that would be foolish), and try to see what went wrong.

After playing around with some of the macros, i discover that it has something to do with when i save a model scenario or when i actually run the model. What are the common things i do in both of them? In both macros, i generate text files. To do that, i save the spreadsheet as a text file, then re-save it as a spreadsheet file. It never seemed to be a problem before, but that's never stopped anything before. I decide to create a blank spreadsheet, start recording a macro, save as a text file then save as a spreadsheet, and look at the code.

This is the bit of code that Excel spits out:

ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs FileName:="Book1.txt" FileFormat:=xlTextPrinter, CreateBackup:=False
 
ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs FileName:="Book1.xlsm" FileFormat:=xlOpenXMLFormatMacroEnabled, CreateBackup:=False

And this is what i originally had:

ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs FileName:="Book1.txt" FileFormat:=xlTextPrinter, CreateBackup:=False
 
ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs FileName:="Book1.xlsm" FileFormat:=xlNormal, CreateBackup:=False

First, i need to point out that with Office 2007, the new file formats have new file extensions. So a Word 2003 document has a ".doc" extension, while Word 2007's have a ".docx" extension. Similarly, Excel 2007 changes from ".xls" to ".xlsx." In addition to that, if a spreadsheet has a macro, you have to save it with a ".xlsm" extension. This gives an easy way to look at a file name and know right away if there is code in it or not.

In both cases of the code above, it takes the currently open file (ActiveWorkbook) and saves it as a text file in the first line, then saves it again back to the spreadsheet file format in the second line. You can see right away that in the second line, the FileFormat is different. Apparently Excel 2007 expects something different from the 2003 version. xlNormal no longer works, it has to be xlOpenXMLFormatMacroEnabled. After thinking about it for a while, this makes sense to me. Since you have to specifically tell Excel that you're saving it as a file with macros, to do that in code will require a format name that Excel recognizes. I wish it was smart enough to look at the ".xlsm" in the file name and figure this out on its own, but oh well.

Everything seems to be working after this, so i leave for the day.

The next day i come in, open the spreadsheet, and lo and behold, my custom tab and buttons are missing. I open up the file in WinZip and my custom XML file is gone. I start suspecting that the same code from the day before is the culprit yet again, so i add the custom XML file back in and run the macro again. After it's done i close the spreadsheet and open it again. Sure enough, the tab and buttons are missing again. Apparently when you save as a text file then re-save as a spreadsheet, it strips out any custom stuff you add to the file. This seems pretty strange to me because the Visual Basic code doesn't get stripped out when you do this. I suspect that this is actually a bug in Excel 2007. Remember, this is beta software. It's unfinished, not released to the general public, and the whole point of running beta software is to find bugs and submit them to the developer. It's a testament to the quality of the software that i haven't found very many so far and i'm actually able to run it for day-to-day use.

So first i tried to find a way to spit out the text files we need some other way. I was unsuccessful. Apparently the only way to do so is how we were already doing it. So i started looking at how to manually write out the values through pure Visual Basic code instead of using recorded code. I tried this out and it looks like this may work. It looks like this may actually be faster than how we were doing it before, as far as how long it takes the text files to be generated. There are still some issues i need to work out, but i left early on Friday so i didn't have time to play with it any longer.

I originally started this whole process to learn some new things about Office 2007. In the process i learned a lot more about file formats and the perils of upgrading software to the latest version. This is why companies don't generally jump to the newest versions of operating systems, office suites, web browsers, etc, without testing them thoroughly. Sometimes you get lucky and there are minimal problems with upgrading. Sometimes, though, things break, and it's up to the company to figure out how to get things working before rolling out new software throughout the company. It's been fun so far, and i'm looking forward to getting things working properly.

Busy busy week at work. Past couple of weeks, actually. Trying to juggle two projects for the Navy is an interesting experience. For a while there the days were going by quickly, but that seems to have stopped for now.

On Tuesday i'll be taking car in for some a possibly apocalyptic amount of work. I have oil in my spark plugs. Apparently that's a Bad Thing™.

I'm playing through Half Life 2 for the third time. Still a great game.

And Battlestar Galactica's new season starts tonight. Sadly, i must wait to download it off of iTunes tomorrow morning. The anticipation is killing me. It's only been since APRIL that i've been waiting. Still, though, it's not worth paying for a fuller cable package. Here's a quote that some reviewer had about the show:

"...the secret to "Battlestar ," as one of my colleagues keeps saying, is not to think of it as science fiction. This is a show about religion, politics, parent-child relationships, and the moral dilemmas of insurgency. Consider it a workplace drama where the business is armed resistance."

Seriously, it's a great show. Rent the Season 1 and 2 DVDs and check it out.

I thought i'd regale everyone with how my weekend has been so far.

Let's see. On Friday... I can't seem to remember what i did, so i doubt it was anything exciting.

Yesterday was more interesting though. I woke up and made a Best Buy run to pick up some blank DVDs and the new Battlestar Galactica season 2 DVDs that just came out. Seriously, go watch this show. Ignore the fact that it's got a science fictiony name and takes place in outer space, and just watch it. I despise 99.9999% of tv shows, and i love this one. After that i cleaned up some, played some games, read, and other boring things.

Later on though, Allisa and Steve came over. We went out to dinner at Sapore di Mar, a local mom and pop type Italian restaurant. They're cheap and give you a ton of food. Oh, and the food tastes amazing. When we were finished with dinner, we decided to get a movie from Blockbuster, get some drinks from the liquor store, and candy from the grocery store. Everything was going fine until about 20 minutes into the movie it started skipping horribly. We tried cleaning it but that didn't work, so we ended up driving back to Blockbuster and getting another copy.

When we got back to my house, i was sitting in my chair and Allisa was sitting on one side of the couch. Steve sat down on the other end of the couch and we all heard a loud crack come from underneath the couch. Steve looked at me in terror and said "Dude I'm sorry.." We pulled the cushions up and the front part of the couch's frame had broken right in the middle where it was put together. Then the part that the cushions rested on fell and landed right on Steve's toe. Serves him right.  I don't really mind since my parents are giving me their couch when they move into their new house, but i'm now couchless unless i can figure out how to glue or otherwise attach the broken frame back together. We set up the cushions ont he floor and Steve and Allisa laid on those.

The movie, incidentally, was terrible. It was a crappy horror movie called Ring Around the Rosie. Don't waste your time or money on it.

After the movie me and Steve started playing the Xbox 360. We ended up playing Marble Blast Ultra, which is a game where you roll a marble around trying to get to the end of the level without falling off the platforms. You're also timed to see how long it takes you to finish. This resulted in a vicious competition between Steve and I as we picked different levels and tried to see who could finish the fastest. The most epic part was a level that started out taking us 4 minutes to beat, and proceeded as we shaved off minutes, then seconds, then milliseconds off our times. After Steve held the winning time of 36.30 seconds for several rounds, I reclaimed the throne with a winning time of 35.91 seconds and was declared the winner after Steve could not best me. The fighting was fierce, to say the least.

They both ended up staying the night and sleeping on the couch cushions on the floor. This morning we woke up, i made some scrumptious blueberry muffins, and Steve and I played some more Marble Blast. We were shocked to find out that the world's best time for that level is somewhere around 11 seconds. We could not for the life of us figure out how that's possible. But we have something to shoot for i suppose.

So that was my weekend so far. Sunday, however, is just getting started, so who knows what today will bring.