I came across the Editplus Wiki page today and had to share the joy

For those of you who are not familiar with Editplus, it is quite possibly the best free text editor for developers (all things considered).  It's lightweight (it'll fit and run off of a floppy), it has excellent and highly customizable syntax support, the list just goes on and on.  It's pretty much all that I used in college for everything I did, from Prolog to C++ to Java to HTML.  I still us it daily for all of my DHTML work, simple ASP.Net proofs of concepts, working with files on remote servers, T-SQL work, and formatting the stupid HTML generated by FTB.

Best of all, it's free (it'll warn you after 30 days that you should pay for it, but it'll happily let you keep using it).  One of these days, I gotta get around to paying these guys; I've been using it exclusively (with VS.Net for other needs) for the last 6 years.  Possibly the only feature that I've found a want for is an "Export to HTML" button that would export a selected section of code as formatted HTML for display in web pages (that would rock so hard).

One of these days, I need to put together a writeup: "Editplus for Beginners".

I'm kinda puzzled by the nomination of Harriet Miers for the seat left open by Sandra Day O'Connor.

What has me confused is Miers' background, according to CNN:

"Miers, who has never been a judge, was the first woman to serve as president of the Texas State Bar and the Dallas Bar Association. She also served on the Dallas City Council."

Hmmm.  While I have no idea what the president of the Texas State Bar does, I'm quite certain that the job is entirely different from that of a judge.  Analogously, I certainly wouldn't expect that our CTO be "nominated" as the lead architect on a new software project.

Is it a coincidence that she's from Texas?

I guess that's why I'm not in politics...none of this makes any sense to me at all.

I recently read through an article in Time that asked "How Many More Mike Browns Are Out There?"  It will shock you how many people, in key positions, are lacking in real credentials and experience for the leadership roles that they're in.  One has to wonder whether the correct question to ask today is "How many more Mike Browns are going to be appointed?".

Finally figured out how to fix some of the bugs and problems I had with jsTetris last night as I was laying down to sleep (I hate that).

Each list element needs to have a property, State, which takes one of two values:

• 0 when the list element is empty (no pieces in it) or the list element is holding an active block (a block that can still move).
• 1 when the list element is holding a fixed block (a block that can no longer move).

One of the big problems I had previously was that it was difficult to calculate when a piece could still move.  The method I was using was too inefficient and took too many lines of code.  It tried to examine each of the target blocks to see if it contained an inactive block.  This should make it easier by performing some simple math instead.

Each block of each piece must be examined in the direction of the move and simply do a sum between each block and the list element in the target block.  If the sum of the State is 0, then we can move the block.  If the sum is anything other than 0, then the block cannot be moved anymore.

Once a block stops moving, before the next buffered piece is moved (may have to cancel timer), we sum across the bottom most row up 4 rows and see if the sum in that row divided by the number of columns is exactly 1.  If so, this means that every list element in that row is holding a fixed block and we can move get rid of that row.  Once we've checked 4 rows, we can then move all of the remaining straggling pieces down before reactivating the timer on the buffered piece.

Seems like a plan.

I was also thinking about doing two other games last night. 

One of them would be based off of pipe dreams.  Remember that game where you have to move around blocks which contained pipes as this green ooze started flowing?  I think it can be done with .gif animations if each of the animations takes precisely the same amount of time.  There are a total of 7 different pieces.  6 of those pieces would need two sets of animations and one of them, a cross shaped piece, would need 4 animations.  This brings the total number of pieces up to 16.  The idea would be to cache each of these images and swap them out as the flow of the ooze moves through the pipes.  This one should be interesting.

The other game would be based off of a game that I had on my TI-83 back in my highschool days which is kind of along the lines of Dr. Mario or Tetris Attack, except without falling pieces.  Basically, you get a random m*n board, which is completely filled with pieces (maybe 5-6 different types).  When you have three or more adjacent pieces, those pieces disappear.  And "loose" pieces fall into the space left by those pieces and can cause "combos".  The objective is to clear the entire board with as high a score as possible (factoring in time and combos).  Like Tetris Attack (I don't completely remember the mechanics of Dr. Mario), you can manipulate two adjacent blocks in the grid at a time.

Neither of these seem too difficult and sound like fun.

Oh yeah, I'm also working on a ASP.Net Beta 2 based version of Chinese chess or Xiangqi.  The idea is to use Atlas to allow two players to play in real time, with the moves and chat being relayed using calls to web services from the client.  So far, I have the board and objects laid out.  I still have to figure out how I want to implement the game rules and how complex to make it in terms of supporting multiple games at once.  I'm also waiting for my Beta 2 hosting account from ServerIntellect, my webhost.

That's it for now.

I (pretty randomly) came across an awesome series of Photoshop tutorials on deviantart.com (good place to wander around if you're in a creative funk).

I haven't done any heavy Photoshop artwork in quite a while now, regardless, my technique never turned out results as good as hers.  Very nice work and nicely put together tutorials.

Makes me want to plug in my (severely) underused Wacom and work on some backlogged sketches.  Gah!  Can't make up my mind.  Am I a software developer, or an artist?

This pretty much sums up how I've been feeling every-freaking-day for the last few weeks/months:

I've never been more unsure about everything in the entire universe. I no longer comprehend what is important in the essence of everything. All knowledge and understanding I have aquired now all just seems meaningless and empty. I feel I am completely hopeless. My mind revolves so much around school and stale concrete fact. I don't really have a life. Right now I am just existing, going day to day with what seems like essentially no purpose or direction. I can't find my foundation for thought or reason or action. This is the worst feeling I have ever had in my entire life. Nothing is important, which in itself is sigificant for some reason. I think. I don't know. I feel so overwhelmed. I feel like I'm trying to wrap my head around life. Do you know what all is in life? A whole fucking lot. And my mind feels obligated to figure out every fucking bit of it at the same time. I feel like I'm trying to wrap a rubber band around a dumptruck. I'll either stay frustrated like this, or I'll somehow keep trying to stretch until it snaps.

In my case, I don't think I can even recall a particular point in time when this happened. It feels like I've been in this kind of funk forever.  I envy people, like my wife, who (at least on the surface) seem to have figured out exactly what life is about, what is important to them, what their goals are, and what they have to do to get there.  I think it's healthy to have goals; it gives you purpose and meaning in every action that you do.  Problem is, I just can't seem to solidify mine.

:Sigh:

For those of you who are curious, this is what my (tiny) "office" space looks like.

I finished my first "workshop" article!

Had a bit of free time and decided to finish it as it's something that I've been meaning to do for quite a while now.

As an aside, the "workshop" series of articles are meant to be my gesture of giving back to the community from which I've taken so much.  I know I've found tons of useful blog posts and articles online that have helped me greatly in the past, so I feel that it's only fair that I give back a bit.   I don't claim to be some guru or know all of the answers, but my hope is that the information that I provide in these articles can help someone out there get their job done more easily.  I'm also aware that someone out there may have already done something like this, but my own experience tells me that it's always helpful to work with various sources to gain different insights.

Now onto the article!

In March, I worked on creating a SQL Server DTS package to import data from various data files.  One aspect that grew tiring really fast was having to manually change the paths of the source data files each time I moved the package from one environment to another (or even from my machine to Kent's).  We had 6 datafiles at the time (early testing/development phase) in addition to various other settings that were environment dependent like mail server addresses and database logins.  I was simply too lazy to keep fiddling with the settings in DTS every time I had to send the package to the client or to Kent.

The solution I came up with makes use of DTS global variables, the powerful "Dynamic Properties Task" task, and some simple VBScript.

Still interested?  Then read the full article.

Feel free to leave comments, questions, and criticisms in this thread

Came across this article via Ars.

If you didn't know, I'm a huge fan of the cepholopod class of animals.  The giant squid is one of those rare beasts that we know exists via dead specimens that we've found, but have yet to observe, live, in the wild.

So this is a very cool discovery!

As I was browsing through the forums at Arstechnica, I came across a post titled "Alternatives to outsourcing?".

Being an IT consultant, this immediately caught my attention.

I read in Time, a while back, that a few companies were experimenting with insourcing, or the idea of setting up shop in areas of the US where the cost of living is low.

As the Net has spread and the amount of bandwidth has increased, to me, physical location is becoming less and less important as communication via the Net has become more accessible.  From video chat to VoIP, the reality of a truly distributed team unit is getting ever closer to reality.  Hopefully, WiMax will get us over that next hurdle of "the last mile" and truly network the entire nation.

What kind of strikes me as odd is that, even though most (probably every) software developer or IT consultant has a broadband connection, why I still have to show up at the office every day.  To be honest, for the 9 months that I've worked here, a total of 4 of those months were spent on "The Bench" (some refer to it as "The Beach").  I know some people that can't work at home due to the inability to focus or other distractions like spouses or children, but that's not the case with me and I'd happily and productively (somehow this doesn't seem like proper grammar) work from home.  It wouldn't be so bad if I could show up in jeans and a dress shirt, which I did for the first few months, but now we have this silly business casual dress code (yes, I'm being picky), and I have to wear khakis.  Tucked.  Blah!

Okay, back on topic .  To be honest, I could do my job just as well from my fictional house in rural Georgia or South Dakota, provided I have a broadband connection.  And I'd rather be doing that than living in Jersey.  Traffic congestion is horrible and I think it lessens my lifespan by 20 minutes each day (the amount of extra time it takes me to get to work due to traffic).  For the price of a small townhouse in Jersey, I could build a huge, 4 bedroom castle in Kansas.  In fact, Kansas offers free residential land to encourage people to move out there.  Not only that, they offer free commercial land and lots of monetary incentives to set up shop out there.

So the question stands, what's wrong with insourcing and why don't we see more of it?  Certainly, while it's not as cheap as outsourcing/offshoring, I think it's a better investment in the long run considering the state of our economy and the good press it can bring a company willing to invest in the American people.

There has to be other people out there like me.

I have issues.  Many issues.  We all do.  Perhaps the one that gets to me the most is that I'm a perfectionist when it comes to certain things, like designing software.  It's a curse, because I try to be perfect from the beginning and it adds to the inertia of getting the project started in the first place; getting that first, crucial prototype out the door is the key first step to any project.

This is an issue that I've had for a quite a while now and I know that software is supposed to be imperfect.  Particularly when you undertake to create something new, no one knows what it's supposed to look like; no one knows, 100%, what it's supposed to do.  Certainly, there is an idea of what problem a particular piece of software should solve with version 1, but I'm always trying to figure out what it's supposed to do in version 2, before version 0.1 is even complete.  Therein lies the problem.  My psyche forces me to understand the problem and solution completely before I can really start to make it a reality.

I have a pile of papers scattered around my desk at home and my desk at work with various projects that I've doodled or half started, but couldn't think through completely either due to waning interest or lack of time.  In all cases, I get stuck trying to see the whole picture before I've arrived at the destination.

As a developer, I know the importance of prototyping and building simple proof-of-concepts.  If fact, I do this often in my professional life.  But as soon as I start working on any type of personal project, this perfectionist drive just kicks in and immobilizes me from the get-go :-(

I can't be the only one that suffers from this afflictive emotion.  How do other developers deal with it?

One way is to work with others.  A couple of months back, I worked on a project with a friend I met while working at ITT, Blake Dubin.  It was great working with him as he had a vision of exactly what this tool needed to do, which relieved me from over-analyzing the requirements of the tool.  In addition, it helps that he prodded me to get the work done Yeah, the code was a bit sloppy, but it was done in under 15-18 hours and it's really pretty cool to boot.

The problem is that in my day-to-day life, I rarely deal with other developers/managers that I feel are as interested in building these things as I am.  One of the big problems is that I'm surrounded by slightly older developers.  That in itself is not so bad, as there is always something to be learned from experience in the industry, but the problem is, they're not old enough that they can kinda shake off the responsibilities of family life yet.  These guys are in their late 20's and 30's, so they have to, rightfully, place family ahead of self, especially since they have very young kids, which leaves them with little free time to work on anything else.

I have a few friends who are developers as well.  My college roommate, Joe, lives right around the corner from me.  But he's absorbed by World of Warcraft.  The man is practically glued to his computer desk.  In addition, he doesn't have the same passion for creating random pieces of software (I think he'll end up in management in a few years).

I'm sure this problem is not restricted to just software development.  So how do you guys deal with this?  It's even more annoying that I realize that this is a problem that I have, and yet I'm unwilling or unable to resolve it by myself.