Welcome to the second installment of my workshop series of articles.

This time, the workshop focuses on tools, for what is more important to the master craftsperson than the tools used in the craft?

While most people are resigned to using Microsoft's default IDEs for working with SQL Server (Query Analyzer, SQL Management Studio), both utilize terribly subpar text editors which are just too clunky to work with when dealing with complex procedures.

Enter EditPlus, the greatest text editor, ever.  Evar.  I've been using it since my Freshman year in college when a co-worker at iCan Services introduced it to me.  I've been using it for everything from Prolog to Java to C# to DHTML to TSQL.  With a little help from some of the tools that ship with SQL Server, we can hook up EditPlus so that working with TSQL is no longer a pain in the butt.

If you're tired of working with Query Analyzer and you're a cheap bastard like me, then this workshop is for you

Please feel free to leave comments, questions, criticisms, error reports, and what not in the thread.

Enjoy.

Engadget is featuring an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. 

In commenting on the Revolution controller, Miyamoto says:

"Personally, I feel that first-person shooters are really well-suited for this controller. I’ve worked on them in the past in the Metroid Prime Series. And to be honest, I felt that first-person shooter controls on a classic controller were kind of clunky. They didn’t feel very—they didn’t feel very right. Whereas with this controller, with the nunchuck-style of controller it’s extremely natural and extremely intuitive. First-person shooters are a genre that are very popular in the United States, and I think that when gamers get their hands on this controller and start playing first-person shooters with it they’re going to find it’s probably the best way to play that kind of game."

Yeah, I can recall when I first made the leap from console gaming to PC gaming.  I had been playing way too much Goldeneye on the N64 (possibly the single best console shooter, ever) for months during my freshman year of college.  At some point, I started playing Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear, a very fun tactical shooter.  It was hard to play Goldeneye after that since FPS controls on a console just seem weird.  To date, I haven't purchased a single FPS (MGS3 (check out my review on Amazon) doesn't count) on console systems for the specific reason that there's no reason for me to do so.

As has been iterated by others, this will be a huge selling point for Nintendo: they will offer all games and non-gamers an entirely unique experience that cannot be had on any other platforms, including PC.  So far, the Revolution is the only "must have" on my list of next-gen consoles.

On a related note, there's a nice discussion regarding the Revolution hardware at Arstechnica.  I, along with some other Nintendo fanbois, make some good arguments for the plausibility of the "leaked" hardware specs.  Let's hope that Nintendo pulls through

Man, I'm just salivating for more info!

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.

The funky looking thing on the right is actually a vertical, blower style, fan made by Holmes.  Yes, that is indeed a 19" Samsung LCD.  Very sweet.  Since I have very little desk space, I've started to invade the neighboring desks and even the divider (which doubles as a bookshelf!).  I swear, we were told that this was temporary, like 3 months ago.  Oh well.  Note the extra fanny cushion...these are the worst desk chairs.  EVAR.

On a side note, I finally figured out how to upload images from my cell phone

I snapped a pic of a truck this morning that had quite a funny line scrawled on the back of it: "REAL MEN LOVE BUSH 04" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).  Something very humorous about that , especially first thing in the morning.  Unfortunately, it came out all blurry

Actually, I'm somewhat disappointed in the quality of my cameraphone.  Whodathunk that the camera sucked so much given the hefty price of the Razr?

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!