Waiting For History

First Tooth

2008-08-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

As a proud (recently initiated) papa, I feel obligated to post a picture of my son's first tooth:

It took me enough tries to finally get a good photo, so I need to validate all of that work by sharing the result.

For historical reference, the tooth first reared its head on Thursday, August 21 2008.

This is My Life

2008-08-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

I wish that I knew the source for this little gem, but I ended up at some non-English site and lost the trail.

I need to get out more.

Zune Moves North

2008-01-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

Well, just over a year after my original post, Mr. Bill Gates himself officially announced that the Zune will make it to Canada in the Spring of 2008... if anyone still cares ;)

Gmail and Shaw email over POP

2008-01-03T22:17:00.000-08:00

This post is mostly about how Gmail seems to know how to set up POP access to my shaw.ca email account better than I do. Not that it is really news to anyone.

You see, I decided to try using Gmail as my central email storage. My ISP is Shaw, so I have a shaw.ca email account. When I started the process of configuring Gmail for POP access, it asked me for the Shaw's POP3 server name - and pre-populated it with 'pop.shaw.ca'. Now, I have had my Shaw email address for some time, and have set up numerous desktop email clients to retrieve my email over that time - and I was pretty sure that the Shaw POP server name was 'shawmail' (or the appropriate FQDN name as described on Shaw's online help). So, I replaced the pre-populated value with the shawmail value. Well, when I finished the configuration, Gmail wasn't able to access my Shaw email account (something about a connection timeout). A quick Google search and I found out that I was not alone. Looking through the Google search results, the consensus seemed to be that Shaw does not allow external access to their POP servers. I was sure that someone must have found a work-around, so I spent the better part of an hour following the numerous search results, without any real solution (other than forwarding your Shaw email to your Gmail account). Then, just as I was about to give up, I came across this handy Shaw support page - lo and behold! Shaw does support external POP access using the server name 'pop.shaw.ca'. If only I had trusted Gmail at the beginning and not changed the POP server name, I could have saved myself some grief...Hopefully, this post saves someone else from a similar fate.

Note to Game Developers: Gamers are Competitive

2007-06-07T23:11:00.001-07:00

The title of this post may be a little harsh, but it was the first thing that came to my mind when I read this forum post from a game developer. I do understand that the author is looking at the issue of Xbox Live achievements in more of a philosophical light. But I don't think that the situation is as deep as he makes it out to be. Achievements are so popular with gamers not because of what they add or take away from the game play experience itself - but simply because they provide some more tangible way to compare your skillz with other gamers.

via Joystiq

www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts

2007-05-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

Inside joke for fans of "The Office" - In the words of Ryan the Temp:

"Even for the Internet ... it's pretty shocking"

Blame Facebook

2007-05-31T22:26:00.000-07:00

It's a lame excuse really, but I have been spending a ridiculous amount of time on Facebook lately - so I have been really struggling to find time to post stuff to this blog. I don't really have anything new to say about Facebook that hasn't been said by others who are much more articulate that me. Suffice to say that I have been having lots of fun connecting with friends that I haven't been in touch with for a number of years. Now that the initial rush of excitement is over I am hoping that I will have more time to write here.

Caffeine and Espresso

2007-02-10T22:08:00.001-08:00

After looking at this chart, I guess that my extra "energy" after a grande mocha from Starbucks is probably more from the sugar than the caffeine!

BTW - I never realized that such a simple question could have so many answers.

"The Office" Extras - For Americans Only?

2007-01-31T23:44:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of the US version of the TV show "The Office". (disclaimer: I never watched the original UK version - I believe it when people tell me it is great. I have no opinion on which version is "better" - I just watch the US version.). So I was quite excited to hear that NBC was posting "Producer's Cuts" versions of some of the episodes, which included a bunch of content that simply didn't make it into the original broadcast episode for whatever reason. Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed to see the following message when I actually went to view the video on NBC's "The Office" website:

Apparently, the video is only available to US residents and NBC uses your IP address or something to guess where you are accessing the site from. Now I am sure that there are plenty of reasons why NBC believes that restricting access is necessary - but this kind of thing just drives me crazy and flies in the face of Net Neutrality. So, I can watch the show on broadcast TV, but some extra content is unavailable just because of where I happen to live?! The sad part of the story is that this kind of approach doesn't even work - there are plenty of alternative means to find the content online.

More Winter Weather

2007-01-29T17:24:00.000-08:00

Honestly - this isn't a weather blog - but with all of the "significant" weather that we have been having around the Greater Vancouver area this winter, I can't help but take some quick snapshots. I found this small plant looking rather cold just outside our front door.

(Did you notice how I conveniently didn't mention the fact that I haven't posted anything to the blog in over a month! There are a dozen excuses, so I will save some space and just move along)

Halo Movie

2006-12-17T15:09:00.001-08:00

At the risk of becoming a one-trick pony before finishing up my first official month of blogging - here's another Halo related post.

Recently, there has been a few minor news items concerning the making of a movie based on the Halo games. Apparently, some good preliminary work was being done, but then there were some disagreements amongst the studios and producers, etc. so the project was put "on hold".

Since it is probably inevitable that a movie will get made at some time, I am wondering if, with the recent releases of some great Halo trailers, Halo isn't a great fit for an entirely CGI movie? It's been 5 years since the last big-budget CGI movie: Final Fantasy. And while that movie is largely considered a flop due to it's poor showing at the box office, I believe that the problems were related to 2 primary things that a Halo movie could avoid:

Weak and confusing plot.
Too many "human" characters.

The first point is pretty self-explanatory (I hope), but the second point may deserve some further explanation. You see, I remember when the Final Fantasy movie came out there was a lot of talk about how realistic the characters would look (I seem to recall something about the animators modeling all of the female, main character's hair strands individually, in order to make it move more naturally). While the results were amazing, I still think that were not good enough to not distract the viewer during the movie. Additionally, it seemed like the quality of the character modeling varied with the level of importance of the characters - i.e. the main character looked more "real" and natural than some of the less important human characters.

With the Halo movie however, this would be far less of an issue. Part of the Halo mystique is the fact that the main character (the Master Chief) doesn't ever remove his helmet - and therefore we never see him. I am no CGI artist but I am pretty sure that the amount of effort required to create a character who is basically covered from head to toe in some fancy armoured jumpsuit is a lot less than the work to model human facial expressions and individual hair movements.

Also, since the Halo world is occupied by a large variety of alien species, you know that there is going to need to be a large amount of CGI work done for the movie anyway, so doesn't it make things a lot easier - especially for visual continuity - for the entire movie to be rendered inside a computer-generated environment?

On the good side, at least the news for Halo isn't related at all to Uwe Boll being the director ;)

Stunning Halo Trailers

2006-12-10T22:08:00.001-08:00

I am a sucker for both movie and video-game previews. I think that it's the sheer intensity that the creators manage to cram into such a short clip. Inevitably, the full version of the move/game can not realistically live up to my expectations, mostly because you can't keep up that same level of intensity for more than a couple of minutes.

Even with all that being said, I am still drooling over the latest Halo 3 trailer. (Make sure to download and watch the hi-def version).

Whoa!

Bonus - Another cool video from the Halo universe is the trailer for an upcoming real-time strategy game called Halo Wars.

Self-Improvement

2006-12-10T21:52:00.001-08:00

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has a great personal blog where he writes about all sorts of things that enter into his mind. I got a real kick out of his recent tips on "Acting Smarter Than You Are".

It's funny because it's true.

Trying Windows Live Writer with Blogger

2006-12-05T23:06:00.001-08:00

It didn't take long for me to get annoyed with the web-based authoring provided by Blogger (more on that in a future post). I looked around a bit for a simple desktop blogging application. Many of the more polished looking apps that can work with Blogger are not free, so my choice was limited. It's not that I am (overly) cheap, it's just that I am not a professional blogger so it doesn't really make sense for me to pay money to write my posts.

Since my primary home computer is a Windows PC (please no religious flame wars over that), I decided to give Windows Live Writer a try. The installation was quick and painless: I just needed to enter my blog URL and login information along the way. If you see this post, then I guess things went smoothly.

No Zune in Canada?

2006-12-04T21:46:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about getting my wife a new MP3 player for Christmas (she doesn't read my blog so the secret is safe). I had been reading lots of interesting stuff about the new Zune from Microsoft as a reasonable alternative to an iPod. So I went to the usual Canadian online sources Future Shop and Best Buy. The result: nothing. I thought that was kind of weird, so I did a quick search on Google and found out that the Zune isn't available in Canada. Apparently it has something to do with the availability of the companion online music store for Canadian customers.

Oh well, I guess that my Christmas shopping got a little bit easier.

API Lessons

2006-11-28T22:40:00.000-08:00

A co-worker came by my desk at work today to ask a question about a software component that I had been involved in designing and implementing. The more that we talked, the more his questions turned into complaining about the component design... primarily it's API. Now this kind of bothered me at the time, but the more I thought about it the more I came to realize that he was right - and I think that I know why.

While I haven't been directly involved in maintaining that particular component, I can still remember the project quite well. It was a relatively small project to design an infrastructure utility that could be re-used by various larger applications. There was no user interface (graphical or command-line) - just a bunch of Java classes that were bundled as a jar file for other development teams to use when they needed this certain functionality. I think that part of the problem was that without that standard user interface, we ended forgetting that our product still had a customer: other developers within the organization.

While there are lots of important things to remember when designing and building software, there are a couple of items that I think deserve extra emphasis when writing a component with a programming API - and writing them down now will help me remember them next time:

Don't wait until the internal design is complete before designing your API.
You will end up with an API that is far too tightly coupled to your internal design (can anyone say Leaky Abstraction?). Looking back now, I realize that during all of those weeks of design and development, we never once had a discussion on *how* the "customer" was going to use our beautifully designed piece of software. Of course we all knew that there would need to be an API for our component (we weren't completely clueless). It was shown as a nice thin layer on our architecture diagrams. But no one actually designed that API until the implementation was partially complete. I use the term "design" quite loosely here, because I honestly don't know how the API came to be, it just kind of appeared in our source code repository somewhere along the way.

USE your API before it's final release.
Write a sample application, or some extended functional tests - whatever. If you use it before you release it, then there is still time for change those pieces that looked good on paper, but don't really work in the real world. I am ashamed to admit that to this day, I have still never written any code (other than some isolated unit tests) that actually used the component that I helped to build. As far as I'm concerned, that's the equivalent of writing a web site in a text editor and never actually loading it into the browser and clicking your way through!

So, whether you are writing a more traditional application with a user interface, or a more technical component like a programming library - don't forget about your customer.

Oh yeah - it wouldn't hurt to read up a bit on API design before starting, like these slides (pdf) from Joshua Bloch.

Active Vancouver Weather

2006-11-26T21:19:00.000-08:00

The Vancouver area has been getting some wild weather recently. There were some heavy rains a week or so ago that resulted in a boil water advisory that has lasted over a week for some people. Now on the heels of that excitement comes a major snow storm!

I went for a walk in the evening and snapped a couple of pictures. I wanted to capture the natural look so I turned off the flash and slowed down the shutter speed on my little point-and-click camera. The results were very bad... this picture is the only one that is even moderately acceptable:

From Snow - Novemb...

Us Vancouverites are typically pretty inept at dealing with snow - especially when it comes to driving which should make for an interesting drive into the office tomorrow.

Update: The boil water advisory has finally been lifted. And I didn't have to battle the morning commute in the snow because I am working from home today.

Blogger (Beta) and FeedBurner

2006-11-22T22:48:00.000-08:00

So since I have a blog now, I thought that it would be a good idea to register the blog feed with FeedBurner. It's a pretty simple process - and the good folks over at FeedBurner even have some Blogger-specific instructions. Unfortunately, the instructions aren't as simple as they can be when it comes to the part entitled "Promoting your FeedBurner feed on your Blogger site" - which I only figured out after wrangling with Blogger's HTML template for a while.

You see, the instructions from FeedBurner tell you to "edit your blog's HTML template directly" in order to provide an easy way for people to subscribe to your feed. Unfortunately, this is a bit misleading. Maybe that is the way that you had to do it with previous versions of Blogger, but now you can just use the Page Elements feature instead:

go to your blog's Template tab
select the "Page Elements" section
select the "Add a page element" link (I created one in the blog sidebar),
give the section a Title, then paste the FeedBurner HTML snippet directly into the Content section.
Done!

That's progress.

Hopefully Late is Better than Never.

2006-11-21T21:11:00.000-08:00

I have been reading and participating in blogs for a few years now, but seemed to never bring myself to actually start one of my own... so here I am, late to the party.

I guess a short introduction would be worthwhile. My name is Jeff Smith and I am a software developer in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada. I expect the content of this blog to run the gamut of topics including hockey, software, technology and miscellaneous personal ramblings.

I apologize in advance since the quality of the posting is going to be pretty erratic until I start to get the hang of it, so bear with me (notice how I am writing this as if someone is actually reading, I never really considered myself to be such an optimist!).

Now that the proverbial ice is broken, let's get going. It feels good to finally join the conversation.