The Ink Smudge

Age In the NBA

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:40:00 +0000

I have several searches trolling the twitternet in search of news about the NBA and what's going on with free agency. Being a Mavs fan first and foremost, I make sure to read over what people are saying about the team. One theme that I've read several times is that they are so old. I thought the signing of Shawn Marion(info / twitter) was a great move. It seems that most of the NBA world agrees but there are still lots of tweets and comments that refer to how old the Mavericks are getting. "Marion is 31!!!" As if being 31 is the equivalent to sitting in the rec room watching Matlock with Methuselah.

Anyway, it got me to wondering...how old are the Mavericks? If you took the average age of all their players, how would they compare to the rest of the league? Who's got the oldest team? Well, I have the answers and the results may surprise you. I have not included rookies in this calculation because a lot of them won't make the team they play for anyway. The team with the highest non-rookie average age is...the New Orleans Hornets. I know, I was surprised too. Chris Paul(info / twitter) is a young player and that makes me think of the Hornets as a young team but they have nine players that were born in the 70s. Hornets average age: 29.7857 years. Here's how the 10 oldest teams in the league breakdown:

New Orleans - 29.7857
San Antonio Spurs - 29.4666
Milwaukee Bucks - 28.9375
Houston Rockets - 28.6
Cleveland Cavaliers - 28.6
Dallas Mavericks - 28.375
Boston Celtics - 28.375
Orlando Magic - 28.3333
Chicago Bulls - 28.3077
Detroit Pistons - 28.2727

The Mavericks are the 6th oldest team in the league even with Shawn Marion in the line up. He actually made the Mavericks a younger team by replacing Jerry Stackhouse. These rankings will no doubt change as rookies get signed, free agent signings continue and various players are dropped. I'll post the rankings again as we get closer to the start of the season. What is most interesting to me about this list is that every single team on this list (with the exception of the Bucks) made the playoffs. Experience counts.

The youngest team in the league? That would be the Golden State Warriors with an average non-rookie age of 25.2 years. The second youngest team is the Portland Trailblazers. They also happen to be the tallest team in the league going by average height at just over 6' 8". Now that is intriguing. The Blazers made the playoffs and they have some amazing young players. If Greg Oden (info) continues to improve, we might be hearing about the Blazers for a long, long time.

By the way, the Cavs are the heaviest team in the league with an average weight of 233.5 lbs. Shaq(info / twitter) hasn't played a minute yet and the Cavs are already at the top of one statistical category.

Full spreadsheet can be found here.

What you'll find here

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:13:00 +0000

I started this blog to write about writing my first novel (which I finished and decided I should leave in the drawer). Why did I think writing about writing a novel would be good idea? Well...I thought I'd finish it sooner than I did, and that I'd get to write about sending out query letters and meeting with agents and getting that first deal and all the hooplah that goes along with that sort of thing. Delusions of grandeur indeed. I'm still writing, but I have a lot of other interests that I like to write about (it all comes back to the writing) and rather than start a new blog each time I get into a new topic, it's all going to go here.

I do not imagine that most people will be interested in everything that goes on here. I'm going to setup labels so, if one were so inclined, one could pick and choose what pieces of the Ink Smudge one reads. This list may get bigger as time goes by, but here are the main items:

Writing (How it's going)
Programming (Mostly .Net but some other stuff too)
Technology (General tech talk, some product reviews).
Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
NBA (as in basketball, the greatest sport)
Reading (Quasi book reviews of ones I like)
Musings (Some other topic that I wanted to share)

I still have that Introduction to Programming(intro) series of posts that I want to do. I will do them, but I got hung up after I finished the presentation part of the first post. The day I planned to record the screen cast, I got sick. Even though I knew I'd need to edit the recording some, I decided I did not want to cut 80+ coughs and wheezes. I am just now getting over the cough. I have some room on the schedule to do it, so I hope to get it done soon. I won't commit to a date because something will come up and it won't get done.

Of course, you can subscribe to the main feed and get it all. Fine by me.

Jason Kidd: Worth Every Penny

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:41:00 +0000

Sociology text books tell us that human beings are social creatures and, a few oddities aside, prefer to be in groups rather than alone. The same holds true for opinions. People say they call it like the see it but in reality they call it like they hear it. If a person hears opinions from several different sources then often times it is deemed true…and safe. A safe opinion is one that you can state in most areas and no one will call you out on it, because most people have heard the same thing. Instead of devoting ones time to finding out if it is indeed true, why not spend the efforts on coming up with snarky, clever, ways to give the opinion. Who cares if it’s true or not? Let’s just take pot shots and bask in the warm glow of group approval.
Here are a few examples of what I am talking about.

• The Inuit have an overly large number of words for snow.
• Saturday Night Live isn’t funny anymore.
• Sugar causes hyperactivity in children.

It does matter if it is true or not, we know we can get away with stating these kinds of opinions because everyone else says the same thing.

Let me add one more to the mix…

• Jason Kidd is old, broken down, and not worth $25 million for 3 years.

It’s up to you, dear reader, to make up your mind about the first three misconceptions I listed. But, I’m going into detail on the 4th one about Mr. Kidd. It’s wrong and I am going to tell you why.

Jason Kidd came to the Mavericks via trade with New Jersey half way through the 2007-2008 season. Devin Harris was the 5th pick in 2004 draft and he's a very fast point guard. He was a big reason the Mavericks were able to pull off a game 7 win against the Spurs in 2006. He is also 10 years younger than Jason Kidd. Bad idea right? Why trade a young up and comer for an older player who is slowing down? And if you do trade for the older timer, why on earth sign them to a three year extension for $25 million?

Let’s take a look at the output of the starting point guards for all sixteen playoff teams last season, plus the stats of Devin Harris and Steve Nash (neither of whom made the post season). For the rest of this article I will be referring to Jason Kidd’s rank among these 18 players unless otherwise noted.

In this select group, Jason Kidd ranks dead last in points per game. He is also the oldest player (born in 1973) on the list by a year (Steve Nash was born in 1974). So apparently he is an old point guard that cannot score. But let’s look further.

Assists per game is a very important stat for point guards. Last year Jason Kidd ranked 4th. Assists per turnovers is another important stat for point guards. Jason Kidd had the #1 assist to turn over ration out of all 18. He ranks #2 in steals per game (2.0). He is #4 in steals per turnover. He is 8th in efficiency in the playoffs . He is #1 in rebounds per game. He is 8th in +/-, which is close to middle of the pack but it’s the best on the entire Dallas Mavericks team. When he is on the court for the Mavs, good things happen. Jason Kidd does take some flak for not being a great shooter. Fair enough, he is 17th on the list in field goal percentage. He cannot drive and score like he used to. He does take more threes now but so what? He makes over 40% of them. His three point shooting ranks him 7th in our list, not even in the top 5, but that percentage is the best 3 point percentage on the Mavericks team, even better than Dirk. Sure he takes more 3 point shots, he makes more too.

For double-doubles among all guards in the league, Jason Kidd is 6th with 19. That’s only 1 behind Dwyane Wade, but it’s 3 ahead of Devin Harris, 4 ahead of Rajon Rondo and Tony Parker. Kobe Bryant only had 8 double doubles for the entire season.

Let’s look at triple doubles. Not much of a field here. Only fourteen players in the entire league had at least 1 triple double. That’s how hard they are to come by. Old, broken down Jason Kidd had 3. That’s good for third in the entire league behind only Chris Paul and LeBron James.

For a guy who can’t play defense, Jason Kidd sure manages to rack up some decent. Like I said earlier, he is #2 in steals per game on our list of 18. He’s #5 among all guards in the NBA in blocks per game (.5). Half a block per game may not look like much, but in the tightly packed Western Conference, a block every other game can make a difference.

Yes, it will be hard for Jason Kidd to guard all star point guards like Deron Williams, Tony Parker, Chauncey Billups and Chris Paul. But those guys are on play off caliber teams and the entire league has a problem staying in front of them. Especially Chris Paul. He’s the one guard that cannot be stopped by anyone. But even Chris Paul can have trouble guarding other top point guards. For example: Chauncey Billups in the playoffs. In the first round, Chauncey Billups and Nuggets did well against the Chris Paul led Hornets, beating them in 5. The Nuggets also beat the Mavs in 5, but consider this: the Mavs had just beaten the Spurs, a higher seed opponent, and old man Kidd should have been more fatigued in the second round of the playoffs. If Billups did well against Chris Paul he was absolutely going to torch the defensively challenged Kidd, right? Nope. Billups had fewer points, assists and rebounds per game while his turnovers per game went up in the second round. Now, it ultimately did not make any difference, the Mavs still lost. Jason Kidd didn’t exactly light it up during the second round, but they didn’t lose that series because the Denver back court ran roughshod over Jason Kidd. They lost because the Nuggets were the better team.

The Nets have not made the playoffs with Devin Harris at the helm after making it for six straight years with Jason Kidd. The Nets were so bad this past season that they were 5 games out of the 8th spot in the East. Detroit( losing record of 39-43) made the 8th spot. Sure, Devin Harris scored 21.3 points per game which is impressive and way better than Jason Kidd, but somebody has to take the shots on a bad team. That doesn’t make them a great player. Jason Kidd had 26% more assists, almost twice as many rebounds, 25% more steals, 26% fewer turnovers. He also played 12 more games than Devin Harris did last year. What’s that? Yep, the old timer Jason Kidd played more games than Devin Harris during the regular season, which brings me to the topic of durability.

Devin Harris has been playing pro basketball for six seasons. He’s already missed 64 games. Jason Kidd has played 17 seasons and missed 95. Three time as many seasons, but only 1/3 more missed games. In fact, since Devin Harris came into the league, an aging Jason Kidd has only missed 23 games (while making the playoffs each of those years). That is one third as many missed games as Devin Harris. If durability is what you want, you want Jason Kidd.
So by now I think you will agree with me that Jason Kidd can play at a high level and has done so for a long, long time. It’s amazing that he can have such a drop off in points per game and still have such an impact.

Best PG in the league? Nope. No one can touch Chris Paul. There’s also Deron Williams, Tony Parker, and Chauncy Billups. Rajon Rondo and Derrick Rose are both great players as well. But Jason Kidd is right in there. He is arguably a top 5 point guard in this league. At the very least he’s the 7th best. So why all that money? $25 million for three years? Ridiculous right? Well, of all 18 players on our list, Jason Kidd is 10th in expected money for the next three years. I had to project some years for a few players, but I doubt he’s higher than 9th. Most likely he will drop to 11th or 12th once all the free agent signings are complete. Jason Kidd will be nearly 40 years old when he reaches the end of this deal. Most likely he will retire then. His game may drop off a little more, but I doubt it will drop much. Great point guards have a longevity to them that is simply amazing. Here’s a list of point guard greats and the length of their careers:

• Bob Cousy-20 years (1950-1970)
• Oscar Robertson-14 years (1960-1974)
• Walt Frazier-13 years (1967-1980)
• Magic Johnson-17 years(1979-1996)
• Isaiah Thomas-13 years (1981-1974)
• John Stockton-17 years (1987-2003)
• Mark Jackson-17 years (1987-2004)
• Gary Payton-17 years(1990-2007)
• Steve Nash-13 years (1996-present)

Many of the players I just listed made major contributions to their teams until the day the retired. Steve Nash is still contributing. And speaking of Steve Nash, he is only one year younger than Jason Kidd. He’s had the same kind of “can’t play defense” things said about him. He will make over half of Jason Kidd’s three year deal in 2009-2010 alone. I bet he has at least one more contract in him. Think it’ll be less than $25 million for three years? I don’t.

I could go on, but I think I have made my point. If you still think it was a bad deal to sign Jason Kidd for another three years, very well. Part of the fun of sports is to argue over stuff like this. I still think you are wrong, but then I picked against Orlando every series during the playoffs so I must have my blind spots too.

One last thing. I’d like to comment on the Dallas Mavericks front office. Donnie Nelson has done some great things for this organization. Not every trade, signing or draft has been a great one. But the Mavs are in the playoffs, consistently after a decade of finishing near the bottom. How consistent are the Mavericks? Since the 2001 season, only two teams have made the playoffs every year. Those two teams would be the San Antonio Spurs and the Dallas Mavericks. It’s true the Mavericks finished 6th last year. But things are very interesting in the Western Conference right now. It appears that, thanks to the Lakers farm team (also known as the Memphis Grizzlies), no one can touch the Lakers. They finished an easy 1st in the West. But it sure was tight from 2-8. A total of six games separate the 2nd seed from the 8th seed in the West. The spread in the Eastern Conference from 2nd to 8th was 23 games. Every little bit helps in the West. An ill-timed three game skid can send you from opening the playoffs on your home court to barely making it in at all. Just ask the Rockets. To succeed in the post season (especially in the West) you need smart, consistent players. Mark Cuban did the right thing by signing Jason Kidd for another three years.

And for $25 million, I say it was a bargain.

Link to data.

Data was compiled using the following sites:

Facebook Friend Filtering

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:34:00 +0000

Do you have Facebook friends that comment on every last thing you do? Do they sometimes write comments that make you cringe? Are you in the position where you don't want to de-friend them, but you just don't want them commenting their incredibly well thought out political and economic commentary on your posted items? You are in luck, I have TWO solutions for you:

De-friend them.
Make it so they can't see your status updates or your posted links.

I'll go into detail on the second option.

(If any of these screen shots below are too small for you to read, click them for an enlarged view)

Move your mouse over "Settings" at the top right of your Facebook home page. Click "Privacy Settings".

Now click the top link called "Profile"

Here you want to click the drop down list for "Status and Links" and choose "Customize". I've already done this so I'll use the "Personal Info" section as an example.

Look at the bottom section that says, "Except these people." It's in red. You can type the names of people here, or the name of a friend group (I have a group called "Stay Away"). Click Okay

If you want to make sure you did it right, look at the top of the page. Type the name of a person you filtered in the "See how a friend sees your profile:" box. You'll then be able to see how they see your information. If they can't see your status or links, you've done it right.

Now, you can be friends but not friend friends with some one. Hope this helps.

By the way, option #1 is a lot simpler. Sometimes it's the best way to go. Don't feel bad about it, I'm sure someone has already de-friended you. You didn't think you were the only discriminating Facebook user in your circle of friends did you?

An Introduction To Programming

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 04:14:00 +0000

When I tell people that I am a software developer (after they ask...I don't run up and tell people), I sometimes get a wide eyed response. Rarely, the person will tilt their head to one side to see if my melon has an abnormally large egg shape. Occasionally I will hear a comment like, "Oh man, I could never do that."

Now, there is a certain amount of brain work that goes into software development. But it certainly is not rocket science. Well, it is if you write code for NASA, but for the most part, it's straight forward. At least, I think it is. I have always thought that software development was a very approachable field because there are many free tools on the web as well as a gazillion websites devoted to answering questions. There is an aura of perceived complexity around computers that is starting to diminish. The IPhone, TiVo, and the Web in general are used by lots of people who would not call themselves technical. Computer programming (software development, coding, etc.) is one of the last bastions of pure geekdom. But it does not have to be. If you have an interest (a big if), you can learn enough about it to make write your own original software.

So, my plan for the next several posts is to provide an introduction to software development. I asked some of my colleagues how they would go about it and many of them said, "You have to learn real fundamentals. Some of it is hard and there is just not any way around it." Perhaps they are right, but I am of the opinion that software developers are sometimes not the best at describing how we do what we do. Technical people in general can be like that. Have you ever called technical support and the answer you received confused you more? We all have.

Perhaps I will only confuse a potential reader more. But even if that is the case, by attempting to instruct others in computer programming, I will no doubt learn about it myself. There are things I can still learn by going over the basics. As the Wu Li master Al Huang says, "Every lesson is the first lesson. Every time we dance, we do it for the first time." I don't know what he is talking about but it seems fitting.

So...

This series of posts will be under the label "intro". The first one will cover the basic parts of a computer and how several of those parts work together. There won't be much to it, just big pictures and me talking. It'll be short too. Until then.

What it takes

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:26:00 +0000

What does it take to start a custom software company these days? Quite a bit. First of all you have to come up with a way to brand yourself as something other than a custom software company because "custom software" means, "no one else has ever used this before" to most customers. So you bandy around several names and come up with something that probably ends with "solutions" in order to give the impression that you solve problems with software. By the way, I mean "you" as in you alone, not the formal/plural you. You are starting this thing on your own right? If your friends or co-workers wanted to start a software company, they'd already be doing it right? You are on your own.

I assume you already know how to register a domain name and all that kind of thing. If not, then software freelancing may not be for you. Once you know what you are going to call yourself, check out these ten services...

GoGrid - Virtual servers galore. Sign up for a new account. You'll get a $50 credit and literally within 15 minutes you can RDP into a Windows 2003 or 2008 server with an administrator account. Load whatever you want. They do Linux stuff too. It's great if you want to host applications (and charge your customer a markup) or for quick proof of concept deployments that require a server but not for very long.
Sherweb - Hosted exchange. 3GB of inbox space for $9 a month. If you have a team you can add more accounts. Shared calendar, contacts, public folders. Includes web mail access and mobile access for your PDA. They also throw in a full copy of Outlook 2007. Love it. Hosted Sharepoint? They do that too.
Google Voice - Formerly Grand Central. You can have people call your business without revealing their number. You link your Google voice number to a schedule so that it rings a certain phone (or phones) during business hours and have it go straight to voice mail during off hours. It's free.
Google Sites - Rather than spend a lot of time coding a site, you can use Google's templates and widgets to make a decent site without having to worry about hosting. Link your domain name to the site and you're in good shape. It's free.
SMTP Server - If you have an application that needs to send emails, or you want to do a marketing blast (though you shouldn't), this is a good service. It's not free but it's not expensive.
Billing Manager - Invoice management from Intuit. Enter hours, send invoices, record payments run reports. It's great for the price, which is free.
Mozy - This is an online automated backup solution. If you are not backing up your work, then you will find yourself in a lot of trouble. It's bad when your hard drive crashes and you lose your vacation photos. It's a whole lot worse when your hard drive crashes and it takes with it the only copy of code that the client has already paid for. Mozy isn't the best application out there for code backup, but it does work and it's free for up to 2GB. Unlimited backup is $4.95 a month. It's worth it.
Microsoft Developer Express - Don't worry about buying an expensive MSDN subscription. You don't need it. Get some work and use that money to buy your development tools later. Do not use software licenses from your for real job. These tools from MS are great and they are free. You can get what you need to make windows applications, web services, web applications, databases, console applications and other components. You can target C# or VB (or download it all, it's free). Load up SQL Server 2008 Express and exult in the greatness that is Intellisense in the SQL Manager.
PDANet - This handy little application let's you use your mobile phone as a modem for your laptop or other computer. It's great when you are in an area that isn't covered by Wifi. If you don't have an unlimited data plan you might not want to use this. It could get very expensive. If you are on a 3G network or EV-DO RevA you'll really like this.
Buy these three books. Be sure to read #1! Being able to properly estimate software is a crucial skill if you are freelancing and every dime counts. It counts even when you are a part of a large IT group. You will go far if things work the way they are supposed to, when they are supposed to and cost as much as you said they would (in dollars and hours). These books are several years old, but I still go back to them.

So there's my list of tools and sites that can get you going with out too much in the way of time or money. You still have to get the clients, meet the deadlines and deliver. Hopefully these tools will make it a little easier to do so. Good luck.

Twitter and the NBA

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Mon, 25 May 2009 18:01:00 +0000

My wife and I decided to give up cable for Lent this year. The idea was to buy a Roku Digital Video Player box after Easter and get our "cable" that way. Then we decided what we really wanted was Hulu on our TV so we're waiting to see if Hulu signs with Roku or any of the other set top boxes. As a result of all this, I am without cable TV and so I'm missing most of the NBA playoffs (which I would have missed with our without the Roku). I missed most of the Chicago - Boston series. I missed LeBron's shot at the end of game two in Cleveland. I catch the games that are on ABC but for the most part I work on whatever project I'm working on and keep the ESPN gamecast window open in the second monitor. It's just not the same.

But the other night, as Denver was giving the game away to the Lakers, I pulled up Twitter and saw what the NBA was posting about the game. Nothing I did not already know, but interesting. Then after some more surfing I found out that Kevin Durant has a Twitter feed and he was posting about the game. So was Stephen A. Smith and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Steve Nash is on as well although he has not talked about basketball lately. Most of his posts have to do with "fute-bole" as he trots the globe.

Anyhoo, what was cool was that I really enjoyed reading what those guys had to say. I watched ESPN's Game Cast play by play and then I looked at Twitter and saw what each of them had to say about the play. Pretty cool and very informative at times. How often do you get to sit next to Kareem Abdul-Jabar during a game and hear what he has to say about it? Kevin Durant has some good stuff too and he isn't afraid to call players out. He's a bit less polished but I like that. I like getting to hear what they think off the cuff.

If you are watching the NBA playoffs (or play by play stats online), have a Twitter window open and follow these guys if you are not already. Oh yeah, Shaq is on too but I cannot make sense of most of what he writes. But, how can 1,000,000+ followers be wrong...right?

So, I'm starting to get Twitter. At first it seemed like a hype machine to get big followings for celebrities but I am finding out about some interesting things through Twitter feeds that I otherwise would not know about. I'll talk about that another time.

Auto Complete Example Project

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:02:00 +0000

I've written an ASP.Net project that shows how to configure the Auto Complete Extender(ACE), get back the text and the ID, and pull data to show in a details view. If this is your first time using the ACE, pay special attention to the web service files and the javascript in the default.aspx page.

To run this project you'll need Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, MS SQL Express 2008, and the Adventure Works demo database(AdventureWorksDB.msi).

In addition to the ACE I also used an ASP Update Panel and some basic Linq To SQL.

You can download my example project here. You'll need to set the correct connection string in the web.config file to connect to your copy of the AdventureWorks database. If you need help with connection strings, try this site.

More AutoComplete

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:35:00 +0000

I have been getting a lot of hits on the Google Search Appliance Auto Complete post. I thought I would add a few more notes concerning the Auto Complete control in the ajax.net toolkit. Let's say you have a long list of items in a drop down list. Wouldn't it be better to filter that list based on what the user types? Yeah, of course! That's why we have that functionality all over the web now. The only probelm is that the Auto Complete control isn't as easy to use as the other controls in the Ajax control toolkit.. For instance:

You have to write a web service to handle the back in call to the data source. So if all of your data is in an MS SQL database, or Access, or XML, you have to write the query for that and put it in a web service and tag it with a WebMethod attribute. Read more about web services here.
The webservice that the Auto Complete calls can have any name but it must have the following paramter signature: Public Function GetItemName(ByVal prefixText As String, ByVal count As Integer) As String(). The first variable must be a string and it has to be called prefixText. The second one must be called count and it has to be an Integer. Read more about the Auto Complete extender here.
One final thing you need to know about the Auto Complete extender is that most of the examples you'll find online show how to get back the text that the user selected, but they don't show you how to get back the ID. Let's say you have a dropdown list of car parts. There could be thousands of them. The user types in a few letters, sees the part, arrows down to it and hits enter. What you need now in order to do look ups in your related tables is the ID of that item, not the text itself. How do you get that? Inside my webMethod function I do something like this: tempResult.Add(AjaxControlToolkit.AutoCompleteExtender.CreateAutoCompleteItem(itemname), itemID))
In this example tempResult is List( Of String). By using this CreateAutoCompleteItem function I can create an item that the Auto Complete Extender knows should be split into a text value to display and an ID value that will actually be used. Now, the return type has to be a string array, so the last line of my function is "Return tempResult.toArray()". I like working with generic lists but you could just as easliy dimension a string array with the size based on the count paramter.
Now, how do I get the value back from the ajax call? In the markup for the AutoComplete Extender, you need to specify a javascript function to be called after the user selects an item. Something like this: OnClientItemSelected="showItem". The showItem function will look something like this:
function ShowItem( source, eventArgs ) {
alert( " Key : "+ eventArgs.get_text() +" Value : "+eventArgs.get_value());
}
What's that? You don't want the value in a javascript alert, you want to assign it to an ASP.net control, like an asp:HiddenField or something like that? Then do a getElementById('hiddencontrolID').value = eventArgs.get_value(); somewhere in your javascript function.
Now you are probably going to ask...what if it's in a User Control and there are lots of them on the page and I don't know what the ID is going to be for each asp:Hidden control? That's an answer for another blog post. If this one generates lots of hits I'll write it up.

Authors@Google - Neal Stephenson

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:48:00 +0000

I recently watched an hour long question and answer session with one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, from the Authors@Google series. It's a great interview in that he gives lots of well thought out answers to the various questions and it's a rare one because he does not often do this sort of thing. He spoke briefly about his latest book, Anathem, and then took questions for the rest of the hour. Real quick, I would jump at the chance to hear Mr. Stephenson speak but I doubt I would have the guts to ask him a question. I would be afraid I would get planed like the guy who asked him, "You are known as a sci-fi writer but when are you going to write a story that takes place in space?" I forget what his exact answer was but it was something along the lines of, "A lot of things take place in outer space in my current book...so there you go." In fairness to the person asking the question the book came out on September 9th and the talk was given three days later. I did not get the impression that Mr. Stephenson was being smug but...that was the answer.

The part that was most helpful to me was when he answered a question about how he writes. One thing that has always discouraged me about my own writing is that I felt that I did not want it bad enough. I would read about other writers who wrote all the time. Now, I understand that to be good at anything, you have to devote lots of time and energy even when you do not feel like it. I get that, but there are times when I do not feel like writing because I really feel like working on something else. Often times those other things are very time consuming. For a long time I thought that meant that I was not meant to be a "real writer" because I did not have that all-consuming must write all the time attitude.

Here is what I learned and if you are a writer maybe this will help you as well:

He usually writes for two hours a day. That's hard to do if you have a fulltime job, school and perhaps a family, but it's approachable at least. Once that time is up he does something completely unrelated to the writing project.
He writes about 10-15 pages a day.
In order to get back in the groove he reads the previous day's writing and does some light editing.
He tries to stop right in the middle of a scene. This was big for me. The reason he does this is because it's easier to ramp up from the previous day's work and finish off a scene rather than start on a brand new scene. If he is starting a new chapter then the ramp up does not do as much good. I realized that I almost always write until a scene ends. Which is to say, I take a break where a reader would take a break. But how one writes a book is different from how one reads a book. Aha!
Lastly, when he completes a book it takes about a year to finish the tying up of loose ends. There's the final editing, cover design, talks @Google and whatever else an author has to go through after a book has been selected for publication (I wouldn't know). Mr. Stephenson said that it takes about a year to fininish all that stuff. During that time he works on other things.

He also writes in long hand and then types that draft into a word processor. That has worked for me as well. I tend to be much less verbose if I write by hand than if I just clackity-clack away at the keyboard. The sound of keys clicking away can lead one to think, "Man! I am really going now!" but in fact what I have written is full of extra words ("just", "like", "a little", "seemed") and a slew of adverbs. I have only tried this ink first/computer later approach on short stories. The one novel that I wrote was written almost completely on a word processor and it isn't in the greatest shape. However, I think that its problems have more to do with the fact that it was my first attempt at a novel and not that I wrote it in MS Word.

Anyway, here is the talk in full.

My Review of The Worm of Ouroboros

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Mon, 04 May 2009 01:25:00 +0000

How did I ever come across this book?

Well, my brother-in-law runs a blog and from time to time he will talk about things related to role playing games such as D&D. He wrote a short blog post about the influence of Christianity on D&D (yes, you read that right). That post linked to another post written by James Maliszewski, a guy who writes about old school D&D all the time. I found that post to be fascinating so I added his blog to my daily RSS reading.

One day Mr. Maliszewski mentioned a book that he called one of the "Most Influential Fantasy Novels You've Never Heard Of, Let Alone Read". Evidently Mr. Tolkien read this book too and had good and bad things to say about it. I was intrigued. The book was called The Worm of Ouroboros, written in 1922 by E.R. Eddison. It was available on the Kindle so I downloaded it and started reading.

I liked this book, I really liked it, but it was not an easy read. In fact, I'm not sure how to describe it in a way that will not be immediately off putting. It's long, uses very archaic language, has pages of description and will build up to huge events only to skip over them and have a minor character recount what happened later. I'll explain each point:

It's long. 458 pages.
Uses archaic language. I will provide an example. This is how one character says that he does not like to get up early:
"Truly I was seldom so uncivil as surprise Madam Aurora in her nightgown. And the thrice or four times I have been forced thereto, taught me it is an hour of crude airs and mists which breed cold dark humours in the body, an hour when the torch of life burns weakest."
Uses even more archaic language. Sometimes the characters have to write letters to each other and then they get really formal. None of that familiar, vulgar, tongue wagging like you saw in bullet point #2. Here's a passages from a letter:
"Fram Me, Gorice the Twelft, Greate Kyng of Wychlande and of Ympelande and of Daemonlande and of al kyngdomes the sonne dothe spread hys bemes over..." Some of these letters go on for pages.

Uses archaiec spellings. Words like "murder" and "had" are written, "murther" and "hath".
Lots of description. These parts you can skip over. All you need to know is that whenever there is a feast or formal gathering of any kind, there is lots of food and everyone is dressed nicely.
What happened? There are several major battles that take place. Some of them are described in adequate detail, some are skipped over. For instance, the battle that turned the tide of favor of "Daemonland" (who are the good guys), is mentioned by more than one character as "the greatest battle I was ever a part of." And yet we don't hear anything about it first hand. The reader is told the outcome by way of a side story where a young woman and her father are tending a field and the woman's husband comes home from the battle and tells them what happened. A great sea battle is completely glossed over. We just find out who won.

Who would ever read this book, right? I started it and by the time I was five pages in I said to myself, "No way I'm going to read 500+ pages of this." But I did. I read the entire thing. And I enjoyed it. I was glad when Witchland was defeated and Demonland won the day. I was right there with Lord Juss as he searched the world for his brother. Just so you know the people of Witchland aren't really witches and Demonland is not peopled with demons. Those are just names of various kingdoms.

The language kept me in that world in a way that contemporary American English would not have. As for the ending, I'll give you a hint. It's similar to the ending of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Mr. Tolkien liked the book very much but had some reservations about the themes presented. Here is an excerpt concerning Mr. Eddison's work from letter #199 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien:

"Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. Incidentally I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of all of which, I still think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read."

A user review of this book at manybooks.net sums it up nicely:

"The first few pages shocked me like a first taste of strong drink. I could hardly comprehend what I was reading. But once I was drunk on the book it got much better and I can't put it down. "

You can get this book in many electronic formats for free at manybooks.net.

The main things are the plain things...

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:00:00 +0000

A couple of years ago I did what lots of aspiring writers do when they decide to get serious about writing. I bought lots of book on how to write and read them. I took notes and underlined passages. Sometimes I would type up pithy statements, print them out and put them above my monitor. It was great stuff. I'd compare what each writer said about "the craft" and weight it against my own experience. Only I did not have much experience. I even bought a book on how to get a liteary agent. I spent a lot of time reading about how to write but very little time writing.

It took me a while to get over the fact that it was okay to write when I didn't feel inspired. I figured if I did not feel like writing then whatever I wrote would be crap and it would mess up the story. But waiting until I felt like it did not get me anywhere. A day became a week, became a month, became chanting of the phrase, "I'm not a writer, who am I kidding?" That kind of stuff. This quote from Frank Herbert woke me up:

So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two.

I need a muse that acts like Gurney Halleck in Dune:

"I guess I'm not in the mood for it today," Paul said.

"Mood?" Halleck's voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield's filtering. "What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises - no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting."

"I'm sorry, Gurney."

"You're not sorry enough!"

Reading those "how to" book on writing was not a total waste of time. Here are the three best ones that I read:

I feel like I am on the right track now. I am writing again. I'm reading lots too, but not books on how to write. The books that were the most helpful were not that long because the main(plain) thing they had to say was...write as much as you can. That's it. There is no spoon and there is no secret.

Care to Comment?

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:30:00 +0000

I was reading an article about an NBA playoff game the other day and after I finished the article I scrolled down to the comment section. Internet comments have been around in one form or another for a long time. When blogs took off around 2003 it seemed liked every website added a comment section to whatever content they published. And so began the insanity.

Back to this NBA recap. At the bottom was snippet after snippet of pure vitriolic non-sense. Back and forth went the, "all fans of thus and so are-" and things like, "(star player) is overrated and will choke!!!!!!!" On and on. Sixty eight of them. Some individuals worked all seven words that cannot be said on television into a single screed. We have all seen this stuff on various websites.

It is amazing what people will say when there is zero chance of ever being called on it. It is also interesting to see what happens when someone has the tables turned on them and all of a sudden their email address is attached the the comment they made, and it is made available for all to see. Here's an example.

Sometimes there are moderators to check the comments before posting them to the site but there are problems with that. Let's say an article really gets people going and people all over the world want to weigh in. When the moderators get hundreds of comments at once the flow of user interaction is broken. They can't get to all of the comments in time to actually show what people really think and before they can

catch up it is the next day and a new article or post is out. Conversations between users cannot happen because pieces of the conversation are left out due to content or time constraints.

I suppose one could turn comments off altogether. Several blogs that I follow do not allow comments. I can see that point of view. My email address is available so if comments are turned off, I could still be contacted. Maybe I do not want to start a conversation on a blog if I cannot know who I am talking to. A person could email me and tell tell me off 100 different ways but I at least can answer that person with an email of my own. If it's a rant email with a throw away address, no worries. At least no one else had to see it.

When I cross post on Facebook I have nearly 300 contacts (mostly people I have been acquainted with for several years) who could potentially read it. They know who I am and if they want to comment on the FB link I know who they are. I can still be taken to task but an actual, civil, dialog can occur. Also, a group of our peers gets to see what is written and they can jump in at any moment too. I like that kind of thing.

But, what if you actually want to start a dialog about a topic and the participants in the dialog will be people from all over the world who can't possibly know each other or verify each other's identity? There is a website that I frequent that seems to have a solution. It's not perfect but it is better than anything I have seen elsewhere. The site is slashdot.org.

Slashdot is a site that generates value from the comments of its readers. Anyone can get an account. There is no approval process. No one checks to see if you are who you say you are. Actually you don't even have to sign up. You can submit an article, post a comment and reply to other comments by clicking the "anonymous coward" check box before you click submit. The site is followed by a wide range of age groups, ethnicities as well as diverse political, religious, educational backgrounds. The motto of the site is "News for nerds, stuff that

matters." The articles posted to this site are usually pretty good and the comments are highly informative, interesting and sometimes out right funny. How does a site like this work and not devour itself after the first post concerning Microsoft vs. Apple? How can it carry on an intelligent conversation concerning the War in Iraq with so many different backgrounds? I will tell you, as best I can.

I've been reading the site almost since it got started in 1997 and I still do not quite understand how it all works. I am not sure anyone does. That's the beauty of it.

Here is what I know:

A denizen of the Internet comes across an article that they think falls under the banner of "New for Nerds, Stuff That Matters." They go to slashdot, write a brief summary of why the article is interesting and post a link to the article.
Next a group of randomly selected users look over the submitted stories and decide which ones are deserving of the front page of slashdot (there are other sub-categories but I'm not going to get into that). If enough of these moderators vote yea then the blurb submitted by the user and the link to the original source shows up on the front page. Now the fun begins.
Users start to read the front page submission. Some users decide they wish to comment on the story. So he or she writes a comment and clicks submit.
Another group of randomly selected users are assigned 5 moderation points. They can use these points to mark a submitted comment as insightful, interesting, funny or something like that. This gives the comment a +1. If it's a comment that is full of cursing, personal insults or someone just banging randomly on the keyboard it is moderated down as "troll", "flamebait", or "off topic". That's a -1.
Mod points are added up. You can't go below -1 and you can't go higher than +5.
A user cannot comment on and give moderation points on the same story. So, you can't mod yourself up. The mod points only last for a few days so you cannot hoard them and go hog wild enforcing your bias on all comments in a story down the road.
The beauty of it is that if your comment is marked down to a 0 or a -1, it's going to be very hard for people to see it. It will be marked as "hidden" and unless someone clicks on it specifically it won't show up at all.
If no one decides to mark your comment up or down, then it is viewable to all but only the first few words are seen unless some one clicks it so they can view more of it.
If you are modded up to 3 or higher, then usually your comment will be show in its entirety for all to see. The cream rises to the top and the rubbish drifts to the bottom.
What's cool is when you have two posts, both marked as +5 Insightful, making cases for two different sides of an argument. The number of people with moderation points is big enough that it's hard for any one faction to take over a debate.
If you make lots of good comments your "Karma" rating goes up. It can also go down. I think if your karma rating goes low enough your comments start out at 0 right from the start.

Another interesting thing about slashdot is that comments cannot be deleted. If you write something in a fit of rage and later wish you could take it back...too bad. You can clarify your comments by replying to yourself, but there are no do overs. Your comments are tied to your user name forever so anything you say is going to stick with you. It encourages people to think about what they say before they say it.

Most of the comments don't receive any mod points and stay as hard to see 1. But in my opinion that's the whole idea. If there are 800 comments on a given story most of them won't contribute. It's lots of "your an idiot", "yeah me too!", "nuh-uh!" But that stuff doesn't get modded up. The insightful, thoughtful funny stuff written by intelligent people who actually know what they are talking is what makes it all work (highest I ever got was a 3).

You can read more about slashdot's comments and moderation guidelines here.

Not All Companions Are Created Equal

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:54:00 +0000

I became a fan of the Lord of the Rings in the third grade. My mother read it to me at night before I went to sleep for months on end. Not long after she finished it I read it again for myself. I was hooked. My mother worked at the Lancaster Public Library for a few summers and sometimes I would get to skulk about the library for most of the day. I remember being scandalized by a VHS tape that seemed to be about Sherlock Holmes but on the back of the case it said something like, "What everyone has wanted to know...were Holmes and Watson lovers?" I stayed away from the VHS section for the most part. There was something blasphemous about having videos in a library anyway. Don't get me wrong, I loved moves. But libraries were sacred places to me because most of the people who walk into a library in a small Texas town are book people and book people know how to act in a library. Video stores were different. You acted different in a video store. You could browse movies as a group and laugh and giggle and snicker at the goofy covers. Browsing in a library was a solitary thing. Quiet wasn't necessary but it sure did help. I didn't like it when my book browsing was interrupted by some teenager asking his buddy, "do they have Faces of Death?"

It's possible I was more attune to this difference because the section of the library that I called home was the Fantasy and Science Fiction section. It was right next to the VHS tapes. (Real quick, for those who don't know what a VHS tape is, it is an analog media format that was used by lots of people in the 80s and early 90s to record movies off cable TV and then put in a big storage box, rarely to be watched again.)

I am not sure if other book lovers do this, but I tend to look for my favorite books and make sure they are getting by okay. Is the The Book of Three in good shape? Does Watership Down have lots of dog-ears or highlighted passages? Is Farmer in the Sky missing any pages? I would open these books and look through the names of people who had checked them out, just to see if I knew who they were. Sometimes I did, usually I didn't. I felt a connection with these people, even when the date next to the signature was 1967. I thought it was cool that someone else had appreciated a story for longer than I had been alive. But let's move on because none of this has anything to do with what I wanted this post to be about.

It's a long winded way of saying that one day, while inspecting the various volumes of Tolkien's work, I came across a book called The Tolkien Companion. I had never heard of it. I flipped it open and started reading random pages. It was a one volume encyclopedia of people, places and things relating to Middle-Earth. It was fascinating (to me). There were family trees and definitions of elvish words. Bits of history that were mentioned in passing in Tolkien's novels were given pages and pages of detailed description in this book compiled by one J.E.A. Tyler. I loved it. Even though I knew the main story backwards and forwards, I wanted to know more. I checked the book out non-stop for months.

Many years later I came across a copy of the exact same edition in Half Price Books in Dallas (I could and probably will devote another entry to that place). I bought it for just under $6.00 late in the summer of 1990. When I got it home I started flipping through it. My Tolkien craze had died down by then. Not because I liked the books any less, but because I realized that there was only so much of the story that Tolkien had written and there just wasn't anymore.

I decided to read the preface of the book to see what the story was on how it came to be written. What I read surprised me. Mr. Tyler was a bit of a kook. He did not just love the Lord of the Rings as I and millions of other people did, he thought it was real. At least that's what he wrote in the preface to his Tolkien Companion in 1976. According to Mr. Tyler, J.R.R. Tolkien was not the author of Lord of the Rings, he was a translator of ancient documents written by "hobbit" scholars...

"Mythology had prepared him for working with antique manuscripts, but the Annals of the Shire, four volumes transcribed from copies of original tomes complied by the renowned Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, were written during the Third Age of Middle-earth long ago; and they were far older than the Celtic, Germanic and Icelandic manuscripts with which Tolkien was then accustomed to deal. Nevertheless, he set himself to the decipherment of one of the four volumes, the Red Book of Westmarch, and by 1936 he had successfully completed the translation - and the preparation for publication - of the first (much smaller) section of the Red Book."

He goes on to say that it is widely believed to be an original work despite "Tolkien's frequent disclaimers". That's right. According to Mr. Tyler when he wrote this preface in 1976, Professor Tolkien was telling anyone who would listen that he translated historical documents and did not in fact write "in a hole in the ground their lived a hobbit" on a blank scrap of paper as described in his authorized biography.

I tried to find more information on this gentlemen by consulting the Mighty Google and the All Knowing Wikipedia, but I did not find much. There is more information on the book itself. The edition I posses is from 1976. The Silmarillion was released in 1977 and showed that a huge amount of the histories presented in the Tolkien Companion were false, in so much as they had nothing to do with story Tolkien had written covering the same time period. Mr. Tyler had to release a newly revised Tolkien Companion to correct the mistakes in his volume. He has released several versions of it over the years. One of these days I will pick up a current edition and see if the preface still claims that Tolkien was a translator and not an author.

In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, the professor wrote that he hoped the back stories, languages, names and histories would give his story a "certain verisimilitude." I think he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Is this thing on?

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:15:00 +0000

I'm blogging again. It has been a long, long time. Since the Smudge went dormant several months ago I've started and stopped several different blogs. The pattern goes something like this:

I get excited about a topic.
I start a blog devoted to that topic and write maybe five posts.
I get bored with the subject and quit blogging.
I delete the blog after a few weeks of inactivity.

I actually have one devoted to software development/tech stuff right now (http://jwcode.blogspot.com). I'm not going to create a link to it because I will be deleting it soon.

But I still want to write about stuff. It's fun. I enjoy it. So, I'm going to try one more time and keep everything here at the Ink Smudge. Reveiws (probably not many of these), interviews (hopefully more of these), technology, software development, writing and maybe a sports post or two. I will make liberal use of the tags to help keep things organized.

I plan to bring back a few of the old Ink Smudge posts (there are over 130 of them) and some posts from the other dormant blogs, but most of them will stay out of site. Not because they are poorly written (although some are) but beacuse I am embarressed by some of them. Looking back over five years and 130+ posts is humbling. I read some of that stuff and think, "What a jerk!"

Anyway, the WRITING is going well. The novel is still in the bottom right drawer of my desk. I think about it from time to time but I have not taken it out in a long time. Every so often I come across some scribbled notes relating to the novel and I put them in the file with the rest of novel stuff.

Instead of attempting another novel I'm writing short stories. I thought about posting PDF links to them here on the blog but I have decided not to do that. I am going to follow the standard submit/hope route and try to get some things published that way. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to post links to my stories that have been accepted else where. Of course if a story has been turned down a number of times I will post it here.

So there you are. I hope to keep this up. The more I write the more I tend to keep writing. Inertia is key.

How the Kindle Changes Things

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:48:00 +0000

So I have had my Kindle 2 for almost one month now. The battle is over. Kindle wins over traditional books hands down. Sure, I wish it had a touch screen, could make notes on it with some kind of stylus and that it was color. But those are all "nice to haves" for me, not "must haves". I've read three books on it (David Copperfield (by Charles Dickens), 'Salem's Lot, and Wired for War) along with a couple of newspapers and sample chapters from about a dozen or so books.

The battery life is fine. I set the font size one size smaller than what comes out of the box so that I would have fewer page turns. I usually charge every night but I've also gone three days without charging it and I've only reached the halfway point on the charge once. During the week I read at least 90 mins a day on it (train ride into the city and lunch). Although I can't write notes with a stylus, I can still use the keyboard (meh) and highlight passages that I want to come back to or that I think are especially poignant. The most used feature for me is the dictionary. Especially reading a book like David Copperfield that uses words that are not in the current American English vernacular or are used in strange contexts. I used to highlight words like that and then look them up in a dictionary later...sometimes. Now I don't have to do that and I can find out what it means, how it's used in a sentence, alternate spellings and the etymology of the word. Very helpful.

Since the Kindle arrived I have not read a regular book. I'm annoyed with having to pick up and shlep around a 1000+ page .Net development book...or even a small one. I grew up going to used book stores on the weekend and pouring through boxes of dusty books looking for out of print titles, 1st editions, or just books that I wanted to read for cheap. I love the smell of books. I like the torn dust jackets, I like hearing the spine crack as I open a book for the first time. I like having shelves full of books. I like writing sentences that start with "I like." I would give all that up if I could have the content on my Kindle. No question. Sure, I like collecting Stephen King 1st editions (to read, not just to look at) but if I had the choice between that and an immediate download on my Kindle, I'll take the Kindle.

I almost never use the Kindle web browser. It's okay. I get more use out of the SkyFire browser on my Windows Mobile phone. But as far as reading a story on it, it is great.

A few things you should know if you decide to buy one.

Download Mobipocket eBook Creator. (You DO NOT have to pay the .10 to Amazon by emailing content to your Kindle...although it is very convenient.)
Download lots of public domain titles from this site.
Make use of the sample chapters through the Kindle store. I've probably downloaded three times as many sample chapters as purchased content. Sometimes I decided I don't like it and other times I decide I want to spend the money later (I have plenty of stuff on there to read as is).

At $359 it is too expensive. People like me will buy it because...we just will. Now, take the IPod, I most likely will not buy one because it is just not that important to me to have that many mp3s all the time. My love of music does not justify the cost of an IPod. My love of books does justify the cost of a Kindle 2. But that's just me.

Scott Hanselman has a YouTube review of the Kindle 2 that goes over some pros and cons here.

Auto Complete on the Google Search Appliance

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:08:00 +0000

At my job we have an .aspx page that displays search results from a Google Search Appliance. Nothing too fancy. The page passes the query, gets the XML results from the GSA, we pair that with an XSLT and sha-zam, search results. It was brought to my attention that some one higher up the chain wanted to know if we could have that "cool google suggest drop down thing" on our search page. Google has it. Amazon has it. Dang near every text box on FaceBook has it. Why don't we? Seveal people told me that there must be a way to enable it, because it's a GSA and Google runs it on their site. Now, I'm as guilty as the next guy when it comes to assuming how hard/easy something is going to be. I'm not pointing fingers. As with most things, there's a little more to it.

First off, the Ajax toolkit from Microsoft has an auto complete extender. It's great for running against SQL tables, or XML files or just about any data source. You can get back the ID of the record that the user selected and really make things snazzy. The question is, how do I use a GSA as a data source?

The GSA does return results in XML, but it doesn't do wild card queries. You can't do a search for "hea*" and get back head, hearing, heart and things like that. You get Dr.Hea and some mis-spellings and that's it. I did some looking on the Google Code site and found a "Search as you Type" project that seemed to do just what I wanted. It said in the documentation that you could turn any text box into a Google suggest box. It was written in PHP but I figured I could download it and convert the page to .Net. Most of it was in javascript files anyway so no biggie. Except that the page doesn't connect to a GSA. It has a pipe delimited text file that it uses as the demo source for the drop down. I looked through the readme.txt looking for some way to magically refernce the GSA. Nothing. What I had found was a Google Base code project that did the same thing as the ajax toolkit from Microsoft. I was right back where I started.

I fumed for a little bit. I drummed my fingers on my desk. I went back to Google's site and looked over their page source and javascript files. Then, as I was taking a swig of Red Bull, I realized what Google was doing. They weren't running against their index either.

Google is fast but not so fast that they can ajax call from your browser back to their index and back to your browser with search results each time you press a key. They have been in the search business for quite a while so there is no doubt that they know the top 1,000 search terms for words that start with each letter of the alphabet. The top 1000 As, the top 1000 Bs and so forth. Google had compiled a list of the Top 26,000 key words (something like that, I'm gusessing) and that's what they are running against when they do the Google suggest ajax call.. That's why when you do an obscure search it doesn't show anything but when you hit "search" you get results.

Now, back to my problem. It's not a problem anymore. I can run a report against our GSA, get back the top 10,000 or so search results, filter out the trash, and have everything I need in a nice and tidy XML document. I can put it in a SQL table or leave it in XML. I'll b able to sort it either way. Now I can use the ajax toolkit Auto Compete extender and in a short amount of time I have the same functionality as Google Suggest for our GSA. Only I'll be using .Net.

I'll post the code and link to the search page when I'm done. Shouldn't be long (will I ever learn to stop saying that).

Another post I wrote about the MS Autocomplete Extender can be found here.

The Lost Sheep

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:12:00 +0000

Efficiency is mentioned often in economics. It seems to be one of the most important concepts in the entire field of study. It does not matter if something is fair or right, as long as it is efficient. If there is a problem that faces society and the solution implemented happens to benefit the rich more than the poor then as long as the rich benefit more than the poor lose, it is efficient as far as simple economics goes. But our economics cannot be so simple.

This theme is present in a lot of the works that I have read so far. In a way it is even more democratic than democracy. If it benefits the most people the most, then it should be used. Period. But that line of reasoning can lead to some horrifying results. Most people, whether they are religious are not, find such an outlook repulsive. People are not products or resources in some grand international collection of interlocking gears and should not be treated as such.

As a Christian, I am confronted with many New Testament texts that command me to care for others as much, if not more than, myself. Economically inefficient commands and stories abound. There are the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son. Why not be content with the ninety-nine sheep that did not stray or the nine coins that are still in hand? Why not shower love upon the obedient son who stayed by his father's side? In these examples, economic efficiency instructs us to go in the opposite direction of what Jesus tells us to do.

In the past few weeks I have read example after of example of efficient outcomes and effective allocations of resources. But something was missing. Sure, applying sound economic principles to my own life can certainly help me. If these principles were applied more often to our government, it would probably help the vast majority of US citizens. But what about those who fall outside the vast majority? As Jesus teaches us in John 12:8, "You will always have the poor among you..." I started to wonder if the economics books and blogs I was reading would have anything to say on the matter. It cannot only be about improving oneself, ones peer group or even the "majority." There are always the others to consider. Again in the New Testament, James(2:15-17) tells us:

"If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead."

Turns out, there are those who know what economic tools can provide and where they fall short. I think I was looking to economics to provide easy answers. If this, then do that. If that then do this. Economics provides illumination to a degree. It does not provide easy answers. Take the following quotation from Dr. Steven E. Rhoads' book, The Economist's View of the World:

"Thus, despite economists' prominent role in proposing alternatives to existing programs and despite the good sense of many of their suggestions, the discipline is unlikely to make major contributions to solving one of our principal domestic problems - pockets of dependency and poverty in a land of plenty."

The subtitle of this book is Government, Markets and Public Policy. I recommend this book if you have an interest in any of those fields. Dr. Rhoads says quite clearly that economists should not lose site of the ultimate purpose of their profession, that is to improve the lot of humanity. It is not to make the rich richer or to keep this or that party in power. It is an attempt to make informed decisions. There are only so many resources available to us. Part of what makes an economist sound cold hearted is that he will announce, ahead of time, what the possible costs will be in human lives and suffering. The idealist ignores such costs and asks us to believe that everything will be okay if only...

Dr. Rhoads goes on to say in his book:

"There is great uncertainly in many analyses - uncertainty about the potential effectiveness of programs and about how to value that effectiveness...The more complicated the problem, the more uncertain the variables involved, the more likely are bad decisions in the absence of analysis."

There are many other great passages in this book but I cannot list too many more or I will end up quoting whole chapters. What I like most about it is the reasoned way in which Dr. Rhoads talks about matters of public policy in addition to economic theory. As with most powerful tools, economics can be used to accomplish amazing thing in the hands of a trained craftsman. I am not such a craftsman, but I hope to at least gain some proficiency in this area of study. It is fascinating stuff. I hope that I am able to apply it properly as I learn more.

"'Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children'...The truth is, you're the weak, and I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm trying, Ringo. I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd." - Jules from Pulp Fiction.

It is a great scene. I just watched it again.

1st draft is complete

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Wear) — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 23:03:00 +0000

Wow. It's finished. I finally finished the first draft of my novel. And what's more, I really like it. It's not ready for prime time, far from it, but it's really, for real, done as far as the story goes. I doubt I'll send it off for at least another year, but I'm not worried about that. I can set aside the burden of writing my first story. Revising will have its own problems but the main thing is, I'm free. I can write other stories now and not feel guilty about it. There have been many times in the past year or so when I'd write two or three pages on a new story and then stop and set them aside. I promised myself that I would not throw my efforts into another story until I had finished the first draft of this one. And now I have. It's done. It needs work (a lot of work) but my first draft is complete. Thanks to all of you who encouraged me to keep working on it.

In case you are wondering, it ended up being 144,618 words spanning 414 pages.

D'Antoni != Pioneer

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:37:00 +0000

Believe it or not I'm going to quibble over something. I won't say my view on this is the correct one(as I roll my eyes) but I will say it's valid. On March 8th ESPN's Daily Dish podcast interviewed one Kiki Vandeweghe(if that is his real name). In this podcast Mr. Vanda...Vandu...Vanwd...Kiki. In this podcast Kiki said, and I quote (5:48), "Mike D'Antoni, almost all by himself has started a new type of style that's more fun for players and people really enjoy playing on his teams - seems to be the way to win right now." As the Teacher said in Ecclessiates:

Is there anything of which one can say,
"Look! This is something new"?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.

There is no remembrance of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow.

If you want to talk about fast paced wide open offensive basketball in the modern NBA you have to talk about one man, The Don, Dynamite, Don Nelson. Who can forget the Run TMC days from his first stint with the Warriors? Who can forget how crazy good the Mavericks were on offense when he came to Dallas? According to Dean Oliver's book Basketball on Paper the 2002 Dallas Mavericks were the most efficient offense in the history of the NBA as of 2004. How did they do it? By having the fewest turnovers ever by an NBA team in a season and by having three fantastic players in Dirk Nowitzki, Michael Finley and Steve Nash. Take a look at that last name there...Steve Nash. I'd like to ask two questions:
Would Mike D'Antoni's system be what it is today without Steve Nash?
Would Steve Nash be the same player he is now if he hadn't spent those several years under Don Nelson?
My answer to both of those questions is no. I think Mike D'Antoni is a great coach. D'Antoni fine tuned the Nelson system so that it's geared for the playoffs and not just the regular season. As a Mavericks' fan I'm terrified of what the Suns might do in the playoffs if they get hot with a healthy team. But their system, I think, owes a great deal to Big Nellie. It didn't start in the desert.

Well I'm the GM all you utha GM's can...

jon.wear@yahoo.com (Jon M. Wear) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:51:00 +0000

Get a load of this. According to Forbes magazine, Kevin McHale is the top GM in (American)pro sports. What? How can anyone on theTimberwolves' staff be considered tops in the league in something? I'm not saying they have the worst front office, but the best? How can they be the best when they have a once in a era player like KG and have oneconference finals appearance to show for it. Let me emphasize I'm not putting this on #21. That guy plays hard every single game. But the fact remains that other than that one run to the conference finals in they have never gotten out of the first round. It doesn't add up.

The Forbes list bases a large part of their rankings on improvements based on the previous GM. This doesn't work for me. It should be based upon your peers currently, not the guy you replaced. Being better than the guy that got fired doesn't say that much for the replacement's performance at work. You're supposed to be better than the previous guy. If I compare my coding skills to the average ten year old then on the charts I look great (the above average ten year old might take me out).

Number two on the list is Billy King...are you kidding me? Sure they had the final's appearance (and AI) but the Sixers have the 3rd highest payroll in the league this year. Heck, the Sixers still owe Jamal Mashburn $10,850,000. And don't get me started about the Chris Webber deal. I'll let one of my Philly brethren sound off on that if they feel so inclined (real quick, FG% with the Sixers:38.7%, with Detroit:an all star-esque 52.1%). It does not matter if they make the playoff's this year. Eighth in the playoffs is first to get bounced. But, despite all this the Sixers do have three first round picks in what should be a great upcoming draft. If Mr. King puts those to good use then lots (not all, this is Philly) will be forgiven.

Another factor that is not taken into account is the owner. If you have an owner that's tighter than a duck's butt (Donald Sterling, I'm looking in your direction) then how can you make the right moves as a GM? Let's say you had an owner like...hmm...I don't know...let's say Mark Cuban. Now you have a chance to acquire guys and keep them. The notable exception being the two(three?) time MVP of the league (hey, you can't win them all).

The first GM on the list that makes sense is John Paxson. The Bulls are still middle of the pack but they are on the way up with their big three. Did they over pay for Big Ben? Maybe, but again that's the owner too. They are better with him, it's just a question of will it be worth it. Ask Paxson in 2010 after all $60,000,000 of that contract has been paid out. But even with the Big Ben paycheck the Bulls are just barely over the salary cap (3rd lowest payroll in the league). They may be under the cap. I'm not sure how the mid-level exception fits into what hoopshype shows on their website. Read more salary caps here if you are having trouble sleeping.

I could go on but talking about GM's but I won't. I'm tired of it. You can find the list of just NBA GM's here. It's worth checking out some of the profiles Forbes has on NBA teams. There are some interesting things to be found. For instance, did you know the Sonics might move to OKC?

Ladies & Gentlemen, Lord Macaulay

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Wear) — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 21:53:00 +0000

I started reading Lord Macaulay's The History of England. I expected this to be quite drab but I have been pleasantly surprised. I'm using it as research material for my book which is good and bad. Good because it gives me some interesting things to add to the world the story takes place in and bad because it is so interesting that time spent reading is time taken from writing. Two quotes I wanted to share:

"Those who compare the age of which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present."
"But the experience of many ages proves that men may be ready to fight to the death, and to persecute without pity, for a religion whose creed they do not understand, and whose precepts they habitually disobey."

I'd drive my car but I haven't got a car to drive

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Wear) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:16:00 +0000

Yes, it has happened. At long last I sold my automobile. A Texan without a car. "Hi-ho Silver! Away...to the glue factory." It's not so bad actually. I was glad to get rid of the thing. It was a great car but now that I take the train every day I had to come to grips with the fact that I just did not need it. It was comforting to have it out front, all black with those Texas plates, but I did not need it. 40/mpg is great but transit is even better. Besides, now I can read during my commute.

When I had a car I would get annoyed with pedestrians that did not pay attention to traffic. I would think to myself, Hello! People do drive on Lincoln Drive. There are lots of cars buzzing by who are trying not to hit you! Help me out! I wondered how long it would take me to switch my mind set now that I would be a pedestrian. Not long.

The morning after I sold my car I crossed the street in front of my house and headed towards the train station. A car was turning left and was not paying attention. I kept thinking he was going to slow down or swerve or something. Nope. He nearly launched me into the holding pattern for Philadelphia International. I jumped out of the way at the last second. I yelled. I gestured. I was in the crosswalk for crying out loud! Doesn't he realize there are people walking in the crosswalk?. The guy never stopped. It did not take long for my mind set to change.

Now as far as transportation goes there is the mass transit upper class and the raving lunatics who drive metal hulks that run on putrid, fermenting dinosaur guts.

A helpful article...

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Wear) — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:18:00 +0000

I discovered a new magazine the other day called Pages. Maybe lots of people know about it but I had never laid eyes on it before. It is a decent magazine. Some of the interviews sounded really cliche but for the most part I liked it. I did find out about a lot of authors and books that sound very interesting (I'll get to them one of these days). Also, I found a section in an article that was very helpful, especially since I recently took the fifteen-thousand-word step backwards with my own story. Michael Cunningham had some things to say about how lost one can feel writing a book. Here's a quote:

"I always get discouraged with a novel at a certain point," Cunningham says. "I think it is a good sign. I see this happen to other writers, too. There's often a point, say roughly a third of the way into a novel, when it just falls apart. You look at it, and all you can think is: 'This is going no where, I don't even know what it's about, I don't know who these people are. I should just dump it. This is an idea that isn't working out.' Which is always, of course, a possibility. But I find what is actually happening is that the novel is defeating whatever little idea pulled me into it and taking on a life of its own, which is different from what I had anticipated. You hope for that. You want the novel to surprise you."

I was one third of the way through my book when things sort of fell apart. I kept on for a while, pretending that it would work out. I finally cut all that crap out and started back where I felt it still had promise. Now I'm moving forward again and the book his changing. It is surprising me. The whole thing makes more sense now. I can't wait to finish the dang thing so I can share it.

DOOMed

noreply@blogger.com (Jon Wear) — Sat, 21 May 2005 01:16:00 +0000

So I work at a software company. There are many topics that come up in conversation over and over again. The Star Wars Prequels, the Simpsons, South Park, what's really wrong/right with the government, comic books, obscure movie references and...video games(many of these stories are told in some kind of "accent"). Many of the guys at the company either have had or are currently in the throws of a deep video game addiction. I was an id Software junkie back in the day. Back in 2000, work would end and the office would play Quake III for at least two hours after work. Every day. Sometimes we came in on Saturdays to play. Civ3 was the worst. On three separate occasions I have thrown that game away because it took up so much of my time.

Those of you who are still reading this are doing one of two things. You are either shaking your head and saying, "what a doorknob" or you are nodding your head, raising your hand in the air and saying "Preach on!" I'll take the good with the bad. At least you are still reading.

Okay, where am I going with this? Well here's the thing. I do not have a college degree. I made several attempts but never walked across the stage. My mom has her degree but my father never got his. I have two great parents but the combined salaries of a police officer and a public school teacher didn't exactly put us in the country club...er...club. I'm not saying I had it bad. I had it good. But with no degree, no marketable trade and no trust fund, how was I going to make a living?

So there I am back in 1994. I knew that it was just a matter of time until I dropped out of college. I went from being an out of state full time student to an in state part time student to a flunky who got up and walked out of his astronomy final exam because I did not have a clue what I was looking at on the planetarium dome. I failed astronomy. Astronomy for crying out loud.

One day while I was at work (I was a radio dispatcher for a wrecker service) a co-worker handed me a floppy disk. It was your typical 3.5" disk that some people mistakenly called a "hard disk" at the time.

"Here," he said, "Play this game." It had one word written on it, DOOM.

It sat in a stack on my desk for several weeks. I was busy with my real full time job, which was keeping up appearances. It's hard work keeping up the illusion that you are a serious college student when in actuality you're just reading Dragonlance novels and screwing around with whatever pirated games you can get your hands on. Anyway, I popped in DOOM and I saw that opening screen. Then the first person POV comes up. I'm in that hallway. I walk through that first door and that first monster jumps right in front of me. Pure 2D Pixelated Horror! I hit the Enter key to fire my pistol. The monster screams. I hit the key two more times and he falls. My pulse is racing. I'm sitting up in my chair (There is that great shot out the window to your right as you your character down the hallway). It looks like the level just goes on forever.

I played until 10 am the next morning.

That is what did it for me. It started with Doom. My Packard Bell 486sx 25 Mhz with 4MB of DIMM memory, 110 MB HDD, a 2x CD-ROM and a 16 bit sound card barely played it. And of course, the 2400 Baud modem. So I learned how to upgrade. First the RAM went from 4 megs to 8 megs. Then I got a clock trippler to take my chip to a 486 75mhz with the DX math co-processor. Then I figured out how switch out that 100MB drive for a 1.0GB Western Digital (set me back over $300). Then I disabled the on board modem and installed a screaming 14.4k modem so I could play doom head to head against other people (I played John "You're No" Romero once on DWANGO). Now this is back in the day where no one really knew what the heck they were doing when it came to upgrading computers. This was the day of comm port conflicts, IRQ conflicts and jumpered motherboards/hard drives. Don't even get me started on deciphering modem initialization strings. You couldn't look it up on the web because the web didn't exist yet. There were no books because no one had done this before. You just figured it out for yourself and pieced together the rest from FAQs and ReadMe.Docs that came with the downloaded addons.

Then there was Doom II and it all got kicked up to another level. Full blown editing tools were floating around. I would play DOOM II all night with my friends and then we would start making our own levels (WAD file maniacs) when we woke up the next day. Then there was Quake I and OpenGL hit big. Everyone had to learn how to get their PCs to run the 3dFX video card so that all those crazy colors and the crisp resolution would come through.

If you are still reading then I thank you. I got a little carried away there. Why did I go into all that? That is where I learned how to be a programmer. I learned how to trouble shoot, how to research, how to think about abstract things in my head and hold it there long enough to type some commands that would make it show up as a level in the Doom II engine. If I could not figure something out then I would pour over books, download files and talk to other like minded junkies until we did figure it out. Programming in QBASIC as a kid was interesting but DOOM made it fun.

So in closing, if it had not been for id Software and their groundbreaking games Castle Wolfenstein and Doom, I'm not sure where I would be. I'd be like that guy in the Sting song, "I got no prospects, no education, I was lucky to get a job at this gas station." In my case it was working for AAA. But now? I started working in the Best Buy PC upgrade/repair shop in 1995. In 1996 I went to technical support for a software company and ended up writing software for them until I left in 1998. After that I went to development full time, building experience and a skill set a little at a time until I got to where I am now. Am I on top of the world? Heck no. But I can write half decent code and solve the tech problems that come my way due to the time I put in figuring out how to make hardware run a game and then how to make that game do more. Without id Software, I don't know if that would have happened.

So now, as far as economics go, life is good. Debt is going down, savings are going up and as long as I stay current I take care of my fiscal responsibilities and finance my writing endeavors. Speaking of which, I need to get on that. Remember to keep moving. You don't wanna get telefragged.

Wikipiedia: Doom