May, 2004

Saw this Interview with writer Karey KirkPatrick on Slashdot who is the screenwriter for the movie. I hope he doesn’t screw it up. Seems a nice enough chap and I did like Chicken Run. I have recently gained faith in the Hollywood writing/directing process because I thought The Lord of the Rings was genuinely good. As were a lot of the Superhero adaptations I’ve seen.

This is a completely different cup of tea though. Best of luck to him. I wouldn’t want his job.

Finally got these suckers working. You do need to define the control that needs to be validated before hand. After that it works like a charm. Probably the biggest time saving feature I’ve seen in .Net so far.

I like the fact that they killed the President.

Why is it that the Vice President is always the asshole though? Is it impossible for a movie to depict the President as being an asshole? I mean we know they are assholes, the present one being the case in point. At least the President in the movie seemed to be an idiot. Very realistic on that score.

Dennis Quaid is an idiot too. Believable as a rugged arctic adventurer, harder to believe as a real human being. I just hate the way he acts. I think he is a boring person in real life.

Other than that, I thought the movie was great. It’s always nice to see stuff blow up. The scene in LA with multiple twisters was awesome. That and the waves of the sea frozen so it looks almost like a desert. Isn’t there some saying about the desert being the sea of the land… Or something equally paradoxical? Donnie Darko is in it which was weird but added to the endearment factor. What the hell is his real name anyway? Jake Gyllenhaal is Donnie Darko, IMDB owns your ass.

Well worth my Rs. 150. I might even pick up the DVD.

Been messing about with ASP.Net and was having trouble getting CustomValidators to work correctly. I wanted Server Side validation for a Username (check to make sure that the username does not exist). I got it to the point where it comes back if an error occurs without writing to the database but it didn’t display the error. Found this page: 4 Guys from Rolla that provided an easy server side only example. Still didn’t fix why my message wasn’t being displayed though. I think it has something to do with setting the controls to validate at design time in the design window. I am currently setting those properties at runtime through a function. Lets see how it goes when I switch that.

Hey everyone out there. Finally got around to setting up the site on Ron’s server. Blogger does a nice job of ftping and keeping everything looking good. Look forward to more words of (questionable) wisdom in the coming weeks.

I just got done reading this article: Eurogamer.net – Microsoft set to offer XNA technology to consumer electronics rivals. This is the right way to go about it. If you’re making games today the hardest choice is having to pick a platform or pay out the waazoo for a piece of the other hardware manufacturer’s pie. XNA might just be a the best way to go about it. I’d love to have a competing open source standard (As OpenGL is to DirectX) but I think it takes somebody with the muscle to put out it’s own console that will be able to drive adoption. If the Phantom guys at Infinim want to survive they’d be jumping on this bandwagon as soon as they find the trail.

I was concerned with the reference to movies and about how it is the “perfect analogy”. Firstly both movies and music are far less complicated technologically when compared to games. There is a “right way” to see a movie. It scales down to a smaller screen, the sound drops from Dolby Digital whatever to mono as required but as long as you’re capable of churning out upwards of 30 fps you can play a movie. There is also a “right way” to play a game. It needs to be played on the platform it was designed for. You can’t expect a game written for a PC to work on a handheld. That means theres a hell of a lot more work involved in making games as flexible as movies. That little handheld can’t possibly have enough juice to play your game as well as a PC could. You’d end up making an entirely new game, oftentimes sans 3D for that mobile platform. How is that the same as movies? The PSP will play your movie, the iPod will play your MP3. I think it’s an oversimplification to believe that the game will work perfectly on so many platforms just because it uses XNA. Games are not as simple as movies. At best it is an analogy that falls apart at the end. XNA has the right idea, but it’s going to take something special from Microsoft.