A collection of various ramblings on technology, life in 
Friday, December 30, 2005 5 things I will NOT miss about life in New York (in no particular order):
1) The people - Sometimes there just too many people here.
2) The traffic - I'm sick and tired of traffic so bad that it takes an hour and half just to drive 10 miles.
3) The small apartments - I feel like I live in a shoebox at times.
4) The high cost living - Rent is the worst. I'm tired of paying more per month for rent than what a typical American pays monthly for on a home mortgage.
5) Over priced beer - I have paid as much as $12 for a 12oz bottle of Bud Light. And $5 to $7 is not uncommon.
5 things I WILL MISS about life in New York (in no particular order):
1) The people - New York City has some of the nicest people in the world. And I have made some great friends here.
2) Bars and pubs - New York City has great places to hang out, meet people, and have a couple of cold brews.
3) The energy - I still remember the first time I walked out of Penn Station and onto a Manhattan street. I immediately felt the energy from the city, and I love that feeling.
4) $2 beers - There's nothing like finding a real deal in New York City. And there's a special feeling you get when you know where to find the $2 beers and can eat dinner for under $3.50.
5) Living in New York City - There is no greater city than New York City in my opinion. I'm definitely going to miss living here. posted by Kirby | December 30 03:57 PM | comments (1)
Sunday, December 25, 2005 December has been a very busy month for me and my wife. We've had a lot going on, which is why I have been slow to post this month. And no, I have not spent the entire month playing on the Xbox 360, although I wish I had.
First the exciting news...We're moving out of NYC!
Yep, you read it here first. We're moving out of NYC at the end of January. Melanie and I both love this city but we also want a life style that is hard to have in the city unless you are filthy rich. And contrary to my family's beliefs, living in Manhattan doesn't mean you are rich and we are far from rich.
So where are we moving to? Salem, Massachusetts. I call it our "From Rainbows to Witches" move and if you know anything about where we currently live and where we are moving to you will know this is not a Wizard of Oz reference.
We found a super nice apartment in Salem. It's actually a house but a portion of the first floor is used as office space for the church that is next door. We have a small portion of the first floor, all of the second and third floors, and a small storage room. This house is definitely larger than our small Manhattan apartment. And for a faction of the cost too. I'll post pictures of the house in about a month.
A number of other things have been keeping me busy in December too. Migrating all my Visual Studio.NET 2003 (.NET 1.1) projects to Borland Developer Studio 2006 (C# Builder) has not gone as smoothly as I had hoped. I'll post my experience about this later, but I will say I absolutely love BDS. Live templates are awesome and the IDE is very fast. Aside from load time I find it more responsive than Visual Studio 2005, which is why I'm moving all my .NET 1.1 projects to BDS.
I also spent a lot of time in December reviewing and evaluating specific features of Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0. There are some improvements I like such as typed data sets but I'm finding my customers are slow to move to or have little interest at the moment in .NET 2.0. So while I wish BDS 2006 had support for .NET 2.0 it doesn't look like I will be doing any hardcore .NET 2.0 work anytime soon. My focus will continue to be on Win32 and .NET 1.1.
Happy holidays to everyone. posted by Kirby | December 25 10:57 AM | comments (0)
Thursday, December 15, 2005 I finally got my copy of Delphi 2006 install and I have started using it day. I love it and it is a huge improvement over Delphi 2005.
Unfortunately the IDE crashed on me, but it did something really cool. The exception was caught and I was given the option to send the error report to Borland's Quality Central. Not only that, but if you provide your BDN credentials you can track the report! How cool is that!
I'm happy to see this new level of commitment to quality. posted by Kirby | December 15 02:06 AM | comments (2)
Sunday, December 04, 2005 At first I did not like Amped3 but I quickly warmed up to it. I owe Amped and Amped2 so I naturally expected to jump into Amped3 with some free riding. But that didn't happen. Here's my story.
My copy of Amped3 arrived a week before my Xbox 360 arrived. Since I couldn't play the game I read the booklet. "Wow! This is going to be the best Amped yet," I first thought. Not only can you ride the mountains but you can jump on a sled, ride snowmobiles, and even throw snowballs.
As soon as my Xbox 360 was setup and running the first game I planned was Amped3. After you setup your player you are immediately placed in the story. I found the beginning annoying because I wanted to ride the slopes but every couple of minutes I had to watch a silly movie.
You start off in a pink bunny suit and you get to do a quick, short run. I guess this part gives new players of Amped3 a chance to learn the controls. You see movies that introduce you to your crew and you meet a wacky woman. After playing Amped3, or should I say watching the wacky movies, I turned off the game and spent time with my wife. I told her I was now thinking this is probably the worse Amped game. A huge difference from a week earlier.
I started playing again a few days later only to find I was wrong. Amped3 was in fact fun and is a great game. The story mode became more interesting (and wacky) and as you progress through the story you unlock new mountains areas and new mountains. Once unlocked you can spend as much time as you like free riding, exploring, hitting the park, sledding, snowmobile riding, and even build your own park. I was finally getting into the game.
The story mode is wacky but will hold your attention for the 6 or 7 hours needed to complete it (that is, after you get pass the initial start of the story). Once you have finished the story all the mountains are unlocked and you are free to explore and complete the many, many, MANY remaining challenges. Although you can finish the story mode in a day, it will definitely take much more time to finish all aspects of the game.
My favorite feature of Amped3 is the leaderboard. When you win a gold medal on a challenge, you are ranked on the leaderboard which is posted on Xbox Live. This allows you to see how you rank with other Amped3 players throughout the world. It's a whole new level of competation. I often find that if I don't place well on the leaderboard for a particular challenge I will re-play that challenge over and over until I'm happy with my ranking. And I'm stoked everytime I place in the top 10 on a leaderboard.
Another new feature of Amped3 I really like are the player stats. I love stats and I review them all the time. With Amped3 you can see how much time you have spent playing the game, the number of tricks thrown down, and the number of crashes you've had. You can see other stats as well like how many miles covered on a snowmobile, high scores, and number of leaderboards you are on. And there are many, many stats available too.
Game play is similar to previous Amped games but the controls are easier. I imagine the game developers decided to do this to appeal to more causual gamers and/or to attact the SSX crowd. You still get awarded more points for style but jibbing is much, much easier. You don't have to press B to start a jib. In Amped3 just land on the object, or snowboard right up to it, and you're jibbing. Grabs, tricks and so on are determined by pressing XYBA button combinations (XYB for jibs, A will ollie when jibbing).
One feature I dislike is the awesomeness graphics. These annoying graphics are displayed around your character when you reach a level of awesomeness. I find it annonying and luckily the game designers were smart enough to provide a way to disabel the awesomeness graphics. Go to the ride customization menu and select Awesomeness. From the menu you can select the awesomeness graphics to display or you can select "None". I prefer "None".
My biggest disappointment with Amped3 is the lack of multiplayer support. I really expected offline, split screen multiplayer support, and I miss the online multiplayer games found in Amped2. It's a real shame that Amped3 does not have multiplayer ability given the new features like sledding, snowmobile riding, and having snowball fights. These new features could make for hours of multiplayer fun.
By the way, there is a stupid sled game that you can play on some mountains that is multiplayer but it's a really stupid game. You and a buddy are on sleds that are attached by a rope. The goal of the game is to get the most bodily damage. I don't know why the game designers put this in there. It makes me think maybe, just maybe the plan was to have multiplayer support in Amped3 but got rushed since it is a launch title game. Personally I would have rather waited another 6 months for Amped3 just to have multiplayer support.
If you enjoyed Amped and Amped2 then you will really like Amped3. Just get pass the first 30 minutes and you will start enjoying the game. I also recommend playing out the story mode as quickly as possible. Afterwards you can focus on all the other challenges, building your own park - yes, I forgot to mention that. In Amped3 you can design your own park! Way cool - and exploring the mountains. The leaderboards on Xbox Live is a great new feature, but the lack of multiplayer support does suck. Still, it's a great game and a must buy for those who loved Amped and Amped2. posted by Kirby | December 4 11:45 AM | comments (0)
It's true. Borland Delphi 2006 is shipping. Unfortunately I still do not have my copy which I pre-ordered back at the beginning of November. So much for a first come, first serve approach. According to my order status, my order has been back ordered!
I hope my copy comes soon. I want to start up a new dev environment where I use the Borland Developers Studio 2006 for all my Delphi and .NET 1.1 programming. I'll use Visual Studio 2005 for .NET 2.0 development since the Borland Developers Studio will not have support for .NET 2.0. This is unfortunate but I understand it had something to do with Microsoft consistently changing the release schedule for .NET 2.0 and a license agreement between Microsoft and Borland regarding the distribution of pre-RTM releases of the .NET 2.0 Framework. Unfortunately I can't find the link to the blog that explains why this latest release from Borland does not support .NET Framework 2.0. I'll post the URL if I find the link.
Meanwhile, I anxiously wait for my copy of Delphi 2006. posted by Kirby | December 4 11:02 AM | comments (3)
Finally a dusting of snow is on the sidewalks of Manhattan. I was happy to finally see the white stuff, which is melting fast. posted by Kirby | December 4 10:42 AM | comments (0)
Saturday, December 03, 2005 Melanie and I saw First Descent last night which was also opening night for the movie. We both thought the movie was excellent. If you ride, wish you could ride, or just want to learn more about snowboarding and the history of snowboarding then First Descent is a must see movie for you.
The movie has two story lines. One story is about 5 of the world's top snowboarder getting together in Alaska for some big mountain riding. The other story is the history of snowboarding covering primarily the 70's through the 2002 Olympics. The movie switches back and forth through the two story lines and it definitely holds your attention throughout its entirety.
I might try seeing it again this week. And of course I can't want to buy it on DVD.
Into snowboarding? Then go see this movie! It's a must see. posted by Kirby | December 3 01:17 PM | comments (0)
Friday, December 02, 2005 There has been a lot of buzz this week about the Desktop Linux Client Survey 2005, release earlier this week by Open Source Development Labs. In this report OSDL says the lack of a quality email program prevents Linux from being widely adopted on the desktop. Some argue that Linux is suitable for the common user while others argue that more application support and training is needed.
My opinion in this debate is simple. I believe users will go where the applications are and most applications developers (including in-house, corporate developers) and ISV are NOT targeting Linux. And the reason many developers do not write desktop applications for Linux is because there are no good RAD development environments like Delphi and Visual Studio to help increase developer productivity for Linux development. Also, there is a lack of 3rd party control support for Linux developers. At the end of the day it is easier to write and go to market with a Windows desktop application than it is with a Linux desktop application (or Mac application for that matter).
Vendors like Borland have tried in the past to sell a RAD environment to developers for Linux, and I for one wish they would continue work on Kylix. Unfortunately Borland has made Kylix a classic product which means there is still some demand but the product is no longer enhanced, supported or marketed. A real shame in my opinion.
Speaking as an ISV I would very much like to see White Peak Software target Linux for its desktop products which includes a new email client for the Windows platform due out next year. However the time to market for Linux desktop applications is much longer. Development tools like Delphi and 3rd party controls like the ones from DevExpress and /nsoftware make it easier and faster to write and publish Windows desktop applications.
Give general development community the tools needed to write Linux desktop applications faster and I believe you will see more Linux desktop applications. And once there are more useful, quality applications available on the Linux desktop the user community will follow. It worked for Palm in the 90's. Palm made it easier for developers to write Palm Pilot applications as compared to WinCE, and Palm Pilot became the preferred hand held for the majority of users.
It has also worked for gaming consoles. The number of titles and the quality of those titles helps decide which console has the majority of the market. Microsoft wants to see the new Xbox 360 beat Sony's PlayStation worldwide. A key point in Microsoft's plan is to attract the biggest names in game development to produce Xbox 360 game titles. Microsoft knows that the best games must be available on its new console for the platform to be a marketing success. The gaming community will go where the best games are. The desktop user community will do the same.
Linux will become more feasible for the desktop once the number of useful software titles has reached a critical mass that attracts the general user. And to make it happen, more software developers need to target the Linux desktop. But first there needs to be better development tools that make it easier and faster to go to market with a Linux desktop application. This will attract more software developers, which in turn will produce more software titles, which will attract more users to the Linux desktop. posted by Kirby | December 2 10:02 AM | comments (5)
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Copyright © 1999-2008 Kirby Turner.
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