Dark Side of the Carton

Talking to my 3yr old son more often than not results in me staring at him in amazement. If the child were 5, he would posses an astounding vocabulary for his age. The fact that he has a vocabulary this wide at age 3 truly makes me wonder about him sometimes. On the way to school this morning him and I were talking just about nothing in general when he told me “You’re the man dad.”

Of course, hearing those words from your son would warm the heart of any dad, but hearing those from my son is an extra special thing. He inherited my inability to communicate appreciation and express feelings and there he was, telling me that he actually liked me. He then jumped straight into “I think that I’d like a skateboard, dude. You just put one foot on the front and the one on the back. Yeah, that’s all there is to skateboarding.”

Excuse me? How old are you? Did you just call me dude?

Being a parent is hard and makes you crazy sometimes, but there are times that are truly worth all the insanity.

Playing video games is a great way to have some fun and kill some time. What happens when you shift that form of entertainment from a hobby to work? Over the past 5 years, I’ve been rushing through games all in the name of doing write-ups for Snackbar Games, and while I love both aspects of what that entails, I think it’s ruining the joy of playing video games for me. I’ve got a stack of new and awesome games at home and I can’t bring myself to even turn them on right now. It’s a wholly dis-heartening thing to be experiencing.

I know all things happen in cycles and I am just going through the regular burn out phase, but man it’s hard to get motivated to pop in a game and play enough of it to actually do a proper review without sacrificing all of my integrity and bullshitting through it.

I seriously hope I can get out of this rut soon as I am missing out on some seriously good games right now.

PHP is a very simple language to learn. It’s loose data types and plethora of examples on the web make the cost of entry to PHP development very low. It also empowers new programmers to venture out and get cracking on their own projects. I admire the efforts of these new programmers, but I also think that choosing PHP as their starting point is going to bite them in the butt in the long run.

Like having just enough rope to hang yourself, figuratively of course, PHP provides you just enough rope to develop some very bad programming habits. As a product of a University Computer Science program, I strongly believe that some level of professional or formal instruction is paramount to being a good programmer. There are exceptions to all rules, and especially this one, but by and large most people don’t see programming best practices as common sense so they must be taught. Here are a few tips that I think early programmers should be firmly familiar with:

1. Watch your datatypes - PHP supports loose variable declarations. What this means is that can change a variable’s datatype on the fly based on whatever you are assigning to it at the current time. While this is nice and prevents you from having to declare massive lists of variables, do not get into the habit of reusing variables for numerous purposes in your code. A variable named $count should be used for it’s initial purpose as a counter and not used later to store some other bit of data such as a name or other string.

2. Pick a variable naming standard - PHP allows you to name variables just about anything. There are a few exceptions to this that are explained over on php.net. Keep in mind that variable names in PHP are case sensitive. One mistake that you will want to avoid in variable naming is mixing and matching your variable naming scheme. By this I mean, choose a method for utilizing case or underscores when creating variable names. $my_variable_name and $myVariableName are both acceptable and easy to read variable names. The latter is an example of Camel Case and is the method that I use for naming all of my variables. Either method is fine, but pick one way and stick with it. When working on a group project, discuss this with your fellow programmers and set a standard for the project to avoid inconsistencies.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for help - There are a huge number of development forums filled with some very experienced programmers that are more than happy to lend new coders a hand. Don’t be afraid to ask them for advice. They have a lot of wisdom to impart and they can be a great source of information. My personal favorite is the PHP forum over at DevShed.

4. Just because  you saw it online doesn’t mean it’s good code - There is a lot of bad PHP floating around and there are a lot of well intentioned people out there passing this bad code off as a good source for learning PHP. Don’t be sucked into that cycle. Try to keep your resources to some of the more mainstream PHP sites like PHP Builder, DevShed, PHP Freaks, and the W3 Schools website.

I’ve been going to church for as long as I can remember. Back in the day we would head for church every Sunday morning where my brother and I would curl up on the wood pews with baby blue fabric and take ourselves a nice 1 hour nap. As I got older, I got very involved with a church that we had been members of from Day 1. I was proud to have been a “founding member” and I wanted to do all I could to help out at the church. Years later I no longer attend that church and have hopped around looking for a place that I wanted to call home.

One of those places my family and I tried out was Eagle’s Nest Christian Fellowship. A story broke yesterday morning on the front page of the local paper citing a whole laundry list of expenditures that the Pastor and his family have been taking advantage of all in the name of service. I always wanted to like Rick Godwin, the paster of ENCF, but my wife and other family members never could bring themselves to that point. There was just something about him that they couldn’t get over. It turns out they were right. Here are a few quotes from the article.

Pastor Rick Godwin constantly presses his flock at Eagle’s Nest Christian Fellowship to give generously for a new $36 million megachurch under construction on the North Side at the same time he spends tens of thousands of dollars of church money on luxury items for himself.

When he flies, it’s first class or private chartered plane. He stays in high-end hotels and buys expensive gifts for some of his church associates. He can watch the Spurs from an AT&T Center luxury suite and play golf at the exclusive Club at Sonterra.

In 2005, an independent audit done at the church’s request questioned similar expenditures, such as spa services massages and vitamins for Godwin, and warned that changes were needed to bring the church into compliance with tax rules for religious nonprofits.

Another one

In September, Godwin’s wife took a private plane to California — along with an unknown number of other church women — to attend a women’s conference that was training for Chosen, a women’s event put on at Eagle’s Nest. The cost of the chartered flight was more than $17,394, according to another journal entry.

I find the whole situation to be completely appalling and I am very glad I no longer attend this church. This is exactly why people stop trusting churches and can’t bring themselves to be involved with organized religion.

Source: MySA.com

I’m a big fan of skateboarding games for some reason. In High School I was an “aggressive rollerblader”, a term that I hate to this day. It just sounds so… gay. I mean, skateboard just kind of rolls off the tongue and “ag-gres-ive roll-er-blade-er” doesn’t. In fact, it kind of struggles to make it to the edge of your tongue and then trips and falls off in spectacular fashion.

At any rate, I love skateboarding games. The market to date has been totally dominated by a little series named Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. EA decided to challenge Activision’s dominance and NeverSoft’s formula with their own title that emphasized somewhat realistic moves and a real hands on approach to controlling the skater and the board. What they ended up with was skate.

I had a pretty tough time jumping into skate. I kept wanting to Press A to do an ollie or jump. This is not how things work in skate. You have to Flick-It to jump. Basically the whole paradigm of pressing A to jump and then execute the trick in the air is out the window. skate allows you and forces you to be more hands on by essentially controlling the feet of your skater with your right analog stick. Hold down and then flick up to do an ollie. Slight variations of direction combined with slight rolls of the stick create an endless stream of wicked tricks. Once I got over the massive learning curve and broke free from the years of THPS training, I really got into the title and I am loving it.

There is nothing easy about executing some of these tricks, but it takes patience and a calm, collected, composure to really stick some of these tricks in the heat of the moment. I’ve still got a long way to go in this game, but so far I think EA did an amazing job building a new title from the ground up that is going to change the genre in a big way.

My brother let me borrow his copy of Call of Duty 4 to check out and I just played through the first 2 missions. Graphically, it’s very impressive and so realistic I felt like I was playing a movie. Gameplay wise though I felt like I was playing a squad based game like Ghost Recon and my team was doing most of the work and I was along for the ride. If the entire game is like this, I doubt I’d sing very high praises about “playing” it. I’ll try and get through the at least Act I before I am too harsh or critical of the way the game plays.

I’m primarily a web developer and currently spend most of my time with PHP and JavaScript. My roots go back to Unix C programming and a whole host of other languages including Perl. Making the move to Win32 development hasn’t been an easy one and it’s not a place that I want to stay for very long. I’m writing a relatively simple application for some of my users in the sales department and I’ll be damned if I don’t have to go look up the syntax for every little thing. It’s beginning to get very irritating.

Take for example, a string comparison. One thing you may not realize is that VB and other compiled languages often times require strict declarations for variables. If I want a variable named iCount, I’d have to do this:

dim iCount as integer

PHP will let me just start using $iCount whenever I want and will let it’s datatype change as I see fit. While I can see this has some limitations with being able to trace values and maybe even do error checking, it makes it very easy to whip out some code. So here is that string compare in PHP:

if($myString == "this string") {
echo "Yes, we are a match";
} else {
echo "No, we aren't a match";
}

The same code in VB?

dim myString as string
if(string.compare(myString, "this string") == 0)
msgbox("We are matched")
else
msgbox("We are not matched")
end if

Hopefully there are no typos in that VB as I’m not so good with it that I can type it freehand like I can PHP. Before you jump all over my case with the differences between a web scripting language like PHP and a compiled desktop app (yes I know there are vb scripts, but let’s pretend there aren’t) language like VB.NET keep in mind that regardless of what a language allows you to do, it should be get out of your way and let you work. I don’t feel like VB.NET really promotes a good programming experience. It sure as hell won’t let you screw something up or mis-convert some data, but you won’t have fun writing it.

I always find it funny when large companies use the same stock photos. This guy is showing up on Verizon.com right now as well as the Publisher front page for Yahoo’s ad service (sometimes, it’s a rotating photo).

Previously on this blog you had to register to post comments. This is not ideal. After combing through every setting and even the code that generates these pages I found nothing to show me how to flip the switch. I gave up and did it the dirty way and set the “comments_registration” option to 0 in the wp_options table. Things seem to be working the way I want now, but we’ll see if I went off and busted something by doing that.

Feel free to leave me a comment and see how it works.

Toy makers these days are full of wonderful ideas. I mean, who wouldn’t want their kids playing with toys coated in lead paint and little dots that are akin to your children poppin’ ruffies. Looking through a recent toy catalog, my wife and I saw one of the worst ideas for a children’s toy I’ve ever seen. The Step-2 Extreme Coaster is a large ramp with a car like coaster for the child to ride on. At 40″ high, your child is sure to get quite a bit of speed as they exit the ramp. What happens then? You fly off into oblivion or grind to a halt 3/4 of a mile down the road. Who knows.

While the children in the picture are sporting helmets, I doubt they are included. This leads me to believe that the goal of this children’s toy is to send your son/daughter down a ramp with no built in way to stop and no included safety gear. Sounds like it’s right on par with the other toys that are coming out these days.

While I can put my “bitchy parent” mode on hold and see how much fun this would be for a properly equipped group of kids, I think it still represents a very dangerous scenario waiting to happen.

On the other hand, I wonder what the weight limit is…