Tron

Sharon and I watched Tron on Sunday. It made me realize how much we take our technology for granted. It’s so much more affordable to produce high-quailty animation these days compared with 20 years ago. The “special features” on the DVD contained “The Making of Tron” which was pretty cool to watch.

It seems that Steven Lisberger (director) was really the driving force behind the whole movie. He owned a small animation company in the late 1970’s that was mainly doing cartoons and simple digital animation. But he had a dream of doing a movie that really “stretched” the technology boundaries. At that time there were only a handful of companies in the world that had computers powerful enough to run decent animation software, and the frame-rendering times on many of the action sequences were incredible.
In the end he managed to convince Disney and some awesome actors such as Jeff Bridges to come on board – and thus Tron was born!

The results speak for themselves. Tron is a classic movie. It’s really one-of-a-kind in so many aspects. All the Monsters Inc/Bugs Life/Toy Story/Finding Nemo clones are all so much alike these days. I was surprised that many of the designs such as the lightcycle still look cutting-edge even after 20 years.

Select Random Row in Sql

I was trying to create some test data the other day by “scrambling” all the names and addresses of real customers in a production database. This was not as easy as it first sounds.

I thought I would be able to use the .NET Random class to randomly generate numbers that I could then use as the key in a SELECT statement. The problem with this approach was that the table I was using does not have an integer primary key – it is a 10 character alphanumeric value.

Then I stumbled across this article that explains how to use the SQL newid() function to randomly sort records (this function basically generates unique uniqueidentifier values). To select a random surname I could write:


select top 1 surname
from customer
order by newid()


Using this method I could generate new records by randomly selecting a surname and matching it with a random address.

Funny Blog

Yes, I seem to be part of the minions that now read Rory Blyth’s blog.

What can I say, some of his posts are hilarious! I would probably read his blog even if I had no interest in MS nerd-speak…

Scheduled Task

Ever wanted to setup a scheduled task in Windows that runs on a different schedule to the basic options listed in the Add Scheduled Task Wizard but didn’t think it was possible? Don’t fall into the same trap I did by thinking that the wizard options were the only options available. The following steps can be used to create a task that runs hourly 24×7:

1. Create a new task using the wizard. Select Daily when prompted for a schedule
2. Open the Properties of a task once it has been created
3. Under the Schedule tab click Advanced
4. To repeat the task hourly, click the Repeat Task option and select to repeat every 1 hour
5. The final (and important) step is to select a Duration of 23 hours and 59 minutes. This will ensure the task is repeated hourly for an entire 24 hour period.

Scobelized

I was well and truly Scobelized back at the end of October, and totally forgot to post to celebrate the event!

It was really crazy when it happened because I was in the middle of converting the entire site from blogger to typepad and couldn’t post at all. I was up in Brisbane on that weekend (the link went up Saturday morning Australia time) and on Sunday afternoon I thought, “Hmmm, I’ll quicky check the stats on my site”, and I couldn’t believe my eyes! Just a little over 3000 hits in 24 hours!

When I found out Scoble had linked me I couldn’t believe it! I turned to Sharon and tried to explain my excitement by saying, “This Micrososft blog-dude in Seattle linked my site!”, and she looked at me VERY strangely.

Anyway, that was my millisecond of fame. Shame that I was linked because of the look-and-feel that I basically stole from another site, but I suppose you just have to take what you can get! Now that I am back to my usual zero readership the pressure is off to actually post an entry that anyone would actually be interested in reading, but I can still keep dreaming…

Fly Guy

There is some really cool flash happening over here. The menus and site design are pretty schmick. The fly guy is amusing.

Public Fields vs Properties

I was over at Eric Gunnerson’s blog (one of the MS C# gurus) and noticed his post on the usage of public properties. I have always followed the MSDN Class Library Design Guidelines religiously and go out of my way to avoid public fields in every class. I end up with lots of properties that simply get/set a private field. Why not replace these simple properties with fields?

Well, I went back and had a look at some of these properties that seemed to be doing a simple get/set and noticed that some were missing validation code to prevent incorrect values being passed to them (maybe I was too lazy to put in this validation in the first place). If I had created these properties as public fields, it would be really painful to now have to go back and change each field to a property to allow validation code to be added.

I beleive it was probably easier for the authors of the Class Usage Design Guidelines to just use a blanket statement for all public fields rather than try and explain which cases would best suit a property.

Serious Lego

Ever tried solving a Rubik’s Cube using…. LEGO!! This site has a whole heap of cool robots built with LEGO Mindstorms.

Strongbad Email

This is one of the funniest sites I have been to in a long time. I don’t know who is behind this site (Dennys I assume) but the characters and stories they are coming up with are hilarious. My favourite is the Dragon email.

Typepad

The conversion from Blogger to Typepad is almost complete. I haven’t posted here for a couple of weeks while I was getting the new site up. I decided to keep the look and feel the same which means I have spent many hours coverting blogger templates to moveabletype templates.

I am really happy with the results! It makes such a difference finally using a real blogging tool!

Now the only thing left to do is map my old domains to my new typepad site.