Yesterday we (I) purchased a Nintendo Wii, spent most of the day playing Wii Sports with the kids.

There was no issue get the product as there appears to be in the USA.

Mistakes made:

1. Should have brought a Zelda bundle, and got Zelda for $65 instead of having to go second hand or pay $100
2. Should have brought a extra Remote, not Nunchuk (Remote add-on), so Michaela is going to take it (the nunchuk) back and see if we can up-sale to a Remote+Wii Play bundle.

Lots of fun watching people play Wii Sports, I really was enjoying Tennis and Bowling. It was nice playing a full game of bowling without getting a sore arm.

Games that I’m looking forward to getting so far:

• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Need for Speed: Carbon

Wii Sports “Fitness Age”: Me 32, Michaela 77 (hehe)

From Mark:

I always did like the Browser Wars ;)
Luke Spyglass: “You fought in the browser wars?”
NCSA Mosaic: “I was once a web browser the same as your father.”
Luke Spyglass: “My father didn’t browse the web. He was a finger server at the community college.”
NCSA Mosaic: “That’s what your Uncle told you. He didn’t hold with your father’s ideals. He thought he should stay home. Not gotten involved.”
Luke Spyglass: “I wish I had known him.”
NCSA Mosaic: “He was a cunning application, and the best downloaded in the galaxy. I understand you’ve become quite a good downloader yourself. And he was a good friend. For over a thousand days the W3C protected the web. Before the dark times. Before the Empire”
Luke Spyglass: “How did my father die?”
NCSA Mosaic: “A young web browser named Internet Explorer, who was a derivative of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Emporer hunt down and destroy the W3C standards. He betrayed and murdered your father. IE was seduced by the Dark Side of the internet.”
Luke Spyglass: “The internet?”
NCSA Mosaic: “Yes, the internet is what gives a web browser his power. It’s an energy field created by all connected computers. It surrounds us. Penetrates us. Binds the world together. Which reminds me. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your Uncle wouldn’t allow. He thought you’d follow NCSA Mosaic on some idealistic crusade.”
Luke Spyglass: “What is it?”
NCSA Mosaic: “It is open source browser source code. The weapon of a web browser. Not as random or clumsy as a closed source. An elegant idea for a more civilized age.”
NCSA Mosaic: IE was a good friend.
NCSA Mosaic: When I first knew him, your father was already a great application. But I was amazed how strongly the Internet was with him. I took it upon myself to train him as a browser. I thought that I could instruct him just as well as Lynx. I was wrong.
Luke Spyglass: There IS still standards compliance in him. I’ve felt it.
NCSA Mosaic: He more Microsoft’s interpretation of W3C standards now than compliant; twisted and evil.
Luke Spyglass: I can’t do it, Mosaic.
NCSA Mosaic: You cannot escape your destiny. You must face Internet Explorer again.
Luke Spyglass: I can’t kill my own father.
NCSA Mosaic: Then Microsoft has already won. You were our only hope.
Luke Spyglass: Lynx spoke of another.
NCSA Mosaic: The other he spoke of is your twin sister.
Luke Spyglass: But I HAVE no sister.
NCSA Mosaic: Hmm. To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born. The Emperor knew, as I did, if IE were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him. That is the reason why your sister remains safely anonymous.
Luke Spyglass: Opera! Opera’s my sister.
NCSA Mosaic: Your codebase serves you well. Bury your threads deep down, Luke. They do you credit, but they could be made to serve the Emperor.

Update: And from Conor we get Store Wars

In the process of trying to do a Format Selection (Ctrl+E, F) I butter fingered the Code Definition Window (Ctrl+W, D) open. Now this is a really cool window (for C++ and C#) that shows the definition code of the current item under the cursor. So in C++ clicking on

FLAT_DESIGN_INCREMENT_1

I get the display below, very cool!

I have been working on the build scripts for our products, and they are almost perfect now.

New enhancements are:

• All build done on a remote machine “The Build Machine”

• Get the SVN revision (via svn.exe info) so it can be inserted into the version numbers of our tools.

• Do all the replacement of major.minor.build.revision via SED

• Build it all

• Copy it to the network in a nicely named directory e.g. “2007-04-04 (005 Release)”

Makes things feel much better than the bad old days of hand altering each tool’s version information, building locally, and bundling every thing up.

Things left that I’d like to-do

• Automate the build number (current entered for each build)

• Put the whole process into some continuous build system

• Get email notification of build success/failure

But on the whole, where we are now is such a happier place.

I’m off to the CodeGear Developer Day tomorrow. I had not sent the details home, and realized I was clueless about the When and Where parts.

So after spending ages

• trying to remote desktop into my work station, (I could get to the build machine, and FTP into mine) to try use Outlook.
• trying to workout how to get to and then access the work web-mail portal
• trying to find my colleague’s phone number
• complaining to my wife that it was all too hard

I tried Google for the event. and found it. So I now know the Where and When, I can get on with other things….

First the good. My current C++ projects were updated from VS6.0 so the project files are quite messy. One project file was 250KB large. One of the feature I like about VS2K5 is unloading the project (right click on the project in the Solution Explorer). Then right click it again and choose Edit project. Ta-da, you can edit the raw XML of the project. Now in my projects I had for each file, extras that were always blank.

<File
RelativePath=“ActDt.cpp”
>
<FileConfiguration
Name=“Debug|Win32”
> <Tool
Name=“VCCLCompilerTool”
AdditionalIncludeDirectories=“”
PreprocessorDefinitions=“”
/>
</FileConfiguration>
<FileConfiguration
Name=“Release|Win32”
>
<Tool
Name=“VCCLCompilerTool”
AdditionalIncludeDirectories=“”
PreprocessorDefinitions=“”
/>
</FileConfiguration>
</File>

The Italics parts are just filler, as they are not add any new options. So using the fancy Search-and-Replace (Ctrl-H) and this handy visual studio regex ^:b+\<FileConfiguration\n(.*\n)(.*\n)(.*\n)(.*\n)(.*\n)(.*\n)(.*\n):b+\</FileConfiguration\>\n to can find all the blocks, and replace with empty. But you don’t actually want to use the above regex, as it will match lines that with seven inner lines but things like

UsePrecompiledHeader="1"

which you don’t want to lose. So I changed it to

^:b+\<FileConfiguration\n(.*\n)(.*\n)(.*\n)(.*\n)(:b+.*=””\n)(:b+PreprocessorDefinitions=””\n)(.*\n):b+\</FileConfiguration\>\n

So now we know only blank entries will be removed, we can charge ahead and press the Replace All button. Oh the rush, did it work? Anyway after the trimming the large project is only 35KB now. The above file block only has two build targets, but the large project had seven, thus every file had seven FileConfiguration blocks.

After editing, close the project file, then right click to Reload it.

Now the other part of this post is for me to rage that devenv.exe (Visual Studio) keep using 100% of one of my CPU’s when editing/debugging more than one solution at once. Which is really annoying as I have 4-5 programs in our product, and I want to debugging then concurrently. It seems that if I start a new copy of VS while another is debugging it’s lost to the weeds until I reboot.

It gets tiring having the debugging going to a crawl. The whinge is now out of my system now, thank you.

In 12 hours, 3 minutes and well, 40 seconds from the time of writing this, Shutdown Day Begins - see http://www.shutdownday.org/ for details.
To summarise (or rather, to steal their summary):

It is obvious that many people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

See the website for details, counts, comments from people on what they plan to do instead of using their computer, and more.

Cheers Mark

On Saturday we brought a Casio CTK800 from the Christchurch Rockshop. Great service from them so far.

We wanted to get a WK3XXX series, due to them being adult versions, but knew the primary target were the children, so got the CTK. It has a very good tutoring system. It displays the keyboard and the fingers to use, and if your learning the right hand, the left will play up till the point you need to press your next key, so as you get up to speed the tune starts sounding full and complete. The kids love this as the simpler songs have nice accompaniments, so they feel really proud of their progress.

Another feature I like is the display shows you where on the treble or bass stave you current keys are. Very handy for decoding sheet music.

Oh my god! I cannot believe I forgot to blog about this book!

I loved reading Freakonomics, and am just gob smacked that I said nothing about it. It was just eye opening, factoid strong, wowa! reading.

Steven & Stephen have a Freakonomics blog as well! What hole have I been under?

I’ve been letting my spam collect in my Gmail account, but presently I’ve been getting low volume, and I want to know why?

Here the graph of daily count the last 300 SPAM,

See, less SPAM, and I want it back!, how else will I keep up with the latest health products. I’ve still got inches to gain!