FEAR 2 Mini-Review

Downloaded the demo from Steam. 
Hated it.
Seven things:

1. Slow motion is a stupid gimmick.
2. Even on “easy” I shoot a guy in the head from 20 feet away with an assault rifle and he not only lives, he gets back up and keeps shooting.  Where do I get a helmet like that?
3. That fog…is that ambience or an enemy? ….ENEMY!!!  Or not. 
4. Man-like gooey figure on the wall.  SHOOT IT!  Hmm…it’s not a bad guy.  Next man-like gooey figure on the wall.  Not a bad guy obviously.  WRONG!!!  GACK!!
5. Coffee table blocks shots?  Since when do bad guys shoot BB Guns?
6. WHEEEE!!  Mouse too sensitive, I’m getting nauseous.  Lower sensitivity all the way.  WHEE!  (notice 2 less E’s).  Still way too sensitive.  Lower sensitivity with gaming mouse.  Doesn’t work at all.  BARF!
7. I’m hallucinating and following this creepy kid.  She disappears.  In front of a flaming pit.  I’m not jumping in there!  5 minutes later after realizing I’m being herded like livestock.  *jump* Moo!

One a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a D+.

Visual WebGui Needs SERIOUS work!

It seems like everywhere I turn, I keep seeing “Visual WebGui” and how to use it with Microsoft products.  Just today I saw in the MSDN Flash email that they were promoting a webcast on the subject.  I’d never looked at WebGui and I wasn’t even entirely sure what it was or anything about it.

So I headed on over to their site and poked around a bit.  I’m not going to review it, but I’m going to point out some things that are obviously broken and need work.  There’s no way I could ever put garbage like this on a client site!

 

The reason this is so important is that a demo should be the very best of what they can do with something as well as being representative of the kind of results you can expect.  If the company that makes a product can’t even get it to work on their own demo site, what chance to I have of doing better?

Don’t get me wrong.  There’s a lot about Visual WebGui that’s pretty cool.  But I just can’t see myself ever recommending the product to a client or ever getting it myself.

(the above pictures were taken while browsing in IE 7 with no add-ons enabled, ad-blocking turned off, and all javascript and cookies turned on.)

Why Impulse Sucks and Steam Has Nothing to Worry About

I own Sins of a Solar Empire, a great game, and I haven’t played in a while so I wanted to see if there were any updates.  So I load Impulse and wait…

and wait…

and wait…

but it never loads.  There’s no process running for it and it never ran.

So I load it again and I get this:

Which wouldn’t be a problem if it ever said something else.  The application is basically frozen.  It doesn’t make me want to update Sins anymore.  It makes me want to go play something else, which I will do after I finish this post.

Players want reliability more than anything.  People wouldn’t really care about DRM if SafeDisc didn’t crap all over their computers.  People actually like buying a game from the store on impulse (no pun intended) and installing it from a DVD.  People just don’t like having to keep putting the stupid thing in the drive just to play a 2 year old game.

And Stardock, people wouldn’t mind Impulse if you would have a program that actually worked even semi-reliably.  It only successfully loads on the first try about 1 out of 4 times.  That’s not what I’d call a good track record.  I’ve had the program crash simply by right-clicking on an icon.  That part’s not rocket science.

Look, you’re a generally good publisher and some great games.  Impulse was a good idea except the little part that the software is an unadulterated piece of crap.

SSRS WebForm ReportViewer settings with SharePoint Integration

I’m currently in a project that requires I use ReportViewer in aspx pages that access an SSRS report server (2005) that is in SharePoint Integration Mode (MOSS 2007).  What isn’t obvious is how to set the ReportViewer properties for the ReportPath and ReportServerUrl attributes.

What is most significant is that you can’t use the same settings that you used to deploy the report. 

One would think you could take that information from your report project, but it’s unfortunately not that simple.  If you do, you may get something similar to this:

Yeah.  That’s bad.

I discovered that there are 2 keys to setting up your ServerReport variables when using SharePoint Integration:

1. ReportPath needs to have the full URL of the report .rdl file.
2. ReportServerUrl is the URL that SharePoint supplies.

For the ReportPath, that should be pretty easy to find.  I can’t speak for every installation, but on mine I was able to take the TargetReportFolder URL (see above)  and concatenate the report name.  For example:

http://rpt.example.com/Reports/yourReport.rdl

For the ReportServerUrl, you’ll need the help of your SharePoint administrator or someone who can run SharePoint Central Administration.  It’s easy to find out the URL you need:

Run SharePoint Central Administration.  On the left, there should be a bar similar to this:

Select “Application Management” and the screen it gives you will have a section like this:

Under “Reporting Services” select “Manage integration settings”.  It’s the first option. 

You will then be presented with a screen similar to this:

The parameter you want is in the first text box, “Report Server Web Service URL”

Using the sample data and parameters I’ve given in this example, your line in the markup page (under the ReportViewer tag) would look like this:

<ServerReport ReportPath="http://rpt.example.com/Reports/yourReport.rdl" ReportServerUrl="http://ssrs.example.com:8674/ReportServer" />

This may not work for everyone, but after many hours of struggling, it’s what I was able to get to work.

The main source for my solution is at this link where I took a blended approach from the various solutions offered.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,ssrs,integration,microsoft,reportviewer

Microsoft's faUX pas

You would think that Microsoft would have User Experience people.  I mean, that's the impression they want you to have with all of this hullabaloo about WPF and Silverlight (which are great products, mind you).

I am referring to the horrible opening to the Keynote at MIX07.  It starts with a rather abstract background and then a bunch of stuff starts moving around, designs shift and so far.  It's very snazzy.  But there's just one problem.  There's no sound.

Now, what happens when you're hearing a presentation without sound?  Well, I checked the codec the wmv file was using.  Nope, that's not it.  I tried the silverlight version and the same thing.  I'm wondering "what the heck?!" and then wait about 30 seconds and THEN the sound comes in.

Come on guys, this was just stupid.  When people start a video, they expect to see video AND sound!

Tell me this.  Do you think it's a good user experience to have to wonder if my hardware is working right or (as I saw it) more likely, the software isn't working?

And that's another thing.  This really, really ticks me off!!!  I have a nice 2Gb, 3.4 GHz machine with Vista Ultimate.  Would it be too much to ask to have your free e-learning (good thing I didn't pay for it) actually work???  How about webcasts?  I simply can't get LiveMeeting on the webcasts to work.  If I want to view a webcast, I have to wait for it to show up "on-demand" and download it as a video.

Am I the only one who thinks it's silly that I can't watch a webcast about Vista since I got Vista?  C'mon guys!

Firefox is starting to tick me off

I love firefox in general.  There are a few plugins that I wouldn't want to live without.  But lately (lately = since I've installed Vista, it seems) Firefox has been hogging resources like Rosie O'Donnell at a, well, anywhere.

What happens is that apparently when I highlight something, it just sits there.  All I can figure is that the browser is attempting to handle some kind of javascript and/or ajax event.  Yes, I know it can only handle a certain amount at a time (I think it's two) and then it sits and waits.  But that's just really annoying.  Firefox becomes completely unresponsive and I see my Vista version of the hourglass going in circles for up to a couple of minutes.  I keep google reader open, but that's really the only heavy ajax site I use.  I'm going to start getting rid of some of my plugins (but never Adblock!) and see if that helps at all.

Silverlight needs work

It's a good thing that Silverlight is still in beta.  I couldn't even get the stupid thing installed.  This is what I got:

Ooooookay.  That's really helpful.  I'll be sure to close all of my user-mapped sections next time.

Technorati tags: microsoft, silverlight, wpf/e, beta, error

Too True for Words

Goodbye Old Friend

Microsoft, after years of hinting, has finally decided that there will be no more FoxPro after version 9.

As one who used FoxPro since its MS-DOS days, before even Microsoft had purchased it, I have fond memories of some amazing applications I was able to design with it.  It's been a long time coming and FoxPro is a dog that's too old to hunt, but it certainly had an impact on my career as well as the careers of many others.

Little known fact (unless you were a FoxPro user):  Tom Rettig, fka Tommy Rettig who played Timmy on Lassie was a well-known and accomplished FoxPro developer.

Compression is not always necessary!

I'm tired of having to unzip downloads that have one file in it that's already compressed.
Why do this?!  That makes no sense to me!  Look (to the left) and the download I just got.  Uncompressed it's 92, 927 bytes.  Oh gosh!  That's too big!  Let's compress it!  WOW!  Now it's only 86, 335 bytes!!  I saved 6592 whole bytes. That's 52, 736 bits!
Look, folks, a PDF is already compressed!!! Why would you want to try to compress it again??  Do you really think that those 6,592 bytes are going to make a difference?! 
Unless you have multiple files, don't freaking Zip your downloads if you don't get a big gain with compression!!!
(and if you try to come back with "I can't upload them to my blog in their native format" then get a new blog!!!
Really, folks.  I shouldn't have to tell you these things.  :)