A View from Elsewhere

As part of our remodel, considerable work was done on the front porch. Unfortunately, that work didn't include putting up the railings. This weekend has been the weekend for me to replace them. This has involved purchasing 4x6s and 2x4s to create the classic Craftsman heavy look, then assembling them, which has involved tracing the contour of the house's siding so the 4x6s are notched to fit, and mortising the 4x6s so the 2x4s will sit in them. Yesterday it took me about 8 hours to build 4 feet of railing. I'm hoping today goes faster.

Popfly, which we opened to the public last fall as a web mashup tool, has come a long way. Over the last ten months we launched an add-in for Visual Studio (Popfly Explorer) so people could create and open projects on the Popfly site from VS, a lightweight structured data storage system, we worked with Mark Frydenberg at Bentley College to design mashup curriculum, and we launched a game creator that puts the creation of casual games within the reach of people who don't have CS degrees.

Yesterday we moved from the alpha release of the game creator to beta in time for the PAX conference here in Seattle. Ben Anderson from our team will be at PAX giving demos, so if you're there drop by and harass him. Or just post on his Popfly profile page.

By the way, the title of this post is an allusion to two movies and the fact that Popfly now supports achievement badges -- for example, if you play a game late at night, you get the Night Owl badge.

About a month ago my wife and I attended the Seattle Luxury Chocolate Salon. With a name like that, I had no idea what to expect. When we showed up we paid our $20 admission (<cough>) and walked in. When we arrived, it looked like a miniature version of every computer trade show I've ever been to -- vendor tables with flyers and brochures and lots of people in variously matching polo shirts. You know what I'm talking about -- everyone looks a little bored after giving the same shtick a hundred times to semi-interested people wandering around.

Except this one was with chocolate. And they were giving out free samples.

So Amy and I worked our way around the room. It was surprisingly hard work -- the room was over 90 degrees in places, which meant not only that everyone was sweating, but that the chocolate was mostly the texture of mousse. Of course, mousse is good, too.

We tasted, I think, everything there. Four stood out for us:

• Claudio Corallo Chocolate. A single origin chocolate and cacao producer -- they make raw chocolate. The flavors were unlike anything I'd experienced before. I know it was meant to be used as an ingredient for other confections, but I could have eaten it raw. They have a store in Ballard.
• Kekau. A range of interesting flavors, including things like black truffle honey and Thai curry made these folks stand out -- they'd really done some interesting things. I've had many chocolate flavors before (curry chocolate, lavender chocolate, etc.) but they'd done them really well, including -- get this -- olive oil chocolate. Sounds awful, tastes great.
• Intrigue Chocolates. Truffles were the order of the day from Intrigue. Again, they had the standard flavors, but the ones that stood out for me were basil, and tequila-lime.
• Fiori Chocolatiers. These folks truffles also, but with an Mediterranean twist -- olive oil, fig liqueur, lavender and raspberry blossom. If you want a chocolate that you won't get elsewhere, try them.

By the end of the couple of hours we spent there I was thirsty, dehydrated, and tired. Oh, and buzzed on sugar.

A customer noted yesterday that the patch for "big VS" (that is, Visual Studio 2008 Standard, Professional, and Visual Studio Team Suite) doesn't patch Visual Studio Express. We did this because of the patch size: in the past Express customers would download one of the Express products (probably 50-60MB) and then have to apply the full VS patch (typically over 200MB). So we decided that we would do what we call a "major release" of Express 2008 with SP1. Effectively, rather than creating a separate service pack, we added the features of the service pack to the full Express SKU -- we used to call this "slipstreaming" but I've been told that's not quite the right term. Most Express users will just download the Express SKU of their choice: if they already have a VS Express 2008 RTM SKU on their computer, we'll upgrade it. If they don't, they get the full SKU without having to install a separate service pack.

Have you created a really cool Popfly project? If so, we want to hear from you!  Click here to send us your story and you may be featured on our site!

Created by students. AlfredTh has the list.

A coworker who is teaching Popfly to his daughter just asked me,

I'm working with my daughter who is working on a game and she wants to import a picture to be an actor.

How does she do that? And is there a wiki or other site to get these kinds of answers?

For once in my life, I have answers to both.

If you look in the upper right (next to your name) you’ll see the integrated help. That will open the Help window.
From there, you’ll get context-sensitive help. If a topic isn’t covered in the sidebar, you can click on the more help section on “How Do I…?” which will take you to the online documentation on http://www.popflywiki.com.
The page you’re looking for is linked to from several places – it’s called “How do I use uploaded files in my game?” and it’s here http://popflywiki.com/GameCreatorUsingUploadedFiles.ashx.
Once there, you’ll need to read the instructions, but they go like this. First, create a game (you’ve done this) and save it. Then upload the image. Go to the Game tab and on the right you’ll see the “Files” section. Click to add a file to your project, either from the web (e.g. from Flickr) or from your computer. Once it’s uploaded, save the project again.  I’m uploading john.PNG.
Now click on the Scenes tab and click on Draw. Then click on “Switch to XAML.” The screen should look roughly like the one on the right.
Next, add the XAML to include the file between the two <canvas> tags. In my case, I’ll add john.PNG. <Image Source="$base$/john.png" Canvas.Left="191" Canvas.Top="324" Width="200" Height="150"/> The Canvas.Left, Canvas.Top, Width, and Height control where the image will go and how large it will be. You’ll have to experiment to get it to the right position.
Save the game and run it. My “game” looks like this. I’ve saved it as http://www.popfly.com/users/johnmont/wonk.details, but we have examples in our tutorials of how to do this as well – the Canada Quiz in particular.

My wife has had a houseplant for the past ten years. It's one of those plants with huge leaves that thrives on being ignored. Despite ridiculous underwatering and one notable experience where we left it in the sun for a couple of days and it started to turn brown and crispy, it has done exceptionally well.

Unfortunately, it had outgrown its pot. So over the weekend we bought a new, bigger pot, roughly large enough to serve as the cauldron the three witches use in the beginning of Macbeth. Last night I attempted the transplant. Today, though all the leaves are leafy and green, the plant is canted to one side much like a well-known tower in Italy.

Should I try to re-plant the plant, or leave it and see if it decides to straighten up?

Plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task. Today I tried to repair the drain in my mom's front bathroom. The pop-up wouldn't go up and down. Based on this and all my previous plumbing experience, I have come up with John's Rule of Plumbing: All plumbing work takes three trips:

• Trip 1: Get the parts.
• Trip 2: Get the right parts.
• Trip 3: Get the parts you forgot in trip 2.

Oh, and at the end of this I should add the optional trip 4 to replace the parts from trips 2 and 3 that are defective out of the package.

Have I mentioned that plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task?

The toilet in the bathroom I was using in my mom's house was running. Not a "jiggle-the-handle" kind of running -- more like an "unstoppable-gallon-an-hour" kind of run. I lived with it for a couple of days, thinking, "If I were back in Seattle I'd go to the hardware store, buy replacement innards, and install them." But my mom's tool collection is a bit sparser than mine (no pneumatic tools, no table saw. Imagine! And her an 80-something year old woman!).

Then the light went on: hardware stores also sell tools. Two pairs of pump pliers and a couple of hours later, no running toilet.

Oh, and the review on Amazon of the Fluidmaster 400AK doesn't reflect my experience. I've used them several times on different toilets and they've always worked.

When Pandora launched it garnered a lot of coverage in the mainstream press. I tried it then and found, as with most music sites, that its classical knowledge wasn't very good. I went back today, propelled by I don't know what, and found it much, much improved.

Just in case you were wondering.

When traveling, I often like to listen to music. Unfortunately my choice of music tends to be classical. Classical music listeners are a minority, and most places have at best one classical station and that will be filled with commercials. One of the reasons I love XM Radio in my car is I get two good classical stations (a station that plays "popular" classical (e.g. movements of symphonies) and one that plays full-length pieces that may be more complex). At home I have Comcast's Music Choice that has two similar stations. Because I have accounts with both, I get access to their web sites.

Now that I'm out of the office (and have headphones) I've spent a lot of time listening to both. I've come to the conclusion that, content-wise, Comcast and XM are about the same. The pops channels play the same assortment of Brandenburg concertos and movements from Tchaikovsky dances and the full classical channels play everything from Shostakovich string quartets to Ives to composers I've never heard of. Both music streams are of similar audio quality, at least on the $10 earphones I'm wearing (my Sennheiser headphones might show more difference but they're bulky to pack).

But I'm listening more to XM. Why? User interface. XM feels lighter-weight and puts my favorite channels at the fore. With Music Choice, it's many more mouse clicks to get to the UI where I tell it to switch to one of the two stations I want to listen to.

In any event, both Music Choice and XM are incomparably better than the local classical stations, sadly, especially since they have no commercials.

Every time I'm out visiting my mom, I cook a few times. I'm not sure why, I just do. This time I made something that I thought was simple -- home made marinara sauce with grilled steak, fresh mozzarella cheese, and lightly-dressed arugula. To me this is a simple dish. To my sister, her husband, and my mom it was a complicated meal because I started the sauce last night. Though it was a basic meal (and only of fair quality since I chose a cut of meat that was, to be polite, filled with connective tissue) hey lauded it and me to no end.

And this is why I love my family.

I'm an RSS Bandit user. I have been for years -- before I knew it was written by Dare Obasanjo. He and his RSS Bandit team on Sourceforge have been working on it for years. It has one deficiency that I haven't liked: I read feeds on multiple computers and they would get out of sync. Read some at the office and then come home and I have to figure out where I left off in the unread items. But I love RSS Bandit. I've tried a host of other online and offline feed readers including all the big ones and I keep coming back to this simple desktop application.

With Phoenix, the team is working towards eliminating the one thing I haven't liked about the current product: synchronization. They're going to connect to online readers like Google Reader and enable you to synchronize through them.

So far, the alpha has treated me exceptionally well.

One of my friends, and a former teammate, is Aaron Brethorst. For the longest time I thought of him as the amusing guy from VScore who attended shiproom. It was only later that I realized he was an accomplished photographer. The photograph below is of the Smith Tower in Seattle, one of my wife's favorite buildings.