Scott Hanselman

It's 5:31am and Z just now went to sleep. We suspect caffeine drank (by Mom) unsuspectingly earlier, but who knows. So, I'm listening to Chris Sells on .NET Rocks and here's a random collection of links of other things I'm reading this morning.

• CNET: 10 Must-have games for the PSP - FIFA actually looks pretty good, as does Burnout Legends, but I'm not one for "Must-have" lists, so I may just hold off out of spite.
• Casey Chesnut's DivX to Xbox 360 Rube Goldbergian How-To is making the rounds. Dude is clever. Seriously.
• Nikon's going to stop making film cameras - End of an era indeed. Speaking of ending eras, I've got a Canon EOS Rebel that's shot all of two rolls of film. It's pristine. For sale, best offer. Stopped using it after I got my first digital and haven't looked back.
• Transformers Movie coming July 2007 - Michael Bay is set to direct. Crap, and I was hoping it wasn't going to suck.
• The "Twinkie" Tax - Folks are thinking about another go at a Fat Tax. Seems it'd be easier just to stop making fatty foods. Thank goodness that trans-fats now get their own slot on the Nutrition Labels. Time to start shopping at New Seasons.
• Truthiness - American Dialect Society's 2005 Word of the Year. "The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all. You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut." Colbert is a brilliant satirist. Watch the video here.
• The [sic]ing of the President - An excellent linguistic analysis of the White House and the President's speech patterns. If I had a lot more money I'd go back to school and get a Linguistics degree.
• Overheard in New York
• Video: OS X 10.4.3 dual-booted on a Thinkpad - Oh, it's on, baby! This whole "Mactel" thing is very exciting.
• Advertising with Google Maps - Mental note, mention to my boss that we need to paint a huge Corillian logo on the top of our building(s). I can almost see my car.

P.S. And here's some fresh Z photos just for good measure.

Now playing: .NET Rocks - Chris Sells on Model-Driven Development

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Z is fast asleep on my lap, and I'm trying to find a PSP 1st-person shooter that doesn't totally suck. Of course, I bought my PSP as a TV and Portable Media Center, not a gaming system. But, when you've got a kid asleep on your lap at 3am, somehow you find yourself wanting to blow 15 min with a game now and again. Maybe that's just me.

Here's the three I've got.

• Coded Arms - I got this at the same time I bought the PSP. There were few games around an a hacker-themed 1st-person seemed like a no brainer. It's got gorgeous graphics, seriously. Detailed and beautiful. The first level is amazing. However, all subsequent levels are the same level. Never since Mario Bros. (Not Super Mario, people, just Mario Bros.) have I seen a game with such similar levels. I got bored after level 3 and feel asleep. It's a shame because the theme had such potential. You hack from level to level and get upgrades while fighting viruses. Sigh. For sale: $15 or buy me lunch a few times.
• Star Wars: BattleFront II - Got this for Christmas, it was on my wish list. It was a great Xbox game, how couldn't it be a great portable game? Well, let's start with an unspeakably obscure control schema that makes virtual no good use of the single analog stick and quite lousy use of the shape buttons. The guys I'm trying to shoot are always just above or just below my view. I literally can't get past the second Hoth level. Folks on the boards insist that this is a great game with some really great spaceship levels, but I'm too much of a putz to get that far. I've almost given up on this game. As I write this, I'm wondering if I was too harsh; I may try again for a few minutes. Seriously, though, it's got Castle Wolfenstein quality graphics (Not Castle Wolfenstein 3D from your 286, I mean Castle Wolfenstein from your C64. Achtung!)
• SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo - I received a gift card from Cingular for $30 as a rebate and promptly squashed it on this game. Now THIS is a game. It's like Splinter Cell + Hitman + Rainbow Six. Many times while playing I thought I was, for a moment, playing one of these games. It's that broad in it's appeal. Some missions have you not shooting anyone, instead collecting digital photos of conversations between spies. Others have you sneaking into a compound to rescue the VP of Chile, while still others are more battlefield focused. That's just the single player game. What's amazing to me is that it supports online wi-fi multiplayer (via a poorman's Xbox Live that is specific to this game) with a headphone attachment. On a freaking PSP. Now THAT'S 2006 baby. The single player is well done, with excellent pre-rendered cut scenes with missions in locations like Chile and Morocco. And, get this, the folks in the cut scenes and the folks you fight actually speak the local language. I like that they recorded many minutes of Spanish and Arabic and included subtitles. It did give you the sense of traveling around the globe to different locations - and the maps are HUGE. It's not as pretty as Metal Gear: ACID (an almost un-playable, but truly gorgeous game) but it's tight. The controls are clean and feel natural after a few minutes (even though having a single analog stick ISN'T very natural.) You're graded on mundane things like accuracy to more "soft" skills like teamwork.

If you really want to know what the "Halo 2" killer addictive game is on the PSP, experience Hot Shots Golf for yourself. I love the single player career game. If I see you around and you've got a PSP with Hot Shots, let's play an ad-hoc multiplayer game, eh?

Now playing: Freshlyground - Human Angels

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Travis Illig took my NUnit/Watir integration POC and ran screaming down the street with it and has released his code on CodeProject. There are also some other integration projects in a similar vein going on that I'll post about later.

Travis' solution is clever in it's use of attributes. It does everything automatically that I did manually with resource extraction. The easiest way to grok it is to look at a sample NUnit test you'd write:

It's the ExecuteTest() of course that does all the heavy lifting by walking the call stack looking for Attributes and acting on them. Check out his article and get involved.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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There will soon be an easy way to click and generally deal with JavaScript Dialogs with Watir (Web Application Testing in Ruby, pronounced "WATER"). It's always been possible, but the team is working on ways to make it easier. Until that day comes, we use the old way. Mark Cain posted sample code recently on the Wtr-General Mailing List. I'd been meaning to post my code that fires up another Ruby "thread," but his is arguably simpler if not slightly brute force. Thanks Mark!

#Put this method in your script:

def startClicker( button , waitTime = 3)
   w = WinClicker.new
   longName = $ie.dir.gsub("/" , "\\" )
   shortName = w.getShortFileName(longName)
   c = "start ruby #{shortName}\\watir\\clickJSDialog.rb #{button} #{waitTime} "
   puts "Starting #{c}"
   w.winsystem(c)
   w=nil
 end

#Then call it right before you click the button (or whatever) that
causes the javascript popup to display:

startClicker("OK" , 3)
$ie.button("Submit").click

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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This is an older tip, but a lot of folks don't realize that it exists and its easy to miss.

If you've got a blog and you want folks to subscribe to it, make sure you're set up for Feed Auto-Discovery. FireFox supports it, almost every feed reader like FeedDemon supports it. Basically it saves you this whole process: Go to a site, search everywhere for an orange XML badge, right-click on it, select Copy Link Location, go to your reader, paste in the XML URL to the Add Feed dialog.

Add markup like before the </head> tag in your site. You can have different links for different feeds or different protocols if you like.

<base href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman" />

If you're using a blog engine like DasBlog you likely already have this, however, if you've added to or modified a theme you might want to confirm that your theme HTML contains this autodiscovery info. You can just hard-code it in the main blog template's, there's no harm.

I also like to add one-click subscription support like this feed:http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman with the feed protocol. Many readers will catch clicks that start with feed://.

We'll add autodiscovery to Hanselminutes very soon. :)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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