First up was The Periodic Table of Dynamic Management Objects by Tim Ford. What I liked about this lecture was how Tim organized the Dynamic Management Objects (DMO’s) into a chemistry-like periodic table. There are so many DMO’s that it might be hard at times to know which ones you need to solve a particular issue, but with the chart it makes it much easier to narrow things down. Once the presentation is available for download I am definitely going to print out the chart and post it at my desk.

The next presentation on our agenda was Development Mise en Place by Keith Tate. What Keith talked about applies to more than just DB Developers and DBA’s. You can apply his suggestions to any area such as programming. The main goal here was to show how you can increase your effectiveness, production, and reduce your stress by getting things in order when you set off on your tasks for the day. By getting the rest of your office on-board for respecting the times you do not want to be interrupted, you can maximize your Flow. On a side note I found out that Keith also is a hockey goaltender like myself, which is pretty darn cool.

The last lecture before lunch was Edge Case Testing for the Database Professional by Vicky Harp. Similar to the presentation given by Keith Tate, the lessons learned here can apply beyond the scope of the DB world. What she pointed out is that most testing is basic and does not look for those special cases that can lead to unnecessary issues and roadblocks in production. On top of that some companies do not have standard procedures for writing up test and use cases. As a developer if you take the extra time to think about the edge cases you can save yourself and the company a lot of time and headaches.

After lunch I sat in on the Discovering the Plan Cache presentation by Jason Strate. Another great lecture where we learned about how to leverage XQuery for examining the execution plans SQL creates. By looking through them you can get better insight into why SQL does what it does and figure out ways to further improve the optimization of your database. The live demos helped me in understanding this topic better.

Second to last in the day was 10 Things That Every DBA Should Know by John Morehouse. Being a programmer this presentation was very helpful in exposing some of the things I am doing wrong when I work with databases. There were a lot of things clarified by this lecture and going forward I hopefully will be making far fewer newbie mistakes. I probably should have them posted near my desk just in case.

Last but not least was But it worked great in Dev! Performance for Devs by Randy Knight. This lecture complimented John Morehouse’s and went into additional detail about safe and best practices when working with databases. At the end of the presentation we worked through some live examples and were able to see first hand the dangers of just hacking away in a database.

At the end of the day was the closing comments and prizes raffled off. I came in second place for the M&M jar counting contest. I was off by 42 M&M’s and my friend ended up winning with a count that was only 27 off. Similar to how I felt after attending my first SQL Saturday event, this event got me even more pumped up about wanting to be more of a DB Developer. I am very excited to be on this path and I look forward to the next SQL Saturday in my area.

The town of Urbeth is the next stop on the adventure for Jusqua when he decides to leave Liberte in search of Aire, who went off on her own in search of the town of Arbor. I suggest you switch Jusqua over to the Bandit crown as you make your way to Urbeth in order to make the random battles easier to manage and be careful of Hellhounds you come across.

Urbeth is a place filled with greedy and deceitful people and like to take advantage of any passer-by who has money. Why not take advantage of this yourself and capitalize on a little trick to make a ton of Gil. The weapons shop in the northwest corner allows you to rent free counter space and sell any items you have in storage. There are 10 slots available each time you want to sell and can either be single or double slots. At most I have seen four double slots paired with two single slots.

Easy Gold Method
Buy at least two (six would be ideal) Burning Harps from the weapons merchant and send them directly to your storage. Talk to the person in the corner (to the right of where you bought the harps) and ask to setup counter space. After selecting Start you can see what configuration the 10 slots are in. Depending on how many harps you have, you want 1, 2 or 3 double slots. If you do not see the configuration you want, just hit the cancel button once and hit the Start button again.

Add the harps to each double slot and assign the 5,000 gil tag to each of them and if you want, a Hot Deal tag as well. Even though you bought the Burning Harp for 970 gil, customers come up and willingly buy each pair of Burning Harps for the 5,000 gil price tag you set. Repeat ad nauseam.

As I mentioned in my first post about Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light, this game is not an easy cake-walk. It is very important to have the gems available in order to enhance crowns and upgrade weapons and armor. The only other way to generate Gil is to sell items monsters drop or find it in treasure chests. At this point in the game you come across some magic spells that are quite expensive (for example Firaga is 5,000 gil) as well as weapon and armor upgrades. Unless you want to grind levels to death, it makes sense to raise some extra Gil to help you along in your quest. I am not suggesting to use this trick and raise a million Gil, but enough to give you a little edge against a game that has such a high difficulty.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT

In order to advance the story you need to raise 10,000 gil for the sorcerer in the northeast corner of town. You can raise 7,500 gil by taking on three different jobs from the various merchants around town. Regardless if you use the easy gold method listed above, I still think you should do these three jobs. It lets you test out the Bandit crown’s steal technique and gives you an opportunity to go through the entire Hunting Caves to get the Thunder Axe.

Note: Remember to talk to Yunita (she is outside of the weapon shop in the northwest corner) until she joins your party before venturing off back to the Hunting Caves.

Be sure to also check out PlayRough089′s Youtube Channel for tons of great videos for Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light.

As I was playing the game I could not help but think about all the PS2 and PS1 games that I either wanted to replay or never got the chance to play (yes that’s right, I have games as old as PS1, in fact even older than that, that I have not yet opened or played). Now that my PS2 is available my wife and I can finally finish Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XII, and begin Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded as well as Kingdom Hearts II. It is going to be great to play the games we love and get to spend that time together once again.

Next up on the list is purchasing a system selector so I can get Gamecube, NES, and SNES all hooked up.

Now that I am in Colorful Colorado I wanted to see if I can track down an event happening out here. So, in a few weeks time I will be attending #104 in Colorado Springs. The event has a wide variety of topics being covered from beginner to advance levels. This time around I am going to be focusing on presentations that help people wanting to get more involved with databases and get them on the right path to working towards a career as a database designer and/or administrator. I probably will also hit up the presentations that focus on optimizing, something that I am really interested in.

Here are the presentations I am hoping to see:

• The Periodic Table of Dynamic Management Objects by Tim Ford
• 7 Ways to Fix Bad Parameter Sniffing by Grant Fritchey
• Edge Case Testing for the Database Professional by Vicky Harp
• Discovering the Plan Cache by Jason Strate
• 10 Things every DBA should know by John Morehouse
• But it worked great in Dev! Performance for Devs by Randy Knight

Just like the first SQL Saturday event I attended, I am sure this one is going to rock.

In other database related news I recently ordered Beginning SQL Queries: From Novice to Professional and it should be arriving tomorrow. I have been working with SQL and databases since college, but I wanted to go over the fundamentals again and really refine what I do. Also, I’m sure there are plenty of things I will learn that I never knew before.

After I crush that book I am moving onto Grant Fritchey’s book, SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled. It just so happens that Mr. Fritchey is giving a presentation at SQL Saturday #104, the second one from my list above. Optimizing queries, tables and full databases is something I find very challenging, rewarding, and fun. It will be great to meet the person behind the pages.

I’ll be sure to write a follow up post on how SQL Saturday #104 went!

My alarm went off at 6:20am Mountain Time and I quickly put on as many layers as I could and rushed outside. I ran down the hill behind my house onto the golf course and found the tallest hill. Thankfully in the area I live in we have a great view of the foothills and some of the 13,000ft+ peaks. When I reached the hill and looked west the Moon was about halfway into the eclipse, where the Moon was moving from the Earth’s Penumbra into the Umbra. The Penumbra and Umbra are the shadows that are cast from the Sun’s light hitting the Earth. The Penumbra is not as dark as the Umbra, but is much larger.

The temperature was hovering around zero degrees Fahrenheit and the wind was blowing strongly. As I was freezing my tail off it was incredible watching the Moon eclipse as it was approaching the mountain peaks. The deep blue’s of the sky were lightening as the Sun was rising directly behind me. If you came out to see the eclipse right before totality, you might have mistaken the Moon for a small cloud. With the Sun rising it quickly became too difficult to see the part of the Moon that was eclipsed. I’m not sure if people on the west coast or in Asia saw the Moon turn red, but from where I was standing it was grey and blended into the light blue sky. The last sliver of the Moon disappeared just as the Moon was about to set behind the Rockies.

While I was watching this event (and trying not to freeze into a Popsicle) I could not help but yet again be awed and humbled by the experience. Every time I look up at the night sky to check out the constellations or witness a celestial event, I am simply blown away. I look up and the few words I can get out are, “Wow, that is so cool!”

Even though here in the Mile high part of the country we did not get to see the eclipse go through the full cycle, we still got to see it fully eclipse. The good news is that in 2014 there will be two total lunar eclipses. At least we do not have to wait too long to get another shot at seeing a total lunar eclipse from start to finish.

Steps To Install Red Alert on Windows 7

1. Right-Click on the Setup.exe file -> Properties -> Compatibility. Set the compatibility mode to Windows 95 and have it run as Administrator.
2. Run Setup.exe
3. Download and install the latest patch, version 3.03 from the Red Alert Archive
4. The patch adds a new file “_RA95.LCF”. Remove the file “RA95.LCF” and then rename the “_RA95.LCF” file to “RA95.LCF”. This stops the dialog asking you to install the Westwood internet tools
5. Find the RA95.exe game file and set its compatibility mode to Windows 95 and run as an Administrator
6. And you’re done!

The only catch is that you have to stop the Explorer.exe process before playing the game, otherwise the graphics get messed up. I open a command window, kill explorer.exe, and then run the executable. After I finish the game the command window is still open, so I just restart explorer.exe. I have not tried installed the Aftermath or Counterstrike expansion packs yet, so I am not sure if there is anything special to do for them. I’m sure at a minimum you have to set the compatibility and administrator modes.

Happy Gaming, and as Tanya says, “Shake it baby!”

For starters there is an awesome class system designated by the various “crowns” you collect throughout the game. These crowns or hats are interchangeable and provide various stat boosts as well as unique attributes. For example a White Mage can cast spells for one less AP than say someone wearing a Wayfarer hat. To add another layer of depth to how you approach the game, you can enhance the crowns with the gems that you collect from various monster battles. Each crown has a certain arrangement needed to advance to the next level. These gems can fetch you a fair amount of Gil at the shops if you are strapped for cash. I would recommend not selling gems too often since you will not know which ones you will need as you progress further into the game. Another reason why keeping your gems is so important is that if your entire party is wiped out in a battle, you are taken back to the nearest town and you lose a percentage of gems as a fee.

So what is AP? AP or Action Points are what allow your characters to perform various actions such as attack, use an item, or cast a spell. Each character has a maximum of five AP and each action can cost one or more points to execute. When you start a battle each character gets a new AP and can use the special attribute Boost to skip a turn and gain an extra AP. Yes you can still button mash and just choose attack every time, but the AP adds a nice level of strategy when deciding how to approach a given battle.

As you progress through the game you will realize that you cannot just hack and slash your way through every fight. Even as early as the second town you visit, Guera, you encounter a monster during your quest that requires a certain spell to be cast on it before you can defeat it. I forgot about what the king of Guera told me and I got decimated after a few rounds with the monster. By figuring out what you need to take into battle, with what hats, equipment, and spells, you will be able to move along in the game. One of the things that can throw you off with developing strategies is that early on your party keeps changing. Some points you have one character, other times all four, and occasionally you will get paired with a temporary party member. Be careful what items you give the temporary companion because after they leave your party, the items they have go with them.

Another aspect that adds depth to the game is the item management system. Each character can only hold a maximum of 15 items at any given time. Since each character has four equipment slots, right off the bat you are down to 11 available item slots. Depending on the character’s crown, for example a Black Mage, the available slots decreases rapidly with each spell book you carry. So besides coming up with a crown combination for your party, what spells to bring, and what armor and weapons to equip, you have to worry about how much you are carrying. The last thing you want to do is head into a dungeon with little to no slots and not be able to take rare items or worse, have to drop items you otherwise would have kept. To help make it easier on you there are storage facilities in towns that can hold onto items you do not want to lose or carry.

One thing to keep track of is what time of day it is. In FF 4 Heroes time passes from Day to Afternoon to Night. So far I have seen it affect whether a person is standing in front of a gate or appears in a corner of town or tide levels change. I wasted a little time trying to clear a dungeon because I couldn’t find where the magic spell was that was needed to defeat the main boss. Turns out I just needed to revisit a certain place at night and the guard was no longer blocking the entrance way to the catacombs where the magic spell was hidden. I haven’t seen too much of a change in the monsters you face in battle, but I think there is a possibility that they do.

Speaking of battles, the battle system for FF 4 Heroes is not like other Final Fantasy games that you have played. You have no control over what monster your character attacks or casts a spell on and you also cannot choose which character gets affected when you cast a spell against your party. At first I was a little turned off by this type of battle system, but the game does a nice job of determining what monster to attack and which character desperately needs the Cure spell. Like the other features of the game, the battle system adds a nice variety and moves you in the direction of really thinking about what actions to take during battle.

Since I am only in the beginning stages of the game I cannot really comment on the equipment upgrade feature that happens later in the game. The story so far is engaging and when the party is split up the narrative does a nice job of keeping it all together. Already from the beginning there was a nice twist and I am sure there will be more as I make my way through the game. I am not a fan of the single save feature the game has though. I know that old-school, traditional JRPG’s were meant to be difficult and hardcore, but I can easily see winding up in a situation where you would like to go back and redo something or fix an error you made. Because you go back to a town after your party is defeated, having your last save in a dungeon will not trap you permanently, but at least one more save slot would have been nice. What if you wanted to play the game using a different crown strategy? You need to wait till you finish the game completely or start over, wiping out your current progress.

Now that I realize that this is not your everyday Final Fantasy, rather it is a cute exterior with a kick-your-butt center, I think I might start over from the beginning and start taking notes of the information I learn from the townsfolk, where I have to go, and what I have accomplished so far. Once I get further into the game I will try to post more of my experience.

Installing and setting up Git was straightforward. The only issue I ran into was having to refresh myself on Terminal commands that I haven’t used since college. What I like about Git is that the commands are easy to use and the logic for checking items out, merging, branching, etc… make sense. Having a strong background in Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) helped with understanding the various concepts and models in Git. I work with branching and merging everyday at my job, so it was not difficult visualizing how Git works.

Similar to my experience with Git, GitHub was easy to start using. I setup my account and followed the well written instructions on how to setup my SSH key, registering my account with GitHub, creating my first repository, and forking a hosted repository. With my newly learned Git knowledge I had no trouble bringing down a local copy of the project that I will be working on for the apprenticeship. Now the next step is to go through the code and understand what it is all about.

Click Here to see the Dodgy Coder post. Click Here for the original StackOverflow post.

Number one on the list is Yoda Conditions and rightfully so. Anytime you can merge Star Wars with programming it’s a win. Just reading a line of code such as if (null == theValue) will bring a smirk to your face every time. In some cases coding this way makes it more readable and for several languages such as C#, can help you spot an error. You cannot assign a variable to a constant, so if your conditional statement looked like if (37 = theValue), you would get a compiler error.

I don’t know about you, but there have been plenty of times that I have gone and discussed a problem with another developer or had them come to my desk to see an issue and without them uttering a single word, I would figure out the problem. I have no idea why this method has such a high success rate, but at least now I know the correct term for it: Rubberducking. According to the entry on StackOverflow, there was a story about a developer who put a rubber duck on his desk to talk out his programming issues.

If you have ever worked on a large project that has been around for a few years you most certainly have come across lines and lines of Scar Tissue code. What’s that? Basically it is the commented code left around from previous builds that the programmers forgot to take out prior to release. Over time the commented code is forgotten and no one remembers what it was for and why it was left there. No one wants to delete it because there is a chance it might be needed in the future.

Just as the wise Yoda once said, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering”, Refuctoring leads to Mortgage Code. Mortgage code leads to job security. Refuctoring your code involves making changes over time that only you understand so that the code is so complex only you can maintain it. By using this approach you create Mortgage Code forcing the employer to keep you around (salary pays your mortgage) since you are the only one who knows how it works.

There is usually a clash between non-developers (salespeople, management, customers, etc…) and the developers when it comes to discussing a feature that is not yet completed. The non-developers do not understand what it takes to make that single, shiny button do all the fancy stuff behind the scenes. To help ease the tension and buy us developer more time, when the non-developers ask for your status, simply tell them that you are still Reticulating Splines. A nice way to tie in video games (Sim City 2000) and confuse the non-developer so that they walk away.

In my programming world my friends and I commonly use the terms F12 and Push Play. F12 is similar to Reticulating Splines. When a non-developer barges into our office claiming something isn’t working and demands an answer, we tell them, “Just hit F12 and it will work itself out.” F12 does absolutely nothing to fix the problem, but by now the other employees get our joke and it tends to calm them down enough so that we can calmly work on the issue at hand. At one of our previous jobs our manager would give us a hard time whenever we said, “Push play.” We would say that whenever we were asking another developer to run their code in debug mode because the icon representing that is the same icon for “Play” on a television remote. To this day we have no idea why our manager got so annoyed by it.

Behold the Ice Cream Zombie:

I met my wife and In-Laws at the local mall after work on Halloween to help my son go trick or treating from store to store. On a side note I wish as a kid I went to the mall instead of houses in my neighborhood. The amount of candy and swag you get at the mall is astronomically greater than going from house to house. After Noah was done being Superman we headed over to the food court to grab some dinner. Of course he wanted to eat ice cream for dinner. My wife and I joked around how crazy kids get over sweets and the idea of showing Noah how to be a zombie popped in my head.

The first thing any zombie needs to learn is how to hold their arms up. Noah held them perfectly parallel to the floor and got the bent wrists down solid. The next step was tilting his head to one side, which in the beginning caused him to walk towards the direction his head was tilted. The walk is crucial for being a zombie, you have to get that foot drag just right and Noah did a fine job of it. It was pretty cute seeing Noah try to combine all three zombie characteristics and mumbling “Ice cream zombie, ice cream zombie…” We practiced a few times up and down the food court and then it was time to film it. I have to say he did a stellar job and he even improvised the attack at the end.

Oh, and for you Walking Dead fans out there, here is a short video of the cast talking about whats to come in the next season. I am not going to spoil it for anyone who did not get a chance to see last night’s episode, but all I can say is that it was amazing and jaw dropping.