Tuesday, 25th of November, 2008
The ESI headquarters is a great place to work if you're a transport nut. You can see the airplanes land and take off from the airport, you get a nice view of I-70, and Metrolink runs right by it.
Wednesday, 19th of November, 2008
A few new things in Business Objects XI 3.1 (vs. 3.0):
- WebIntelligence: A report filter bar that allows you to build drill-down without hierarchies defined in the universe
- Crystal Reports 2008 SP1: Flash (and therefore Xcelsius dashboards) print to paper correctly
- Universe enhancements: A Begin_SQL variable to insert SQL statements before the universe-generated SQL (great for hints/database settings) and an Enhanced prompt() function
- Support for new platforms: Red Hat 5, Server 2008, Vista SP1
Sunday, 16th of November, 2008
Since it's release day for the Guitar Hero World Tour Band Kit, I stopped by Gamestop to pick it up today. I assumed it would come with a USB hub like the Rock Band kit, and was disappointed to discover that the wireless guitar it comes with is instead a Dualshock port controller. It took me all day and searching around the internet to discover that this is not a bad thing - unlike Rock Band 2, you can add the microphone player with your guitar after you have completed setting everything up for the guitar. Therefore, you can have 2 dualshock guitars, the USB drumset, and the USB microphone plugged and have 4-player gaming without any hubs or adapters. I think I need to get the MultiTap dualshock adapter to play 2 guitars and a vocalist for Rock Band 2 since it requires a regular controller to select options for the vocalist.
The real disappointment is actually that the drum set is not compatible with Rock Band 2.
Also, the composition feature turned out to be too difficult to mess with today - at this point it's easier to just play real instruments if I want to compose something. But really, in spite of the missed expectations, the game is tons of fun. The drumset is more fun than the guitar (and closer to a real instrument), and there are some good songs to be unlocked. I think we also need a new TV - Rock Band 2 seems to have more space for the lyrics - Guitar Hero World Tour is difficult on a small TV...
Wednesday, 12th of November, 2008
What can you expect nowadays from a $3500 video card? 4GB of RAM and 240 parallel cores. Amazing - I remember when 4MB video cards were a big deal.
Saturday, 1st of November, 2008
So I entered my Speed-RPM calculator that I started working on in March in the Business Objects Diamond contest at the last minute - I didn't find out about it until a few days before the deadline this summer. I ended up winning...