Ogwaros Iwenâl

IAmLaZyMo

Brian Upton — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:13:43 +0000

This month is NaNoWriMo and I haven’t written more than a couple of words in my existing (and languishing) novel. Which is all of 9 pages long so far. I did manage to write an entire three paragraphs in a single sitting in late October. Hardly impressive but those three paragraphs represent the only real progress on it in about a year.

Not that I’m participating in NaNoWriMo — and it would be cheating to start with my existing material anyway — but I would like to start making progress again. I just need to find a way to focus on it. Installing Q10 seemed to help some, but I think this is just going to be one of those force-of-sheer-will things.

Leap of Faith

Brian Upton — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:16:57 +0000

Nothing short of breathtaking.

ASP.NET MVC views and content_for

Brian Upton — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:02:38 +0000

I’ve switched over development at work from ASP.NET WebForms to the new ASP.NET MVC framework, and so far I’m loving it. It codifies several practices I was already using within WebForms development, while making it easier to code cleaner in other aspects. The MVC framework certainly presents some difficulties, especially coming from being entrenched in WebForms for so long. Sometimes simple things.

For instance, what is the best way to set the HTML page title for a view that uses a master page? Almost all of the examples provided for ASP.NET MVC pass the page title in from the controller using the ViewData dictionary.

ActionResult Index()
{
    // ... action code here
    ViewData["PageTitle"] = "Hello World!";

    return View();
}


    <%= ViewData["PageTitle"] %>

While this approach certainly works, it relies on both the weakly-typed ViewData dictionary and magic literals to retrieve the title. I want to pass in strongly-typed models for all my views.

None of the options for using strongly-typed models containing the page title (and other HTML page data) seemed very appealing. It would mean either passing the model within a “Page” container, or deriving from a common interface that contains the page content. Wrapping the model is cumbersome when working within the view, and putting page data inside the model objects simply is not an option

// Awkward but usable model wrapper.
public class PageData
{
    public string Title { get; set; }

    public ModelType Model { get; set; }
}

// An even worse idea - why should the model care about this?
public interface IHasPageData
{
    string PageTitle { get; set; }
}

class MyModel : IHasPageData { }

Indeed, unless there is significant calculation involved — and why would there be for a page title — why should the controller determine the title for the HTML view at all? Keeping in the spirit of RESTfullness, a “page title” is meaningless for XML or JSON results. Therefore, the HTML view itself should be responsible for its own title.

This is easy for normal views; you have full control of the HTML and full access to the model. However, things become more complicated when you use a master page view. You somehow need to pass up the title of your current view to the master page view. Moreover, you need to do this at run time if you intend to use your strongly-typed model within your title.

Look to the leader as always. After a bit of searching, I found the construct that Ruby on Rails uses to do this: content_for. You would use content_for :title "Hello World" in your view to set the title, then yield :title to output it within your master layout. Bingo - just set up a similar mechanism

There’s an ever so slight problem - the master page view is run before the page view. This unfortunately means that the contents must be registered within the page view’s code behind. It’s a price to pay, but I think it may be worth it to separate HTML-specific view elements from the controller.

So I derived a couple of classes - ContentViewPage (and its generic equivalent) and ContentViewMasterPage. They add a few methods: ContentFor which associates a content key with either a string or a rendering action, and YieldContentFor which outputs the contents associated with the content key. Rather than using constants to define the keys, I chose to use types as the key. While I fully admit it’s an abuse of generics, it provides more unique keys and I like the readability it provides.

Registering content is fairly simple to do:

protected override void RegisterContents(object model)
{
    ContentFor("Hello World");
}

Then, when you want to render that piece of content, you simply use the YieldContentFor method.


    <% YieldContentFor<PageTitle>(); %>

This example is pretty trivial. Real world scenarios would involve constructing the title from the model object, passing in renderings for navigation menus for the master view, including specialized stylesheets or scripts for the view, and so on. The (extremely simple) implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.

Your feeble heart attacks are no match for the power of the Dark Side!

Brian Upton — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:17:50 +0000

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: Ian McDiarmid is the man.

The end of dreams

Brian Upton — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:16:02 +0000

Do you remember the last dream you had?

I don’t.

I was digging through my old files and came across (among other things) an old dream log. It only contained two dreams. I remember the first one listed fairly vividly - a rather unpleasant dream about religious fanaticism and Dr. Phil - but do not remember the other at all despite its pleasant nature.

Dream entries used to constitute 50% of what passes for content on this site. I have entries dating back to mid-2004. But I can’t remember a single dream I’ve had in the past 3 months. I’m sure I’ve had them, but I suppose they weren’t interesting enough to share or remember for more than 5 minutes after waking.

So here is to a dream tonight. A back-crushing nightmare or uplifting fantasy fulfillment. I don’t care. So give me something to dream about.

Please, give me something!

Lost: Via Domus

Brian Upton — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 01:54:15 +0000

I was at Target the other day looking at PC games when a clearance sign caught my eye. Lost: Via Domus was one of the marked down titles. I remembered that the game got fairly terrible reviews, certainly not worth fifty dollars when it came out. But for today, the game was a mere five dollars. Keep in mind that Lost: Via Domus came out February of this year, as a tie in to the premiere of season 4 of the show. What kind of shovelware TV tie-in gets marked down to 10% of its price within less than a year? I decided to find out (it was only five dollars, right?).

After playing the game, I can say it is very much a case of getting both what you expect and what you paid.

You play as an amnesic photojournalist who is being hunted by an assassin. It seems you took a few incriminating photos prior to crashing on the island that someone doesn’t want published. Your quest is to piece together your past so you know why you are being stalked, and to explain the ghost of a woman that is following you as well.

The setup is fairly good - uniquely suited to a Lost game, given the flashback structure the show and game both use - but execution falls down in so many aspects. Perhaps the most obvious is gameplay - Lost: Via Domus is an adventure game. Or rather, it is a poor adventure game. Most of the game consists of walking from point A to B, picking up objects and trading them, fixing electrical panels and passing intelligence tests. Most of the items you pick up are useless except to trade for more slightly less useless items. You must purchase a gun at one point - you may buy extra ammo, but you won’t need to shoot it more than three times during the whole game.

The other significant component to a typical adventure game is speaking with other characters. This is an utter failure in Lost for several reasons. First and foremost, the script is awful. Characters randomly spout lines from the show, as if the player is supposed to gleefully cheer and think “I remember that line!” Such lines will merely confuse players not familiar with the show and feel like patronizing fanservice (if it can be even called that) to hardcore fans.

For instance, early on John Locke randomly tells the player “I don’t want to leave this island.” No context is given as to why he would not want to leave the island - and you are given no option to ask him why. So if you have never watched the show, almost nothing anyone says will make sense. If you have watched the show, there is no point in talking to anyone, except to trigger events to move the game along. The lack of even basic conversation branching makes talking to anyone boring and tedious.

Then there are the graphics. By trying to replicate the actors on the show, the game sits well within the uncanny valley. All of the characters - except the ones created specifically for the game - look like horrific living-dead versions of themselves. Marvel at zombie Hurley, who looks like a fat little midget who has gorged himself on ten too many brains! And there’s zombie Ben, who… actually, Ben looks more or less accurate, thanks to how wonderfully creepy Michael Emerson looks.

The voice acting doesn’t help with the uncanny valley effect. Very few actors from the show reprise their role, and as such very few of the characters sound correct. As an added bonus, the acting itself is horrible and shows very little direction.

In fact, the less the actual Lost characters are involved, the better the game feels. Some of the later flashbacks within the game are pretty well put together. But when the main characters get involved, things tend to fall apart. It does not help that the beach is typically populated with a maximum of five main characters at once. There were 48 survivors of Oceanic 815 - where are they? A much better game would have focused on characters we haven’t seen (such as the main character of the game) with sparse interactions with the “A-team” as Charlie puts it in the game.

I do have to give the game credit in a few places. The music seems to be variations on the themes from the show, without reproducing them verbatim ad-nauseum. The direction style of the cut scenes (voice acting excluded) is quite interesting and in the same vein as the show. Breaking up the game into episodes works quite well. And there is also a very handy “Previously on Lost” feature that recaps previous episodes for you. Unfortunately, these are played at the beginning of each episode even if you just beat the previous episode, not just when loading the game. They are also unskippable, which becomes a pain when you die and have to sit through it all over again.

A good Lost adventure game is possible. This simply is not it. Not recommended, even for five dollars.

Dr. Wily is a jerk

Brian Upton — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:56:48 +0000

What kind of mad scientist builds 8 robot masters every year in order to wreak havoc on Utopia? What kind of mad scientist would name all of his robots “___ Man?” What kind of mad scientist would frame his rival for the destruction he has wrought?

A jerk, that’s who.

Sure, Mega Man can fly through Wily’s robot masters in under 10 seconds flat each. But when faced with a flying dragon robot that spits explosive eggs, which starts shooting parabolic gouts of flame in its second form, poor Mega Man is out-matched. What kind of robot creature is this anyway?! What jerk builds a dragon robot that spits out eggs?

Dr. Wily, that’s who. And should Mega Man beat the robot-that-makes-no-sense, Wily pops out in his flying saucer and zaps Mega Man’s shiny blue ass with energy orbs of death. Why not bring out the big guns in the first place? Why make Mega Man slog through a fight bouncing explosive eggs (seriously?!) back at the dragon and dodging flame with last minute jumps when you can just kill him with a few shots from your magic flying saucer? To give him hope?

What a jerk.

The art of trailer recuts

Brian Upton — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:43:14 +0000

The idea is simple. Recut footage of a movie into a trailer that totally misrepresents what the movie is really about. There are a ton on the YouTube, but most just aren’t very good. It takes skill at editing, good use of music, and good footage to take from to make it work. Here are some of the better ones I have come across (many are NSFW):

Home Alone:

The Ring:

Office Space:

The Big Lebowski:

The Terminator:

And perhaps the best of all, The Shining:

I’m not the human you thought I was

Brian Upton — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:55:17 +0000

I got carded yesterday.

Buying Bioshock.

Perhaps perpetually looking 16 has something to do with it… Or silly store policy.

The future of Windows is… cake.

Brian Upton — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 06:07:42 +0000

Sense: this ad makes none.

(P.S. - the cake is a lie…)