Programming

Stardate 57012.8 (01-28-2004)

AHA! Using the search term “madden family” + xmission will get Google to return my site. It turns up a slight flaw as well. The frames are not available. So I put a link to get to the frame page. This post makes me somewhat glad I don’t get Google hits my web site.  Then, of course, there has to be a person to who thinks of interviewing a search engine.

Been reading up on C#. There is a sizeof operator to give you the number of bytes a data type requires for storage. I find this interesting. Java doesn’t have this because the virtual machine specification says the sizes of data types are fixed and do not change from platform to platform. C# is only available on Windows, although I hear rumors of a Linux version. Of course, the underlying system is supposed to handle memory for you, so I guess they didn’t consider storage size an issue. I did find a bug list that had an entry for GDI handle are not released by C# when windows are closed. This is one of the reasons I object to automatic resource handling at times. It’s probably not a big deal, but when I was doing Win 95 work, there were a limited number of these. Every programming article pounded into you to release them the millisecond they were not needed.

I tried to get Regex Workbench up and going on my work laptop. It won’t work because I have the initial release of .NET. It wants the 1.1 version. I could download it, but Big Brother is watching net traffic. I had to burn it to CD at home and install it from that. Snarl.

GotDotNet moved the blogs, and I found the interesting ones this week. I rearranged things again to list the ones I like to check out every once in a while. I’d use the RSS feeds, but again, BB may not like it.

One of Eric Gunnerson’s blogs gives his view of ROTK, and the siege of Mina Tirith. He is not an LOTR fan, and he didn’t think the defense was done very well. I posted a comment to the effect that that was the point. Denethor considered the war a lost cause, and didn’t put much effort into defending the city. It got me wondering if anyone had put a scenario of the battle of Pelennor fields for Age Of Empires II. One is out there, and others are working on it. The big problem is there are no flying weapons to simulate the Nazgul. WarCraft might be better for this, but I don’t own a copy. Oh, well. There are also scenarios for Helm’s Deep.

The Pelennor scenario is well done, except for some strange mistakes. You command the forces of Kondor instead of Gondor. The wizard is Gandolf instead of Gandalf. The Riders of Rohan swept the Orc assault long before it reached Minas Tirith. These guys were aggressive, to say the least. After dispatching all the Orcs at the city, they went after Mordor all alone. This was good, considering the tactical mistakes I made (the game doesn’t understand that undead are not supposed to die). I lost both Theoden and Eowyn in that game. The first Helm’s Deep scenario I played was not very good. The designer divided the defenders, and you get the Elven archers. The troops from Rohan sit around while the elves are massacred. I think the guys from Rohan ought to be a little more aggressive.

I also noticed a Pirates of the Caribbean scenario. It might be fun to get this, and add the OST Patrick has as the background music. I’m considering looking at the FAQ on the scenario builder. It would also be fun to build a campaign for Belisarius against the Vandals and Goths, or the battle of Agincourt, especially if I can find some good sounds and music. I could spend many late nights as an armchair general on this.

Rachel’s troop is setting up a kiosk to sell cookies in front of Wal-Mart. They've been good about it. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

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