Notch tweeted yesterday that Minecraft is going gold next week! I’ve been on the beta for at least a year, and with the latest additions, I almost feel lost in the game, having not played the last few updates. I welcome a final release, I wonder what pricing he’ll place on it. I’d like to think I saved some money being in the “beta program”.
For the eight-billionth time, I’m going to try and start blogging again. I have a lot to write about, it’s a shame that it stays in my head to be forgotten =\
I’ve been tasked to work with old Microsoft Access database files (MDB). I have a lot of experience in this area. This time though, I’m developing my application on a Windows 7 64-bit system. I think all the ODBC work I’ve done in the past happened on Windows XP machines.
So I bring up the ODBC Data Source Administrator tool to try and add my MDB file. I could not find a way to add my new data source. All it listed was two SQL Server entries. Doing a quick Google search, it turns out the other data sources are security risks so they are “dissabled”.
If you ran into this same problem, navigate to ‘C:\windows\SysWOW64′ in Windows Explorer. Right-Click on ‘odbcad32.exe’ and select ‘Run as administrator’.
You should now be able to add MDB files as well as all the other formats that you could in Windows XP.
That’s my new project for my media manager. I’ll be using http://thetvdb.com to help me manage media files on my computer. I was hoping to finish another side project before starting this one, but I sort of have a need for this one right now. There are a few apps out there that kind of do what I want, but I need something more basic yet powerful.
Media Center Master is the software I am currently evaluating, but it’s way overkill. I think if I ever release this project, I’ll make it geared just for Boxee.
Wish me luck, I don’t have a very good track record of releasing any of my side projects.
So nothing got accomplished on my long weekend. I had plans of getting up at my normal time on Friday and banging out some site updates, but I kind of ruined that by setting up a platelet donation appointment at the Red Cross for 9 AM. After spending a couple hours having all the blood drained from my system and poured back into me, I devoted the rest of the day to myself for my gracious donation. I got some hot wings and then played Supreme Commander 2 on the XBOX for around nine hours.
Before going to bed Friday night, I started watching the Dexter series. That ruined my Saturday because I couldn’t stop watching it!
Sunday was time for family, unfortunately my wife had to work, but she caught up with us later in the afternoon. I’ll try and get my updates to the site done by the end of this week. Though I’m seriously thinking about watching seasons 2 & 3 of Dexter. I MUST BE PRODUCTIVE INSTEAD! 
A Computer Programmer’s Wife Asks Him to Go To The Store
By: Maggie GillA wife asks her husband, a computer programmer; “Could you please go to the store for me and buy one carton of milk, and if they have eggs, get 6!”A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk.
The wife asks him, “Why the hell did you buy 6 cartons of milk?”
He replied, “They had eggs.”
In the next week, I’m going to work personal over-time to get my blog revamped. I’m also going to dedicate time every week for posts. I need to keep my web development skills sharp, while working on this blog doesn’t help me much with that, I’ll be posting more about some side project PHP classes I’ve developed as well as some my general day-to-day work issues and how I overcome them. Oh yeah, and I’ll hopefully post some more reptile stuff for those interested.
Look forward to…
An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn into a beautiful princess.”
He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn back into a beautiful princess and stay with you for one week.”
The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it
and returned it to the pocket.The frog then cried out, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I’ll stay with you for one week and do anything you want.”
Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it
and put it back into his pocket.Finally, the frog asked, “What is the matter? I’ve told you I’m a beautiful princess and that I’ll stay with you for one week and do anything you want. Why won’t you kiss me?”
The engineer said, “Look, I’m a busy engineer.
I don’t have time for a girlfriend. But a talking frog, now that’s cool!”
I’m hoping this post might just help out at least one person that gets put into the same boat I was. I’ve focused back onto a different project at work, mainly working with JavaScript (JS) and DOJO. There may potentially be two other parties working on the same code base so I took the time yesterday to class out all the code. Generally, I always use jsdoc style commenting in my JS code. However, this was my first time utilizing the jsdoc-toolkit to generate docs from code with DOJO.
If you don’t do any sort of advanced utilization of DOJO, you may never experience any issues. I, however, found it to be a pain to get DOJO classes to show up properly in my docs.
Let’s use a simple class as an example…
dojo.declare("SnakeClass", null,
{
constructor: function(breed)
{
this._breed = breed;
},
GetBreed: function()
{
return this._breed;
},
SetMorph: function(morph)
{
this._morph = morph;
},
GetMorph: function()
{
return this._morph;
},
});
OK, here’s how I originally would have commented this code…
/**
* Represents a single snake.
* @author jbfreels
* @see Reptiles#
* @class
*/
dojo.declare("SnakeClass", null,
{
/**
* New snake
* @param breed The breed of snake.
* @constructor
*/
constructor: function(/**String*/ breed)
{
this._breed = breed;
this._morph = "normal";
},
/**
* @returns {String} Breed of the snake.
*/
GetBreed: function()
{
return this._breed;
},
/**
* Sets morph type of the snake.
* @param morph Morph type of snake.
*/
SetMorph: function(/**String*/ morph)
{
this._morph = morph;
},
/**
* @returns {String} Morph type of the snake.
*/
GetMorph: function()
{
return this._morph;
},
});
Here’s what jsdoc outputs…
This does no one any good. Let’s try and trick the jsdoc parser to think this is a valid class (since it kind of is).
dojo.declare("SnakeClass", null,
{
/** @lends SnakeClass# */
/**
* Snakes, snakes everywhere!
* @param breed The breed of snake.
* @class Represents a single snake.
* @author <a href="mailto:jb@tech-tiles.com">J.B. Freels</a>
* @see Reptiles#
* @constructs
*/
constructor: function(/**String*/ breed)
{
this._breed = breed;
this._morph = "normal";
},
/**
* Retrieve breed of the snake.
* @returns {String} Breed of the snake.
*/
GetBreed: function()
{
return this._breed;
},
/**
* Sets morph type of the snake.
* @param morph Morph type of snake.
*/
SetMorph: function(/**String*/ morph)
{
this._morph = morph;
},
/**
* Retrieve morph type of the snake.
* @returns {String} Morph type of the snake.
*/
GetMorph: function()
{
return this._morph;
},
});
And here’s what we get with jsdoc…
If you’re on the fence about getting the new iPad, I’d say go ahead and pull the trigger, that is, if you can find one. If you already have the first iPad you could probably skip this version, but I love it!