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I have a half written post doing a comparison of the various social gaming platforms on the iPhone, and then Apply goes and announced (link via Engadget) Game Center today during their show-and-tell for iPhone OS 4.0 and essentially sounds the death knell for all of them. Because let’s face it, when Apple joins the fray (for good or ill), especially on their own device, everyone else is shit out of luck. With a friends list, leaderboards, achievements and even multiplayer matchmaking they have all of the ingredients that draw users to social gaming networks. Xbox Live is the gold standard in the console space and I can say with relative certainty that Apple will quickly take that crown in the mobile space. OpenFient, Plus+ and Scoreloop will need to do something aboslutely amazing to beat was is essentially going to be built in functionality on all future iPhones.

My advice: quit now, and go sell knit hats or something.

Let me start by admitting that I have a problem. I like iPhone Apps. I like downloading them. I like using them. I like bitching about how shitty they are. I like deleting them and leaving 1 start ratings. I pretty much like everything about them. I’ve downloaded hundreds, come really close to maxing out my 11 home screens and I’m always looking for new ones to play with. So the idea of an app that recommends other apps to me is pretty much crack dipped in chocolate to me. My new favorite is Chomp.

Chomp is one of a handful of recommendation apps that I’ve found. Others that I’ve tried, and ultimately discarded, are Chorus, AppMiner, BargainBin, and PandoraBox. The latter three are primarily discount and sale finders so they may not be directly comparable, but Chorus is billed as a recommendation network very similar to the Chomp. I had high hopes for Chorus. You had a friends list so you could get recommendations from friends. There’s a concept of “feeds” that my assumption was you could subscribe to and get turned on to things you may not find otherwise. There’s a feed for friends and an All feed that originally I figured was just any and all recommendations by Chorus users, sort of like the Twitter public timeline. That’s not really the case though. I really have no idea what the All feed is in Chorus. But in general it’s crap. The interface design on Chorus is mostly poo as well. It takes about twenty seven clicks to see a list of reviews of a specific app. The app uses a white on black design that always puts me off from the start. And the “App Mavens” in general, are douche bags.  Basically Chomp succeeds in just about all of the areas that Chorus fails for me.

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Recently I’ve been looking into new ways to deal with extremely large datasets. With Twitter and Digg making announcements recently that they’re migrating, or have migrated their operations to Cassandra, I’ve started to take a keen interest in NoSQL. NoSQL is a term that casts a wide net. In general it encompasses data stores that eschew the traditional relational database model in favor of distributed data stores. Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn and a host of others have all thrown their hats in the distributed data ring. I mention those companies specifically because all of them have built their own distributed database offerings to satisfy their particular needs. Google has BigTable, a propriety technology that has an open source flavor under the Apache Software Foundation project Hadoop called HBase. Amazon has Dynamo (even more proprietary). Facebook created Cassandra and open sourced it thankfully. And LinkedIn developed Voldemort (a great name if I do say so).  Twitter and more recently Digg.com have gotten behind Cassandra which has given that particular project (not even up to version 1.0 yet) a lot of press lately. I’ve started to dabble with Cassandra and HBase (really the whole Hadoop project) in an attempt to get familiar with technology but I keep coming back to something in my mind. That is that “NoSQL” is probably the stupidest possible name that could have been coined to describe all of these amazing technologies.

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Is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your users a waste of time. As far as I’m concerned the answer is yes. I’m sure there are folks that will come up with all sorts of “it depends on the situtation” answers to the question, but I’d say that for the most part those folks are, either detached from the day to day maintenance of whatever is trying to be measures, or untrusting of the people who are charged with those duties, or perhaps a little of both.

Just so everyone is on the same page let me start with some assumptions. An SLA is an agreement with your customers (whomever they may be) that you will maintain a certain level of service. It’s a contract that both sides agree on, one side attempts to maintain the terms and another enforces those terms. When dealing with a vendor, an ISP or hosting service (I come from a tech background so we’ll stay in that field) an SLA may be necessary. It gives the customer potential recourse if the vendor fails to meet the terms of the contract. But when talking about departments within an organization creating SLAs with each other I’d argue that any time spent on creating and attempting to montior or enforce an SLA is wasted time better spent doing just about anything else.

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Gowalla by Austin, TX based Alamofire and Foursquare are two new location based mobile apps that were release this year and both have been getting an lot of attention. Location based apps and games are gaining quite a bit of popularity as GPS becomes almost ubiquitous in our handheld devices. The raise of Geocaching is a great example of how a techy hobby has gone mainstream with the increase of GPS aware devices; just do a search for geocaches near you and you’ll know what I mean.

In concept Gowalla and Foursquare are rather similar. You create an account, get connected with friends, and then you start “checking-in” to various establishments as you go about your daily or nightly travels. I’ve decided to write up what’s turned into a rather lengthy comparison of the two and which one I prefer. So without further ado, here goes:

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I did a presentation at my office recently about the basics of XNA 3.0 and what’s possible with it. During that presentation someone asked me if XNA was being used by any major developers to create games. At the time I didn’t have any specific examples but I did say that I believed the platform had the capability to do so. Yesterday I found an article that talks about the new Rock Band Network a joint venture between MTV (which owns Harmonix, the company that developed Rock Band) and Microsoft to create a community driven platform for adding content to Rock Band.

This is pretty much what I’ve been expecting from one of the two music games from the beginning. Some way for emerging artists and bands to throw their master tracks up and have something spit out the appropriate colored buttons on virtual fret board. I actually think the Rock Band Network is an even better solution than some sort of algorithm. Now, there’s a way for labels, bands, or studios to put a track on the Network and have a dedicated community help create the virtual track.

Now, being that this Network is actually a subset of XNA Creators Club it’s unsurprising that the tracks created through this network will only be available on the Xbox 360. Bummer for those PS3 owners, but in the grand scheme of things a venture like this is only going to improve the music game genre which, in my opinion, has become incredibly stale and over-saturated. Maybe I’ll even dig my plastic instruments out of the garage and turn the game on again.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The Rock Band Network is the result of a 16-month development process with a number of partners. Most important was Microsoft. Tracks released through the Rock Band Network will only be available at first to Xbox 360 users, as it relies on Microsoft’s XNA game development platform and its Creators Club online community of developers.

The Creators Club allows freelance developers or hobbyists to make their own games and sell them on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Games created through this process must first be submitted to the Creators Club community for game-play and content review before they are added to the marketplace.

The Rock Band Network marks the first time that XNA and the Creators Club have been used to outsource the development of expansions to an existing game, according to Dave Mitchell, the Microsoft product unit manager in charge of overseeing the two programs.

The Creators Club reviews about 30-50 games per month. Because MTV and Microsoft expect the number of “Rock Band” submissions to quickly dwarf these totals, the software giant took the unprecedented step of creating a custom version of the Creators Club for Harmonix, complete with a customized set of review procedures specific to music games-including checking for copyright infringement-which Harmonix will host separate from the existing Microsoft site.

We use partitioning quite heavily at my current job. And in order to take advantage of switching data from a partitioned table into a staging table all indexes must be aligned on the partition scheme. So, I was frustrated to find out that when you attempt to script out the create statement for an index in SQL Sever Managment Studio (SSMS) 2008 it does not include the clause to create the index on the partition scheme that the index was created on.

Thankfully, Microsoft wasn’t so dense as to remove this funtionality entirely, they simply turned it off by default (which I would argue is ridiculous, but they aren’t really going to listen to little old me). So, here’s the fix.

Open up Tools -> Options then change the setting at: SQL Server Object Explorer -> Scripting -> Script Partition Schemes to TRUE. (it’s at the very bottom of the list)

The Veterans Golf Course in St. Cloud, MN is yet another fun executive course (it seems that’s what I’m going to be playing this year). As a matter of fact, I’ve purchased an annual pass at this course because it’s only 5 minutes away from work and it can be played in 45 minutes which makes it perfect for a lunch game.

The course is a par 30 with 3 par 4 holes and 6 par 3′s (scorecard). The second is a slightly longer par 3 at 187 yards which makes it a nice challenge compared to the typical 115-160 yarders that you normally see at these less expensive courses. The course is very well tended and pin/tee changes are made frequently, which helps keep the course interesting each week. In general the greens are a bit flat (not unusual for Minnesota) but the 9th hole makes up for that by being one of the most dynamic greens I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s a two-tiered green hidden by a small rise on the approach and dense trees in the back. It’s a fantastic end to a generally good course.

The one big draw back that I find with this particular course is the complete lack of hazards. The course doesn’t have any water or sand on any of the holes. About half the holes (1, 2, 3, 4) have out-of-bounds along the left but other than that there really isn’t any penalty for missing the fairway; even missing by a significant margin. A righty with a terrible slice of the tee could come out with a pretty decent score on this course as long as he/she can close pretty well. I’ll be the first to admit that the sand is probably the worst part of my game so not having to worry about it is sort of nice, however not getting any practice isn’t going to help me at all.

All-in-all I still really like the course. Fairways and greens are beautifully tended. There are low hanging trees all over the place so there’s a lot of opportunity to learn how to shape your shots. The par 4 holes are short which makes for the occasional and satifisfying “par 4 green in one” situation. And finally the final hole is very challenging and makes for a great end to a quick afternoon round of golf.

I’ve wanted to tinker around with creating videogames for years. I’ve been a “gamer” for most of my life. We had an Atari 2600 when I was very young because my dad thought it was cool. The Nintendo Entertainment System was the first games system that I could really call my own and I’ve owned just about every system released since then. I’ve built my own MAME joystick layout (that’ll be coming in a future post) but I’ve never been able to break into the creation realm. The price for entry was just too high. The level of programming knowledge, or the tools necessary were always a little out of reach for the amount of time and effort I had to spare. However, with Microsoft’s XNA offering the whole prospect seems to finally be within reach. Read more…

The Fred Richards Executive Course is one of those well designed executive courses I mentioned in my previous post on The Par-3 Course. I’m actually pretty amazed that the thing even exists. It’s located in the middle of what I previously thought was just office park divisions just North of 494 in Edina. As a matter of fact, you have to drive through two office building parking lots just to get to the entrance to the course.

The course consists of 7 par 3 holes, and 2 par 4s, the longest hole being only 299 yards. Despite being located in the middle of a bunch of office buildings and apartment complexes they’ve created some really great hole layouts with water hazards everywhere (I won’t mention how many balls I lost on my first round of the season) and really interesting greens.

My favorite feature of the course is that the greens are huge and they put 2 pins on every green. One pin is placed in a relatively easy spot while the second pin is quite a bit more difficult to reach right off the tee. The second pin will often require going over a water hazard or sand trap and then will have a short run to the back of the green (often leading off to another water hazard) so you really have to be precise and control the spin of the ball when you’re aiming for second pins. Of course, I can’t do any of that, but having the opportunity to practice short-game skills like that is exactly what I’m looking for in a short course like Fred Richards. In addition if you’re not losing balls every other hole and there aren’t a lot of other players on the course you can finish a round in about an hour; perfect for that afternoon lunch break.