Gowalla vs. Foursquare: Location based “gaming”

Dec04
2009 3 Comments Written by Will

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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Posted in Gaming, Social Games - Tagged

XNA Used by Rock Band for Community Content

Jul18
2009 2 Comments Written by Will

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.

Posted in Gaming, XNA - Tagged ,

Partition Schemes Disabled by Default When Creating Indexes in SSMS 2008

Jul15
2009 1 Comment Written by Will

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)

 

Posted in SQL Server - Tagged , ,

Table Disk Space Usage By Filegroup and Partition

Apr06
2009 4 Comments Written by Will

I wanted a more granular level of detail when looking at disk space usage of our databases. I wanted to see the disk usage of each table. Since we use partitioning pretty heavily I also wanted to see how that usage was broken out by partition and filegroup. In our implementation we have a separate filegroup for each table partition but in a configuration that has multiple parititons on a partition this script can tell you usage for either metric.

Normally I’ll take this query and take the results over to excel and pivot the data so that I can filter and sum data in whatever way I want. I also have this running in a SQL Agent job and inserting into a table so that I connect to that table and do growth trend analysis.

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Posted in Scripts, SQL Server - Tagged , , ,

Database File Auto-Growth History

Apr05
2009 Leave a Comment Written by Will

Here’s a quick script to find the recent history of file auto growth on a MSSQL system. I work with a large OLTP database that’s partitioned monthly. If we get files auto-growing toward the end of a month when the partition is already upwards of 60GB, timeouts start to crop up. Sometimes finding out where those timeouts are coming from aren’t readily apparent. This script helped us out when we were searching for recent file growth.

 

SET NOCOUNT ON
 
DECLARE  @path VARCHAR(MAX), @cmd VARCHAR(4000);
 
SELECT @path = CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX),VALUE)
FROM fn_trace_getinfo(DEFAULT) WHERE property = 2
SET @cmd = 'dir /b "' + @path + '"'
-- PRINT @cmd
 
DECLARE @files TABLE
(
	fn VARCHAR(64)
) 
 
INSERT @files
EXEC master..xp_cmdshell @cmd
 
DELETE @files
WHERE fn IS NULL
 
SELECT
	e.DatabaseName
	, e.[FileName]
	, e.SPID
	, e.Duration
	, e.StartTime
	, e.EndTime
	, CASE e.EventClass
		WHEN 92 THEN 'Data'
		WHEN 93 THEN 'Log'
	END AS 'FileType'
	, f.fn AS 'TraceFile'
	, te.name
FROM @files f
	CROSS APPLY fn_trace_gettable(@path, DEFAULT) e
	JOIN sys.trace_events te
		ON e.EventClass = te.trace_event_id
WHERE
	e.EventClass IN (92,93)
ORDER BY
	e.StartTime DESC
Posted in Scripts, SQL Server - Tagged , ,
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