A couple of weeks ago I decided that I needed a break from the stresses of daily office life.  I walked down to the company cafeteria and purchased a Big Kat from the vending machine.  A Big Kat is like a regular Kit Kat, but bigger.  It’s absolutely delicious.  Anyway, I looked down at an open copy of the Globe (or was it the Herald?) and saw something that caught my attention.  Apparently, IFC was going to be showing a documentary that night focusing on the topic of LARP.

LARP! I thought to myself.  Live Action Role Playing.  A bunch of geeks playing Lord of the Rings on a soccer field!  YES!!!  I have to see this.  The documentary was called Darkon and about five minutes into it I was scolding myself for taking such a narrow-minded view.  

One thing I should have realized about LARPers is that they take their game very seriously.  I admire how much work these folks put it into it.  Watching the interviews and hearing the reasons why they play was truly enlightening.

The larger theme of the movie is obviously the idea of escapism and fantasy.  Why do people feel the need to escape reality?  To what lengths will they go to maintain the fantasy?  Trying to answer these questions goes a long way in explaining why World of Warcraft and Second Life are so popular.  I find all this stuff fascinating. 

Aside from the thematic elements, Darkon is also an intriguing story with interesting characters (both real and imagined).  Different players come to the game for different reasons, but most are motivated by the desire to be something that they can’t be in real life.  I’m not going sugar coat it, at some points this a little uncomfortable to watch, but it doesn’t make it any less compelling.

As you might guess there are political struggles and ego clashes both inside and outside the confines of the game.  The film primarily focuses on the conflict between Skip Lipman (Bannor of Laconia) and Kenyon Wells (Lord Keldar).  A scene at the beginning of the film makes it clear that these two leaders are headed for a showdown. 

If you’ve ever been near an RPG or simply can relate to the need to escape every day life, I heartily recommend Darkon.

Hail Laconia! Hail Mordom! Hail Darkon!

I’ve really been enjoying the Orange Box so far.  Unfortunately, I’ve encountered an apparent bug in Half Life 2: Episode 2.  During “Chapter 2: Vortal Coil” the game will consistently crash at the same point.  The crash occurs after you escape from the guardian ant-lion by dropping into a corridor.  At the end of the corridor there is a medic sitting against the wall.  When you walk closer to the medic, the display will freeze and you will be dumped back into Windows.  You receive an error informing you that the “hl2.exe” process has crashed.  After doing some Google searches I was able to find a solution posted here and here.  The workaround is to basically shoot the web at the end of the passage, face the wall on the right, crouch, and then strafe until you get into the next room.  I followed these instructions and I was able to avoid the crash.  I love being a PC gamer!!!

For reasons beyond my control I recently found myself developing in classic ASP.  After years of developing in ASP.NET this was obviously a little jarring.  However, what surprised me about the experience was that there were some things about classic ASP that I actually enjoyed.  Most notably I felt I had more control with classic ASP.  Nothing was in my way.  Things that should be simple were simple.  For a moment I imagined that this is what it must feel like to be a PHP developer.  

I wondered why I felt this way.  After all, the whole the whole point of ASP.NET is to save me from having to deal with “icky” HTML, JavaScript, and CSS…right?  I really like developing in ASP.NET.  I would take ASP.NET over classic ASP any day of the week (and twice on Sunday).  ASP.NET is certainly one of most thoughtfully designed and well implemented frameworks I have ever worked with.  Scott Guthrie is a genius and he has the patents to prove it.  However, I couldn’t ignore the fact that some things were a lot easier to accomplish in classic ASP.

I realized the unfortunate truth that there are some abstractions in ASP.NET (and all frameworks for that matter) that can transform into obstacles.  In order to use these abstractions you end up having to learn a lot about the internals of the framework.  I’m talking about Reflector. You have to codify assumptions about the underlying technologies into your application.  In other words, the abstraction leaks.  I borrow this term from Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions.  I think that the small sense of empowerment I was feeling when developing in classic ASP came from the fact that I wasn’t forced to dig too deep into, or worse, code around the framework in order to get the job done.  There was no framework. 

Another, even more heretical thought occurred to me during this process.  I wondered if code-behind is always necessary. Is it always essential to separate code and markup?   If you simply replaced VBScript with C# and gave yourself a set of libraries as rich as the BCL, would combining code and markup be more palatable or even more productive in some scenarios?  Can some aspects of ASP.NET be abandoned entirely?  I’m not sure, but I’m now a little more inclined to find out.

Here are the slides from my 2006 Beantown .NET talk on ASP.NET Ajax.

beantown_ajax.ppt (636.5 KB)

Every once in a while I find myself reading a book that makes me feel stupid. As I try to internalize the prose I can’t help but feel a strong sense of regret for not being more adequately prepared.

Then I learn that the book has long been the basis for an “Intro to Programming” course at some college. Did you say intro to programming!? This is usually the part where I start to feel a strong sense of inferiority. :-(

Is the feeling of inferiority enough to make me want to put the book down? Hell no. If anything I’m finding SICP to be one of the most compelling computer books I have ever read. Like the Scheme language itself, SICP is incredibly dense. No reading on autopilot here, folks. You need to be paying attention or you’re going to get nothing out of it. The code examples draw almost exclusively from math. In the first chapter alone the following mathematical concepts are used to “help” teach the reader about computer programming (in general) and Scheme (in particular):

• Newton’s Method
• Fibonacci
• The Golden Ratio
• Euclid’s Algorithm
• Lamé's Theorem
• The Fermat Test (Primes)
• Miller-Rabin Test
• Summation (Sigma)
• Integrals
• Simpson’s Rule
• Fixed Points (Functions)
• Lambda Calculus

The other thing that seems strange at first is that Scheme uses recursion for nearly all processing. I’ve only completed the first chapter, but I have yet to see a “for” or a “while” construct in any of the code.

I know that that some fellow .NET developers might ask “Why are you wasting your time with that?” or “Why aren’t you spending your time learning about Silverlight?” Well I couldn’t really say for sure. I’m a big fan of Paul Graham’s essays, so those are certainly what motivated me to have a look at a Lisp dialect. What’s keeping my interest is the richness and depth of the content. There’s just so much there.

I plan to post more about SICP as I wade my way through it over the next several weeks… or months. I’m going to take my time and savor every head scratching moment. 

If you are Java or C# programmer who is looking for something to expand your mind, you should certainly have a look.

After being dormant for years my blog is finally being resurrected. Wish me luck!