[FOOTBALL] Ed Hochuli and other referee-related awesomeness

Besides my obvious interest in software development (and XKCD, which is where I got my blog title from), I also love football.

While I could write a novel on all the reasons I love football, I'm sure people would love to just see some interesting random football tidbits instead.

For starters, Ed Hochuli is basically my hero. He is one of the only two refs that I know the name of. When they release the ref schedules for the games I actually get excited when I see him listed for a Pats game.

Why is he my hero? Oh, so many reasons...

• He's really jacked.
• The guy is in better shape than I am and he's over sixty.
• He's one of the best active refs out there, having been selected to ref for two Super Bowl and many playoff games.
• His day job is a lawyer.
• He represents the refs in their union.
• He has the best explanations of any ref I have ever heard, gaining points for clarity, completeness, and unintentional humor.
• The players think he's hilarious.
• Did I mention he's really, really jacked?
• and the list goes on...

But that's enough hero worship. Just check out some of his awesomeness.

"There was no foul on the play... the defender was just overpowered." Check out Belichick's facial expression.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u2kXnGov9w

God, this guy is thorough with explanations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoYULM2x7nI&feature=related

NFL special "I want to be Ed Hochuli":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpzEBWcjkAI&feature=related

"He once needed 91 words to explain an illegal motion infraction."

Jared Allen: "Ed's arms are looking better than all of ours!"

Butt slap at 0:47-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymPxvYyNnQ4&feature=related

Tony Romo wishes he was Hochuli:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLTRw9ogag0&feature=related

Ed Hochuli gives a penalty call in Spanish while refereeing a game in Mexico:

http://www.footballzebras.com/tag/ed-hochuli

And just so I'm not too focused on Hochuli, here's a great ref call that I won't spoil by typing it out first.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbO0RQmESHM&feature=related

[CODE] Problems with Ext.LoadMask and Modal Windows

Anyone who has used the Ext.LoadMask object with a modal window (basically a popup that prevents you from interacting with anything outside the window) that spawns another mask will know that there is a known bug in ExtJS that doesn't mask the modal window automatically.

Example:

Say you're looking at an online menu for a restaurant, like something you would see on GrubHub. You select one of the dishes and it pops up another window that asks you what kind of rice you want with it, simultaneously graying out everything around the popup. That rice-selection popup is a "modal window".

Imagine you select your rice choice (white, of course) and press the OK button. A small loading icon appears, a mask appears over the modal window, and a second later the modal window and both masks go away, leaving you on your original menu window, with your dish and rice option selected.

That's what should happen. In ExtJS that second mask doesn't overlay the modal window, meaning you can click things while it is doing work in the background. It probably won't affect the operation, but it's tacky and unprofessional.

I've run into this at work, and an easy solution that worked for me is

Ext.WindowMgr.getActive().setDisabled( true );

That will (usually) get the topmost window, likely the modal window you are looking at, and disable it which causes it to gray out as if masked. Call this right after the user hits the OK button and you should be all set!

[GAMES] Figuring out your saved Nethack character name on Windows

One of my coworkers is a dual major in computer science and game design, and recently we've been talking about some of the games that set the groundwork for the games we know today. He started talking about the game Rogue and the games that built off of it, called "roguelikes". Basically, they're text-based dungeon crawling games with randomized dungeons and permanent death. Diablo was actually heavily influenced (according to the developers) by the most popular roguelike, NetHack.

Of course, I had to try it out, and now I'm pretty much addicted.

But this post isn't about my propensity for gaming addiction, it's to actually provide some useful information. I got the furthest I'd ever been last night and saved and went to bed.

The problem is that I couldn't remember my character name. I'd started and died so many times I was just hitting random keys for name creation. However, you can look at the save file and figure out your character name.

On Windows XP at least, it will be saved into the same directory as the NetHack executable. The file format is

WINDOWS_USERNAME-charname.sav

For example,

Administrator-AwesomeValkyrie.sav

Just type in "AwesomeValkyrie" in the load screen and you're all set!

I hope that helps someone out there who looked up the solution to this problem and only ran into *nix answers :-)

[TOOLS] Transparent development progress

One of the biggest movements in software development is that of transparency: telling all observers, especially stakeholders, exactly what the team is building right now.

For example, the Scrum development methodology suggests the use of a "burndown chart", a publicly visible graph that shows how much work is left to do in a sprint.

I found another cool example of this when following the Natural Selection 2 video game's blog. They released an alpha version of their game to people who have pre-ordered the game, and want to keep people updated on their progress towards completion and which features they're working on.

Through the use of Pivotal Tracker (I've never used the tool, so I can't say good or bad things about it) and a simple web page (actually the web page might be built through the tool) the company has created a great transparent window into their development process and increased the connection with their customers.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/progress

This is a huge step forward in communication with the customer. Anyone who has ever pre-ordered something still in development (a phone, some software, even startup capital in a new company) knows how frustrating it is to sink money into a black hole and not know what happens to it.

With a simple but effective interface like the one shown above, people can have faith that their money is actually being spent on real features and get a handle on the direction of the product. It also encourages new investment by displaying the progress of the team.

[TOOLS] Spring 3.0 - making life difficult

Just kidding. Kind of.

In Spring 3.0 they decided to break up the main spring.jar into a bunch of smaller jars. While I'm sure they had great reasons for doing so, it means that old examples are now broken since you have to figure out which jars they use.

Or, alternatively, you can just reference all of the jars. In Eclipse, create a new "User Library" called spring jars and just add all those spring jars into it. In whatever package needs spring, add your new user library to the build path.

[TOOLS] Off-label use: ExtJS 2.3 with Managed IFrames

FYI:

The ExtJS extension "Managed IFrame" only lists support for ExtJS 1.1+, 2.0.X and 3.1.1+ only.

However, I can tell you from personal experience that the miframe_1_2_7 version (found here) definitely works with ExtJS 2.3.0. We use it at work in our widget system, and we found it to work perfectly.

[RANDOM] Best of Wikipedia edit wars

For a bit of amusement, check this out and see what the lamest edit wars on Wikipedia are.

My personal take:

-Why bother mentioning House's lack of Asian diversity?

-Totally appropriate to put spiders on the arachnophobia page :-)

-Aluminum

-Cat: Owner

-Sulfur