Now, this year for Christmas I got myself a new guitar and another Xbox to mix things up in Left 4 Dead properly. But what I’m most excited about getting to break in is the gift that Santa brought me this year. Santa brought me one of the new Sony Digital Readers the PRS-505. It’s pretty sweet, but not without its flaws, but so far I like it better than the Kindle (that may just be because I don’t actually own a Kindle and do own one of these). I swore after getting a Sony MiniDisc player that I would never again own a Sony device, so I guess in some way I’m eating crow. Switching from page to page isn’t as fast as I would like, but the text is as smooth as butter to read. I’ve tried reading technical documents and books on computers screens (CRTs back in the day, and LCD displays these days) and I just can’t do it. My eyes just flip the quack out for anything longer than a few minutes. But with the digitial ink displays, its fantastic. I’ll write a more proper review of the PRS-505 once I’ve gotten some more time to play with it, but my first impression is very high.

Then it is Thanksgiving; I’ll be headed down to Florida to spend time with Abby’s family. It is all but guaranteed to be interesting, and I’m sure I’ll have a fantastic time. One thing that always concerns me about events such as this is the fact that I don’t eat Turkey. I’ve been to Thanksgiving dinners where that is more offensive than being a communist apparently. You know, the kind of people who call it Turkey Day and seriously mean it. So we’ll see how that goes. I probably won’t get back to Atlanta until Saturday or Sunday. And then its back to work on Monday, and classes resume that week…

So it is quite literally the shortest break imagineable. There is never enough time, is there?

It all started back on September 16, 2008 with the release of Star Wars: Force Unleashed. A decent title, not the best game ever but a worthy addition to the Star Wars line-up, and it told a relatively decent story arc, in comparison to Episodes I-III anyway. One thing that continutes to depress me is how much Lucas seems obsessed with making Vader a bitch. In either ending to this game the kid comes out of no where and totally hands Vader his own ass on a platter. It just makes the Lukes accomplishment later seem somehow less amazing. I mean, nobody, save the Emperor, should be able to take on Vader. And somehow this kid seems to take them both out, one after another, no problem. And jeez why did it seem like nobody knew what Jedi were in IV with all these Jedi running around killing stuff everywhere.

Anyway, two weeks later we got Fracture. Can’t really say this i a must-have title this year, but in a lesser year it would have been a more than acceptable addition. Then, a week after that on Oct 14, we were blessed with Dead Space, an amazing sci-fi/horror survival game. This game had heart. Amazing atmosphere! Oct 21, Fable 2. A solid update to the XBOX classic (multiplayer is the suck however, why two players over xbox live cant control their own camera is COMPLETELY beyond me, it makes no sense and whoever was in charge of that should be banned from making any decisions in the future…). Also that week we got FarCry 2, which bears little resembalnce to FarCry 1 but whatev, its cool.

Next was the epic Fallout 3. I don’t feel like I have even scratched the surface of this game, and it will probably warrant multiple play-throughs, so its easily going to consume a chunk of next year. November 4th, was got EndWar. I haven’t had a chance to pick this up yet, but I’ve heard good things. Just too many games to play and not nearly enough time. Friday of the same week, Gears of War 2 was released… I posted earlier how I feel about that… Amazing.

This week we got two solid titles that are almost polar opposites of each other. We got CoD: World At War which is all about shooting people and MirrorsEdge which is about shooting no one. I picked up MirrorsEdge today, mostly for Abby because I think she is sick of seeing me shoot things in Fallout and GoW2.

November 17th, a date which I seem to run into more often than I would like to, is the release date for Left4Dead. I’ve been looking forward to this game for a long time now, and am excited to the point of being about to pop that it is so close. This was going to be my big “MUST HAVE” title this year, but damn if I don’t love the hell out of Horde. Finally in early December, things get wrapped up with the new Prince of Persia title.

All I have to say is I’m glad I’m not a kid anymore, and can buy my own games. Because having to come up with a list of one or two games that my parents MIGHT buy me would kill me this season. Ahhh, the small joys of being an adult.

I’ve never felt this level of comradery with a group of total random stranger before. Usually, in team based games (like Team Fortress of the Battlefield series), even though there is a strong emphasis on “team” and working together. I’ve never felt like I really gave a damn if somebody else died. I mean I could be standing right next to a guy and he could take a bullet to the face, and I would think to myself, “Sucks to be him!” Mostly because I knew that 10 to 15 seconds from now he would respawn and it would be cool. No harm, no foul. Just as long as I didn’t die.

Horde is a completely different. The entire atmosphere reenforces the idea that the guy next to you is just as important as you. If one of your guys falls to the enemy, it just makes it that much harder for you to hold your position, and you have to cover more territory, making it even more difficult to stay alive. The thrill of running into a firefight, bullets flying around you, as you try to race against the Horde to get to your fallen teammate is intense.

Yes, intense is about the only word that I can use to describe it. I’m looking forward to getting a match going tonight with Ford, Declan, and Rashaan. It’ll be good times indeed.

Also this week, the Left 4 Dead demo went public (it hits the street mid-next week). Which is also a lot of fun. I will reserve final judgment of the game until after I’ve played the real deal. But so far, it’s going to be tough to edge out Gear of War 2 Hoard mode as the multi-player experience I’ve ever had.

Here is the scenario: I’ve got a model, lets call it Items. Now Item belongs to Users by the way of user_id. However it is also possible for different User to temporarily rent an Item, this is represented using renter_id.

Now in Rails this is pretty straight forward:
class Item < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :renter, :class_name => “User”
end
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :my_items, :class_name => “Item”, :foreign_key => “user_id”
has_many :rented_items, :class_name => “Item”, :foreign_key => “renter_id”
end

No problem, right? Well, what if i wanted a list of all items that a User has access to. I basically want a mySQL select of this:
SELECT * FROM items WHERE (items.user_id = user.id or items.renter_id = user.id)

What would I like to do is this:
has_many :items, :foreign_key => ["user_id", "renter_id"]

Unfortunately that was not to be. So my next idea was just to use a method that gathers both and passes it back. For example:
def items
my_items + rented_items
end

However, this is gloriously inefficient, requiring the entire collection to be gathered from the database then chopped up and paginated in Ruby. Bad idea… Besides, will_paginate doesn’t like working that way (which is a good thing)

After beating my head against rails and mySQL and trying to remember which comes first AND or OR. I finally broke down and decided to implement it old school using :finder_sql, which ended up looking something like this:
has_many :items, :finder_sql => 'SELECT * FROM items WHERE (items.user_id = #{id} or items.renter_id = #{id})'

(And yes the single quotes are quite important in this context because you want the literal string ‘#{id}’ to be evaluated later, not when the string is generated.)

And this will work fine for things like User.find(:first).items, and I was happy. Until I tried to do User.find(:first).items.paginate and it freaked the hell out (being unable to build a proper request from the finder_sql which is totally understandable). And again I fell into despair and hit up the rails api. And lo and behold I found the :extend key on has_many. What it allows you to do is define custom methods, usually finders or creators for the assocation, using the proxy reflection data that it provides it was “easy-ish” to accomplish what I wanted to do, by overwriting the paginate method from will_paginate and build the Pagination collection by hand, and the controller programmer is none the wiser that I have totally hijacked the ball.

It ended up looking something like this:
has_many :items, :finder_sql => 'SELECT * FROM items WHERE (items.user_id = #{id} or items.renter_id = #{id})' do
def paginate(page, per_page)
total_entries = proxy_reflection.class_name.constantize.count_by_sql proxy_reflection.options[:counter_sql].gsub(’#{id}’, proxy_owner.id.to_s)
WillPaginate::Collection.create(page || 1, per_page || 10, total_entries) do |pager|
pager.replace proxy_reflection.class_name.constantize.find_by_sql(proxy_reflection.options[:finder_sql].gsub(’#{id}’, proxy_owner.id.to_s) + ” LIMIT #{pager.per_page} OFFSET #{pager.offset}”)
end
end
end

Finally!

But I will definitely be back for more.

So my little kitten, Hamilton, is now a little over 5 months old. He beginning to get to get his adult teeth in. Which roughly translates to him chewing on everything. And do I mean everything: anything made of plastic, anything made of cardboard, my limbs and phalanges, my other cat. You name it and he has his teeth in it.

The thing is, he doesn’t mean to be a jerk. It is just nature, I’m sure that it doesn’t feel that good for him and he is the sweetest cat on the planet, even if he tries to put his paws on my mouth when he is trying to sleep on my stomach to keep me quiet. Still, it is plain to see why so many kittens get given up for adoption or abandoned at this age. Which saddens me, because I know that Hammy will be a perfect cat as soon as all his teeth come in. But it is so easy to loose patience with him and punish him for something that isn’t his fault.

BTW, for those who are interested the little guy is named after Alexander Hamilton because he was born around the 4th of July. Seemed fitting…

Between her critique about african-american culture here in the South, and her apparent lust for rice and imitation crab (a combination of which I can only imagine would be purely orgasmic, I’m sure), I’m not really sure what to say, other than its always a pleasure.

Now, on to Iron Man. I will attempt to write a more detailed review over the next week, but suffice to say, its definately a keeper. Well adapted, solidly acted, exceptionally timed. Some might argue it is a bit on the long side, however, long movies never bothered me, as long as the pacing is spot on, and Jon Favreau and Dan Lebental were on the ball. They worked together before on Elf, which I honestly can say that I enjoyed.

Robert Downey Jr. was an exceptional Tony Stark, far better than I would have imagined. Jeff Bridges was a surprisingly good villain. I thought that the movie over-all was well paced and compact, which is impressive considering it has a solid two hour running time. I’d rather not give too many spoilers for those that haven’t seen it yet, but it’s a solidly fun watch and easily the best movie of the year so far.

And I must admit, the appearance after the credits gives me new hope that the new Hulk movie might not be as terrible as I fear that it will be.

Overall, it feels more like sequel to Mario Kart DS than Double Dash. Snaking is more or less out, which I think makes it more balanced for new-comers especially for online matches, but I’ll have to see what its like with some serious competition. Drafting is in from Mario Kart DS, which is great.

The Wii Wheel is surprisingly more responsive than I would have thought. I played all weekend with it and it was a lot of fun. I think as I try to share the precious seconds off my times, I’ll probably switch over to the classic controller or GC controller. But in terms of Nintendo wanting a straight-forward, easy-to-pick-up, rewarding controller option, the Wii Wheel is spot-on for casual gamers.

Playing online is a blast. I hate the need for Friend Codes, but pick up games are fun, lag free, and easy to jump in. I really like the idea of the leader-board for ghost runs. I think its a perfect fit that has been missing from the series for a long time.

My biggest complaint, aside from removing snaking, is the inability to play through the championship cups with two players like you could in Double Dash. I think they really dropped the ball there. But at least you can play two player multi-player.

I’ll try to write a more detailed review later, after I’ve gotten more of chance to play it, and some of my friends have ponied up for it and I can get a better feel for the multi-player.