Today is my 40^th birthday.  Like most other days, I started by taking the air the dog and doing a To-Do list.  Still, today’s list has a particular item:

• Resolve whether to have a mid-life crisis or not.

I’ll concede I am not all thrilled about being 40.  It doesn’t appear that long ago that 40 appeared far aside.  Nowadays that it’s hither, I see that it’s not what I required.  I guessed my life at 40 would be dissimilar.

Many who cognise me would affirm that I have nothing to sound off roughly.  And they would be right.  My life has been filled with blessings of all kinds, for which I am truly grateful.  I am a written author.  Most would see me financially successful.  I am in a career where I love my work.

But all the same…

As the honest-to-goodness supposing moves, nobody lies on their deathbed liking they had passed more time at the office.

Like most everybody else, when I was 30 I bet in front ten years and shaped a picture in my mind.  My life today doesn’t jibe that picture very easily.  Examples:

• I thought by nowadays I would be more substantial in the quality of my relationships with my loved ones and in the practice of my faith.

• I thought by nowadays I would be a better guitar player.
• There’s a mussy pile in my study that has been in that location for ten years.  (Yes, we went six years ago.  The heap went besides.)  I opined it would be stript up by at present.
• I e’er taken over that by 40 I would have picked up to work on a regular basis and terminate feeding junk food.

I move could on.  And on.  But you catch the idea.

I am allured to entertain my regrets, the places where I had a untimely turn, the places where I would have done a saucy choice if I cognised so what I cognise at present.

But this hale line of thinking doesn’t seem at all contributive to well genial health, indeed today I will prefer to focus on two things which appear more constructive:

1.  Tapestry

One of my favourite Star Trek episodes is called up Tapestry.  It is the story of someone consecrated a chance to re-experience a polar moment in his youth so that he can keep off doing the inexpedient choice he did the first time.  But it sprains out that his foolhardy moment was a decisive ingredient in his late successes.

Today I prompt myself that there are no more do-overs, and I’m not sure I would desire one anyhow.  For every mistake I have done, there were disconfirming consequences and convinced lessons.  I can’t require to keep off the former and maintain the latter.  They descend in concert as an inseparable package.

2.  Life Calculus.

Backward in 2003 I indited an article sent for Career Calculus.  In a nutshell, it alleges that at any contributed moment in your career, what you cognize is far less authoritative than whether you are geting a line.

Today I cue myself that the same principle applies in life.  I am convinced in my first derivative.  Whatever I am today, I intend I will be a best person tomorrow.

Indeed if I’m withal blogging when I’m 50, I ask I will be capable to cover progress on some of the items remarked supra.

And simply to be unmortgaged, if that heap of junk on the floor of my study is however in that respect, it will be bigger than it is at present, and I contrive to cover that as progress. 

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Sean & Scott  [fixated link]: The example you yielded is outstanding, although I would advise something a little more robust, specifically you believably desire to take into account data to pass between the already escaping instance and the newfangled one made (this takes into account you to mobilise the command line arguments). I pent an article on this last year… however holding up data marhsalling makes believe the code much much more awful.

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Yesterday my coworkers redecorated my office.  Pictures
in this blog entry are photos of their work.  Strangely enough, I found myself
quite appreciative of their act of vandalism. 

Today is my 40^th birthday.  Like most other days,
I started by walking the dog and making a To-Do list.  However, today’s list
has a special item:

• Decide whether to have a mid-life crisis or not.

I’ll confess I am not entirely thrilled about being 40.  It
doesn’t seem that long ago that 40 seemed far away.  Now that it’s here, I
realize that it’s not what I expected.  I thought my life at 40 would be
different.

Many who know me would assert that I have nothing to
complain about.  And they would be correct.  My life has been filled with
blessings of all kinds, for which I am truly thankful.  I am a published
author.  Most would consider me financially successful.  I am in a career where
I enjoy my work.

But still…

As the old saying goes, nobody lies on their deathbed
wishing they had spent more time at the office.

Like most everybody else, when I was 30 I looked ahead ten
years and formed a picture in my mind.  My life today doesn’t match that
picture very well.  Examples:

• I thought by now I would be more solid in the quality of
  my relationships with my loved ones and in the practice of my faith.

• I thought by now I would be a better guitar player.
• There’s a messy pile in my study that has been there for
  ten years.  (Yes, we moved six years ago.  The heap moved too.)  I thought
  it would be cleaned up by now.

• I always assumed that by 40 I would have learned to
  exercise regularly and stop eating junk food.

I go could on.  And on.  But you get the idea.

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I am tempted to think about my regrets, the places where I
took a wrong turn, the places where I would have made a smarter choice if I
knew then what I know now.

But this whole line of thinking doesn’t seem at all
conducive to good mental health, so today I will choose to focus on two things
which seem more constructive:

1.  Tapestry

One of my favorite Star Trek episodes is called Tapestry. 
It is the story of someone given a chance to re-live a pivotal moment in his
youth so that he can avoid making the unwise choice he made the first time. 
But it turns out that his reckless moment was a critical ingredient in his
later successes.

Today I remind myself that there are no do-overs, and I’m
not sure I would want one anyway.  For every mistake I have made, there were negative
consequences and positive lessons.  I can’t expect to avoid the former and keep
the latter.  They come together as an inseparable package.

2.  Life Calculus.

Back in 2003 I wrote an article called Career Calculus.  In a
nutshell, it says that at any given moment in your career, what you know is far
less important than whether you are learning.

Today I remind myself that the same principle applies in
life.  I am confident in my first derivative.  Whatever I am today, I think I
will be a better person tomorrow.

So if I’m still blogging when I’m 50, I expect I will be
able to report progress on some of the items mentioned above.

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And just to be clear, if that heap of junk on the floor of
my study is still there, it will be larger than it is now, and I plan to report
that as progress. 

http://software.ericsink.com/entries/Life_Calculus.html

Also see: Infrequent blogging

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/248013264/thread.tss

The BitBoards so far have been astoundingly accurate at producing moves. But even after the moves have been produced they have to be fully validated. Take for instance, a bishop in the middle of the board. The number of potential moves for the bishop is 13 or so, but the number of valid moves, unless no spots are blocked, is much less. Further performing friendly versus non-friendly extension is extremely importan since you can’t move into a friendly position, but you can move into the first occuring non-friendly position (capturing). I’ve found some interesting transformations here, but once I can more fully validate them I’ll start to post their intricacies.

Even more frustrating are the pawns. Pawns are capable of special feats when in their original file (forward by 2), they are allowed capturing moves that are different from their standard movement rules, and they are also allowed the ability to capture en-passant. Deciding where and how to implement these extra conditions is very important. Remember the original blocking square algorithm I implemented for removing invalid moves consisted of:

uint myPieces =…; uint notMine = ~myPieces; uint validMoves = moves & notMine;

This has to be expanded a bit, since notMine actually points to all empty and enemy squares. What we need now is a blocking region for all enemy squares (which we have to store anyway, since eventually the board swaps sides and enemy and friendly are reversed). The valid moves become something like:

uint nonCapture = pawnNonCapture[x]; uint capture = pawnCapture[x];
uint validNonCapture = (~(myPieces & enemyPieces) & nonCapture);
uint validCapture = capture & enemyPieces;
if ( board.enPassant ) { /* special case when prior moves allow */ }
uint validMoves = validNonCapture | validCapture;

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Even with all of this magical bit-shifting we aren’t accounting for visibility off the first rank. After all, if we are blocked forward 1 and not forward 2, this might still give that as a valid move. After all of this work on pawn movements, it might be better just to leave them to special cased code because of their intricacies compared to other pieces. What can we do then to quickly generate pawn moves? Some ideas are floating around for sure. If I have a BitBoard of all my pawns I can easily do the following:

uint validMoves = (curPawns << & (~(myPieces & enemyPieces)); // one sided, but basically advance and check.
validMoves |= ((validMoves & 0xFF0000) << & (~(myPieces & enemyPieces)); // all that were able to move forward 1, move 2

Some of the above information would be pregenerated, but you can see all of the gruesome details in action. Captures are a basic extension of the above. The basic premise involves 7 or 9 bit shifting operations along with clearing of the overflow file. What do I mean by overflow file? Well, take the rightmost file, h, and then tell me how a pawn would attack off the right side of the board. If we shift by 9 still the pawn in file h, would wrap around and attack the other side of the board. Clearing the pawns in the oveflow ranks is the only way I can think of getting rid of this for now.

Live Help Server: Jerry Messenger Server is Live Chat with Users on your websites.

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uint validCaptures = ((curPawns & clearRank[0]) << 7) & enemyPieces;
validCaptures |= ((curPawns & clearRank[7]) << 9) & enemyPieces;

It is fairly nice to be able to calculate all pawn moves simultaneously in this manner. I’d still calculate en-passant separately because it has side-effects. The attacking square is different from the square where the enemies piece would be removed. It is an extra piece of information that the board has to carry around to make sure that it always performs the appropriate captures.

If you have questions about some of the rules, I actually found the following a bit helpful. I have a chess rules book that I tend to go to first for explanation, especially since I need to ensure accuracy in the engine. When I don’t feel like leafing I’ll check something out here in the FAQ and then put a little comment in the code to go back later and check the official rules http://www.chessvariants.org/d.chess/faq.html. Even if you know how to play chess, these FAQs can be algorist playgrounds, since often overlooked newbie questions can point out subtleties, patterns and optimizations you might not otherwise dream-up.

http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/archive/2004/10/24/246983.aspx

In school, there were two kinds of tests. The regular kind where you learned and memorized all you could and then did your best on the test. The 2nd kind was the Open Book Test. Where you could use your notes and text books to figure out the answer to a question.

The 2nd was always preferable to the first because it was always a lot easier to prepare reference than to memorize.

Come finals time, a schedule of traditional tests meant packaging hours and hours to study. It was the ultimate experience of Information Overload. It also was the quickest way to forget everything you just learned the minute the tests were over. In fact, if you hung out with my friends and me, the minute tests were over, every penny we had was destined to be spent on beverages that killed more than a few braincells.

Today, life is so much simpler. I can’t remember the last time I had to go to the library or bookstore to search for a book on a topic that was important to me. I can’t remember the last time I HAD to invest the time to read a book as opposed to choosing to read a book that I wanted to read.

There was a time when I would scour online forums looking for any information that would give me an edge. Those days are long gone.

Today, I still read a ton of magazines that I both enjoy and which give me a solid foundation of information that help me professionally and personally, but I don’t stress that I might miss something. I don’t stress if I don’t read an issue immediately when it comes out, or if I’m out of town when its delivered. I used to.

Two things have

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changed dramatically over the past 5 years. The first is that search engines have matured to the point where just about everything is indexed, from webpages to books to videos. Life has become an open book test. Between Google for News, video and web, Live.com for images, Icerocket.com for blog and RSS and Amazon for books, its pretty easy to find everything and anything from anywhere. It doesn’t matter if I’m in front of my PC, or sitting on an airplane or just with my phone at a game. Information is available.

The 2nd is the threading of information. Sites like Techmeme connect articles so that its easy to not only keep up with technology topics of interest, but to follow related conversations. Techmeme like sites are popping up for most vertical categories, so keeping up is far far easier than the old days of waiting for your PC Week , InfoWorld and Computer Reseller News !

Information overload is having to read everything and remember it. Open Book life means knowing where to look to catch up when you are ready to catch up.. I will take the Open Book Life anytime

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http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/03/10/we-live-in-an-open-book-world-the-lie-of-information-overload/

Until about 2002 I had a broad disdain for most IDEs.  I
just felt they were too pushy.  They were always trying to take control
over my build system or the layout of my source tree.  If I’m going to give
those things up, I want something in return.  For a long time, the tradeoff
never seemed fair.  THINK C on the Macintosh was one of the only IDE products I
actually liked.

Visual Studio.NET 2002 was the first Windows IDE that won
me over.  I still use vi or emacs almost every day, but I’ll admit that I now use
Visual Studio more.

Last year I switched to Visual Studio 2005, and I love it. 
This is a product that is so perfect I worry about its next release.  Now that
Visual Studio 2008 is out, I’ll probably give it a try at some point soon.  But
Visual Studio 2005 is sort of like “if it works, don’t mess with it”.  The last
thing I want is for them to screw it up, and I can’t really imagine how
it could be better.

I guess when it comes to IDEs, I’m just not very
imaginative. 

I started using Eclipse a few weeks ago, and now I
understand a bit more about where Visual Studio has room to improve.  I think
Eclipse is amazing, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

So anyway, here are a couple of my current favorite Eclipse
features:

Constant Builds

When I first installed Eclipse, the very first thing I did
was look for the menu item to start a build.  When I didn’t find one, I assumed
that the Eclipse menu system must be too cluttered and counterintuitive.  How
could they make such a frequently-used command so hard to find?

Of course I now understand that Eclipse has no build
command because it is automatically building all the time.  In fact, I’ve
quickly become rather hooked on this feature.  I once got it confused, but
mostly it Just Works.  I make code changes, save the file, and the Problems
pane automatically shows all the current warnings and errors.  Sweet.

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In fact, this morning I fired up Visual Studio 2005 to fix a
bug.  After making the code change, I saved the file and just stared at the
bottom of my screen, waiting for the compile.  A few seconds later I realized I
had to press Ctrl-Shift-B.

Quick-Fix

I really like the Quick Fix feature of Eclipse.  Basically,
whenever I have a compile error or warning, I put the insertion point into the
offending text and press Ctrl-1.  This invokes the Quick Fix facility, which
pops up a little window showing options to automatically fix the problem.  For
example, if I am trying to call a method that doesn’t exist, it offers to
create the missing method.

Visual
Studio has similar features (Generate Method Stub, for example), but Quick Fix
seems more creative.  It almost always offers me several choices for how to
resolve the situation, plus a preview of what the Quick Fix will look like.

This is particularly handy for dealing with exceptions.  I
mostly dislike the way Java forces me to declare which exceptions a method
might throw.  Ctrl-1 gives me a quick way to either add a throws declaration or
a try/catch.

Bottom Line

I am obviously an Eclipse newbie, so my explanations of its
features are probably wrong.  And like I said, I’m just getting started.  As I
was writing this blog entry, I discovered “Generate Constructor Using Fields…” 
I sure I wish I had found that one earlier. 

Also see: Note to self: Blog about using Service Broker

Anyway, feel free to correct me or tell me what I missed or
remind me that I’m clueless or tell me 7 reasons why I should be using
IntelliJ.

But mostly I’m just saying that the experience of using
Eclipse has given me a much bigger perspective on IDEs in general.  In
comparing Visual Studio and Eclipse, I can’t really say whether one is clearly
better than the other.  Mostly I get the impression that these two competitors
could learn a lot from each other.

http://software.ericsink.com/entries/java_eclipse_3.html

I have been trying to find a way to allow you to run Virtual PC 2007 with multiple monitors.  Natively VPC 2007 doesnt support more than 1 monitor, however you can “trick” it by using various techniques that expand the desktop area into a larger virtual desktop.

I tried using the awesome MaxiVista tool which can extend your screen across separate PC’s (think “push” remote desktop), but the new multi-monitor compatibility feature of VPC 2007 (which inexplicably does not add multi-monitor support) made this difficult since it ensures that your desktop recaptures your mouse when you move it outside of the VPC window thus preventing the extended screen from being accessible.

So, instead I tried the Remote Desktop approach mentioned in Steven Harman’s blog post.  

Here is a quick rundown on how it works:

Connect 2 monitors to your PC (more than 2 typically don’t work with this approach).   Make sure to extend your desktop onto the 2nd screen via Display Properties -> Settings.  Then launch Remote Desktop (mstsc.exe) with the “/span” flag:

mstsc /span

Then just use Remote Desktop as usual by specifying your VPC’s computer name in the connection dialog.

When I first tried this, it still didnt work exactly right.  It kept giving me annoying scrollbars instead of going full screen, so I added this extra flag to force it into fullscreen:

mstsc /span /f

Also, since I didnt want VPC to have the extra overhead of maintaining 2 sessions (the console and my new RDP session), I threw in one more flag to make it simply take-over the initial console window:

mstsc /span /f /console

NOTE: The /span flag is only present on the very latest version of Remote Desktop Connection.  Therefore, you must either be running Vista on both PC’s, or install the update specified here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925876

There are limitations on how your  monitors must be configured in order for this flag to work.

Also, keep in mind that this technique only enlarges your desktop area sufficiently large enouch to span both monitors, but it DOES NOT behave exactly like the native dual-monitor support you may be accustomed to.  For example, when you maximize a window, it maximizes across BOTH monitors instead of maximizing within the confines of a single monitor.   For now, I’m just dealing with that by avoiding maximizing and just manually resizing windows to fit 1 screen.

Advanced Users:

One way to avoid having to arrange windows each time is to use a cryptic, yet incredible tool called Hawkeye ShellInit. ShellInit is a small application that helps you manipulate your desktop & application windows via script.   Here is a small script that will move Visual Studio over the right-hand screen (assuming 1280×1024 resolution) and enlarge it to the correct size.

Position Window, *Microsoft Visual Studio, wndclass_desked_gsk, 1280, 0, 1288, 1002 

If you decide to use this tool, make sure and read the readme.txt file for some good sample scripts and ideas.

http://weblogs.asp.net/lhunt/archive/2007/10/11/vpc-2007-dual-monitor-support.aspx

Also see: Infrequent blogging

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/248003447/thread.tss

By default, old blogs are truncated from this web site.  If you want to read old entries that have scrolled off, go to the CATEGORIES section at the right hand side of the web page.  Select CLR (rss) and you’ll see the full list.