Online Education

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of 2tor. All opinions are 100% mine.

I've been reading The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler lately, and in it he says that every good programmer should spend some time teaching. He say's this helps you identify common misconceptions, problems, and to think in new ways

In my last job as an IT guy at a local Public Broadcasting Station, pretty much all I did was teach our volunteers (generally elderly women) how to use word, excel, and the Internet. It sounds terrible I know, but actually I really enjoyed it. One lady told me about the old days when she used to work on a teletype and it blew me away. Lately I've been examining other career options and I thought perhaps teaching wouldn't be too bad actually. I think I had a knack for breaking complicated things down into smaller easier to manage problems (a thing programmers have to do).

Now I definitely don't have time to go to an actual university, so I've been looking at online options. This led me to USC Rossier School of Education’s MAT@USC, which seems to be one of the better online schools that offer a masters in teaching online. They've been around for over a hundred years and have been ranked #22 in the USA and #9 among all private US universities by US News and World Report and were recently award the AACTE for innovative use of technology in education.

If you look at the video it totally blows my brothers online classes at a local university here in Northern California away, check it out below.

So if you're looking to earn your Teaching Degree Online, I highly recommend you check out The USC Rossier School of Education’s MAT@USC.

program information

MyTies for iPhone

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of MyTies. All opinions are 100% mine.

I was talking to a friend recently about social networks and stuff, and how on facebook you don't have a lot of control for grouping or controlling who can see your posts. He told me about an iPhone app called MyTies.com which seems to address these issues, and with the recent facebook security issues not a moment too soon. It's ideal for people that want to have co workers and friends/family on their social network but want to control who see's what. Obviously you don't want your boss to see your post about how much you drank last night or things like that and with MyTies.com you have that kind of control. You can create multiple groups that you can share text messages, photos, and videos with. It's also optimized for small screens like the iPhone, and the app is simple to use and well laid out, so you could probably teach your mom to use it. Hopefully they'll port it to Android, but for now you can download it free on the iPhone app store and if you use the code myprivacy when you sign up you can get 20 more invites for friends and family for free.

Dual Electronics XDMA6630

This post brought to you by Dual Electronics. All opinions are 100% mine.

A friend of mine has been looking into car stereos lately, and me being a tech and stuff he asked me to check out a few and tell him what I think. His criteria was this:

• Bluetooth for hands free calls from his iPhone.
• iPhone charging.
• Play music from his iPhone.
• Remote.
• Less than $200.00.

I looked around and didn't find much in that price range honestly. After a few more days I found Dual Electronics.

I've always wondered why car stereos didn't have hardly any audio in's, but the XDMA6630 has a Headphone jack in(3.5mm) and two RCA preamp out's which is awesome.

No more fiddling with your lighter plug to charge your usb stuff either, it has a powered usb port right on the front. Plays mp3's and wma's (who uses those?) from disk or from an iPod/Flash drive, and supports those cool steering wheel controls.

One of the coolest features I think is its support for Bluetooth A2DP, so you don't even have to plug in most devices just pair them and hit play. The blue LED's look awesome, and A2DP will probably wow some people if they haven't seen it before. Increase your cars Cool stat with Dual Electronics XDMA6630, $179 is a great steal.

FFLIB.NET

    I've been messing around with video conversion lately, I'm hoping to build a windows service that reads the contents of a directory and transcodes the video it finds there into h.264 mp4 aac at a certain time. At first I was looking at FFMpeg and doing it with a bat file and windows scheduler but I think I've found a better way of doing it. FFLIB.NET is a C# wrapper around the FFMPEG .dll's which should be able to provide decent video trans coding in a language I'm much more familiar with. Bat files are nice and all but doing it in a .Net service should be much more comprehensive and provide better deployment, control, and automation.

    The code samples on Intuiitive's website look pretty simple, though I'm not sure yet if I can control bit rate and that sort of thing because it's made for a youtube style site with a php front end but we'll see.

    I know I've been promising some code here but life has been keeping me busy but stay tuned and I'll have some prototype stuff up soon.

    If you’re looking for something to read I highly recommend this book:

Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition
$59.99

Virtualbox

    I’ve recently migrated from VMWare Workstation 6.6 over to an Open Source alternative developed by Sun Microsystems called Virtualbox. It seems to out perform VMWare on my Dekiwiki VM, and its free. Apparently the 3D hardware accelerated guest drivers for Virtualbox are in the works, read Compiz and XGL in your Ubuntu VM, very cool stuff. The usb support also seems to be working fine for my BackTrack 2 VM I use every now and then with an Edimax EW7318USG wifi card, monitor mode and everything. So unless you need any of the VMWare management features or something I highly recommend Virtualbox. Open Source FTW.

    If you’re looking for a Virtualbox book this is the only one I could find really:

VirtualBox 3.1: Beginner's Guide $49.99

Reflections in a Dungeon Master’s Eye - Small Cheer and Great Welcome

    Hello, I thought that a little introduction to both me and this column would be in order. I am a mid 30’s Northern California white guy. I went back to school in 2004 and am close to a bachelor’s degree in Political Science / Pre-Law. Law school by next year I hope. I play D&D proudly and talk about it in public with no difficulty or fear.
    I will be posting this column once a week or so. It will be as well researched as I can make it and a bit intellectual but if you think either of those is a liability I hope that you will go away now and leave the big people to talk things over. I am writing this column because I find that no one will listen to me rant about how cool gaming is in the middle of a game session, they always want to get back to the adventure at hand. So I will share my thoughts with you and maybe get some feedback more helpful than, “So what’s in the room.”

RPG’s I have played (mostly as GM):

• GURPS - still love it but to complicated to GM.
• Rifts - one of my players has a moral objection so we don’t play this anymore – I will discuss the objection in a later article.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness - a dear old friend.
• Palladium RPG - beautiful world but clunky character creation and no player creation of magic items killed this one.
• Amber Diceless RPG - too much emotional investment.
• FASA Star Trek RPG - not enough emotional investment.
• Twilight 2000 - Beautiful character creation but if you only have one or two military buffs in your group, like mine, it gets too bogged down in explanation.
• Advanced Dungeons and Dragons – the one that most people now call first edition. My personal favorite, but little modern support, and increasingly expensive books make it impractical. Also my players don’t like the limited choice of weapon proficiencies based on class and the limitation on race class combinations.
• HackMaster - supposedly based on the first edition rules but too overtaken with extra stuff, and too mush emphasis on humor. A new edition is said to be in the works based in Kenzer Co.’s Kingdoms of Kalimar, could be interesting.
• 3rd and 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons – This is the game that I am playing now and that I am likely to be playing for sometime. The simple reason is the Open Gaming License. The single best idea in gaming, ever. I am currently starting up a campaign in the DragonStar setting that I have wanted to run for a while and this setting is the perfect example of why the OGL is so great. Magic swords and laser guns, mighty wizards harnessing the souls of the dead to power android bodies, ancient red dragons flying through space and doing battle in powered armor, all this and the rules for it all run without a hitch. That is pretty cool.

    This column will not be composed of my musings and reviews of different games as the forgoing might suggest, though it may take that form from time to time. For the most part it is going to be made up of my thoughts on Role Playing and what it can teach us, what it has taught me, and hopefully how it can be used to explain and even predict the events of a world that seams so different from those that we game in but is the sun to the many shadows that are our game worlds.

Warhammer Online Server Population

URL:  http://pauser.com/warhammer/popmon/all_servers.html

    So recently I was thinking of renewing my Warhammer Online subscription, because I remember it having some of the most fun pvp at launch. I haven't played for over a year or so, so I thought I'd check on server population before even bothering to install it.

    I went over to Winkl's Warhammer Online Population Monitor to check out population and almost crapped the population was so low. 1700 players average for all the servers combined, who would even bother playing that's what I want to know.

    It's sad too I really liked the open world pvp and sieges, and you couldn't run right through people which added a lot of strategy in defending keeps and stuff, and punting people into lava was hilarious. Check out the stats if you're curious.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/88sz

About Me

Note: This site accepts sponsored posts.

    I'm into industrial, electronic, rock, gothic and darkwave, including:
The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, Depeche Mode, Mansun, Covenant, Elvenking, Blue Öyster Cult, Pink Floyd, Gravity Kills, Tool, Alestorm, The Mission, Loreena McKennitt, A Perfect Circle, Jeehun Hwang, The Animals, Apocalyptica, Delerium, Hawkwind, Orgy, Wolfsheim, The Cure, The Faint, Ozzy Osbourne, Stromkern, Bad Religion, Alice in Chains, Audioslave, Enigma, Qntal, Ascii.Disko, Econoline Crush, Goo Goo Dolls, In Flames, Snake River Conspiracy, Europe, The Police, VNV Nation, DragonForce, Gary Numan, Blind Guardian, TTC - Teofilo Ruiz, Neuroticfish, Hex Rx, Children of Bodom, Recoil, Mudvayne, Uberbyte, Ensiferum, Dir en grey, Ian Worthington.

Check out my music taste: Last.Fm

Links

Some links I visit on a regular basis:

Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen Blog
Awesome guy, read everything he writes.

ScottGu's Blog
It's Scott Guthrie, nuff said.

Programming Language Popularity
Go C#!

Microsoft Design .toolbox
The place to start if you want to learn Silverlight and UI Design.

ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1

    Now we can use Razor in MVC Views, and SQL Compact looks awesomely easy to use. At first I thought MVC was just MS overcomplicating stuff again but now that I’ve looked at it it’s really cool actually. I like being able to create strongly typed views, that way you get an error if the stuff you’re throwing at your view isn’t expected by it.

    When I was working in PHP and CodeIgniter (which is good by the way) I had a few problems with not remembering what it was my view code was expecting. Also all the IDE’s I tried had horrible intellisense/code completion for CodeIgniter.

    The validation and scaffolding in MVC 3 also looks really good, and you can use SQL Compact for testing or whatever and switch your DataProvider over to mySQL or whatever with Ninject when you're ready to deploy.

 

Amplify’d from weblogs.asp.net

ASP.NET MVC 3

As you probably already surmised, ASP.NET MVC 3 is the next major release of ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it will be easy to update projects you are writing with MVC 2 to MVC 3 when it finally releases.  The new features in MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release.  MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones.

ASP.NET MVC 3 can be installed side-by-side with ASP.NET MVC 2, and you can install today’s “Preview 1” release on your machine without it impacting existing MVC 2 projects you are working on (they will continue to use MVC 2 unless you explicitly modify the projects to retarget them to MVC 3).  When you install “Preview 1” you will have a new set of ASP.NET MVC 3 project templates show up within Visual Studio 2010’s “New Project” dialog – choosing one of those when you create a new project will cause it to use MVC 3.

Below are details about some of the new features and capabilities in today’s “Preview 1” release.  Unless otherwise noted, all of the features I describe are enabled with the preview build you can download and use today.  More ASP.NET MVC 3 features will come in future preview refreshes as we flesh out the product more and iterate on your feedback.

View Improvements

ASP.NET MVC 3 “Preview 1” includes a bunch of view-specific improvements.

New “Razor” View Engine

ASP.NET MVC 3 “Preview 1” includes several nice controller-specific enhancements.

Global Filters

New Dynamic ViewModel Property

New ActionResult Types

JavaScript and AJAX Improvements

Model Validation Improvements

Dependency Injection Improvements

Click here to download ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1.  Post feedback/issues about it in the ASP.NET MVC Forum. Read more at weblogs.asp.net

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/88p1

 

To learn more about ASP.NET MVC Try:

Pro ASP.NET MVC 2 Framework, Second Edition (Expert's Voice in .NET) $54.99

WebMatrix Fundamentals

    The last few weeks I’ve been messing around with Razor and Webmatrix and I have to say it’s freakin awesome.  Just the fact that I can install IIS7 on XP is sweet, and free is even better.

    Not only that though, but we get the Razor Templating Engine with it which is pretty sweet if you like the PHP style code in markup thing.

    Here are some links if you want to learn more:

Learn WebMatrix

WebMatrix Fundamentals: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site

How to create a CSHTML and WebMatrix TweetMeme Helper

Mindtouch Deki Wiki

    I just discovered a very cool piece of software called Deki Wiki from a company called Mindtouch. It’s an open source Wiki / Distributed app platform written in C# and PHP. It runs on Windows / Mac / Linux with MySQL and Apache 2.

    The cool thing is you can write what they call extensions that you can call from within the wiki via a scripting language they call Dekiscript. These extensions can also be written in almost any internet aware language because deki wiki uses REST and XML-RPC so the extension doesn't even have to be installed on the server your running from. They could be hosted on a cheap server with PHP, or in a Google App Engine app, or you could use sites like Flickr and Digg to pull content in using their API’s. Very cool stuff, stay tuned for some examples and some code.