Mark Baillie

Following on from my previous programmers ramblings we've made leaps and bounds recently in a whole range of our toolsets.

uCommerce

We've been working hard and are about to roll out our first uCommerce integration. Unfortunately we didn't try integrating this until we had built most of the accompanying site in Umbraco 5, which proved to be a problem. Five is looking great, and I love working on the templates with Razor, but there’s just not the same level of support there as Four. Never mind, a quick installation of four and some time spent attacking the XSLT templates with a crowbar, and we’re back up to speed.

The demo uCommerce shop does give a great starting point on how some of the systems and stages of the products and cart operate together, although the documentation (especially on the XLST side) is shockingly sparse. This isn’t helped by the fact that the support site links back to the main Umbraco support forum, where your searches get mixed with the other ecommerce products. There’s a forum that could use an advanced search option.

Despite much cursing along the way, it’s now been shaped to our requirements.

Version Control

I’ve tried many of the version control systems out there, looking for something that we could slot into place. Given that we now have a large library of Visual Studio .Net projects, alongside a vast library of still supported Classic ASP solutions, we needed something that could be used to fit both. After a stint with Team Foundation Server (great if all you use for development is Visual Studio) and a trial with the Team Foundation Service Beta (think GitHub for TFS) we’re having good results with Bitbucket and Git Extensions. It’ll require some more evaluation to be certain, but it looks like we might be onto a winner.

New Toys

Our new rackspace servers have been built and are on the rack, awaiting our frenzy of site migration. Yay, new servers. Boo, having to move everything!

A Plea for Help

So we’re looking to add another .Net developer to the team. For the back-end we need experience of .Net MVC, C# or VB (I’m sure you guys can switch between), Razor, and Umbraco. Front end we need HTML5, CSS3, lots of jQuery, and any UI and design skills you can bring. So far recruitment agencies are disappointing (more interesting in placing "A" candidate than "The Right" candidate), so if anyone knows someone that’s looking to make change.....

Increase in both the rate and strength of the heartbeat resulting in increased blood pressure. Blood shunted from the skin and viscera to the skeletal muscles, coronary arteries, liver, and brain. Rise in blood sugar. Increased metabolic rate. Bronchi dilate. Pupils dilate. Hair stands on end ("gooseflesh" in humans). Clotting time of the blood is reduced. Increased ACTH secretion from the anterior lobe of the pituitary. All of these effects prepare the body to take immediate and vigorous action.

Last night I ran faster and harder then I've had to in years. All across Glasgow City Center we were chased breathless, until finally reaching decontamination somewhere in Finniston. It was the most fun I've ever had running for my life.

Can you survive the zombie apocalypse? There are a series of locations around the city. You must find your way to each without being caught by zombies that prowl the streets. At the start you are given the first location and a map. If you make it there you will encounter a survivor with a story to tell. They will give you the next location, where you will another survivor, and so on, until you make it to Resistance HQ. Here you will be scanned for infection. If you are clear you can enter. If the scan shows the signs of infection you must join the zombie horde.
- http://2.8hourslater.com/ 

From a group of seven we reached the end point with just a single survivor, i'd like to say it was due to our valiant efforts to keep him alive, but truth is he got lucky. The zombies were fast.

Over the course of nearly three hours in a route that took us fully across the city center roughly parallel parallel parallel the clyde, we walked, stumbled, and flat out ran. Some zombies would jump out giving the classic movie fright. Others would silently come out of nowhere, screaming inches behind you, driving you to your heels.

You have to applaud both the company running the game, and the volunteer zombies taking part. They'll spend all week running, after just one night I'm a wreck. A happy, broken, but satisfied wreck.

In the office we're currently making strides towards moving our userbase from our bespoke CMS solution to the recently released Umbraco 5. Umbraco really is the sweetheart of CMS's on Microsoft's platform and it's made some real headway in business.

We ran through several versions of our own 404 powered Classic ASP CMS, before making the push and finally migrating this to VB DotNet 2 with some improvements along the way. Since then we've increased our skills and now have several DotNet projects in the wild (in both VB and C#) that we're very happy with.

But there's no point in reinventing the wheel, especially when that wheel is as good as Umbraco.

Alongside this move we're also looking to update all our web servers to the latest Microsoft platform. However, this itself has thrown up some headaches of a chicken/egg variety. We can't commit to Umbraco without continued testing, but we can't have continued testing till we get it running on our hardware. 

You see, we want to play with Umbraco (a lot), but have found that it won't work on the older servers. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for progress and can certainly understand the need to stop supporting outdated software (I'm looking at you IE6). We dont *need* the hardware updgrade (in a business sense) until we can prove we'll be commiting to Umbraco.

The biggest headache for us are the servers still running SQL Server 2000. Whilst the servers have remained stable there's certainly a fear up upsetting the apple cart by performing any large upgrades. This is what's brought us to requesting a whole new set of servers to migrate to.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is "New versions are great, but it sucks to get left behind".

Oh, and to solve our dilema we bought an shiny new dell quad core server.

Also
"Umbraco 4.5" "Umbraco 4.6" "Umbraco 4.7" "Umbraco 5" "SQL 2000" Does Not Work.

I've just enountered a strange Acrobat Reader bug telling me that "you need to install a printer" when trying to print. Now if I didnt have a printer this would make sense, but I have four, one of which is Acrobat Pro

Some googling later and this guy showed the way. All I had to do was change my default printer for Acrobat to see the light.

Very Odd.

Have you guys seen those wonderful animated GIFs lately where the quality is sharp and the animation is fantastically subtle. Turns out (as you may have guessed from the title) they're called Cinemagraphs.

The impressive thing about them is how well they retain their colour. I've used animated GIFs in the past (going so far as to making hundreds of them over a few months for an old advertising job), so I know how hard it can be to work with GIFs limited colour palette. I'm sure you've all seen peoples forum and facebook pages where the video looks like the colour has been beaten from it.

So naturally, I had to find out how they worked. Thank you Fernando.
http://fernandojbaez.com/cinemagraph-tutorial/  

If in typical posterous fashion it's killed the animation, click here to see this working

Like all great things on the web, the real challenge will be finding a suitable place to use it.

Check out this gallery for more great examples.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cinemagraphs/photos  

It's no secret that I love my Xbox. As a grown up you don't get too many toys, and since fast cars and helicopters are a bit beyond my standard of living my faithful xbox serves my entertainment needs.

So over the past year I've played through a load of games, some good, some ... well not so good. Here's some twitter sized reviews.

Alan Wake

9.5/10 - Brought back great memories of playing Silent Hill on the PS1. Loved the creepiness, bought all the DLC, and looking forward to the new XBLA episodes due out soon.

Portal 2

9/10 - Fantastically quirky follow up to the original Portal, great single player plot, and even better co-op with a friend.

Battlefield Bad Company 2

9/10 - Probably my most played game of 2011, a good single player experience, but a great multiplayer game, probably my favourite online first person shooter to date.

Torchlight

8.5/10 - Lovely little dungeon crawler, helps to fill the World of Warcraft bug. Torchlight 2 should be out soon now with added co-op, one to look out for.

Modern Warfare 3

8/10 - More of the same - overblown insane cinematic action. If you can turn off your brain and go with it then it's a great game. You'll find it offers a very solid multiplayer experience too (depending on the maturity of the other players).

Mortal Kombat

8/10 - MK Deception was probably the first Mortal Kombat that could start to sway this Street Fighter fan, but this latest MK release has made that a certainty - a great fighter.

Orcs Must Die

8/10 - A traditional tower defence game turned third person perspective allowing you to take the Orcs out with your sword and bow as well as numerous cunning traps. A fun XBLA distraction.

Bulletstorm

8/10 - Pure mindless shooter with the added bonus of a classic high score system and some fancy whip work. Great fun although lacking a little in depth.

Fallout New Vegas

7/10 - Good, but not as good as Fallout 3. As a fan of the series it's still worth a play, newcomers may be better looking elsewhere.

Warhammer Kill Team

7/10 - I love most things warhammer 40k, but i'm sorry to say i'm not quite as excited about this. A fun romp but it could have be put to any shooter branding.

Deus Ex Human Revolution

7/10 - I loved the original 90s Deus Ex, but I'm afraid this feels like a poor relative. Not a bad game, but certainly fell short of my expectations.

Crysis 2

7/10 - Another average shooter, with its own interesting twists and power-ups. Not a bad game, but doesn't have very much to make it stand out from the crowd.

Fable 3

7/10 - The third in the Fable series just feels too much like the ones before. While a great game with lots of great selling points, I just didn't feel the same buzz I had playing the first instalment.

Medal of honor

6/10 - A disappointing shooter in both single and multiplayer. Maybe there was just too much hype surrounding it ? Whatever the reason, it's not one I'd recommend.

* Not all these games were released 2011, I just played them throughout this year

Once again I've let my poor blog fall into disuse, mostly as the duel forces of Twitter and Facebook have allied to become my social portals of late.

Well, it's been a hell of a year. Not since we welcomed Beth have I had such dizzy heights of merryment. Not just for us either, friends have had babies (and maybe even family might sneak one in past the clock), friends have moved houses and jobs and found great success. As a year its had it's downs as well as ups - but i'm holding onto the good and letting go of the bad. 

We recreated prom night, survived snow storms and hurricanes, been excited and disapointed by politics, returned to Dead by Dawn (with hardly any illness this year), gotten fitter (for a while), had a celebrity birthday message for clare (hoping for an invite to their wedding), geeked out with a return to d&d, enjoyed clares 30th, seen Glasgow taken over by zombies, become a mac user, read loads of books, and much more.

Reading though past posts i'm sure you'll be able to see some great events that rocked my year.

In June I was invited to London to take part in a magazine article for Cosmo magazine. A long knackering day out, but a day like no other. I've found out recently that I'm going to be in the Cosmo Australia edition too - i'm international !
http://markbaillie.posterous.com/a-day-out-in-london  

My family has always been Mum, Dad, and my sister Janine. In August, through facebook, I began talking to my other sister Debbie from a wing of my family long since separated. In a short space of time I've gotten to know them all really well, it's been a real pleasure.
http://markbaillie.posterous.com/68012201 

I wonder what 2012 will bring ?

I'm sitting at the train station, slightly too early, making me the only person here. A train rolls in, it's destination opposite to mine, but it'll be back soon enough. People disembark and quickly leave. Soon I'm alone again.

People, as a general rule, get through their day by planning. Little minute to minute plans are made, always getting adjusted to meet the situation. Food spills, roadworks, poor timing; we wrap these into our plans and adjust on the fly. We can do this because, for most of our plans, we can anticipate the outcome. Leave late in the morning, you'll arrive late for work. Go to bed late, you'll be tired in the morning. So what do we do when something is so far beyond our normal routine that plans just can't be made? Like light striking a prism and dissolving into infinite waves of colour, so too are the results of our choices when no outcome can be determined.

I'm now on the train. The destination is less a place and more an event. The destination is Glasgow, but the event is much bigger. For the first time in my life I'm about to meet a brother and sister that I never knew I had. I am terrified and elated. I simply don't have the vocabulary to express my thoughts in anything close to understandable.

I’m a result of a first marriage, and when that marriage ended so did my communication with the paternal line. My awareness of that side became very sparse.

I’m standing outside our pre-arranged meeting spot, more nervous than ever. I worry that I won’t recognise them, having only seen photos online. I tell myself that it’s time to act like an adult, and head inside. Scanning faces as I approach the bar I think I see them everywhere at once. Reaching the bar, I order a beer. From text correspondence I’ve already established that they are here, so I send a text, “I’m at the bar”. There are lots of little cubbyholes in here, hiding at least one half of every group, so I move to get a better vantage point. There they are.

I’ve spoken to them both over recent days and have been very eager for this meeting to take place. I’m happy to say that they both exceeded all hopes. After a slow start of awkward conversation, this gave way to a more relaxed atmosphere. Perhaps next time though, and this is warning only to myself, a few less beers would be advisable

It’s 2am, raining lightly, and the streets are quiet. Once again I’m alone with my thoughts. The events of the past few hours have been exhilarating, and I’m very happy about the progress made. 

A long time ago, back when I was still using S9y as my blog engine, clare asked me to make a blog for her. It was called "It's Ups and Downs", the name taken from a quote in our favourite TV show spaced. This was online at www.itsupsanddowns.co.uk.

This eventually died when I cancelled my old hosting.

A while back Clare tried her hand at blogging again, choosing tumblr as her platform. Around the same time I made the leap to posterous. Arguments aside, they both had their own pros and cons and both seemed to suit us well.

Recently Clare’s moved beyond photo posts and is actively trying to write content to prompt discussions. The tumblr platform relies on Disqus for comments, again a system with its own pros and cons, but not the best for what we needed. On her behalf I made the move from tumblr to posterous.

Things ran pretty smoothly, except for a bunch of untitled posts (from photoblog entries) and losing all existing comments. You see, since disqus is a separate system, posterous couldn’t make the join between blog post and its comments. You can't really blame posterous for this, but it would have been nice.

Since we first attended Dead by Dawn four years ago my friends and I have been kicking around the idea of creating a short horror genre movie for submission to their short movie competition. Last year I wrote a script for us to test out, a simple to shoot, one location screenplay.

Shooting the movie should be relatively simple, the guys have a few HD camera, the script calls for the use of a microphone so recording audio should also be easy, and we have the perfect location in a friends garage. The part of the project most challenging (both bad and good) will be editing the footage.

Editing software seems to come in at three levels, we'll call the low, mid, and high (in relation to skill levels). Windows Movie Maker and iMovie would be low, mostly for home users. Avid Studio and Vegas Movie Studio would seem to be mid level, people I'd say like myself who want to put something unique together, but without the technical knowledge of a real professional. Vegas Pro, Avid Media Composer, and Final Cut Pro are high level, for the real people who work in the field.

It's been quite some time since I last had to perform full composing from footage, my own wedding video from 2004 in fact. Back then I used Sonic Foundry Vegas 4 / Sony Vegas 5, the best windows based mid level software I culd find (and actually use). Prior to this I used iMovie on the Mac G4's for producing promotional video within a clients multiple store locations, found this very easy to use, and with a few plug-ins this did all that I needed at the time.

So now we're back to talking about our movie, and co-incidently i've just gotten a very powerful macbook for work. I can finally give Final Cut Pro a try after hearing so much about it. Trying it, instantly I'm overwhelmed.

So this put me on the hunt for the best software for us to potentally use for our little movie.

Final Cut Pro 7
Perhaps my biggest problem here is simply screen layout. A lot of things like effects share the same panel as the preview window, so when changing settings you find yourself flipping back and forwards. I know this is just a niggle, but I want something that I can just use. Maybe its just a feel thing, but I'm instantly put off.

Final Cut Pro X
Initally I didn't even think of this since it's taken quite a hammering on the web. After investigation though, it might seem that what people now don't like about it might actually be the things that I like the most. People are calling this iMovie Pro since it "dumbs down" so many of the options, but this might just bring it to a level where I can use it. Having tried it I can say that yes, this is the case. While I do completely understand the professionals concerns at the way this software has gone, it is to my benefit that this has moved from pro to prosumer.

Apple iMove (whatever the lion version is)
Yuck, this looks nothing like the iMovie that I knew. Timelines seem to have vanished. I spent all of ten minutes playing with this to know it wasn't for me. 

Avid Media Composer 5 (mac)
Downloaded the trial, would constanly hang just starting up. Gave up on it. 

Sony Vegas Movie Studio 11
Downloaded the trial, installed, and was able to use immediately. It must be the time spent doing my wedding video, but this was instantly familiar and usable for me. A real contender.

Avid Studio
This is a very strong software package for the mid-range editor such as myself. I'd go so far as to say on the windows platform, simply look no further. Again this might be accused of the same dumbing down that FCP-X has gotten recently, but honestly, give it a spin and I challenge you not to be impressed.

So what's the final answer, trial and error I suppose will show me the way. Off hand, I'd pick FCP-X for the mac, or Avid Studio for windows. Either way, get the best hardware that you can.