Artistic game

It is so cool. I wish we can make this kind of real games:
http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2009/12/02/arcade-expressionism/
Those pictures are from here, I believe:
http://www.itistheworldthatmadeyousmall.com

Customer Experience

I remember this presentation was introduced by some web sites, but I missed the chance to watch it at the time. Long time latter I got the same URL link and I held the URL:

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business-of-software-2010.html

I strongly recommend everybody watch it.
It is a very nice talking about User Interface and Customer Experience.

Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.

Which button do you press?

The result is half and half.

I like the statement Emotion wins over logical thinking. I think it really does.I also learned that complexity is fine but needs to be well organized.

Turn on/off console dev kits: XBox360 and PS3.

Today I found Xbox360 also had a way to turn on and off remotely.

1. Turning off and on Xbox360

"%XEDK%\bin\win32\xbemulate" /Power off
"%XEDK%\bin\win32\xbemulate" /Process %errorlevel% /Quit

choice /d y /t 5 /n /m "Wait 5 sec…"

"%XEDK%\bin\win32\xbemulate" /Power on
"%XEDK%\bin\win32\xbemulate" /Process %errorlevel% /Quit


2. Turning off and on PS3.

D:\projects\Cell\host-win32\bin\dtpoff –d ip_address

D:\projects\Cell\host-win32\bin\dtpon –d ip_address

Unbelievable eye illusion.

I still cannot believe the color on A is same with that on B.But they are the same...Does it look same now???

*PS: These images are from the homepage of edward H. adelson.

CHOICE for batch file

Last week, I found there is a command-line utility, CHOICE. It is for Batch files, *.BAT files.

The usage is simple:

CHOICE /M "Do you agree?"

This will print out a message "Do you agree? [Y,N]" and you can type in "y" key or "n" key to answer. Other keys are ignored and enter key after "y/n" is not needed.

We can also change the key choices like this:

CHOICE /C XPD /M "Do you like [X]box360 games or [P]layStation3 games? ([D]on't care)"

Now you will have "X", "P", and "D" choices instead of simply "Y/N".

The user input is then cared out with "IF ERRORLEVEL" command, eg:

CHOICE /C XPD /M "Do you like [X]box360 games or [P]layStation3 games? ([D]on't care)"
IF ERRORLEVEL 3 GOTO :DONT_CARE
IF ERRORLEVEL 2 GOTO :LIKE_PS3
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO :LIKE_XBOX

There is one more thing to note.

It is always very hard to parse user input arguments. Let's say we have a batch file, "vote.bat", that takes an argument, "xbox" or "ps3".
For example, when we want to vote for PS3, the command will be like this:

vote.bat ps3

Then in the batch file, the argument is parsed in this way:

@ECHO OFF
IF "%1" == "ps3" GOTO :VOTE_FOR_PS3
IF "%1" == "xbox" GOTO :VOTE_FOR_XBOX

Now, we need to remember that the batch file takes either "xbox" or "ps3". It shouldn't be "xbox360" or "pS3". So we now need to add HELP message like this:

@ECHO OFF
IF "%1" == "ps3" GOTO :VOTE_FOR_PS3
IF "%1" == "xbox" GOTO :VOTE_FOR_XBOX
GOTO :HELP
:HELP
ECHO USAGE: vote.bat [xbox|ps3]

With "CHOICE" command, we can make this batch file much simple:

@ECHO OFF
CHOICE /C XP /M "Vote for [X]box or [P]s3?"

There is no need to have dedicated Help sub-routine. And don't need to bother with Case-sensitiveness.

In addition to that, we can also use the batch file in this way:

ECHO x | vote.bat

This will have a same effect to a command, "vote.bat xbox", without any interactive pause.

I am thinking whenever a batch file needs to take additional input as its argument, it can be replaced with CHOICE.

Unfortunately this useful command is not available on every Windows family. It seems like CHOICE.EXE is available from Windows XP with Service pack 3.

ShaderX 8 is published

This may not be a new to many of graphic programmers. The author changed its publisher and had to change the name of series, so the new name is not ShaderX8 but GPU Pro.

I also found the author is preparing GPU Pro 2, so I guess now we need to remember this new name.
I spent about an hour skimming the book here and there. One thing I noticed is that now many of articles are based on Shader Model 4 and 5.

Automate physical action with batch file.

*PS : This is just an idea, meaning I am not doing this in this way....

One of challenge for software testing automation is that sometimes we need to do some physical actions. In that case, we can "open CD-ROM tray". It may sound strange...

For example, we need to turn on XBox360 devkit, before start the testing. Unfortunately XBox360 devkit does not have any way to turn on the machine remotely. We have to manually press the power button in order to turn on the machine. The same thing applies to turning off.

We can place the computer and XBox360 devkit closely, so that when CD-Rom tray opens, it hits the power button of XBox360 devkit.

There are several free utility to open/close CD-ROM try.

I found an interesting YouTube clip that does this.