If you have an XBOX 360, I think you owe it to yourself to hop on XBL and download the latest Gears of War trailer. It is particularly great viewed in 720p, should you have that option available. Set to the Gary Jules version of “Mad World” (of Donnie Darko fame), this trailer demonstrates some of the incredible lighting and texture effects that the Unreal Engine 3 has to offer. And yes, the ad was generated from full game-engine rendering - and I am sold.
I can’t wait for this game…

While you are at it (and not a little squeamish), check out the BioShock trailer too. Impressive graphics… disturbing game play.

From the imaginative minds of the science-fiction fans to your salad plate, you could soon be eating purple tomatoes! Yes, according to news from CNN.com, researchers in Salem, Oregon are perfecting the purple tomato, said to be the color of blueberries. Apparently, these are not genetically engineered, as there are genetic roots to a rare purple tomato in Southern Africa. Sources say these new veggies (yes, I know… they are technically fruit) could help reduce the risk of cancer and could be quite tasty in a Garden Salad. At the very least, it would add some color to your plate.

Purple Tomatoes [www.cnn.com]

I heard an interesting tidbit of information yesterday… did you know that virtually all calico cats are female? I was not aware of that, so I used the intarweb to research this. Of course, we all know that the internet is full of facts, it’s just a matter of finding them. My intense 30 second search unearthed the following site:  www.PetPlace.com.

The site briefly discusses the genetic makeup of calicos. From the site:

For the sex chromosomes, there is a battle for power. This is especially true for the X chromosome. If two X chromosomes are present, which determines female sex, one X chromosome will become inactivated at some point in fetal development. When this happens, all the cells descended from the activated X chromosome will have the same characteristics, including coat color.

So, there you have it - a drop of knowledge to broaden your horizon.

Yesterday, I continued my journey into the joy that is MySQL. I grew up, career-wise, in the house of SQL Server, so I am familiar with SQL and all that. However, when it comes to SQL skills, I don’t have the “mad” skills… just the “know enough to be officially dangerous” type of skills.

Anyway, I wanted to share with you one of my goals of yesterday. I needed to join two tables, getting values from the second table, if they existed, and also combining columns together in order to create a new column. Of course, I used a left join to achieve the joining goal, but I had issues when it came to concatenating field values together. I kept receiving NULLs for my new column value. This was due to there being NULL values being pulled from the second table durin the join.

So, I stumbled upon the COALESCE keyword in MySQL.  There may be something similar to this in SQL Server, but I am not aware of it at this time.  COALESCE  detects when a specified field value is NULL and then replaces it with  the given value in the parameter. This was useful for me when attempting to concatenate  string values to create a new column value.

So my sample code looks like this:

SELECT CONCAT(P.pname, ‘-’, COALESCE(C.cname,”)) AS NewColumn1, CONCAT(p.id, ‘-’, COALESCE(C.id,”)) AS NewColumn2
FROM Table1 as P
LEFT JOIN Table2 as C ON P.id = C.Name

Of course, many of you will have more complex uses for such a function, but for someone getting the feet wet with a different technology, I thought this was useful. Let me know if you know of any other useful functions within MySQL.

Find more information here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/comparison-operators.html 

I bring you “Line Rider”.

A flash based toy where you draw a line, click play, and watch a sledder rider your line. Much fun to be had here…

Line Rider

Ok, so I read various sources of news, editorials, and commentaries. Lou Dobbs, of CNN, has a fairly interesting commentary on the War on the Middle Class. It has put me on a quest to learn more about what is going on in Washington and with our political leaders. I encourage you to read his thoughts with an open mind and at least consider what he is saying. It’s not without its bias, but it is interesting.

Once you’ve read it, come back here and post your thoughts.
Here is the link:

Dobbs: Middle class needs to fight back now

We’ve adopted a new kitten to keep Bosco company. Here she is, the black and orange wonder that is Maggie.

To save QTP documentation to a text file, you have to edit your registry. Be careful doing this, cause if you screw up your registry, you may have a bad day.

To open your system registry:

1. Select Start -> Run…
2. Type regedit and hit return
3. To make QTP save the documentation entries of a script:
4. In the left pane of the registry, select:

   My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ SOFTWARE\Mercury Interactive\QuickTest Professional\MicTest

5. Right click on the right pane, select New -> DWORD Value
6. Name the DWORD SaveSummaryAlways
7. Double click the new DWORD and change the value data to 1
8. Restart QTP to activate the change.

Whenever you create a new test and save it, you will find a summary.txt file in the folder for each action. Each time you save the test script, the summary.txt file will be updated.

To generate this file for existing tests, open the test, perform a minor edit (this can be adding and removing a space), and save the test.

If you need a laugh, I encourage you to go to http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com. It is everything you could possibly need to know about the immortal Chuck Norris. I mean, did you know that behind his beard is not a chin, but another FIST! I, for one, thank Chuck that I’m allowed to live…

And, apparently, Chuck hates pirates. I guess even the best have their downfalls…