Yesterday, I just tried some dance games on Wii, including “Just Dance 2” and “Michael Jackson: The Experience”. I am not originally a fan of that kind of games, but if I can share a good time with friends, why not? And I really enjoyed it! So here are some feedbacks after this really exhausting but cool night:

• If you are a hardcore gamer who can’t stand to move from your chair, be on your way, these games are not for you. Yeah it is more weary than you could think…
• Casual gamers should enjoy these games, the moves are not too hard to do. Some more hardcore gamers might find these games are not difficult enough (in one night, we could reach 4 stars on Thriller of Michael Jackson, and it was the first time we were playing this game…)
• It is definitely a party game, you should not expect to have as much fun alone as if you were 4 players
• Thanks to / because of the lack of precision of the WiiMote, I suspect the devs of having made a really tolerant gesture recognition code. Indeed I could play and do a lot of points even if I was laying down on the ground (yes, it can be that exhausting…)
• Some choregraphies are really girly (Toxic of Britney Spears for example), but it shall not refrains you to play. You are here to play and laugh, so don’t be ashamed!
• The songs in “Michael Jackson: The Experience” are really long, so you should really plan to have some drinks and food as you were doing sport…
• The lyrics of the songs displayed while in game is a really good idea for spectators.

The next step should be to test these kind of games on Kinect. On Wii, only the right hand is recognized, so you don’t have to move your feet if you really aim to have a big score (but it’s less funny). Maybe with Kinect, the both hands and the feet are taken into account?

To conclude, I really enjoyed myself at this party. So bring at least 4 friends and have fun!

I’ve just done a fresh install on my new laptop, and I got stuck with this error when launching a flash project in FlashDevelop (no debug trace, no breakpoints…). If you have the same problem, you may try this:

Check that you have the localhost declared in your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts). Add this line if you don’t have it:

127.0.0.1 localhost

http://tinyurl.com/2dy59t

Even if we cannot generalize this quick test, it is interesting to see the difference between 7zip / gz / bz2. I used to mainly compress in bz2 but I think I will use 7z more often now…

http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/2006/10/16/actionscript-3-overloading-constructors-with-rest

Have a look to this article about rest parameter. It is used to simulate method overloading. If you are from C++ / Java worlds, it will remind you variadic methods.

Like some AS3 tricks (e.g.: Singleton), this one is particularly hacky… ActionScript would really need to natively include this kind of features.

MS Project is really cool to organize your tasks and to do some project management stuff, but sometimes, speaking with “work days” is not really understandable for lambda people. Especially when you have some strange calendars (people working one day on two, full-time, night-shift, 40h/week, 35h/week…) it quickly become a mess.

To have a better view of our tasks, we will see how to show the Total Duration in days.

We will define the Total Duration as the number of days between “Start” and “Finish”, including non-working days. I tried with DataDiff and ProjDataDiff functions but they seem to use the project calendar, and I really wanted the raw number of days. So here the (dirty) trick:

• Right click on a column > “Customize fields”
• Choose “Text”
• Name it “Total Duration”
• Select “Formula” radio button in “Custom attributes”
• Say “Yes” if a popup annoys you (we are creating a new field, so we do not care about what is in)
• Click “Formula” button
• Enter this:

Str(DateValue([Finish])-DateValue([Start]))+" days"

• OK
• Select “Use formula” in “Calculation for task and group summary rows”
• OK
• Add the field you just created (Right click on a column > “Insert Column…”)

Here you done!

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Here are some details about how MS Project calculate things:

• Work: Number of hours spent on a task.
• Duration: Number of days spent on a task. It is the work divided by the number of hours per day specified in the options (Tools > Options > Calendar).

You will notice that Duration do not use the resource calendar!
e.g.:

• resource based on 4h / day
• project hours per day setting: 8h/day
• task work: 8h

Task duration: 1 day (and not 2 days, as 4h is counted as a half day).