A question many car enthusiasts tend to ask themselves while driving. It’s illegal to race on the street and it’s nearly impossible to get that person to show up at a track. What’s a car enthusiasts to do?! I’m glad you asked! That’s where Am I Faster comes into play (AIF). Ok, enough with the cheesy lead up. AIF is the latest website I’ve been working on. It’s a neat little website that allows you to create dream match-ups from a list of over 1900 cars (more added daily). You can even create your own custom car.
Run down of features:
Race 4 cars at a time.
You can search for the car you want.
Cars are grouped by make.
You can suggest cars to add to the list.
Accurate quarter mile times.
You can modify the information we have.
Over 400 (and growing) fully spec’d cars (We have the quarter mile time, 0-60 time, weight, hp and drive train) — This makes it easier to make Custom Cars
Just a quick update on what I’ve been working on. I’ve had a bit of success getting scoring and the scoreboard playing together (see video). Another feature that you don’t see in the video is that all the switches point value can be set via the C# app that I made.
I’ve added the source below. Keep in mind this is all just hacking at this point. It’s probably not very helpful but it can’t hurt.
The led matrix on the top isn’t broken, I just hooked it up wrong :-/
I recently had a need to find a url within a large amount of text and turn it into a hyper link. Knowing that I am just a regex noob I opted to find someone else that could just give me some regex I started with regexlib.com but everything there was exceptionally simple. Simple usually works but the client I’m working with always finds clever ways to do something unexpected. So I needed something that would detect any URL that is possible under the sun.
After a few minutes I found Ivan Porto Carrero’s website which had the following regex:
It’s a pretty stinkin’ big regex but it sure does the job. I tried it with any url I could think of as well as the ones listed on Ivan’s site.
So there you have it. A big change from the pinball stuff but I needed to store this one where I could find it easily. I’m sure I’ll need it again in the future!
Every now and then I need to delete quite a few Sprocs. It’s really a pain in the arse to do this with SQL Server Management Studio as it doesn’t let you delete more than one sproc at a time. So, I found this script that works pretty good (source).
1) Click the ‘Results To Text‘ button
2) Run:
SELECT ‘Drop Procedure ‘ + SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id)+’.'+name FROM sys.procedures
First of a quick note about comments. You probably didn’t notice but they are all gone! I got hammered with a spam bot and had 800+ comments. WordPress doesn’t do too well with that many comments. So I took to phpMyAdmin to get rid of them by hand. And well, I kinda screwed that up .
Now on to the good stuff. I got my hands on VS2008 and installed it a few months ago at a MS conference. But I just didn’t really have a need or use for it just yet. Sure it supported .NET 2.0 and everything VS2005 did but I’m just too comfortable with VS2005.
However, I’ve gotten the oppurtunity to finally use VS2008 in a pretty much every day scenario. I’ve been given the task to give an older (see: PHP4/MySQL) program a huge facelift from the ground up. After a bit of discussion it was decided that we would use all the latest technology that we could. (Unfortunatly I didn’t choose Linq [no time to learn]).
After using VS2008 I’m actually not all that impressed. I mean sure, it has some ‘pretty’ improvements and some stuff is now slicker than it was before. But for the most part it’s a big slow dead horse (compared to VS2005)! Now I can’t say for sure if it’s just a problem with my computer or perhaps the size of my projects. But the fact remains that my solution with 14 projects is unresponsive (read: can’t work) for at least half the day! So below is my list of things that bug me in VS2008. Continue with a grain of salt as some/all problems might be do to user error, computer, etc.
Freezes for minutes at a time after building ONE project w/ no dependencies to build
The debugging seems awfully slow to me lately. It’s probably only a .5 sec delay, but come on.
[Web application only?] You can only change cs files while you are at a breakpoint.
Forces you to stop debugging when you save the web.config. I much prefer making changes to anything in the web project and refreshing the page. I realize it’s going to rebuild but it’s annoying to have to navigate to a certain place while testing.
Leave orphaned web dev icons in the task tray! Not a problem, just bugs me.
Ctrl+Tab is painfully slow. That and why the hell do you need pictures of code to know where to go? I’m sure this is great for 90% of Vista users that drool over the fancy vista colors. But I prefer old skool Windows 2000 theme of things (What? It’s purty!…And fast).
The new design view. It’s slow and it still can’t handle included css or themes. It does handle master pages slightly better. But it’s so slow it’s not worth it to bother.
Well that about sums up with what has bugged me thus far after a couple of weeks of use. I’d be happy to hear from you guys if you have similar problems or if not. (I’ll try to allow comments again) I have a suspicion that it has to do with using a Web application as opposed to a web project.
* 11/17/08 Edit: Ok…it’s not that bad…I kind of like it now:)
I started with regexlib.com but everything there was exceptionally simple. Simple usually works but the client I’m working with always finds clever ways to do something unexpected. So I needed something that would detect any URL that is possible under the sun.