I'm a big fan* of Battlefield 2.

With two amazing children, a bustling, demanding business, and a professional career, it's very difficult to find time to play, but I really try to get a game in every now and then to settle the brain a bit (I find gaming enormously beneficial when doing demanding software projects). The game is visually gorgeous, and in many ways it's the game I (and countless other gamers) "invented" in our minds years ago - "Imagine if there were helicopters and planes and boats and tanks, and different people had different roles. Boy, I'd love to be the helicopter guy shuttling people back and forth!".

In many ways, albeit at a much more arcadish level (e.g. less serious than real simulators), BF2 is a completion of the vision started with Falcon 4 (F4) and its dream Electronic Battlefield. F4 was a remarkable game far before its time, and it actually looks pretty good even on modern hardware (and it can still push modern hardware to their limits). The vision with F4 was much more vehicle specific though, and while many players would exist and battle in the same world, each would be using a specialized, extremely realistic client conforming to their specific interest. Not sure how that'd work if you wanted to eject and then climb into a tank...maybe you'd shut down the client and restart in the tank simulator.

We need a game with the gameplay of BF2, the flight realism of F4, and the troop realism of Operation Flashpoint.

* - BF2, like all large software products, does have numerous problems. For instance the surface to air missiles are infuriating: Not only do they have a ridiculously low hit rate against the enemy, letting enemy aircraft fly around with impunity, but they have an amazingly good (or rather bad) hit rate against friendlies. If you shoot off some SAMs at an enemy aircraft, you can be sure that they'll miss, but that they'll fly off and manage to find a friendly helicopter or aircraft somewhere else on the map.

AdSense, for those living under a rock, is advertising revenue for the little guy - You display Google ads on your micro-site, and Google gives you a piece of the action. It's the reason you see those "Ads by Goooooooooogle" all over the place, and it really changed the landscape of the web: Previously the only monetary action on the low-end was referral type activity (e.g. GoToMyPC or Amazon books).

Given the proliferation of click-fraud, I was sure that AdSense would go the way of the dodo, or would see significant changes, and I wasn't alone. Surprising, then, when I see that Google has now spread out to a referral system as well, where once you sign up for AdSense (use that handy button up above!), you can refer others and start, err, monetizing their income to a small amount as well. Of course Google's business plan with AdSense largely revolves around their $100 minimum payout (which relates to referrals as well): Millions upon millions of small sites and dreamy blogs get into the Google Adsense game, displaying billions of ads, and the reality is that the overwhelming majority of them will never hit $100. They'll never need to be paid.

Pretty sweet deal for Google. Unfortunately it's yet another incentive for the spammers and miscreants, and you can expect to see advertisements even more pervasively than the current glut. When will Google's honeymoon end?

Mark Relph, of Microsoft Canada fame, left a couple of comments under "Blogging from Launch Tour 2005" regarding the software, and connectivity. Should find out about the connectivity issue later today.

[Launch2005]

As mentioned previously, I plan on "blogging" about, or possibly even from, the Toronto instance of Launch Tour 2005 this coming Tuesday. Unfortunately I've yet to hear if there is any sort of public connectivity at the venue (I sent an email to Mark Relph this morning, but alas - no reply. Maybe one just needs to blog about these things nowadays to get any respect - Mark, if you read this tell me if there's connectivity there. Thanks!), and I don't plan on using my exorbitant cell data rate for uploading pictures, so we'll see. It may not be posted until that evening. We'll see.

On another note, apparently the Canadian audience will be given "special editions" of the Standard Edition of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 (what's special about them? Maybe some sort of license clause like "don't do anything commercial with it"). I'm not quite sure why this even matters, as presumably most of the audience will already have it via the MSDN library. Freebies at events are usually a bad thing as they draw people for all of the wrong reasons - I hated being at Comdex LV and trying to get real info, but instead you're fighting with throngs of geeks trying desperately to get a free $5-value t-shirt (coupled with exhibitors that built their entire presentation around giveaways. Yeah, I flew here so I could get a free pen and a tote bag emblazoned with some embarrassing logo).

Mark needs a better digital camera I think.

[Launch2005]

I do make use of the blog categories to try to limit the amount of out-of-band content general readers need to endure. For instance I'll often put .NET code tips only in the .NET section, and SQL code tips only in the SQL section. When they are very specific technology specific items, I don't propagate them to the home page either, so you'll only see them in those categories.

I mention this only because I know some readers interested in SQL or .NET specific stuff only subscribed to the root RSS feed, and unfortunately they'll miss some of the content that way. For them I'd recommend subscribing to both the root feed along with the category specific feeds.

One of the biggest plays currently happening in the "Web 2.0" evolution is PageRank whoring (because PageRank is worth big money) - everyone trying to get you to link to their domain somehow.

Maybe they're handing out "blog awards" and the celebratory icon requires some sort of link back attribution, or they want to add you to their aggregation, but demand that you place various links to them on your site that they'll automatically harvest (and continually validate) to "ensure" that you're legitimate. Some even require a link to a script (that'll do who knows what at some future point) on their site in the header of your blog.

Whatever the case, it's clear that many Web 2.0 strategies these days are based on PageRank as a short-term substitute for money, and clearly these sites are hoping that a PR9 will get them good VC funding.

Examples abound on the net, but this came to mind looking at the way Technorati requires that you decorate your posts to "tag" them in the Technorati world - instead of some general, cross-industry tagging mechanism (e.g. "put a list of tags in square brackets to the right of Tags in your post. e.g. Tags: [SQL Server][etc.]"), you have to add links to various Technorati tag URLs in your posts. 

Not only is Technorati building their entire value based upon external blogger provided content, but you also need to hand over some pagerank to them as well to be categorized properly (and to head off bloggers using rel=nofollow, they also demand that you use rel=tag. How covenient). Imagine if Google demanded that your page add links to every Google searchword that you want to be indexed by? Give me a break.

Technorati is trying to monopolize the blog world, and I'm really quite surprized how quickly so many rolled over for it. They seem to provide a nice service, but they shouldn't require quite the level of complicity by the blog community (unless they're making every contributing blogger an equity owner).

BTW: Could every blogger please link to this post? Thanks! I want to boast about how high my imaginary Technorati rating is so I can generate meaningless "what this blog is worth" numbers.

Irony = Technorati Profile

In that prior example I used a cursor technique that might be alien to some - rather than using a DECLARE CURSOR, I iterated through the records by id.

I came across this at one shop that I did some consulting. At first I approached it with skepticism - It seemed like an unnecessarily quirkly way of doing a cursor - but after several benchmarks I was sold. If the iterating id is indexed (which it often is), the performance advantage will vary between marginal to significant.