Got some great games for Christmas

Got some great games for Christmas…

Ballast is by Gigamic, the makers of Quorridor, last year’s favorite acquisition (right up there with Spy Alley). Ballast is a Jenga-like game where you take turns removing blocks from a structure. You are awarded different points for different sized blocks. The kicker is that the blocks are all cylinders and are stacked within a vertical ring. So, it is pretty tricky. My 5 year-old son liked it but I think he enjoys the carnage of Jenga to the more subtle block-shifting of Ballast.

Octiles is very cool. It is sort of like Chinese Checkers. Up to four people attempt to move all of their pieces to the opposite side of the board. The catch is that the paths your pieces follow change. Between you and the other side of the board is a field of octagons. On your turn you are allowed to place an octagonal tile (“octiles”) which has a set of arcing paths printed on it. Each tile has a different pattern. The paths of each piece interlock to form a twisted maze. Your piece must cross the tile you placed. This one was my son’s favorite of the three new games. He’s able to beat me with minor coaching (and poor play on my part!).

Carcossone was given to me by my Aunt who played the game with my Uncle and a German couple. They liked it so much, the German couple gave it to them (my Uncle had to find an English-language rule set). I can see why they liked it so much. In the game, up to five people take turns placing tiles that contain things like roads, cities, farms, and cloisters. The tiles must match up with existing tiles (eg, grass on an edge matches with grass on an existing tile). After placing a tile, you can deploy a “follower”, a little wooden piece that essentially declares that territory for you. You score points by completing formations like completed cities, roads, and cloisters in which you have a follower deployed. You can also get points for followers deployed as farmers that supply completed cities. The trick is that you have a limited number of followers. And, once deployed, farmers can never be re-used.

The game changes each time you play and requires different strategies based on the number of players. Mine came with a free set of “river” tiles that add a subtle yet challenging twist to the tile layout constraints. Yesterday my Uncle sent me the “Inns and Cathedrals” expansion tiles but we haven’t played with them yet. My son enjoys the game but requires more coaching than the other games (the box says 8 and up). The longer playing time is also a challenge to a five year-old’s patience. My nieces, nephew, and in-laws all enjoyed playing until the late hours. Good stuff.

Recent reads

Read a couple of books over the break. Life of Pi by Yann Martel is outstanding. It is the best fiction I’ve read in a long, long time. It originally piqued my interest because of its lost-at-sea theme (check out my Listmania list for more seafaring books). When Reverend Kanter quoted it during church one morning, I added it to the wish list. I wasn’t disappointed. The book starts out exploring the life of a boy searching for his spirituality. He ends up being a Hindu-Christian-Muslim. That alone is pretty interesting, but he also grows up a zookeeper’s son. These two world’s collide as Pi ends up a castaway during a disaster at sea. I won’t give away any more than that. My advice is to not read anything more about the plot–just open up the book and dive right in.

The other book I read was The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel. It’s a non-fiction account of John’s experiences chasing UFOs and other strange phenomena in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s more like a collection of case notes than a single cohesive story. A lot of the stories sort of ran together. I haven’t seen the movie upon which the book is based, but maybe in this case, the movie pulls it all together better than the book.

How to create a know-it-all company. Lauren Gibbons Paul has written an article on knowledge sharing in the corporate world. To quote: Even in the best of times, it’s a battle to convince employees to participate in knowledge management programs. But in tough times, the tendency… [Column Two]

“Very simply, the effort of sharing knowledge has to be less than the value of participating.”

Scoble doesn’t like group weblogs

A picture named scoble.jpgScoble: “I don’t like group weblogs.” This is a current topic with me. A bunch of people I know wanted to do a group blog. I said okay give it a try. I’m watching from a distance. I prefer to write for my blog and develop a way to route posts to categories so readers can assemble their own group blogs out of their favorite authors (of which I hope to be one). Scoble is a pundit and a very wise man. He’s onto something. [Scripting News]

ECM? Actually, they mostly want WCM

Tony Byrne reports on the results of a recent poll on content management, conducted by AIIM at their recent seminar series. Some interesting results:

The ECM industry’s major trade association (and all-around cheerleader), AIIM, recently polled 333 end-user attendees at its CMS seminar series. AIIM uncovered a lot of interesting data. Not surprisingly, Records Management remains paramount in the face of serious compliance challenges. But for those technology buyers seeking foremost to achieve cost savings and greater customer value, web content management rises nearly to the top of their wishlists.

[columntwo]

This weekend I started looking at XForms. I didn’t know much about it, but what I had a suspicion that it could be a standard that could be leveraged as a standard/best practice method of letting people build forms that would submit data into a content management system like Documentum.

I picked up XForms: XML Powered Web Forms by T.V. Raman. I plowed through the first 80 pages and then grew restless–I wanted to try some of it on my own and the book really didn’t lend itself to that. It’s more reference than how-to. I did find the early chapters valuable, though. When I was ready to try some out on my own, I used the following resources:

Here’s what I’ve learned, so far:

XForms is awesome. When it is adopted by the W3C as a full-blown standard, and production implementations exist, it will not be too soon.

See the above resources for details, but the gist is that HTML forms have outstayed their welcome. Anyone who has ever developed a web app knows this. You end up jumping through all kinds of hoops to do validation, conditionally hiding fields or sections of forms, building dynamic dropdown lists, and what I call progressive disclosure, or showing/hiding entire sections of forms based on field selections or other criteria. Top it all off with coming up with ways to handle the data on submission and you’ve got a large portion of your development effort going towards mundane tasks.

XForms changes all of that. You define your data structure using XML. You can even use an XML Schema if you want. Then, you describe the form using XML. The UI widgets on the form get bound to pieces of the data structure (the model) using XPath. The widgets are described in a presentation-independent way. That means the form can easily be used in devices other than the web browser.

When the form gets submitted, the form data magically fills in the data structure you defined and the server receives a well-formed XML document.

An XForms page can also dynamically pull data in to the form. So, for example, you could write a web service that could be used to populate a dropdown list. I’m assuming you’d do something like this to retrieve the data after it is submitted for editing. So far, I haven’t tried any examples where the data actually gets stored in a back-end repository and then gets retrieved for editing.

The idea of defining the data model separate from the presentation of the form is very appealing. And I like the ability to tie the validation in to the data model via XML schema. It reminds me of the good ole Notes days where documents are collections of fields that can be displayed in many different ways as defined by one or more forms. But, this is all based on XML and Schemas.

Once you get those documents into the repository (relational, native XML, or content management system) you can do anything with it you want like build “views” or lists of documents sorted any way you want using XSLT.