Final Fantasy, a.k.a. FF1, is an NES RPG first published in Japan in 1987 and then in North America 3 years later.  I remember when I first played it as a kid at my friend Dave's house.  It blew my mind.  I would dream about Fighters and Red Mages and making the orbs shine again.

Recently, FF1 was released on the Wii Virtual Console and, even though I already owned it on my NES, I felt the urge to play the classic again without the fear of my NES crashing because I blinked too hard.

So I flipped on my Wii, downloaded the game, and played it for about 2-3 hours a night for a week (keep in mind I logged many, many hours playing this game as a child).  Here are my thoughts on the title.

I just added a new Fep section. I'm going to try to work on a bit more (just ordered this sucker) as making a programming language has been something I've always had an interest in.

First stop: parsers!

During a recent project of mine, I had to do a lot of enum manipulation using the .NET Enum class and I have to say I wasn't impressed. Besides the shortcoming of it not being a generic class (and thus not being especially type-safe), Enum also has some strange inconsistencies in terms of how it handles matched integral types.

Here are some Wezzle screenshots from the latest beta.

As I was working on the PHP classes that Fep was to map to, I realized that it was rather silly for me to re-invent an API for lists since there were already many well-designed ones in existence. In particular, I've found that the .NET 3.5 collections API to be particularly nice to use. Moreover, since everyone and their dog and using .NET now, it would also be familiar to most programmers. Thus, I've decided to use a subset of the .NET collections API for Fep collections.

Disclaimer: This is not the way Fep arrays will work. Refer to the new article on Fep collections for more information.

In this article, I'll write a bit about how I think Fep arrays will look. Keep in mind this a work in progress and is by no means comprehensive. Without further ado...

In PHP, you define an array using the array() construct. Fep will follow the lead of languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Groovy and use the square bracket [] notation.

Initialization

For example, a simple array in PHP is creating like this:

$arr = array(1, 2, 3);

In Fep, this would be done like this:

arr = [1, 2, 3]

PHP bugs me. It's a language with so many inconsistencies, it's just screaming to be cleaned up. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. That's why I'm starting a series of articles on Fep, a cleaned up version of PHP.

I recently spent a couple hours yesterday to fix a problem I was having with my custom EnumStringType (see this post).

Basically, what was happening was when my repository was making a call to ICriteria<FooType>.List(), which in turn called the Set method of EnumStringType, it was always passing in a lowercase string instead of an enum instance.

NHibernate lets you map C# enums to database columns. This can be quite convenient in cases where you have a database column for something like gender. To map them, you follow the procedure outlined here.

That works all fine and dandy, as long as the strings you want to store in the database are valid C# identifiers.

As someone who has had to write a lot of IE-only code (against my will, I swear!), I was pleased to hear that Firefox 3.0 added support for the IE JavaScript function window.showModalDialog. Being in the middle of re-writing an IE-only web application, I thought this would simplify rewriting the modal dialogs to be compatible with both browsers.

Unfortunately, I don't think the folks at Mozilla put their best effort into this one.