*Unfortunately, Papa Johns wasn’t aware they were sponsoring me, and I’m pretty sure I kept that local Papa Johns afloat during the economic downtimes.

Shortly after my 30th birthday I decided it was time to create Trigah 3.0 and actually work at fixing the glaring issues that had popped up throughout my 20’s. I had two ways to go about this transition:
Complete 180
1. Get a job as a construction worker
2. Spend nights in dance class
3. Learn to cook and portion my meals

Augment Current Lifestyle
1. Find a way to get some exercise at work
2. Find a way to raid and get exercise
3. Find a way to eat healthy without learning to cook

I decided to look into ways to augment my current lifestyle, as I enjoyed every aspect of it minus the weight issues and aversion to sun. The first step I got really lucky with, as a group of friends from work were going to the company gym during lunch and I began tagging along. I strongly suggest getting at least one gym buddy, as I know personally that I will use any excuse to skip out on going to the gym unless someone is relying on me to go with them.

The second step was to buy a treadmill for my house and a TrekDesk. I had read in the past about research showing that if people walked 1mph during the work day they could lose up to 57 pounds in a year. I didn’t see myself actually using a treadmill at work, as I could just imagine the strange looks people would give me as they walked by my office, but I felt I could definitely use it for raiding and general WoW playing.

I looked into a lot of DIY options for creating your own treadmill desk, and though many had had huge success in building their own, none of theirs seemed like something I would want in my living room (let alone the fact that I am horrible at DIY construction). I opted to get the TrekDesk, and began to use it for raiding, general WoW playing, working from home, and watching TV. I found that for WoW playing, I could comfortably set the speed to 2mph and have no issues performing in game (3mph made my hand move too much). I decided that for any raid content that was on farm status, I would hop on the treadmill and raid. This led to many 4 hour sessions where I would end up having walked 8 miles, but didn’t even notice due to being engrossed in the game.

As for eating, I decided to go with Diet to Go for my meals. I initially was uncertain about the cost of the meals, but after tallying up the cost of Papa Johns during the week, plus all of the breakfasts and lunches that I bought at the deli in my office building ($7-$9 per meal), I realized that I might actually be saving money by getting these meals. The big thing is to not get discouraged if you hit a weight plateau. As I was doing the low carb plan, I hit a weight plateau and after 2 weeks gave up and went back to Papa Johns and my old habits. The Trigah 3.0 revelation was when I decided to get back on Diet to Go and try again, and though I hit the same weight plateau as before, I was able to burst through it a month later. I personally am doing the 6 day a week plan for meals, as I figure there will be times where I am going out with friends for a meal, or may miss a meal and end up with an extra one during the weekend.

A great online tool I found to use for managing your day-to-day eating and exercise is TheDailyPlate . Through this I was able to track my daily caloric intake and gauge the amount of calories burned during exercise. This was extremely helpful for me as I did a lot of travel for work where I didn’t have my meals and had to forage on my own. I began to realize that 1200 calories is a heck of a lot less than I used to eat, and that many times when I’d stop by a McDonalds I’d approach or go over the 1200 calorie limit in only one meal. Through this site I was able to get a real understanding of what a portion actually is, and better understand how my old eating habits led to my current state of affairs.

I am now approaching the 8th month of Trigah 3.0, and I am down 68 pounds from my WoW maximum. I would never suggest that we change our hobbies and passions just to get in shape, but I strongly suggest we augment them so that we can enjoy them longer.

Having killed Heroic Lich King with my 10-man guild in late June, I was finally able to break away from the grasp that World of Warcraft had on me for close to 5 and a half years. After leaving the game, I found myself spending more and more time at work grinding away at real life accomplishments, and returning home late at night confused as to how to spend the few hours before bed.

I borrowed books from Chingy to relearn Java and brush up on Service Oriented Architectures, but as exciting as those topics are after a long day of work, I found myself wanting more. I would sometimes log into Facebook and just play Bejeweled Blitz until I it was time for sleep, but even that was not fulfilling. The problem I have is that I have a huge backlog of games that I have bought during the course of my WoW career, and they are all sitting there waiting for me to remove the shrinkwrap and begin playing them. The task at hand to play and beat all of these games is daunting to say the least, and I have no idea where to begin. I created a Google Docs form for some friends listing the 32 games I currently have sitting here unfinished to get their opinions, and would like to open up the polls to anyone with suggestions. The full list of games are:
007 Quantum of Solace
Assassin’s Creed
Batman Arkham Asylum (~40% through already)
Battlefield Bad Company
Bayonetta
Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway
Brutal Legend
Bully
Burnout Revenge
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
Call of Duty World at War
Fallout 3
FIFA Soccer 10
Gears of War 2
God of War 2
Grand Theft Auto IV (~40% through already)
Halo 3 ODST
Kingdom Hearts
Kingdom Hearts 2
Metal Gear Solid 4
Metroid Prime 3
Okami
Resident Evil Code Veronica X (>50% through already)
Resident Evil 4
Resistance
Resistance 2
Starcraft
Starcraft 2
Uncharted
Uncharted 2
Warhawk
Zelda Twilight Princess

On the other hand, one could argue that AT&T would have had pay-per-byte plans all along, since consumers would officially have no other option than to pay AT&T whatever they demanded.

So, why the change AT&T? Read more about it here.

A couple of somewhat minor gameplay changes have a significant impact on the game by significantly cutting down on the repetition and grinding.  I play games for fun and these changes allow me to focus more on what I find fun in this game.

1. The majority of battles are unique and present a challenge
2. Health is refilled and debuffs (poison, magics, etc.) are removed at the end of every battle
3. Both during a fight or immediately after losing a fight, you have the option to “retry”, which places you right outside of the last encounter, allowing you to make the necessary setup changes to your group before re-engaging, or allowing you to bypass the fight completely if possible
4. The linear nature of the maps allows you to know where you are going and significantly cuts down on the pointless wandering of its predecessors

With those changes mentioned let me go over the main aspect of the game, the combat system.  The combat happens in real time, with an action meter filling constantly, no more turn based battles and watching the same fire spell be cast and the same boring burning effect take place on the character.  Yeah it’s cool to see Odin summoned and take out a couple monsters, but watching that same cutscene hundreds of times a game is not fun.  Luckily this isn’t the case here.  Once action meter is full, it will execute the actions that you have selected.  You can select actions that consume a segment of the meter (or multiple segments for a more powerful action),  or you can select “auto-battle” and your actions will be automatically selected to fill the meter for you.  Now, although this does sound like it is removing the decisions from the game, the majority of the decisions are made at a higher level.  This game promotes the player from the micro manager they had been made into in the previous games to a more hands-off manager that makes the larger decisions.  This is much more fun.  The thing most JRPGs have been missing is a repeat last set of actions button.  I hate the grind and repetition.  XIII doesn’t avoid this completely but if you customize an attack there is a repeat button to have the character repeat those same actions, and you can avoid a good number of enemies if you want.

The real strategic decisions are made by deciding the roles that your characters should be performing at any moment.  Your team is usually made up of 3 characters, although not always.  The one combat twist is staggering.  Each enemy has a stagger meter and filling up this meter will stagger an enemy leaving them much more vunerable to damage.  The classes break down to this, Attacker, Staggerer, Tank, Medic, Player Buffer and Enemy debuffer.  Since you start every battle with full health no reason to have a medic right?, so your style is up to you, start off getting buffed and debuffing enemy or just come out all attack and hope to take out an enemy before you need to switch to a setup that has a medic.  Now when getting healed, do you want to have your other characters still attacking or maybe distracting the enemy so they don’t kill the medic.  Each set of charater roles is called a paradigm and so switching between this is called a paradigm shift.  So once you get past the naming, this is where the heart of the game is, and it’s great.  At any point during a fight you can call for a paradigm shift and all of your team members change what the are doing to correspond to their new role.  So although you could get through a good number of the fights but just staying in one setup like (Attacker, Stagger and medic) it would be much longer and ultimately boring.  Also the harder enemies and especially bosses would not succumb to that.  So the goal is figuring out the balance, figuring out when you can go all out, and when you need to defend and heal.  The battles have a decent variety.  You don’t face fight after fight of 3 monster x and one monster y.  You get introduced to a new enemy type and then fight 3 of type “A” and one of type “B”, after that maybe 2 and 2.  The variety combined with the scoring system makes the game a puzzle strategy game if you want to approach it that way.  After each fight you get a report and are rated based on the time it took you beat the enemy with a score of 0 to 5 stars.  So figuring out how to beat each encounter and get a 5 star rating is where the strategy puzzle aspect comes in.  Sure you could beat those guys in 2 mins if you had a medic the whole time, but you won’t get 5 stars so can you do it and get the 5 stars?  This simple mechanic and the variety of tactics that it takes to beat each enemy type with a 5 star rating is what keeps the game working for me, especially paired with the simplicity of restarting battles and linear maps.

The game does have issues though, but luckily most of them can be overlooked.  First I hate the characters and especially the English voice actors.  They are all straight terrible and I’m so sick of these JRPG character types.  But that being said you can skip every cut scene easily and it doesn’t hurt the gameplay at all.  I watched the first parts but got so annoyed and begin skipping all and it was the most freeing experience I’ve had playing these games.  I normally have felt that I played these games to see the story, but haven’t been impressed with JRPG story telling in a long time and skipping all the cut scenes no matter how pretty the graphics is so worth it.  Also the upgrade system for each character role is done in this awkward and unusable 3D environment.  The upgrade system is essentially a line with a couple branches coming off and there is no reason for it to be in 3D.  It just makes it confusing and a waste of time.  Dead space has the exact same upgrade system (as do many other games) but they are all done in 2D because that makes sense.  I also hate the weapon and accessory upgrade system.  I’m not going into how it functions, except to say, they made it complicated for no good reason.  This system is so annoying and unrewarding that I recommend just reading a FAQ, figuring out which weapon you want each character to use and then just stick with that one for the game.  That way you can avoid the grinding and upgrading system as much as possible.

In summation, the battle system when treated like a real time, tactical puzzle game is fun and rewarding, and I’m happy they have moved beyond the micromanagement and focused on strategic decisions.  Because what I find fun is a challenge.  I love a good story and characters too, but I’ll look elsewhere for that.

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Although I’d love to see this come to fruition, something tells me that this game has a long ways to go before it can please X-Com fans. I wholly support the effort though.

Thanks to Kotaku for making us aware of this news.

The bad news: They announced the next X-Com game will be a first-person shooter with “strategic elements”.

While I look forward to watching this game’s development progress, I can’t help but wonder why after almost 20 years we still have less-than-authentic games such as UFO: Aftermath that even attempts to bring back the strategic and tactical glory that was the original X-Com.

The original X-Com still ranks as my favorite game of all-time. You can still find it on Steam. Go get it.

In this article, I will briefly describe the steps I took in order to configure some basic to intermediate-level caching throughout our system. Although I did not go as far as to gather metrics on the performance gain, I will say that our entire team noticed a 30-50% improvement across the board – and all from some fairly easy work.

Because of our non-JBoss native application stack – we’re using WebLogic 11g – I chose to select EhCache as my cache provider of choice.

Package EhCache

For this primer we will be using EhCache 1.5. Download ehcache-1.5.0.jar (link) and place it in your /lib directory. Using your chosen build script (Ant, Maven, etc.), ensure that ehcache-1.5.0.jar is built to your EAR so that the classpath loader will find the library at startup.

Configure the Provider

Next, we need to make sure that EhCache (or your chosen cache provider) is properly configured. Modify components.xml and tell Seam to load the EhCache provider.

components.xml

<cache:eh-cache-provider name="cacheProvider"/>

The last step is to configure your persistence provider. Normally with Seam this configuration is broken up into several profiles (local, dev, test, and prod). In this example, I will be showing how I configured my persistence provider for our “local” profile.

Note that there are several options for hibernate.cache.provider_class; I have chosen to use the Singleton provider in this example.

persistence-local.xml

<!-- ... other properties .... ->
<property name="hibernate.cache.use_query_cache" value="true"/>
        <property name="hibernate.use_second_level_cache" value="true"/>
        <property name="hibernate.default_batch_fetch_size" value="16"/>
        <property name="hibernate.generate_statistics" value="true"/>
<property name="hibernate.cache.provider_class" value="net.sf.ehcache.hibernate.SingletonEhCacheProvider"/>
<property name="net.sf.ehcache.configurationResourceName" value="/ehcache2.xml"/>

Note in the example above that we have set hibernate.generate_statistics equal to true; this will initially help you tune your caching provider by enabling you to compare the query statistics (once properly setup via your log4j configuration).

Annotate Your Entities

Be aware that Seam comes with built-in caching; you can always annotate your entity java beans with the @Cache annotation. However, in this primer, we are building a path towards a more robust and advanced cache configuration. Even though the annotations remain the same, how they will be interpreted and used by EhCache will be up to us.

Annotating your entities are a simple and effective means to provide high-level caching of your application’s data. The three main cache strategies that we will concern ourselves with are:

READ_WRITE – should be used for objects that will be read and written to; these objects will change

READ_ONLY – should be used in cases where the object does not change; this tells Hibernate and EhCache to strongly cache this object

NONSTRICT_READ_WRITE – should be used in cases where an object is rarely written to; it will be cached to a degree less than READ but more than READ_WRITE

TRANSACTIONAL – this strategy is not available with EhCache but can be used with other cache providers

In my first entity, I have an object (User.java) that is both read and written; I want it to be cached, but it will need to be designated as READ_WRITE. User objects are heavily queried throughout our system but often modified. Later, I will show how you can provide more control over the caching of a specific object or region.

@Entity @Audited
@Table(name="USERS")
@Cache(usage=CacheConcurrencyStrategy.READ_WRITE
@Name("user")
@Scope(ScopeType.EVENT)
@BypassInterceptors
public class User implements Serializable
{
    /** the users internal id **/
	@Id
	@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
	private Long id;

    /** the userid/logon **/
	@UserPrincipal
	@Length(min=5, max=32)
	private String userId;

 // Rest of class below...

In my second entity I have an object called AdminValue.java; this object is used as metadata throughout the system. This object populates dropdowns and for the most part will not change.

@Entity @Audited
@Table(name = "APP_ADMIN_VALUES")
@Cache(usage=CacheConcurrencyStrategy.NONSTRICT_READ_WRITE)
@Name("adminValue")
@Scope(ScopeType.EVENT)
public class AdminValue implements Serializable
{

    /** the id **/
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    @Column(name="ID")
    private Long id;

    /**
     * name of the value
     */
    @NotNull
    @Length(max=50)
    @Index(name="IDX_ADMIN_VALUE_NAME")
    private String name;

    // Rest of class below...

Next, we have an object (MenuItem.java) that truly does not change. It is populated when the application deploys and will rarely, if ever, change. Because it is used throughout interface, though, I want it to be cached heavily to speed up page rendering.

@Entity
@Cache(usage=CacheConcurrencyStrategy.READ_ONLY, region = "com.bah.englink.MenuItem")
@Name("menuItem")
@Scope(ScopeType.EVENT)
@Table(name="APP_MENU_ITEMS")
public class MenuItem implements Serializable
{
	@Id
	@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
	private int id; //Uniquie id for the menu item

	@ManyToOne(optional=true)
	@Index(name="IDX_MENU_ITEM_FK01")
	private MenuItem parent; //Defines the parent associated with item, can be null for the top level

	@NotNull
	@Length(max=64)
	@Index(name="IDX_MENU_ITEM_NAME")
	private String name; //Name that displays on the screen

        // Rest of class below...

Using Query Hints with Named Queries

Named queries are particularly useful; they are strongly typed, and are therefore checked at compile-time, and cached via Seam/Hibernate JPA. You can provide further caching of named queries like so:

@NamedQueries({
@NamedQuery(
    name="lookupCategoryByName",
    query="from AdminCategory ac where ac.name=:name order by ac.name asc",
    hints={@QueryHint(name="org.hibernate.cacheable", value="true")}),
@NamedQuery(
    name="lookupCategoryByNameByModule",
    query="from AdminCategory ac where ac.name=:categoryName and ac.adminModule.name=:moduleName",
    hints={@QueryHint(name="org.hibernate.cacheable", value="true")})
})
public class AdminCategory implements Serializable
{

Advanced Configuration Via Regions

Here is where the fun begins; using the ehcache2.xml that we specified in our persistence provider, we can define minute details regarding how a particular object (or region of objects) are cached. This feature provides a high-level of control. There are many aspects of these configuration options that are a bit above my head, so I’ve outlined some examples that I used to show what is possible.

Whenever specifying a region with your @Cache annotation, you should try to have a corresponding region defined in your ehcache2.xml. Here are some examples.

//@Cache(usage=CacheConcurrencyStrategy.READ_WRITE, region = "com.bah.englink.ejb.User")

<cache name="com.bah.englink.ejb.User"
           maxElementsInMemory="10000"
           maxElementsOnDisk="20000"
           eternal="false"
           overflowToDisk="true"
           diskSpoolBufferSizeMB="100"
           timeToIdleSeconds="4000"
           timeToLiveSeconds="8000"
           memoryStoreEvictionPolicy="LRU"
            />
@Cache(usage=CacheConcurrencyStrategy.READ_ONLY, region = "com.bah.englink.MenuItem")

<cache name="com.bah.englink.MenuItem"
           maxElementsInMemory="10000"
           maxElementsOnDisk="5000"
           eternal="false"
           overflowToDisk="true"
           diskSpoolBufferSizeMB="40"
           timeToIdleSeconds="9000"
           timeToLiveSeconds="18000"
           memoryStoreEvictionPolicy="LFU"
            />

Note, the bundled ehcache2.xml that comes with ehcache-1.5.0.jar has many more examples for you to review and understand.

Logging

If you would like to see exactly which objects EhCache is storing, and when/if cache objects are being hit, you can turn on debug output from EhCache via your log4j.xml settings.

 <category name="org.hibernate.cache">
	<priority value="DEBUG"/>
   </category>
[/sourecode]

After doing so, you should see cache output, such as in the example below.
[sourcecode language='text']
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-90
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-66
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-65
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-51
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-89
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-82
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-88
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-1004
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-1005
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-14
15:42:44,107 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-83
15:42:44,123 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-26
15:42:44,123 DEBUG [ReadOnlyCache] Caching: com.bah.englink.MenuItem#-64

Conclusion

I hope this has been a useful, if intermediate, review of caching in your Seam-based application using Hibernate and EhCache. Please feel free to let me know what I have missed or if you find any mistakes.

More Resources

Hibernate: Truly Understanding Second-Level Cache

Second-Level Cache with EhCache