I, for one, welcome our North Korean traffic wardens
Wednesday 7th of July 2010, 07:51:03 pm
Futuristic deployment methods are futuristics.
Monday 21st of June 2010, 10:44:18 am
If you're thinking of buying Ziro, the puzzle game, you may want to wait to see if the developers ever write a fix for the terrible mouse lag that the game suffers from. A game this simple (think iPhone app game) should not, and frankly speaking cannot, come with mouse lag. Yet it does. Terrible mouse lag. This makes the game utterly unplayable. Save your $5 or so for now. It really isn't worth the hatred you'll be spewing at your screen.
Computing bezier curve bounding boxes
Tuesday 20th of April 2010, 05:04:04 am
Have you ever needed to compute the bounding box for a vector shape? You may have run into the problem that computing bounding boxes for lines is really easy, and that computing bounding boxes for arbitrary curves is, in fact, not. Not to worry! If you don't mind getting your brain dirty, I suffered this problem so that you don't have to. Compute the bounding box for Bezier curves in the knowledge that math is on your side!
Photoshop CS4 without all the rest
Sunday 3rd of January 2010, 10:28:45 am
I had to redo my computer setup, as I literally fried my system disk (ever seen an HD short circuit? There's a lot of smoke...) and that meant reinstalling Photoshop CS4. This time round I wanted to make sure I only installed what I needed, without all the crap Adobe's installer forces on you, so in the hopes that Adobe doesn't delete the post, instructions on how are here.
If they do, a verbatim copy:
All the dependencies that are not marked as "critical" in the proxy payload XML files for Bridge3All, CSIAll, Photoshop11-Core and Photoshop11-Core x64 need to be commented off, prior to running the installer. This will give you the ability to uncheck everything (except for Drive x64, which can be turned off by turning off the 32 bit version of Drive, so no loss there).
In order to just get Photoshop installed without all the unwanted/unnecessary components, the only things that need to be checked are:
- CMaps (required for proper typesetting for fonts with CID maps, which you care about even if you don't know what that means)
- All Color specifications
- Photoshop (obviously)
- Type Support (lets you type text in photoshop. rather essential)
- XMP Panels (required for the user inferface)
Optional, but recommended:
- Fonts (quite a number of good fonts, no reason not to install these)
- Photoshop Support
- Search for Help
- Commoncolor components (if you care about synchronised/calibrated color work)
- Update Manager (updates are good)
Thursday 20th of August 2009, 02:46:27 am
If you do, then perhaps this plugin that I wrote will be of use to you; it lets you use standard tab delimited tables in your wiki, turning it into proper tables when you view the page in a browser.
This allows you to keep your data as pure as possible (ie, not having to stick in annoying wiki tabling formatting) for processing by other programs or utilities.
Enjoy.
Playing games in windowed mode
Saturday 6th of June 2009, 08:39:26 am
First off, if you play Maple Story, go away.
If that statement didn't make sense to you, allow me to explain. "Maple Story" is an online multiplayer RPG gamy that doesn't let users play it windowed, because that lets you run bots (gasp! imagine!). A bit like WoW, really. Of course, that's also incredibly inconvenient in an age of instant messengers, and so every single Maple Story player has been begging for a way to play it windowed.
Which has made them clutter up the internet something awful. Their millions of posts on forums about getting their game to run in a window makes trying to find a proper solution to running games (or more precise, applications) that use DirectX in windowed mode a ridiculous pain.
Now, I've suffered for you, so you don't have to. Before we continue: the "-win", "-window", "-windowed" etc. command line flags rarely ever work because they're not a universal. Programmers have to explicitly add argument interpretation to their executable, and most will go "fuck that, that's what the in-app configuration is for". So tough luck, don't you dare spout that nonsense on the internet as a viable solution.
With that covered, in the hopes that you don't have to go through the same pain I did, here's the list of programs you will want to have run across (but most likely won't have, because searching for them takes forever):
This is an old (2006), discontinued, DirectX hook utility that lets you play, yes, Maple Story in windowed mode. Also, Starcraft. However, that's pretty much where its compatibility ends. Want something more powerful? You then probably want...
3D-Analyze (click on files, then click the 3D-Analyze picture)
This is an even older (2004), and discontinued, DirectX hook utility that lets you force a hell of a lot of DirectX properties, as well as faking different graphics devices, to see how well the application copes. One of the options is a "force windowed" mode, but like DxWnd, this doesn't work with all applications. If it doesn't, you'll probably want to try...
D3DWindower (real version at geocities but it's a Japanese page, which I doubt you'll be able to read)
This is a slightly more up to date utility (2007) which will hook into DirectX and tries to make it behave, window wise. Generally, this is a good utility, but if it doesn't work, don't despair just yet, because there's always the ultimate solution...
Why is this the ultimate solution? Because this is a DirectX debugging utility. It may be older than DirectX 10, but it was designed to hook into DirectX so hardcore that it would allow DirectX programmers to debug full-screen applications by forcing their fullscreen resolution to something smaller than full screen.
Because of this. it seems to work for most applications that DxWnd, 3D-Analyze and D3DWindower do not work for. Unsurprisingly, this utility too is discontinued, although development stopped in may 2008, so it's only been discontinued relatively recently. Despite of this, if your game is preDX10, good chance this hook will do magical things to otherwise ridiculously stubborn games (I'm looking at you, Lego Star Wars II)
So there you go, four utilities that you can try to get your games to bloody run the way you want them to, rather than the way the game companies want you to. And not a moment too soon, here I was fearing I had to learn Windows and DirectX programming so I could write a stupid fullscreen-disabling-hook myself.
If you're a windows programmer with DirectX knowledge, do the rest of the world a favour... update D3DLookingGlass (it's open source!) for us so it also works with DX10.
Cheers!
- Pomax
Monday 23rd of February 2009, 06:05:58 am
An interesting alternate theory to plate tectonics.
Presented a bit too american "listen to me being right"ish, but as a hypothesis certainly worth examining. I'd love to see some studies into it.
Remarkable People you never heard of.
Monday 23rd of February 2009, 04:32:31 am
Norman Borlaug
Norman received a Nobel prize for his services to humanity: he saved an estamated one billion lives, that's with a b, by moving to developing nations, and helping them develop and grow crops suitable for the local terrains. You could think of him as being single-handedly responsible for overpopulation, but overpopulation occurs when nations already have too much food, not in nations where people die every day from no food whatsoever. So really, he's roughly the biggest hero the world ever had.
Norman's still alive, and can be found on wikipedia.
Stan Meyer
Meyer invented an engine that would let you fill it with water, it would do the hydrolisys for you, and would then derive power from the H2 + O2 reaction. Twenty years ago. It worked fine.
Stan died from food poisoning, and despite probably the most effective revolution in automotive research, never became known to the world. He doesn't even have a wikipedia page. He can be found mentioned on youtube, and that's really not enough credit by far.
Monday 16th of February 2009, 07:27:09 am
I recently watched Death Race 2000. A cult classic featuring Carradine and Stalone, and by today's standards a film so tame you can watch it with your parents and both chuckle.
Then today I watched the reinterpretation, Death Race, feating Statham, and noticed a few things. For one, it spends a good fifteen minutes setting up a plot point that would have been far better exposed as a brief mention once he's in prison. This isn't The Shawshank Redemption, the film isn't plot driven.
In fact, most of the film is The Running Man levels of "I am bored, let's watch some film entertaining. Aside from the film making the classic mistake that the villain has gotten where she is by being shrewd suddenly overplaying her hand, most of it is just explosions and Mad Max style cars.
The epilogue was completely pointless, but then a movie without any world outside the main event can't really be expected to give anything outside explosions and cars, and that's fine, except for the final frame.
I quote: "The motor vehicle action sequences depicted in this film are dangerous. all stunts were performed in controlled environments with professionally trained stunt crews on closed roads. no attempts should be made to duplicate any action, driving or car play scenes herein portrayed"
...
The only possible reason I can think of that makes sense for this text to appear before the credits roll (as opposed to, say, at the end of the credit for judicial purposes because the US rightfully assumes that on a population of 300 million, a low percentage of idiotic kids is still a hell of a lot of idiotic kids), is to actually get as many people as possible to reenact this movie in real life. If the film wasn't enough to make you fantasise about racing around killing each other, here's just an extra bit of nudge to make you go "jesus, how cool would this be if they have to warn me not to do this?"
I wonder if the US film industry can be sued for encouraging overt reverse psychology practices. It probably can.
What they don't teach you about 64 bit
Monday 27th of October 2008, 06:52:01 am
I got a new laptop, courtesy of "The Company".
I will probably give it back to them, because I hate it: it has no dedicated home/end buttons (Fn left/right? wtf?), there are no empty keys above the left/right cursor so forget about finding the cursor block without looking at it, the parts of the casing that my palms rest on heat up, making using it actually painful; there is a switch for the wifi, but not one for bluetooth. Oh yes, and lest I forget:
SHINY SUPER REFLECTIVE 15.4" WIDESCREEN MONITOR AT 1900x1200
What the hell were the thinking? I run my own 17" widescreen laptop on 1440x900, because that's comfortable to human eyes. cramming more pixels in less surface is not progress, and probably funded by the American Association of Opticiens.
But the worst part is that reflection. A very shiny monitor, of which the surface is not perfectly smooth, means you see every vibration because while the desktop doesn't shake, the light reflected on the surface of the screen does. This is a problem you simply don't have with "cheaper" monitors. Who thought this was a good idea for laptops that people have to work with, rather than have to show off? Never mind what the person next to me can see on my screen, *I* can't see what I'm doing under normal office lighing conditions... we have these things in our walls called windows, LIGHT COMES IN!
...but of course, that is not the issue of this post, really. The issue is that this laptop had the technical specs to make one go "tasty!". It has 4 gigs of RAM and a Core 2 Duo T9300, which is a bit of a beast, and also a nicely 64 bit processor. The laptop itself is a DELL Vostro 1510, and because it's a DELL it didn't come preloaded with a 64 bit OS, because DELL hasn't done 64 bit operating systems for over a year now.
This struck me as odd. A 32 bit OS will not be able to access all of the 4GB ram it is outfitted with, so what were they thinking? Why this theoretical monster without an operating system to properly make use of it?
After half a day of installing Windows Server 2008 x64 on it, I now have my own reasons for severely disliking the 64 bit versions of Windows that DELL decided not to carry anymore...
Reason 1) PatchGuard
Windows XP 64 as of SP2, Windows Vista x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64 apparently come with what is the most annoying kernel level feature yet: a system that monitors the running kernel to make sure nothing hooked into it.
I don't know about you, but I sandbox applications on a more than once a day basis. And not my web browser (I blame Google's Chrome for making people now commonly believe 'sandboxing' - and no, it't not a legal verb - means running your browser in a throw-away environment), but genuine applications that have the nasty habit of placing files where I don't want them, modifying my registry invisibly, and generally being a nuisance to uninstall properly.
Sandboxie is a blessing - it also doesn't work under x64 Windows because Microsoft became paranoid about kernel hooks.
Reason 2) I am a java developer.
This means I either use Netbeans, or Eclipse. Or a text editor if I just need a quick test class, but not using netbeans, I spend 99.9% of my java time in Eclipse.
Eclipse does not like x64 at all... I can install the 64 bit version of java as much as I like, and eclipse will still require an experimental build to function properly.
Reason 3) Forced Driver Signing
Want to install a freeware bit of software that had the sense to not pay Microsoft thousands of dollars to have their driver digitally signed? Welcome to hell.
You used to be able to turn that off, thanks to the marvel that is bcdedit, but no, they had to go and remove that the same time they invented PatchGuard. If the drivers are unsigned, unpleasant things ensue.
All in, it's too much of a lockdown to be able to enjoy, so I'll spend the *rest* of today installing Windows Server 2008, the 32 bit version.
"But Mike! Why not install [insert Linux version here]?"Do I seem the kind of person who wants to learn how to configure a new OS from scratch to my liking on a monday? (If you answered yes, I've been giving off entirely the wrong impression >.>)