09.13.07
Posted in Software, Colen Stuff at 11:32 am by Colen
So I’ve been using Vista on my new development machine for a couple of days, after spending the entire weekend getting it set up (ugh). Here are the good things about it so far:
- Breadcrumbs - In explorer, it shows that you’re in “c:\Xxx\Yyy\Zzz” as before, but if you click on “Xxx” it switches to that directory. You can also switch between directories by clicking between them. Overall: Excellent.
- Search ‘as you type’ - just like find in firefox, where there’s a little bar at the top of the explorer window and it filters the list of files as you type into it. Wonderful.
- Start menu keyboard support - hit the windows key and type the first few letters of a program name, and that program runs. It’s like Windows+R on steroids.
- When you hit F2 to rename a file, it selects the filename but NOT the file extension. Oh, this is so nice.
- Windows Aero is very pretty, and the start menu looks nicer.
- The new volume control (with a separate control for each application!) is awesome, and the new clock is very pretty. You can also set up multiple clocks to appear, for different time zones etc.
Bad things so far:
- iTunes bluescreens my machine when I try to import my song library. Waah!
- Apparently I can’t use my geforce 5500 as a secondary graphics card now? It also bluescreened my machine when I tried it.
- Visual studio 2005 doesn’t install properly and needs a patch to work, and complains when you run it. Get with the program, microsoft - can’t you get your flagship IDE working properly on your new OS?
- User Access Control (or whatever it’s called) is annoying sometimes - why should I have to press “continue” 4 times when creating a folder and renaming it? Stupid.
So some good, some bad. However, almost all the good things… those aren’t really “woah we need a new operating system for this!” features. They could easily have been added to windows XP.
The jury’s still out… hopefully service pack 1 will improve things.
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09.08.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 12:31 pm by Colen
<al-qadim> I need a program for my blackberry to roll all my dice for 40k
<al-qadim> so like when 2 squads of fire warriors rapid fire it just shows me a chart of my 48 shots
<scorponok> but that’s not as much fun as rolling lots of dice <:
<khaine_> gaming is a tactile experience
<khaine_> its like saying why have sex when i can watch porn
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08.16.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 5:48 pm by Colen
So we just went to the Wizards announcement of D&D 4th edition. Here’s what I remember:
- The new Player’s Handbook is coming out in May 2008. MM in June, DMG in July.
- The core classes are going to level 30, not level 20.
- Classes are going to have more clearly defined “roles”. I’m not even sure what this means, I guess clerics aren’t healing enough or something.
- They committed to fixing some stupid things, e.g. Wizards not being fun at 1st level because they only have 1 spell, and the party camping whenever the cleric runs out of healing spells.
- They said it’ll still be d20, so presumably it won’t be totally different than 3.5 edition.
- There’ll be a whole set of tools - 3d virtual tabletop, 3d visual character creator, “mechanics” character creator. They showed some pretty videos of these. It looked like a 3d version of maptool, pretty impressive if it’s not faked.
The audience reaction was mixed - some things were cheered, other things (e.g. Dragon and Dungeon going online) were greeted with dead silence.
Also they gave out free t-shirts (good) and USB sticks with images on them. The USB sticks also had an autorun program that crashed when I tried to exit it.
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08.11.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 11:45 am by Colen
“Your download will begin shortly. If it doesn’t, please click here to start it now!”
Why? Why do I have to click anything? I’m a busy man, I don’t want to wait 10 seconds from when the page loads to download your stupid file. Why can’t you just give me it NOW? Are you afraid I’ll forget what I was doing? “Jings, I clicked on the download link and Firefox asked me to save something! I wasn’t expecting that! What’s going on!”
Just give me the file before I stab you in the face, and we’ll all be happy.
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07.26.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 9:43 am by Colen
Just updated Wordpress and installed Akismet to deal with a sudden influx of spam. Let’s hope this fixes it…
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07.10.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 10:38 am by Colen
So I was reading this post about the chap at Verizon who turned down the iPhone, resulting in AT&T picking it up instead and selling 700,000 of them:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/06/the-verizon-guy.html
The post is relatively short, but just look at the comments. Instead of useful comments like “no u r rong”, “I agree with your insightful thoughts” or “lmao wut a newb”, almost every single comment is a “trackback” from another blog. Guys, I just read the article here, I don’t need to see your stupid spin on it as well. Having a trackback URL is fine, but I don’t care about reading the first two sentences! Just stop. Please.
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07.07.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 7:28 pm by Colen
pictar
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07.06.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 6:35 pm by Colen
Walking back to our hotel from the convention center, we can see this advert:
http://www.incompetence-central.co.uk/paint.jpg
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07.05.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 8:28 pm by Colen
Amazingly enough, the new transformers movie doesn’t suck. I’m not entirely sure how that happened; perhaps there was some sort of mixup at the studio. Whatever the reason, you should go see it.
How good is it, you ask? Well, I’m actually going to give the movie two separate ratings. If you’re a reasonably normal person, it gets 6 or 7 out of 10 - it’s pretty funny, the special effects are amazing and almost none of the movie made me wish I wasn’t there. It’s a little juvenile, but hey, it’s for kids. (Although they do throw the word “bitch” around a few times, which I wasn’t entirely happy with, but there you go.)
Major downsides to the movie were the stupid shakeycam(tm) fights and the confusion over who is who, since there’s no easy way to work out which giant pile of metal is an autobot or decepticon unless it’s actively being a tank at the time. My boss, whose only exposure to transformers is me ranting about them and his nephews, said he’d give it “2.5 stars out of 4″ so that’s what I’m basing this off.
Now, if you’re actually a fan of transformers, you fall into one of two categories:
Category 1) Michael Bay better not change ANYTHING! If Optimus Prime doesn’t have his trailer, and if they don’t have Soundwave turning into a boombox, I’m not going to see it! Waahhhhh!
Category 2) I’ll put up with pretty much anything to see transformers on the big screen.
If you belong to category 1, stop reading immediately, because you need to be killed and your body burned. If you belong to category 2, this movie gets 10/10, so stop reading and go and see it.
So anyway. Right now I’m in Columbus, Ohio, at the Origins game convention. We decided to go to this on a couple weeks notice and kinda threw things together in a rush, but it’s going really well - if our sales keep going as well as they did today, we’ll be really happy. In particular, our “sell through rate” is really good - of the people we give demos of Hero Lab to, about 50% actually buy it on the spot - of the rest, 3/4 of them say “This is really sweet, I’ll come back and buy it later” (although not all of them do, which is normal) and the rest just do the “hmm, thanks for the demo” not interested thing. We ended up being busy pretty much all day, and Thursday is always one of the slowest 2 days of the convention. Long may things continue!
Getting here was a bit of an adventure - we had originally planned to fly San Jose -> Las Vegas -> Columbus, since there are no direct flights (apparently nobody actually wants to go to Columbus). However upon getting through security at San Jose, we were informed that the flight was cancelled because of mechanical problems and that they’d have to rebook us on a flight leaving 8 hours later that didn’t get in until 9am the next day, a time so early it doesn’t actually exist.
We declined their kind offer of 8 hours and $20 of meal vouchers at San Francisco airport, and got them to give us a taxi to the mall, where we got a bite to eat and saw the new Die Hard movie (which is possibly one of the best action movies ever made, go see that too). Then we took a second free taxi back to the San Jose airport, where we got a bus to San Francisco airport and then got the red-eye flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, where we waited in their horrible airport before finally getting to Columbus and collapsing into bed at 10am.
Now I’m going to check out some support emails then go to bed. Tomorrow I really need to get to bed early and catch up on my sleep…
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06.09.07
Posted in Colen Stuff at 11:53 am by Colen
I just tried on some old 31″ waist pants that I haven’t worn for like 3 years because they’re too tight… and they fit! yay :D
I am 8 pounds down on my diet, 18 to go.
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