June 2005 - Posts

30 June 2005
Half-Life 2 -- The Next Chapter
Via GameSpot ( full article here ): The good news is that Valve is in the final stages of prepping Half-Life 2: Aftermath, the first expansion for Half-Life 2, due out later this year. Valve likes to describe Aftermath as a new "episode" for the franchise, and we know that it picks up immediately after the events of the main game. The Q/A goes on to say that Alyx will have a much bigger role in the new chapter, and that more emphasis will be placed on interaction with NPC’s (non-playable characters) to get tasks done. It’s expected to be released before the end of the year. Sweet. Read More...
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29 June 2005
Code Formatting for Community Server 1.1 -- Posting From BlogJet
Now let’s see if it picks up the [code] tag from BlogJet; if so this will make me very happy: /// <summary> /// Clean up any resources being used. /// </summary> protected override void Dispose( bool disposing ) { if ( disposing ) { if (components ! = null ) { components.Dispose(); } } base .Dispose( disposing ); } Well, the formatting is a little off (indents), but I can deal with that. What a great CS add-in! Here's the link again. Read More...
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29 June 2005
Code Formatting for Community Server 1.1
Found this little dandy over on the CS forums, let's see if it works: /// <summary> /// Clean up any resources being used. /// </summary> protected override void Dispose( bool disposing ) { if ( disposing ) { if (components ! = null ) { components.Dispose(); } } base .Dispose( disposing ); } Read More...
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29 June 2005
IBM Laying Off 13,000 in US; Hiring 14,000 in India
Un-bloody-f’ing real (it should be noted I am not anti-Indian, I most definitely against practices like this). Shouldn’t this be illegal (yeah, a stretch)? Shouldn’t our government fight to keep American jobs here in America, i.e. tax breaks or whatnot? Having been “displaced” once before myself, crap like this makes me oh so incredibly furious. Yes, financially it makes sense…but it’s a complete dereliction of responsibility IMO. Excuse me while I vomit. Read More...
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26 June 2005
Finally Finished Half-Life 2
I wrapped up play on Half-Life 2 this weekend. The ending was oh so very…anti-climactic, and not very challenging (except for the stryders, tough buggers to kill). The weapon they give you to use is horrifically overpowered for the task at hand, and it was a little impersonal. Oh well, the 20 hours or so I spent getting to the end made it more than worthwhile, and I look forward to going through it again on the hardest setting. Other than the snooze-o-rama ending, the only other complaint(s) I have were lack of variety of bad guys to kill, and lack of vehicles to use (what a tease to give you the fan boat and the dune buggy so early in the game only to realize those are the only ones…bah). I did thoroughly enjoy the bug bait though, I was sad to see the critters part ways with me roughly 2/3 into the game. So now it’s on to Counter-Strike…I hate being the noob in the room though. All in all, the most fantastic FPS PC game I’ve experienced. Half-Life 3? Read More...
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26 June 2005
Longhorn Team RSS Blog
Amidst all the news of Rss being baked into Longhorn, it turns out the Longhorn Rss team has started a blog . Subscribed. Read More...
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26 June 2005
Gallery Updates
Uploaded some new pics, check ’em out . More to come. Read More...
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25 June 2005
Change is in the Air
I had previously stated that I wasn’t going to upgrade to Community Server 1.1 …well, I changed my mind after seeing the new Iroha skin being offered for the new version…what a great skin! So I took the plunge a couple of hours ago and upgraded; it was actually pretty painless due to Ken’s single blog configuration file generator …just plug in the url names you want and his tool will automagically generate the correct SiteUrls.config file, it’s then just a matter of dropping that in your CS web directory (and depending on the url’s you choose creating a directory or two). Rss readers click here to see the changes. Unfortunately 1.1 still retains some of 1.0’s blog quirkiness (mainly Rss stuff), but I was able to port all of my previous mods over in less than an hour (I really need to create a seperate mod project for this, thankfully the CS API will be stable as of 1.2, so I’ll probably wait until that release). You will also need... Read More...
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20 June 2005
Strongly Typed Datasets and XML
I’ve posted numerous times before about my feelings on Xml parsing (and not just as it relates to .Net, but Xml in general), so I won’t rehash my feelings on the subject here except for one sentence: I love Xml, but I abhor querying/parsing/handling it. It’s great in principle, but in practice there is a lot to be desired (IMO). It is getting better though with XQuery support in 2.0, but it’s not quite there yet. So, I found myself with some free time this weekend to work on a small project I’ve wanted to do for a while now, ever since Ray pointed out that our favorite online music streaming company publishes an Xml file of their playlists ; build a WinForms gui that wraps up this playlist and offers more functionality than their website (which is *painfully* slow I might add). The structure of the Xml file is pretty straightforward, but I’m always hesitant to parse Xml files due to the reasons mentioned above, and lack of strong typing (I really don’t like seeing a lot of strings in my... Read More...
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20 June 2005
James Zabiela is Coming to Charlotte
I posted earlier about stumbling across Sasha protege James Zabiela …well it turns out less than two weeks after Sasha was in town , Zabiela will be spinning here as well (Thursday June 30th @ Sunset for any Charlotteans taking notes) promoting his new Renaissance CD Release …unreal! His previous Renaissance mix was incredible; Zabiela is the future of DJ’ing IMO…he has fantastic taste in music and always adds some live touches of his own to mixes. Read More...
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