madalien.com

A little pause to think

Posted by daf on 2006-04-27 at 22:47

Today would have been a normal day hadn’t my internet connection been down, so after I thought up of a bunch of things that I wanted to do and realizing that all of them required an internet I decided to sit down, and start typing this.

I don’t write much, mostly because when I do I end up rewriting the everything over and over again (this time being no exception), which becomes tiresome and boring so you see why I avoid it, still since I’m stuck offline I decided to write something since it was long overdue, what point is having a blog if I don’t post in it.

First of all what’s happened so far. School/work is going fine, and yes work a little summer thing at a computer turned permanent with me working on weekends repairing computers and selling computer hardware, oddly enough that’s what most of my school colleges would like to do, I’m not sure they have any idea how a customer can be annoying sometimes :p.

On a more personal note I practically stopped all coding and stuff, at the time it was something I did because it was fun, these days it’s work, and I already have enough work so I find it better use of my recreational time to spend it in the World of Warcraft, that’s right one more falls pray to it’s charms and I have no regrets :p

I must say the concept is a dam good one, not WoW specifically but the all MMO thing, it’s a game you play alone or in group but others are always present, maybe this is the next big step in gaming, that we are no longer the lonely hero in a virtual world but one of many other persons, the advantage is that it makes PC gaming as much of a social even as console gaming was/is (at least for me, but I don’t play that much on consoles) the down side is that your achievements will be compared to that of other players and not everyone likes competition.

Returning to what brought me to write this, it’s funny how one becomes dependent on something like internet and how it changes your perception of your environment, online I never felt alone, I always have my contact list there with all my buddies at a clicks distance, now I can’t, and that strange feeling of truly being alone as set in again. Anyways being offline for a wile is always good for something.

Until next time, have fun and enjoy your life’s.

7-Zip Colorix Changes

Posted by daf on 2006-01-05 at 00:00

As far as I know nobody but me was using my 7-Zip Colorix Icon pack and I couldn’t understand why, they were nicer then the ones 7-Zip has by default and the color coding made it easy to quickly know what kind of archive you were dealing with.

I was talking with a friend about this and he said something that completely surprised me, “People won’t be bother to install an icon pack”, he had a point, so from now on the Colorix icons will be distribute in a full 7-Zip installer, that means you just need to install 7-Zip Colorix Edition and you’re ready to go :) .

Also I’ve asked 7-Zip author to add a link for the Colorix edition to the 7-Zip page, let’s see how that goes…

Main Screen 2.0 Review

Posted by daf on 2006-01-04 at 21:51

Main Screen is an application designed to make the boring and monotonous work of taking screenshots into an easy task.

Almost everyone as had that time where you needed to show what was going on in your screen, maybe you need to show that strange error message to a helping tech friend, or maybe you just want to show a funny/nasty bug, either ways Main Screen will help you do just that.

The setup is simple, just extract and run, some people might prefer this way but personally I’d like to see an installer, just too dam lazy to copy files around :) , anyways I was told that an installer would appear in a future release.

Even before starting Main Screen a thing that might leave some users scratching their heads is the complete lack of any sort help, documentation or quick start guide, even a simple application like Main Screen should have some simple instructions on how to use it it’s a shame since little pearls like “Alt+Print Scrn” key that will take a screenshot of just the active window will go unnoticed.

Main Screen interface is mostly a well designed one, and everything works fine, still there were two big issues that I noticed:

  1. That it didn’t give valid default values for the directory and filename, if left unchanged it gives a “Can’t create Directory” error when taking a screenshot which may take some users a little time to figure out, giving the valid default values and adding “Please check that the Directory and filename are valid” to the error message would fix it.
  2. The “Start Service” Button name, the part of Main Screen that actually takes the screenshots runs in the background not requiring that you leave the interface open and that button will start it, still I think it’s poorly labeled and should be changed to something along the lines of “Enable Main Screen” with a dialog telling the user that Main Screen is running and that he can close the interface. That would make it less cryptic about what it does.

Besides the issues mentioned above everything in Main Screen worked fine, all I had to do was “Start Service” and click on the “Print Scrn” key and it would save a copy of the screen into the defined directory.

Main Screen isn’t perfect but does what it’s supposed to well, it has become a permanent part of my windows installation making the old Print Screen / Open Paint / Paste / Save As days a thing of the past, if like me you take lot’s of screenshots I sincerely recommend you give Main Screen a try, It may make your day :) .

Mega Fantasma Main Screen Page

Unoficial knows best

Posted by daf on 2005-12-26 at 04:02

This seems to be the rule when it comes to a certain bands websites. After seeing and listening to the this mysterious new band called Fort Minor featuring the vocal talent of Linkin Park‘s Mike Shinoda I Just wanted to get to know how this project came about, after going around in circles browsing trough the official website I finally found the answer in forminor.co.uk an unofficial website. For some reason the “official” websites never seem to have this kind of information I expected it to be the first thing the “official” website would display.

Anyways the music’s dam good giving us a taste of the Linkin Park sound without Chester Bennington a bit like it was presented in tracks like High Voltage, so I highly recommend it (but don’t get me wrong, Chester rocks and Linkin Park wouldn’t be the same without him).

PS: And there you have it, an unusual music review from me (darn it even rimed)

Blasted into the pass

Posted by daf on 2005-11-01 at 18:56

Well I was at least in the graphical side, I was just enjoying a nice relaxing 1on1 of Counter Strike: Source when my not so GeForce 6600GT died of unknown causes leaving me without a usable computer (single PCIe enabled PC around).

Luckily a friend had a S3 Virge/DX I could borrow so I was able to get back at my computer but dam, talk about living in the past :p One day a 1280×1024 resolution is a normal thing, today it’s a luxury I can’t afford, not only that but apparently the Microsoft provided driver doesn’t do overlay so no more TV, video gets weird and games, only if they render in software :( .

So I guess I’m left with browsing the web and working on my code, guess that maybe in the end that’s not such a bad thing…