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Saturday 23 May 2009

Public Safety

Dave posted a link to a new V trailer on facebook. Sure, looks nice enough, but only about 19 seconds in i see something very important. Public Safety important.

A bookshelf falling.

Now i am as crazy as the next guy, but not anchoring bookshelves to the wall? Thats institution crazy right there. Its very common for all of us to think about our homes and offices as someplace safe, a slowmoving area. But reality can be cruel, reality can surprise us, and thats when we will find ourselfes quite unwillingly in the emergencyroom, bleeding and whining in shock and in pain.

Now i bet you start thinking about what a hassle anchoring a bookshelf would be. But i assure you, its not that bad. It doesnt involve heavy duty wallsurgery or even that much work. Since most everyone has atleast one bookshelf from ikea you will have what you need at home. Its a simple little strap. Yes, thats right, the little plastic bag with things you ignored when you put it together. If you have thrown it away use a L-bracket of your choice, it really doesnt need to be that big, just make sure you fasten it properly in the wall behind the shelf.

Its always better to be safe than sorry. The next rainy day, go over your home and/or your workplace, you could even involve the whole family and make a game out of it! Lets find those hidden dangers!

Good Luck, and Happy Hunting!

Friday 22 May 2009

Gel


Tetris crossed with Pengo! Why hasn't this been done before? Gel on Xbox Live Arcade has got Pengo's sliding and pushing blocks, now in 3d but instead of just matching the special blocks and busting the ice, you've got to get four like colours together to make them dissolve. That's nifty on it's own, but Gel ads combos. The gel blocks don't disappear when you group them, they slowly dissolve. If you can get another same coloured block alongside the gooey mass before it goes pop, it'll dissolve too giving you a combo where the points will climb as you keep adding blocks and the board will clear faster. It takes a mediocre puzzle game up to a fantastic puzzle game, worth trying out for yourself.

Monday 11 May 2009

Sometimes Free Is Better

If you’ve used Microsoft development products before, you’ve most likely come across Source Safe. It’s “ok” I guess but does suffer from some problems, and I’ve been too close to more than one corrupted database for comfort.

A more robust version control solution is the open source Subversion. Widely used in the Java community it’s also available for use over the Microsoft side of the fence. As well as being very robust, a couple of other features are it’s optimistic Copy-Modify-Merge model and excellent support for distributed teams. All these together make it suitable for use on large projects.

Version control isn’t just for code either. I’ve even heard a few celebrity geeks on TWIT say they use it for a document repository.

 

SVN Install

Grab the SVN installer for the server & client. You’ll want SVN 1.5 as the latest version isn’t supported by AnkhSVN yet.

 

imageLeave both boxes checked so it installs the subversion server and Apache web server.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

image

Choose the path to your repository. Ideally this should be on another machine, but below I’m choosing a folder under My Documents, so it at least gets backed up with the rest of my stuff.

I’d recommend creating a root folder for SVN then a folder for your first repository under that. As you may want more than one repository in the future. Doing this also makes the setup work without having to tweak the Apache configuration.

 

 

image

The next setup screen alters some stuff in the Apache configuration for you. You’ll probably want to change the port away from the default of 80. Now, the repository path isn’t the path you put in above, but the root SVN folder. The location prefix tells Apache to pass any URLs starting in “svn” through to the SVN server.

 

 

 

 

imageIf you’re on Vista, I’d also recommend installing elsewhere than “C:\Program Files” to avoid UAC pain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the installer' has finished, start the relevant services. (“Apache2.2” and “Subversion Server”).

Then crack open a command prompt and create your repository with

svnadmin create <path to repository>

In this example, the path I gave it was “D:\Users\Brian\Documents\svn\repos”

Badaboom – SVN is all up & running. You can test it by opening a browser and going to http://localhost:81. You should get a page that says “It Works!” – that’s just Apache. To test the SVN server is working & Apache is forwarding requests to it, browse to http://localhost:81/svn/repos/ You’ll get “repos - Revision 0: /”

Apache

This bit’s optional, but you’re better off knowing the relevant bits in the Apache config, just in case you want to change it.

The config is in <Install folder for the subversion software>\httpd\conf\httpd.conf & these are the important bits:

 

LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so

This tells Apache to load the WebDAV module, so you can access your repository through a web browser.


LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so

This tells Apache to load the Subversion module.


Listen 81

The port Apache is listening for HTTP requests on.

DocumentRoot "E:\Program Files\CollabNet Subversion Server/httpd/htdocs"

The  root folder for the web site served by this Apache instance. You can serve up HTML pages form here if you like. One thing Apache is really good for though is serving up XML schemas & doing nifty things like URL rewriting.

<Location /svn>
   DAV svn
   SVNParentPath D:\Users\Brian\Documents\svn
</Location>


This tells Apache that if it gets any URLS starting in \svn just to pass them onto the SVN module loaded earlier. SVNParentPath is a bit of configuration for the module. It’s the folder above your repositories. This is handy If you want more than one repository. If you’re sure you only want one, then you can change the directive to SVNPath and the argument to point directly to the repository folder itself, instead of the parent.

AnkhSVN

The installer for Ankh is just a click through. So no sweat. You’ll want version 2.0 if you’re using VS 2008.

 

Adding a Solution

imageRight click the solution & choose Add Solution to Subversion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for where to, you’ll have a couple of choices. If the repository is on your local machine, you can just use the file protocol and give the path to the repository:

file://D:\Users\Brian\Documents\svn\repos\Code

or the Subversion protocol:

svn://localhost/Code/

Alternatively, if it’s on another machine, you can go through the SVN service with the URL:

svn://myotherbox/Code/

or over HTTP:

http://myotherbox:81/svn/repos/Code/

 

 

image

I’d recommend checking the Add a Trunk folder box. To understand why, have a read of the “Version Control with Subversion” pdf book that was installed with SVN. There is a link on your start menu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

imageAdding the project doesn't commit the changes straight away, you’ll see the list of changes in the Pending Changes window. It’s fairly obvious how to drive it from here. Check the AnkhSVN site for more details.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Optional – Tortoise SVN

image While you’re at it, grab Tortoise SVN, a GUI client for Subversion. You can do everything with the command line tools, but really, why would you? It’ll create and browse repositories, call SVN diff & much more all from a right click in Windows Explorer.

Thursday 7 May 2009

Space Invaders Extreme (360)



The style of Space Invaders Extreme reminds me of Pac Man CE, jazzed up enough to include some trippy visuals and music but not overdone so you can't see and here the original classic game. Visuals are superb in HD on a large screen, particularly as I'd only played it on the DS where it was very cramped. The whirly backgrounds seem to be nuon inspired, or even nuon itself, but quite low key and not something you notice most of the time.



The game itself is still 'shoot a block of enemies', but it adds a combo system where you can shoot a row, a column or a colour at a time to get power ups and activate bonus levels. The bonus sections whip you out of your current wave, into a bonus screen for a few seconds, then plonk you back where you were. Seems a bit bonkers but it does help to make the game feel more varied. Chuck in some boss fights, power ups and wave variations and you've got quite a lot to concentrate on.

Other goodies are the mandatory live leaderboards for all game modes and a bunch of multiplayer cooperative and versus modes including a great coop mode with individual objectives that me and my boy are having a blast with. It's 800 points too, which is a third of the PSP and DS versions price, so an absolute bargain.