Major disappointment

I had high hopes for http://www.giantbomb.com/ which is a game review site started by Gamespot Alumni.

I thought they were going to have high standards and not give in to rating bloat for games by major publishers. I guess it is just the need to pay the bills but recently they've been giving 4 out of 5 for almost every PC game review.

Some game do merit a 4 out of 5, but average games that are just polished shouldn't get 4 out of 5. Games like Red Alert 3 and Fallout 3 do not merit a 4/5 rating. They are average games that are just highly polished. There is nothing inspired about their gameplay!

I wished that game reviews had higher standards than they do now, and I wished that games were made to a higher standard than they are now.

Family and the economy (Long Post)

I am not an expert on the economy, nor am I an expert on families and social institutions. I am just an engineer who is applying his analytical skills to a situation.

I was reading this website about the breakdown of the family unit and religious organizations in Western Europe, the authors conducted a study in Poland and came to one conclusion, the breakdown of the family unit is adversely affecting the Polish economy. This is definitely true to a certain extent throughout Western Europe, birth rates are dropping, their ethnic balance is being skewed by immigration, economic growth is slowing down and their companies are being snapped up by Chinese and Indian investors, all in all there is a lack of vitality in their society.

That got me thinking, and I did some research on China, the family unit is a very strong institution in China, a Chinese family is a basically a unit in Chinese society led by a father/husband and everyone else just follows his lead. Even though there are increasing number of divorces and the number of single parent families are increasing in China, the Chinese government has so far responded by not helping single parents as most Western countries like the USA and UK have.

The Chinese government definitely studied the breakdown of the family unit in Western society and the issues that it causes. There is no support for single families at all in China. I think the Chinese government believes that supporting single parent families actually encourage the propagation of single parent families and the breakdown of the family unit. They want to avoid that at all cost, I think they know that part of the vitality of the Chinese economy is due to strong families. Parents work, grandparents take care of the children, children don't grow up messed up in the head, children become productive members of society. That seems to be their line of thinking.

I don't know how their decisions will pan out, but I am quite certain it will be interesting to compare and contrast the differences between a developed asian country and a developed european/american country in the years to come.

Salt Of The Earth!

I have two colleagues who shall go unnammed, they are great colleagues!

They keep me rooted into the here and now.

They plan carefully and prudently.

People like that are not appreciated enough and are often accused of being stuck in the mud and holding more ambitious peple back.

But that is not true, without people like that nothing will ever get documented, nothing will ever get planned properly and when the chips fall people like that get hit the worse.

So here is a tribute to the steady, solid and reliable colleague!

It is people like them that make striving to build the greatest company on Earth worthwhile.

Here's to you guys, you know who you are! :D

The exploration of PHP

I've been playing with PHP the past couple of weeks, I've used PHP once in a project a long time ago, it was painful and as difficult to use as ASP Classic.

The IDEs for PHP still sucks, not even Eclipse can hold a candle to the wonderous majesty that is Visual Studio 2k8. The open source guys around me always tell me how great Eclipse is and how it is the way of the future and how it will kick the shit out of Microsoft.

I don't know what Kool-Aid those guys are drinking, because Eclipse for PHP suxx0rs. I hate it, I actually hate it more than I hate Dreamweaver. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a microsoftie, I like tools like Aptana IDE for javascript, it is still the superior platform for javascript. Not even Visual Studio is as good for javascript as Aptana IDE.

Gotta go, don't want my boss to catch me blogging at work :D

Grateful to mom!

I'm really grateful to my mom nowadays for making me do engineering. There is still plenty of engineering jobs around, she was right, you will always need engineers.

You want to build something, you need an engineer, even if you want to tear something down whatever it may be, a building, a car etc... you will need an engineer.

Here's bravo to mom! :D

Barack Obama WINS! Nov 4 2008

HOPE TRIUMPHS!

The greatness that is Barack Obama

I've just watched Barack Obama's 30 minute infomercial on YouTube.com.

He is a unique individual, and someone like him could only have emerged in the US.

Not anywhere else on Earth could the son of a Kenyan man and a Kansas woman reach such great heights.

The US truly defines opportunity, that if you work hard and dedicate yourself to something you will achieve it, sometimes even against overwhelming odds.

Barack Obama defeated Hilary Clinton in the Democrat primaries when everyone thought she would be the front runner.

From the looks of it, it looks like Barack Obama will now defeat John McCain.

Even though I am not American, I am excited by this, it shows that the US can be a moral leader for the world again, instead of the land of Bush and the "24" brigade.

Cheers to Barack Obama!

MySQL Community Edition vs MS SQL 2k5 Express

I'll be doing a weekly article on why you should use MySQL when you want to use MS SQL 2k5 Express.

Size Limit

MySQL (UNLIMITED) > MS SQL 2k5 Express (4GB)

The Fuckers in some companies

I heard this on the grapvine a couple of day ago.

John Galt Games Malaysia has officially shutdown.

For the most dumb ass reasons ever.

I point to this thread:-

http://igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?threadid=33676

If you're not going to read the forum thread, I'll sum it up for you.

Bad management and bad planning on the US management side, they are the ones who should be let go off, not the employees here.

Hell, they should be sued for negligence and incompetence.

Assfucks.

Uncomfortable with the direction of the company

I am uncomfortable with the direction of the company.

We have too many abstraction layers in our upcoming product.

And as we all know abstraction layers are bad!

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000026.html

If you have too many.

If the number one selling point of your product is graphics, then you better write your own graphics engine.

My company is not following that rule, hence much worrying on my part.

Apparent Speed vs. Real Speed

Fact:

Safari and Chrome ARE slower at loading images.

Fact:

They LOOK like they are faster.

Reason:

They show incremental loading of the images, firefox, ie and opera just load the whole and shows it.

Same reason why GIFs look like they load faster when JPEGs are actually faster.

Maybe the other browsers should have this mode as an option for people who prefer it.

Something from my childhood

Oasis was my favorite band growing up, sure there was Blur and Suede, but the boys from Manchester was it as far as I was concerned.

Here's some of their live stuff which is just astounding:-

Morning Glory:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Ba68PB3Bk

Some Might Say:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4gYVS76zp4

WTF does Safari insists that its not Safari!

Safari is delusional! 

Or...

Safari is having an identity crisis!

'Cos:-

I did this :-

alert(navigator.appName);

And this happened:-

Rock Is Still Betta :D

I've been listening to a lot of rap and some hip-hop last couple of months.

Not good enough IMHO.

Rock is still better, Led Zeppelin, Stones 'nuff said.

Warhammer Online Oceanic server issues

Oceanic authentication servers don't allow you to login for about an hour after they've been updated and re-started.

I don't know if this is affecting the North American servers but it would be nice if devs took a look at it.

Multi Friend Selector Now Working :D

I've been working real hard on a facebook app recently using facebook toolkit 2.0 to build a facebook app, and its almost done :D

Props to my gf for being so understanding :)

For letting me scratch an itch I couldn't quite get at for so DAMN LONG :) 

I had lotsa help reading these following articles, one day I might post my code :P

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Talk:Multi_friend_selector

http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=8885

http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=34981

http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=35328

http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=32903

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Multi_friend_selector

Happy Coding Everyone :)

P.S. One day, I might decide to kill myself and do a Silverlight multi friend selector.

Official Position On Firefox: HATE!

dumping "FORMS" into a variable on IE and Opera

var myForm = document.forms['postForm'];

dumping "FORMS" into Firefox

var myForm =document.getElementsByTagName( 'form' )[0]

WTF?????????????????????????????????????????????????

Ok, I am better now...

Kagemusha Chronicles #1

I'm beginning this series of posts about playing a Shadow Warrior in Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning

I'll start with quest tips and PVE/PVP tips.

Quests

Artistry of War (Blighted Isle Tier 1 High Elf)

When Eronin Shorewind asks you to recruit 4 shield bearers and 4 spearmen, some people get confused as to where in the name of god the hunters you need for shield bearers are hiding!

Fret not, they are hiding behind giant rocks! The hunters are not in the Swale of Miralei but actually next to Swale of Miralei (to the left on the World Map), there's also one hunter near the Orb that you use to teleport to the village of Lacorith.

Thats all for now, see you around on WAR :)

Blind and mute? :P

My fren in Arizona is learning Java

I have no idea why they are teaching non programmers JAVA.

Can't they teach something simpler?

VB maybe?

I am officially addicted to caffeine

I am addicted caffeine.

I was afflicted with a massive migraine this whole morning until I remembered that I haven't had my coffee yet.

I just drank a big cup 5 minutes ago and now I have no migraine! At all! Gone!

Sigh....

Single Player vs MMO RPG

A single player RPG should be deep and must give you an experience where you feel like the hero of the story.

A MMO RPG should be easy to get into provide multitudes of ways for you to easily play with your friends and if you don't have any help you make them.

The experience of the MMO RPG should all be about the common shared experience of accomplishing deeds WITH other people.

dotnet and mysql

The new dotnet connectors for MySQL got released a couple of weeks ago.

So I took them out for a test drive.

The installation was easy and painless so was connecting to a DB.

The only issue was using the MySQL connectors as a data provider in a SqlDataSource, the code generated by the system was MS SQL centric, but no biggie just take out all the "[" and "]" from your queries.

I haven't tried it out on LINQ yet, but will get to it.

It works just fine on my localhost and I've just deployed it on my own server for deployment testing.

If you don't want to install the connectors on the host, like usual you need to leave the dlls in the bin folder on your website.

In addition to that you need to change the web.config to do this.

<system.data>
<DbProviderFactories>
<add name="MySQL Data Provider" invariant="MySql.Data.MySqlClient" description=".Net Framework Data Provider for MySQL" type="MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlClientFactory, MySql.Data, Version=5.2.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d" />
</DbProviderFactories>
</system.data>

If the deployment still doesn't work db wise you might need to set the application to full trust instead of medium trust.

Remember to get the Version as in "Version=5.2.2.0" correct to your connector.

That's about it.

I am suck a geek but....

MUST PLAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[LINK] STAR TREK ONLINE

Uncle Hamster's Barcamp Powerpoint

Here you go:-

[LINK]CLICK HERE

I don't know how useful this will be for anyone else, I memorized 90% of what I wanted to say and used the slides as reminders.

The browser known as Safari is retarded.

Why?

This is why:-

Because in the head element...

It doesn't recognize this:-

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css.css" title="HI">

Why? What possessed them to do it?

Also, here are some more dotnet hacks to make your dotnet app appear right on Safari....I hate Safari... so much extra work....

if (Request.UserAgent.IndexOf(”AppleWebKit”) > 0)
{

Request.Browser.Adapters.Clear();

}

AND

Create a safari.browser file, and dump this into it

<browsers>
  <browser refID="safari1plus">
  <controlAdapters>
  <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.Menu" adapterType="" />
  </controlAdapters>
  </browser>
</browsers>

One more thing, why aren't they fixing their security flaws?

As opposed to Opera! 

How to make Vista FEEL REALLY FAST

1) Go to control panel
2) Click on Mouse
3) Select the pointer tab
4) Change your pointer style type to none

Voila! It now feels really fast again!

Cracked games don't crash

Cracked games don't crash. This has been true of many games released in the recent past.

1) The Witcher

2) Bioshock

3) Assassin's Creed

4) Rainbow Six : Vegas 2

Check this out!

LINK : http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080720-ubisoft-drm-snafu-reminds-us-whats-wrong-with-pc-gaming.html

This PC gaming issue was pointed out on Ars Technica recently, I hope publishers take note of this and stop crippling the PC gaming experience with DRM.

If you want to support the no DRM initiative buy games from Stardock. 

LINK : http://totalgaming.stardock.com/

Support the good guys :) and buy non DRM games!

Playing to win

I derive my enjoyment of video games from winning at it.
I don't see the point of losing, having fun for me means winning.

I get really annoyed when losers tell me to fuck off because I keep beating them at video games. Like yesterday, I was minding my own business playing my little ole' demoman in TF2, I dominated these 2 guys by killing them a couple of times in a row. One of them started using his VOIP and called me a bitch for being a pipe bomb camping bitch.

I told him to fuck off to his tranny girlfriend if he can't handle the heat, seriously what is the problem? If you suck at something, get better at it, if some aspect of the game is imbalanced the developers will correct it, until then you have as much opportunity to abuse it as I do. If you refuse to do so out of some misguided sense of fairplay or honor, then you deserve the spanking people like me hand out to scrubs like you.

Noob :p

No RTS for you!

Usually a hardcore RTS gamer, I've relegated my RTS gaming to the background while I play Mass Effect and Team Fortress 2.

Mass Effect is an RPG with shooter and puzzle elements and Team Fortress 2 is a class based multi player only FPS. Both are great fun and I highly recommend them both to everyone.

Mass Effect is more of a long term investment, you can finish the game in a short 10 to 20 hours but there is more enjoyment to be had exploring every nook and cranny while earning every achievement in the game.

Team Fortress 2 is the successor to Team Fortress Classic, its an excellent game with a 15 out of 10 fun factor. Its the only game I've played this year that can make me laugh out loud in the midst of a shooting frenzy with rockets flying everywhere.

I'm not ignoring RTS-es though, once I'm done I'll prolly move on to supreme commander and company of heroes while waiting for Starcraft 2 and Dawn of War 2.

Happy gaming everyone :P

Microsoft REMIX to be at Lim Kok Wing University?

Heard this on the grapevine, Microsoft will be having REMIX ESSENTIAL 2008 on the 27th of May @ Lim Kok Wing...might wanna call them up to check it out.

Programmer Productivity (For Managers)

A lot of programmers are mistaken in their belief that just because their language is the faster one (C/C++) they are being productive.

WRONG!

Being productive means producing the most amount of work that serves it purpose in the least amount of time, in this case writing programs that do what they are supposed to do as fast as you can.

That means writing a simple web app in dotnet trumps writing it in ASP/vbscript, a lot of managers fail to understand that the objective is to convert capital into programmer productivity.

Wordperfect died because they used Assembly to build their product when their competitors worked in C.

Dotnet is one of the most productivity enhancing platforms out there right now, it works on Windows and Linux, only a fool won't take advantage of that.

So if you are a programmer or a project manager embarking on something new, or improving on something you already have, remember this! Your job is to convert capital into programmer productivity!

It is simply wrong headed thinking to work otherwise, think of it this way the time a team takes to optimize a product can be better used developing more functionality or tweaking the UI to make it friendlier. The speed at which your application loads or the amount of resources it consumes is rarely a barrier to entry and more often than not it is solved by Moore's Law, so don't worry about it, focus instead on improving your product so that it solves problems for your users and customers.

Programmer Personality Traits #1

You need to have higher than average stubbornness.
If you are not stubborn, you will give up when you hit a wall while programming. In programming you will hit walls so often that they should sell you health insurance for it. So if you are easily frustrated, you should not be a programmer. You can study CompSci, but you shouldn't be a programmer.
In the midst of working my OWN small little project, I hit numerous walls due to my unfamiliarity with the ADO.NET DataSet class. It was a really SMALL project that only does one useful thing! I'm not kidding you on how small it actually is, compared to numerous products and projects out there, the whole thing doesn't even compile to 1 MB!
IF I wasn't as stubborn as I am, I would have given up at this point! So really, being stubborn is really a virtue if you are a programmer, it not determination it's stubbornness.

Cheras

If you live in KL, Cheras to you is like New Jersey to Manhattan-ites.

If you live in Cheras, people from the rest of KL treat you like an illiterate mongoloid thug incapable of speaking coherently.

This is especially true of people living in PJ, Bangsar or Damansara. I am tired of snot nosed punks who sneer at you like you're pond scum, brainless bimbo hypocrites who recoil in horror and all their assorted friends who feign pity at your home.

I have the lowest cost of living in town, I have one of the best access to highways, rivalling Bukit Damansara and I have the best food in town. All you have is congestion, pollution and hypocrisy.

Sinning in a Solar Empire

Not sleeping for 3 days straight has to be a sin somewhere, but when its this fun to sin, who cares?

It started out small, a 2 player map with a few planets, maybe 4 maybe 6? It then slowly degenerated into gigantic maps with 20+ planets and multiple solar systems. By yesterday night/this morning, I was halfway through my new pitting 3 of my fleets against 4 of the AI's. Had to save midway because I had to get ready for work.

Today is my 3rd day awake without sleep, I feel like a zombie and my eyes are probably all red. I'm probably going to skip gym and head on home for some well earned rest and maybe some sinning?

Examples of Visual Marturbation

When a designer gets ahead of himself, he is doing what as known as visual masturbation.

Having a new section on a website to fill out the navigation bar is right up there in terms visual masturbation.

Another example of Visual Masturbation?

Check these two sites out:-

http://www.rechargeroom.com/

http://www.mystudioc.com/

Yeap, Visual Masturbation. All good design follows one rule:-

FORM AND FUNCTION

One without the other is like masturbation, it isn't as fun as sex.

Games galore!

I got

Boiling Point : Road to Hell
Dawn of War : Soulstorm

And

Sins of a Solar Empire

last weekend....talk about gaming overload.

Playing Boiling Point and Dawn of War now, I'm afraid that if I start Sins, I won't put it down so the plan is to finish the lesser games first and then drown myself in the gaming goodness of Sins.

The Polite Fuck-Off

http://kotaku.com/364195/ea-tells-jack-thompson-to-get-bent

The above link is EA telling Jack Thompson to fuck-off when he proposed to help them acquire Take-Two.

Lolz.

X3: Reunion - My first Xenon LX

Yay!

I capped one last night after about 10 retries in a Mamba Raider armed with 4 BPACs.

It's a thing of beauty with 4 AHEPT cannons, 4 BPAC cannons and 2 BHEPT turrets, this heavy fighter craft is so powerful that corvettes and even some capital ships have to be wary of it.

After fixing it up, I took it for a drive around the neighbourhood. The speed is a bit of a put-off after being used to the Mamba's 200 m/s but I eventually got used to it in combat. The Xenon LX and the Mamba Raider fly different in the sense that in the Mamba you blast in and charge out, but in the LX you blast in and kinda just engage everyone in a furball.

Now that I have an LX time to check up what other ships I want, maybe a Pirate Falcon Vanguard? If so, I need to start hanging out in Pirate Alley which is heck far away from where I am now.

X3: Reunion is like crack to me

I am playing an old game released in 2006, its called X3: Reunion.

I am playing it like most people play WoW or Evercrack, since its the only game I am playing right now and I've played it for 2 weeks straight.

Most modern games don't hold my attention span for more than 3 days, but this game has a depth of gameplay to it that is just out of this world.

5 out of 5 easily, and I got it for 50 ringgit on Ebay! Compared to Shitgate that I bought for fullprice @ > 150 ringgit!

Misadventure @ the Marshe

I went with significant other to the Marshe on Saturday. The place was relatively packed but we were sitted quite fast. 

For those of you who have no idea what the Marshe is, it's this 
upmarket western food place
where you go around these stalls that are cooking food and you order what you want. Kind of like an expensive food court.
Food wise they have fresh fruits, fresh juice, various kinds of steaks, fried sausages, fried veges, rosti, fresh salads, pasta, pizza, assorted drinks and cheese fondue.

We went around the marketplace and ordered hawaian pizza, caesar salad and a cheese bun. It didn't take long and soon enough we collected all the food and began dinner.
This was when things started going wrong.

The pizza crust was hard and dry, the chicken on the pizza tasted like putrefied pureed regurgitated chicken organs, the mushrooms had no smell and the olives were flat.

The salad wasn't as much as a disaster but the romaine lettuce were dry and looked like the had spent the better part of a week inside a fridge. I had no idea where they got the croutons because instead of rebaked or sauteed seasoned bread, I got zombie rock hard flat as sawdust bread.

The saving grace was actually the cheese bread which was just right, not too moist, not too dry and cheesy without being overwhelming.

At the end of the night I felt cheated, probably will be giving that place a miss for a while, or at least until they clean up their act.

The science of addiction - Cigarettes

I don't smoke, find the whole idea disgusting.
But I find the science behind it completely fascinating.

The whole idea of companies spending millions of dollars on R&D to make you addicted to cigarettes is completely mind blowing to me.

Do you know that Reynolds American (RAI) spent USD 58 million last year in their R&D division? In their own words, their R&D division is focused on creating efficient methods of preparing tobacco blends, as well as developing product enhancements, launching new products and introducing packaging innovations.

In other words, figuring out how to make smoking more addictive and killing less people so that these people will smoke longer and provide RAI with sustained profit making.

Another really fascinating thing about cigarettes is their additives, for a complete list of the additives in cigarettes visit:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarettes

Also, do you know additives have to be approved on a country by country basis?
Not every country is going to let you stick paint stripping solvents into your cigarettes you know!

Not that I encouraged smoking but if you really read up the chemistry and science of it, the amount of willpower it takes to stop smoking has to be phenomenal in order for someone to beat a few billion dollars worth of research.

Jaring >>>> Streamyx

Yeap I said it. Jaring provides the superior product and service compared to Streamyx.

I've used it for close to 3 years and it has only broken down unexpectedly once, their customer service is first world in their politeness, efficiency and effectiveness. Jaring has the best QoS that I have experienced in Malaysia, the only other company that is at this level of play is Time and Time is expensive and not widely available.

I love Jaring!

Malaysian Politicians

There is this scandal going on in Malaysia, you can read all about it here.

Its basically your basic politician fucking a woman who is not his wife kinda thing, the kicker is he is resigning! Why is he resigning?

He didn't fuck a teenage whore or a young boy! He didn't fuck an animal and as far as anyone can tell, he didn't fuck another man!

Big deal, he had an affair, now get on with life you moron!

What? Malaysians don't fuck? Malaysians don't fuck around? Bullshit, he is a sampling of the population, he is the everyman! You want a candidate for the coming elections? He's your man damnit! He can multitask damn you! He has a mistress, a wife, a bunch of kids, and 2 fucking jobs! Can you manage that? You fucking can't can you?

Fuckers.