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I've been trying to get my little ciso front end to not show the ciso console application anymore. Now I can easily get the information to go directly into my program, but I don't want the user interface to stop working completely while you're compressing a 2GB image. I want it to show what it's doing.
I've tried getting the asynchronous reading function to work, and I can up to a point. It'll read it and return any info that I might want, but when it comes to adding something like a progress bar or even just a textual representation of it, it'll start reading and then just do nothing and get stuck. The debugger doesn't give any kind of error though...

Kamelot - Ghost Opera

Everwood - The Past is Alive

First usable project!

I've made my first project that can actually be used by other people!
Not that it's anything spectacular, it's merely a front-end for Booster's ciso compression utility.
I already have some ideas to improve on it, but I wanted to have something done for now, something that I could show off to my friends.

Whilst typing this message I have already discovered and fixed 2 bugs (I'm stupid, I know).
Try it, you will need .NET Framework 2.0, because that's what I use.

If you have any suggestions be sure to let me know!

My Project Page: here.
Download it: here.

Years and Years...

After years and years of putting it off and watching it halfway or just even a few episodes, I've finally gotten myself so far as to finish watching Tekkaman Blade (Teknoman).
It is awesome, it was back when I was 14 or so and saw the american version on tv here and it was awesome now! Even though it is a lot older then I remember and a lot of mistakes are made and at times it seems like a very low budget and almost badly written anime it is damn awesome.

I'm already usually a pretty big mecha fan, which is probably thanks to this show in the first place, but these are the pinnacle of mecha for me.

I don't know why it took me so long though...

At first I thought to give it an eight, because it's great, the story gets better the further the show progresses, even though they use some really cheap tricks to do it sometimes, but after having seen the Twin Blood special I must say that if it had been like that, the action and visual style and all, it would difinitely have gotten a 9 and seeing how the action could have been done I gave it a 7.

If you like mecha and you don't mind late 80s, early 90s style anime then this is definitely one you should watch!

Slave Zero (1999) XP Fix

A Long time ago I bought this game, Slave Zero, and I played it a little (back when I still used cheats all the time) up to the 6th boss or so, because he had a weapon that even killed you in god-mode.
Then a long time I didn't play it at all. And when I finally did want to I had Windows XP and it didn't work anymore.
Back then I couldn't find any kind of fix for it and I was too lazy to look really closely, but today, 1 day after having finished Max Payne again I wanted to play it again and started looking. This time, first page, first link, a forum post that claimed that a No CD patch would fix it.
So I installed it again, used the no cd patch and it seems to work. At first the game crashed somewhere around one of the first 'generators' one of the first objectives, buildings you have to destroy. Later it wouldn't even start anymore.
Now it's started, options can be changed (resolution and stuff) and the game can be played up to at least beyond the point of destroying all 3 generators (I haven't played it any further yet).

So I am glad that I finally seem to have found a fix for this damn game and I can enjoy it once more :)

You can find the patch here: MegaGames - Slave Zero Trainers and Game Fixes. I used the Slave Zero v1.0 Win 9x/XP ENG one, but if you have 1.1 you should use that of course.

My friend's birthday party...

I friend of mine celebrated her birthday yesterday. Her real birthday isn't until the end of the month, but by that time her boyfriend is probably off to royal police boot camp for an entire month.
I don't know why in hell I said yes when her boyfriend asked me if I would come to the party, because much like my father I have a pretty good reflex of saying no whenever I'm asked these things. Apparently when he asked me I couldn't refuse cause he always gives me the idea that he'll kill me or something when I do things that are socially or otherwise bad :P
My sis came along, she's also a friend of their's. At first we didn't have anyone to talk to, but after a while I started talking to him and a friend of his about his DS and my sis started talking to her about who knows what :P
After that conversation I started talking to my sis and 'her' too, and it was about Lowlands this time and how bad Tool had played. And that friend I was talking to earlier joined in and we started talking about Graspop too and stuff and then another friend joined and we talked about Metal and Lolcats and 'him' and me told people about the same lolcat at the same time (I are Dunecat).

Then unfortunately we had to go since we had a train to catch back home. So we went home and as we were waiting for the train, a drunk friend of mine called, wanted to hang out.
So when we got back and were in his neighborhood (actually he was in ours, the bastard) we called him and we hung out for a while, it was cool, a friend of his joined us for a little while too, was cool.
Then we finally went home, got here around 2:15am, had some eggs my sis made (we hadn't had dinner yet) and then went to bed because we were dead tired!

Now I've got a friend to go to, so more adventures to follow!

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Now playing: Blind Guardian - And Then There Was Silence
via FoxyTunes

Threshold - Pilot in the Sky of Dreams

Opeth - The Grand Conjuration

Dream Theater - Constant Motion

My X-Files...

Damn I'm on a kind of posting spree here! I can't stop posting!

Anyway, I've been watching some old X-Files episodes (Season 2) and damn some of those are creepy!
It's the strangest thing, it's not really scary, I'm not all jumpy whilst watching them, but always after an episode's done I'll be pretty scared of all things dark in our house. This only lasts for about 20 minutes, but in that time I'm usually very thirsty or hungry and I'm afraid to go out of my room!

I think the scariest part is that often these episodes either have something to do with diseases that we don't know about or mutations or things that are not accepted as possible and are certainly not plausible, but the ideas are no less frightening.
One episode is about a pharmaceutical company infecting a number of prisoners in an attempt to test a certain product. The people infected get these huge boils on their body which pop open and spray something on the next victim when they die.
It's not really a disease, but they're parasites who nest into other animal's bodies. These parasite larvae have (apparently) their own parasites which transfer into the person or animal's body and start attacking the brain and stuff. An epidemic is just around the corner.
This is a scary thought, there are still a lot of things we, as humans, don't know about the planet we live on. There could be more horrifying diseases we don't know about because they're hidden so deep in jungles or other places and possibly so rare that we've just never been in contact with them, or perhaps we have but we didn't identify them as such.

Another was about a monkey-mermaid kind of thing (at least that is what they want you to believe most of the time). It's a town full of people who used to work in circuses' freak shows and people who might have been able to get a career in such an area. One of them has this 'twin' hanging from his belly, an under developed human being. It turns out that it can detach itself from his brother and that it's looking for another brother, but since the others aren't made to be attached to like his own brother he kills them.

Then one about a ghost thingy. Sure ghosts aren't proven to exist, but that might just be because we don't have the tools or knowledge to identify them yet. It's a scary thought because this particular one was from a kid's still-born twin and could apparently manifest himself physically through possessing his twin (thus creating 2 identical kids). He'd kill his brother, dad and grandmother before trying to kill his mother.
It's a scary thought to think what could be out there that we just can't see with any kind of equipment yet. Especially if these things turn out to be malicious.
It's like with aliens really, some might find us friendly and help us and other might just think we're bugs and kill us on sight, we don't know.

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Now playing: Mitra - Crucifixed
via FoxyTunes

Everwood - Leaves of November

My musical taste...

The other day a friend of mine started trying to convince me to listen to hip-hop (more specifically Kanye West). It's funny. He can't get his head around the fact, it seems, that there are people who actually enjoy other things then rap/hip-hop and hate the rap things for real.
Whenever he even hears the word Metal he starts screaming and grabbing his head pretending to have a headache.

Unfortunately after about 5 sentences he quit trying to convince me and blamed it on the fact that he couldn't do it over MSN. So I invited him to come and change my mind about hip-hop. His main argument was that I only like metal because I don't listen to the words, but I know a lot of people who listen to the lyrics and still like Metal and hate hip-hop.
He said hip-hop was about all kinds of stuff, my personal experience is that it's mostly about bitches and hoes and drugs, money, gansta (wannabe) crap and crazy purple fur coats. And the way he said it kind of gave me the impression that he was saying metal wasn't about anything. Not that I really care since I don't listen to the lyrics anyway, and sure a lot of the time it's about things like death, depression, etc, but that's not the only thing that it's ever about!
It can be about love and such as well, just not in the way that I hear most hip-hop songs, it's strong, more masculine!
It's not begging to be taken back it never lost it's love at all, metal is good for his significant other, whereas hip-hop apparently always screws up and needs to throw away all masculinity and ask the other to please take him back, and then 3 days later the same thing happens again I guess.

Anyway I think I'll contact him to see if he wants to meet up somewhere to try and convince me, I'm open to listening to it even though I hate it, but I'm pretty sure that once I hear it well I can really tear it down.
Once he tries and fails and I can give him some valid reasons why, maybe he'll stop thinking rap is the only music in the world.

Oh yeah and part of the deal for him to show me what's 'good' hip-hop is that I am also allowed to let him listen to 'good' metal, so he probably never will go for it...

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Now playing: Edge of Sanity - When All Is Said
via FoxyTunes

My job application...

Last Monday I had an appointment with a small software developing company here in The Netherlands. It was so that we could meet since I might start working there soon, but I had a test there today, 10 theoretic question and one practical test.
The questions went ok, but the other thing was a total wipe-out. One of my friends who had to do the same tests (who was also like half an hour late) did better on the practical test it seems and pretty much the area opposite of what I was working on. Seems the questions he got were pretty opposite to me to, seems like together we're one almost valid .NET programmer.

Now they're thinking about hiring one or both of us, we're hoping and thinking it won't be one of us, either both or neither.

It looked like a nice place to work, 2/3 people seemed nice, the other one I really hadn't spoken to at all so I have no idea about him. The area there is nice too, lots of green and small houses and stuff, nice and quiet.

I'm hoping though that we will be hired, but after that practical thing I'm not very hopeful anymore. I did learn something nice though :)

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Now playing: Edge of Sanity - Everlasting
via FoxyTunes

PS3 emu

I recently bought me a PS3, I couldn't wait any longer.
I've been playing on it a good deal. Been experimenting with it a lot too, still need to try the Tiff exploit for PS3 just for fun.
The Americans are blessed though (for now), the Emotion Engine chip (I think it was?) has to be pretty nice. Since I'm stuck with an emulator in my PS3, which isn't bad, but it has it's faults.
I tried playing Soul Reaver for PS on it the other day and with the smoothing feature it looks really nice, but sometimes it really has a crappy frame rate for like a second, mostly when I'm walking around corners and such.
I haven't played many PS2 games on it yet (just Sonic Mega Collection+ which runs fine), but if it's going to have the same troubles here then that would be pretty bad...
It's nice though, now I have an excuse again to play my favorite PS(2) games again. Ahhh, Legacy of Kain, Zone of the Enders, how I've missed them.
Oh yeah I tried turning smoothing off and even though it does help, it still has trouble with the corners. And it seems like the game starts running at 130% speed or something too, so not so much an option since even with smoothing it looks like 110% speed.

But HA HA to the American because I've read that their new PS3s (the 80GB models) will have an emulator as well instead of the chip.
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Now playing: Slayer - War Zone
via FoxyTunes