Zasshi

Gnome-shell in Ubuntu 9.10

2009-12-11T10:35:00.004+01:00

Even though gnome-shell is really only a preview of what is to come for gnome 3.0 and it's still buggy and sometimes not completely stable perhaps, I really like it.

When I first saw the screenshots I was less then impressed, I thought it didn't at all look like anything new or innovative, but rather messy and confusing. But me being ever interested in new things and all I just had to give it a try (the gnome-panel look was starting to bore me).

Installing was easy

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

and starting it afterwards was easy too

gnome-shell -r

Though first I had to disable compiz, which I don't really use anyway.
I was also using avant-window-navigator, which disappeared on me but still kept part of my notification area to itself. So the time after that I first closed AWN and all was as it should be.

I didn't feel like having to manually start gnome-shell every time I logged in so I started looking into a way to replace metacity and gnome-panel with gnome-shell and found that this could be done by editing you gconf (with, for example, gconf-editor) and setting the /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager key from metacity to gnome-shell.

Of course, since it is a composited window manager you need a video card and driver that can handle screen compositing.

mod_rewrite with Fedora 10 and ISPConfig for WordPress

2009-12-09T10:33:00.006+01:00

This relates to Fedora 10 and ISPConfig 3.0.1 set up as described in this HowtoForge post

One of my colleagues recently got interested in offering our clients Wordpress as a content management system, so he's been trying it out.
Yesterday he found out that if he wanted to change the permalink style in Wordpress he needed write access to .htaccess, which he didn't have because the user rights haven't been set up very well there.
So I gave him write access by using

chown apache:apache .htaccess

Unfortunately this resulted in a 500 Interal Server Error.
Looking at the error log for the website I tried this for it let me know that RewriteEngine directives were not allowed in the .htaccess.
Since I didn't want to mess with the base configurations of ISPConfig I started looking around for other options. Eventually I found that I had to add something similar to this to the Apache directives field under options under the website's settings

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  <Directory /var/www/[sitename]/web/>
    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
  </Directory>
</IfModule>

Of course [sitename] should be replaced with the name of your website.

It all works after I restarted the apache server myself, but I do not know if that is completely necessary. Also it might take a few seconds before ISPConfig finishes editing the configuration file.

Higher Resolution in Fedora 11 with proprietary NVidia Drivers

2009-09-22T23:51:00.004+02:00

Ugh... I have been screwing around with this since the beginning of time... Or at least since I installed Fedora for the so-manieth time. Finally though I found out what I had to do.

Following this guide, I was able to easily and correctly install the drivers. I used to build them myself, but that got me worse results then anything.
To sum up, though:

# switch to super user (root)
su
# install rpmfusion repository
rpm -Uvh \
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm \
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
# install the driver (I have an i686 pc, you might need a different architecture, like 64_32 or something similar)
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i586
# reboot to make changed take effect
reboot

This only got me a 1024x768 resolution, though... Which pissed me off...

I started looking around the internet for a way to fix it in the xorg.conf itself, which I'd done on Fedora 9 before, but didn't remember how (the reason I'm writing this right now), but didn't actually find what I was looking for.

In the end I found 2 supposed fixes, one added a Modes option to the "Display" section of the "Screen" section, and another was to add a DisplaySize option to the "Monitor" section.
Well, I found out I needed both, so I added DisplaySize 1280 1024 to the "Monitor" section and Modes "1280x1024" to the "Display" subsection of the "Screen" section.

Now it's working again, running at 1280x1024 with screen compositing (so I can run gnome-do with docky theme, which I'm trying out for a while).

A simple gnome-blog test

2009-09-11T15:23:00.002+02:00

I've been looking for some way to post blog entries from my desktop for a while now, I've come across Drivel (which crashes when I try to log in to blogger with it), can't find a Bleezer package at work (just checked it, first time I heard of it today) and no other gtk/gnome client seems appealing.

Let's see what this gnome-blog app does.

Not much so far, bold or italic seems the be the only options available to me at the moment, let's see about HTML:

to install gnome-blog in Ubuntu 9.04 use

sudo apt-get install gnome-blog

and the rest should then be self-evident.

Removing a service manually in Windows Server 2008

2009-09-08T12:24:00.003+02:00

I was writing a test Windows Service and accidentally removed it through the Programs and Features dialog, which removes the files, but doesn't actually remove the service from the service list. So when I tried to install the 2nd version of this test service it was complaining that it already existed.

I looked around a little and found that I could delete the Service from the registry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\[Your service]. I deleted the key (the little folder thingy) and it did show some change, but my service was still there and the newer version still wouldn't install.

After a little more looking around I found out that to fix it I could use sc delete [YourService] to fix it. And it did!

Next time, though, I really should use the installer I used to install it to remove it...

Code::Blocks "process terminted with signal 255 (0 minutes, 0 seconds)"

2009-08-25T10:40:00.002+02:00

Yesterday after I came home from work I thought I'd try working on a project I've been working on this past weekend.
I was away from home this weekend, so all the work I'd done had been on another computer, in a virtual Ubuntu installation, so I hadn't yet tried it at home.

Trying to build it went fine. Running it from a terminal went fine. Even compiling and running on another Ubuntu installation (my work laptop, non-virtual) went fine, but Code::Blocks reported to me that whenever I tried running my application on my Fedora 11 home installation that it terminated with signal 255.
I couldn't find what was wrong, I knew the application worked since I tested it in another terminal window and if I debugged it it'd go great up to the point where it met with a cin or cout.
Being tired from a really long day (getting up at 5:00am, get on train at 6:25am, get off train at 8:30am and at work 8:50am), I gave up fairly quickly.

This morning though the itch got worse and I just had to investigate further.
After about a minute of looking around I found someone at the Ubuntu Forums asking about the exact same thing and it turns out that the problem was that xterm wasn't installed. So a simple

su -c "yum install xterm"

was enough to fix the problem.

Now I can start developing my application again!

Low Resolution in Fedora 11 with Nvidia drivers

2009-08-19T08:11:00.005+02:00

Finally, after hours of looking and working I have finally again found how to set the resolution to what I need (have 1280x1024, had 640x480). I've had trouble with my resolution in Fedora before, but I don't ever remember it being this much of a pain, but then again I don't remember much about it at all, wish I'd remembered how I fixed it.
So to help me remember and perhaps even help someone else work around it, here's how I finally got it working.

I'm now using the Nouveau driver with a generic LCD Panel 1280x1024. I tried setting this in

system-config-display

many times, but it just wouldn't accept my monitor.
So in the end I looked at

system-config-display --help

and noticed

--reconfigure

, which doesn't base the new configuration file on an old one.
Using this option and setting my driver to nv and my monitor to generic 1280x1024 and then

su -c "init 3"
[log in]
su -c "init 5"

got me the right resolution again. However the nv driver is just a little too basic, so I thought I'd try the same thing with the proprietary driver, so I did everything exactly as before, only I used the driver nvidia instead of nv.
Now again X wouldn't start at all, so I ran

livna-config-display -a

to get it to my old low-res configuration, and then I tried it a third time, this time using the nouveau driver (which I've heard is better then nv) and that worked!

I know that supposedly you're also able to use xorg.conf to set certain Modes values for your display, but this didn't do anything for me at all in fedora, did help me in ubuntu, but then there I got the weirdest resolution.

finally I can look at a normal screen again.

Now I should get going to work, I'm gonna be really late (this really bugged me!)

Convert .VOB to .WMV with ffmpeg in Linux

2009-08-18T11:09:00.005+02:00

A fairly simple command gets the job done:

ffmpeg -i filename.vob -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -sameq -s 720x576 filename.wmv

SyntaxHighlighter follow-up

2009-07-21T12:14:00.002+02:00

Something about SyntaxHighlighter has just caught my attention.

As I'd mentioned in my post about it I started out from an older version. I noticed there are a few more brushes then I'd initially added.

I added

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCpp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'/>

But the list consists of

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushAS3.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushBash.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCpp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushDelphi.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushDiff.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushGroovy.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushJavaFX.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushPerl.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushPhp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushPlain.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushPowerShell.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushPython.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushRuby.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushScala.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushVb.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'/>

Wow that's quite a few. You can add any/all of these along with or instead of the ones I'd posted before. Each one is needed for it's respective language, of course.

My custom RDP script

2009-07-21T11:22:00.010+02:00

I have a crazy situation. I work at a .Net company, but my installed OS is Linux (Ubuntu Jaunty atm). This is ok though, I asked my boss first, because we use Remote Desktop to do almost all actual work.
Now we move around from time to time. So sometimes I have a different printer I need to share with the server. And since I also want to share a single folder with the server (not my entire filesystem like the TerminalServer client would like), so I decided to write a bash script to help me decide where I am.

startremote.sh:

#!/bin/bash

# Ask where we are, since we don't know where we might end up we add 'other'
# which will default to no extra parameters
srem_WL=$(zenity --list --text="Were Are You?" --radiolist --column="Pick" --column="Locations" TRUE location1 FALSE location2 FALSE other)

# Only do something if cancel wasn't pressed
if [ -n "$srem_WL" ]; then

  # The user on the server, I use $USER because I know that on this PC I'll
  # always be logged in under the same name as on the server
  srem_usr=$USER
  
  # The IP address of the server
  srem_ip=0.0.0.0

  # The size I want my screen to be
  # I add the -g here because one might want fullscreen (with -f)
  srem_geo="-g 1910x1120"

  # The shares I want to send along
  srem_share="-r disk:ShareName=/path/to/some/share"

  # The start of my execute command
  srem_ex="rdesktop $srem_geo $srem_share"

  if [ -n $srem_WL ]; then
    # Here we define the configuration differences for each location
    case $srem_WL in
      location1)
        srem_ex+=" -r printer:MyPrinterForLocation1"
      ;;
      location2)
        srem_ex+=" -r printer:MyPrinterForLocation2"
      ;;
    esac
    # Since other has not been added to the case list it won't add anything
  fi
  
  # The end of our execute command
  srem_ex+=" -u $srem_usr $srem_up"
  
  # EXECUTE
  $srem_ex
fi

You could of course also always share both printers, rdesktop won't complain if it isn't connected, but I'm always looking for stuff to program. And this way you can kind-of create different profiles for different locations.

SyntaxHighlighter with Blogger

2009-07-17T14:36:00.008+02:00

Since I post some code from time to time in this blog and I like the idea of syntax highlighting I looked into adding SyntaxHighlighter to my page. I'd found this post by someone else explaining how to do it, but by now this was a little outdated.

So now I thought that I might do this too, since I seem to have gotten it working. Here's what I did:

(Using blogger) log in and go to Layout -> Edit HTML

Insert this code right before the </body> tag:

<link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/styles/shCore.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/styles/shThemeDefault.css' id='shTheme' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/shCore.js' type='text/javascript'/>

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/shBrushCpp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'/>

<script class='javascript'>
//<![CDATA[
  function FindTagsByName(container, name, Tag)
  {
      var elements = document.getElementsByTagName(Tag);
      for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++)
      {
          if (elements[i].getAttribute("name") == name)
          {
              container.push(elements[i]);
          }
      }
  }
  var elements = [];
  FindTagsByName(elements, "code", "pre");
  FindTagsByName(elements, "code", "textarea");

for(var i=0; i < elements.length; i++) {
if(elements[i].nodeName.toUpperCase() == "TEXTAREA") {
 var childNode = elements[i].childNodes[0];
 var newNode = document.createTextNode(childNode.nodeValue.replace(/<br\s*\/?>/gi,'\n'));
 elements[i].replaceChild(newNode, childNode);

}
else if(elements[i].nodeName.toUpperCase() == "PRE") {
 brs = elements[i].getElementsByTagName("br");
 for(var j = 0, brLength = brs.length; j < brLength; j++) {
  var newNode = document.createTextNode("\n");
  elements[i].replaceChild(newNode, brs[0]);
 }
}
}
//clipboard does not work well, no line breaks
// dp.SyntaxHighlighter.ClipboardSwf =
//"http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/[VERSION]/scripts/clipboard.swf";
SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true;
SyntaxHighlighter.all();
//]]>
</script>

The SyntaxHightlighter.config.bloggerMode = true; is used to be able to use line breaks in your code snippets with blogger.

If you go here you can select your [VERSION] and if you then go to [VERSION]/styles/ you can see some shTheme*.css files where you can select the theme you would like to use.

An IComparer

2009-07-07T16:14:00.010+02:00

In .Net you can very easily create a special class to handle comparing of (custom) objects. All you have to do is implement the IComparer or IComparer interface and implement it's one simple function: Compare.

So write a class that implements it:

public class MyComparer : IComparer<MyObj>
{
  public int Compare(MyObj x, MyObj y) {
    // If, for example you're working with an int:
    return x.IntProperty.CompareTo(y.IntProperty);

    // If, perhaps, it is a string:
    return string.CompareTo(x.StringProperty, y.StringProperty)
  }
}

The value you return must be negative if x is less then y, 0 if x is equal to y or greater then 0 if x is greater then y.

This can of course be used with things like MyCollection.Sort(new MyComparer()), really handy if you have strange objects.

SQL Null

2009-07-02T11:43:00.005+02:00

I am seriously confused by whatever it is that makes SQL (At least PL/SQL and T-SQL) consider null in a completely different way then anything else.

If I write a query

SELECT *
FROM table1
WHERE column1 = 0

Then of course if column1 hasn't been filled yet it won't return anything since null != 0

Sooo, then why is it that this query

SELECT *
FROM table1
WHERE column1 != 1

Won't return anything at all either.

I understand that null is not really like anything else, but to exclude it when looking for something in a certain column seems odd to me, or am I missing something?

My Reflection

2009-06-25T11:31:00.008+02:00

The other day I had some trouble with ASP.Net. I was saving a class I'd written into the ViewState (I did this a long time ago, I know now that that might not be the best idea) and it was giving me errors saying that the ViewState was corrupted somwhere around saving it into or loading it from the ViewState.

I had to fix this, but I still needed all the information inside the class. Even though I knew that it was not the right thing to do really and in the end proved to be seriously useless since another measure I took apparently removed the need of saving it in the ViewState altogether.

I did find a solution that worked before the other thing started to take over. I wrote 2 functions, one to save the info in the object into the ViewState and one to load it again.

using System;
using System.Reflection;

namespace My.NameSpace
{
  class MyClass
  {
    private void savetoViewState(MyObj saveobject)
    {
      Type t = saveobject.GetType();
      foreach (PropertyInfo info in t.GetProperties())
      {
        object value = info.GetValue(saveobject, null);
        if (value != null && test.GetType().Namespace == "System")
          ViewSate["myobj_" + info.Name] = value;
      }
    }

    private MyObj loadfromViewState()
    {
      MyObj myObj = new MyObj();
      Type t = myObj.GetType();

      foreach (PropertyInfo info in t.GetProperties())
      {
        object obj = ViewState["myobj_" + info.Name];
        if (obj != null)
          info.SetValue(myObj, obj, null);
      }

      return myObj;
    }
  }

  class MyObj
  {
    public string Name
    {
      get;
      set;
    }

    public int Number
    {
      get;
      set;
    }
  }
}

In the save function we get the type of the object we're working with, because the type class has some very nice reflection functions, among which are GetProperties(), GetMethods(), GetContructors and many more.
We use the GetProperties method to get all the properties and we loop through them in a foreach loop. Now we can examine each property seperately.

We get the value of the property by calling the PropertyInfo.GetValue() method which requires the object from which to get the property (our argument in this case) and an object array of index values, so that you can, I'm guessing, get a or multiple items in an array. The index must be null of you're getting non-indexed properties.

Then we check if our value is null, because if it is we don't need to save it, and we check to see if the namespace of the property's type is System, which in my case made sure that I was only saving properties that were of type System.String or System.Int32 etc and not Some.NameSpace.In.My.Project.

Finally if our property's value gets through these checks, we save it in the ViewState with a prefix to identify it as part of our object.

In the load function we do something very similar. First we instantiate a new instance of our class and we again get the type of it.
Then we loop through all it's properties, much like we did in the save function.
Now, though, we get a value from the ViewState, which should correspond to what we saved in there before. Now if there is a property that we didn't save then getting it from the ViewState will of course result in null, so we check if the value if null. If it's not then we call the PropertyInfo.SetValue() method which needs the instance of the object it must place the value in, then the value that it must place and again like with GetValue() an object array of indexes.

Once we've looped through all the properties, it should again be filled with all the relevant information and we're good to get to work on it again.

This is my first little bit of Reflection that I've written to date. I know it's not much, but since I didn't know if MyObj was going to stay the way it was and I wanted it to work regardless. I also didn't feel like going ViewState["myobj_name"] = myObj.Name; over and over, since the object I was working with had many more properties than this example.

In the line with if (value != null && test.GetType().Namespace == "System") I had just gotten the value of the property, if it had one at all, and then I'm checking to see if the type of that property's namespace equals "System", this is because in the object I was working with also had a few properties that were connected to lazy-loaded database entities, which in turn also had these, and if I wanted to save these then it would have been a serious disaster (Damn how did I ever think that writing an object like that in the ViewState would just work...).

Anyway, it's fun to see how easy a simple reflection function can be. I'd read about it when I studied for my certificate exams and I saw some of it at the Microsoft Dev Days this year, but it always seemed complicated and strange to me. All the more reason to try it out somewhere.

SVN+SSH username trouble in Netbeans 6.5

2009-06-05T10:30:00.004+02:00

Haha, I was having trouble with SVN in Netbeans. It was trying to log in with the wrong user. I could checkout fine by editing the tunnel parameters in the checkout window, but after that if I tried updating it'd use my local username instead of the one I use on the server.

After looking around a bit I found the answer!
In the checkout window, when asked for the url of your svn server, add your username to the url twice. so

svn+ssh://username@username@ip.address.of.server/location/of/svn/repository

should do the trick, apparently Netbeans only removes the first username@ from the url. I tested it and it does seem to work.

Quick mail post

2009-06-04T15:45:00.007+02:00

Linux has an excellent command: mail, now who can guess what it does?

Anyway, I was searching how to send something with this today even though I've looked at this before, it somehow got screwed up.
We only have mail on our server (and sendmail, but that seems way more complicated) and we need to send an attachment and have a sender address.

After looking around for a while I found this:

uuencode $writefile $readfile |\
mail -s "$subject" $recipient -- -r "$sender"

sorry if you don't like the use of variables in explanations, but this seemed easiest.

$writefile	is the filename as the person recieving the email will see it (can be same as $readfile)
$readfile	is the filename as it is stored on your hard drive
$subject	is of course the subject of the mail you are sending
$recipient	is the email address of the person you're sending it to
$sender	is the email address that others will see in the From: field in their mail

uuencode should encode the file so that it will show as an attachment instead of just binary giberish or plain text, but for me, in thunderbird, this doesn't work.
the '|' of course means that you're using the left command as input for the right one
and mail is the mail command.

No C++ at all today

2009-06-03T23:28:00.002+02:00

I've only done a little bit of work on whatever it might be that I am working on today, but I did make some promising progress. I decided I might not be able to use the map and instead might use the vector, the only problem with vector is that it doesn't seem to have a find() function or anything similar.

I will work on it some more tomorrow and try to write some more.

No more C++ today

2009-06-03T00:17:00.002+02:00

Alas, I was not able to write what I wanted to today, so I will not be able to post anything explaining what the hell I'm doing.
I will try again tomorrow though, maybe I'll be able to find some more then.

I know there's 2 people per year or something that stumble down here, but in case someone just happens to stumble down here tonight, here's my problem:
I've made a very simple class with only a few properties. I put this class in a set and when I try to do this:

myClass myclass;
mySet.insert(mySet.end(), myclass);

of course in what I'm working on this class is filled with data, but this is just a quick post. I might be missing something, since I'm tired and the NetBeans error messages confuse me.

Anyway, maybe a night of sleep and a day of work will improve my thinking capacity.
I think it might have something to do with comparison, since one of the messages I see when looking at Netbeans' output it seems to say that it doesn't have a > operator for __y > __x.

Hmm, must quit now, more to follow tomorrow.

C++: Some more stuff

2009-06-02T18:49:00.005+02:00

I thought it might be best to write some extra info on the stuff I wrote yesterday about reading and writing stuff from and to files.

First thing is that I started off with a header (*.h) file. For those who really don't know C++ (pretty much like me then), these files are used to kind of 'define' the corresponding source files.
What we did in there was let whichever other file includes this one know that the source file that should come with this header file contains 1 class with 2 public functions, both returning void.

We then write those functions in the *.cpp file (which we should have named the same as the .h file, except change it's extension from .h to .cpp). In this file we use className::functionName to indicate that this function we're writing belongs the that previously (in the .h file) defined class. The '::' being the scope operator, you can use it to tell what which variable belongs to within your code.

I also seem to have forgotten to post the actual main.cpp file, sorry for this, It was late and I was both rushed and tired, but here it is:

#include "filerw.h"

int main()
{
    FileRW filerw;
    filerw.read();

    return 0;
}

We include our header (.h) file so that the compiler knows where to look for that class we instantiate.

Now this is where it gets kind of weird for me. I'm used to writing in C#, so that first line would create a warning that filerw was never instantiated and at runtime an exception that filerw is null. Here though this seems enough to declare and instantiate. We then call the read() function from the class we wrote and it should work.

Our application will return 0 to let everything involved know that it exited correctly, any other value would mean that our application crashed.

As you can see I don't do anything with the write() function. We could, you could add a line write("anything"); there and it should do what you expect (append "anything" to the end of the file, if the file didn't exists yet, it should now have been created).

So I think this is all I can tell you right now, I'll try to write some more once I've written some more code.

Blue Dragon

2009-06-02T00:06:00.006+02:00

A while ago I finished playing through Blue Dragon on the XBOX360. I've told myself that I should write something about each game I finish to improve on my writing skills.

Now Blue Dragon is a fun game that unfortunately suffers from some faults. It has a very typical story, typical main-character and of course the trademark look and feel from Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragonball.
Being from Akira Toriyama it is fun to walk around the world and see all the different species of creatures living together and co-operating with each other.

The battle system is old. It is unfortunately very repetitive and can get on your nerves from time to time. The thing that really bugged me is that none of the characters in the game have any real weapons or armor, so nothing changed on them through the entire game.
Monster fights are fun though, but they are (to me at least) too much of a hassle to get together all the time.
Balance is a little out of whack though, mostly Disc 1 is easy and you don't really have any trouble with anything or anyone, then Disc 2 becomes slightly annoying since there are a lot of fights and they take a few turns, and though the battles have ok animations they take a while to execute and you start falling asleep after a while, this is the point where I left my XBOX on for 2 weeks without playing.

Story is fun, but nothing spectacular. Boy and friends want to save village, they get lost, they get back, they leave for a big 'ol adventure.

I don't really have much else to say. I liked playing it, I loved getting through it (finally) and that's about it, it's not very remarkable in any respect (other then it's made by Akira Toriyama).

C++: Reading from and writing to a file

2009-06-01T23:14:00.029+02:00

Me being the idiot that I am, I am not satisfied that I have just recently finally really gotten my random wallpaper script working with Python. Nooo, now I feel like a sell-out since I'd already written it in C++ once and unfortunately lost that somehow.
So now that it works in Python, of course I just had to decide to write it in C++ again too.
I found, though, that I am severely lacking in C++ knowledge. All the tutorials I followed almost a year ago now (I think it was at least 3) have all been next to lost from my mind.

Fortunately I had decided on completing a very simple task for today, since it was already 10pm when I started on this: Read all lines from a file and be able to write a line to a file, the rest will come later.

I started out with creating a header file that looked like this:

#include <string>

class FileRW {
public:
   void add(std::string filename);
   void read();
};

Declaring a class called FileRW and 2 public functions: add, read

Now for the simplest of implementations of these functions we're going to read a file with read() and add a line with write()

first we have to include

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include "filerw.h"

That last one is, of course, to include the header file I wrote before, which I called filerw.h

to keep it simple we'll also be

using namespace std;

otherwise we'd be writing std:: everywhere, which is just not so much fun really...

then the functions:

void PaperConfig::read() {
        string line; // string where a line will be stored
        
        // Open the file for reading
        ifstream myfile("test.txt");
        // If the file was opened
        if (myfile.is_open()) {
            // Until it reaches the end of the file
            while (!myfile.eof()) {
                // Get the next line
                getline(myfile, line);
                
                // If it's not an empty line, print it
                if (line != "")
                    cout << line << endl;
            }

            // Close the file
            myfile.close();
        }
        // If the file was not opened
        else
            cout << "Unable to open file";
}

We use ifstream (in file stream?) to open the file for reading.
We use the line variable as a temporary variable to store each line we read in so that we can write it to the console (or do something else with it). We use myfile.is_open() to check if the file could be opened, if not then it'll tell us and we use myfile.eof() to check if we have anything left to work with.
If the currently read line does not equal "" (an empty string).
When we're done we close the file.

void PaperConfig::add(string filename) {
    // Open file for writing and set the append flag
    ofstream myfile("test.txt", ios::app);

    // Write filename to file
    myfile << filename << endl;

    // Close the file
    myfile.close();
}

Here we use the ofstream (out file stream?) to open the file for writing and the ios::app flag to tell the stream to append whatever we write to the end of the file.
Then we write our parameter string to the myfile object like we write a lot of other things to cout and we add an endline character (endl)
Finally we close the file, this way we don't keep things in memory we don't need to.

Now I hope I have explained enough in this post, I don't often write things like this (in case you don't get it this is my version of a tutorial, but even I can't really call it that because it is writting in about 30 minutes) so if you see room for improvement please let me know. I will try to write more things like this in the future and hope to get better at writing, C++ and software development in general.

My walk around the block

2009-05-23T21:55:00.003+02:00

About a week ago I got fed-up with Zenwalk. I had a stint of trying to install software from source and I had some less-then-encouraging results, since many things just didn't build and some didn't build and didn't even give a reason why.

I started looking for alternatives. I tried to avoid Fedora in the beginning, but that didn't last long, since it is one of few mainstream distributions that features gnome as it's standard window manager.

I tried installing Mandriva with gnome first. Though since it got stuck in the initial phase of the installation, before I even selected a single package or anything, that effort was put a stop to quite quickly.

Then I thought about Arch Linux, since I'd already downloaded the install CD anyway, but as I started installing it I changed my mind.

I ended up installing Fedora 10 at that moment, which of course gave me grief over my video card, not allowing me to go beyond a 1024x786 resolution. Eventually I got it fixed though, but then after a few days I wanted to install MP3 and other non-free things such as win32 codecs and such, but then I rebooted my computer and it wouldn't start anymore. So I gave up on fedora too.

I then tried Gentoo, I have been working with Linux for a little over a year now and I thought it might be interesting to build it from near-scratch, and it was. But after going through the entire installation process with documentation and failing to get Xorg to work, I stepped off that train and moved on again.

I got to Arch Linux again, this time I actually went through the trouble of installing it and running it. Again though, the Xorg setup is what killed it, since it's documentation was not up to par with Gentoo.

I also tried g:Noblin, but since it didn't recognise my very generic 3-button mouse, it got thrown in the trash bin too...

Finally I got back to Zenwalk again. I installed it, it feels very comfortable to be back. This time I installed the gnome version, only to find out that it has just been cut-off from support since the guy maintaining the gnome parts had a fight with another guy and got kicked off. I hope he comes back or someone takes his place because I just can't deal with xfce.

During install I did have a few fatal errors installing certain packages, but fortunately I know enough to seemingly fix most of them.

The grass always seems greener on the other side, but when you actually go there you find out that it wasn't so bad where you were.

If I get fed up with Zenwalk again, then my only other option will become Ubuntu most likely, and even though it's very user friendly and all, but I feel it is too easy, I don't feel I will learn much from it. Besides, having it on my work laptop is enough for me, I'd prefer to use something else on my home computer.

Zenwalk: Logitech Quickcam Pro for Notebooks

2009-03-04T00:06:00.003+01:00

After days of searching and dead end results I have finally been able to install my Logitech Quickcam Pro for Notebooks in Zenwalk.
It is surprising what kind of (old) junk you have to go through (like qc-usb, pwc and gspca) to find out that there is actually a universal driver that is integrated in most modern linux kernels.

So, today I finally found out that UVC is the way to go for my 0x46d:0x991 webcam. I checked compatibilities here.
If you're not quite sure which camera exactly you have you can always check by opening a terminal and typing:

/sbin/lsusb

Which will result in all devices that are hooked up to your USB hubs to be listed. This would be my webcam, and yours most likely would be similar:

Bus 005 Device 002: ID 046d:0991 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Pro for Notebooks

if you take a look at this line you will see the name and the ID of your webcam.

All I had to do was download the uvc drivers from here, and then type:

tar -xzvf uvcvideo-5ba3bf58b52d.tar.gz
cd uvcvideo-5ba3bf58b52d
make
su
[password]
make install
modprobe uvcvideo

after which I saw that I finally had a /dev/video0 file, meaning succes!

Skype did not yet respond to it though, so I edited my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file to modprobe uvcvideo every time zenwalk starts and I rebooted, and it seems to work fine now, Skype finds it and shows an image when I press test which even moves.

You might need to install the kernel source packages for this to work, you can find these with netpkg, called kernelsource. I've tried 3 other drivers before finding this one so it got a bit messy in the end.

Zenwalk: Intel 82801G NIC

2009-02-24T13:13:00.003+01:00

I have recently made a switch from Fedora to Zenwalk 5.2 Linux and today I got my internet connection (YAY).

Turned on my computer and to my surprise Zenwalk didn't recognize my ethernet card (an Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) LAN Controller, as I found out by starting an old Live Fedora cd I still had lying around, though later I found out I could have used the command 'lspci -v' aswell).

I looked around a little and found out I had to start the mii and e100 modules in order to get it working, which worked, but then I still needed them to be loaded at startup.
This time around for as much and as long as I can I want to do thing right, I don't want this linux ending up the same way that my Ubuntu has and my Fedora had where I didn't know what was installed where or how.

Looking around a little I found out that you should edit the file /etc/rc.d/rc.modules to include these 2 modules at startup.

So, if you're having this same trouble that I'm having, all you need to do is edit the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file:

su
[enter password]
vi /etc/rc.d/rc.modules

(I use vi but you can of course use any editor you like)

and then add or uncomment the lines:

/sbin/modprobe e100
/sbin/modprobe mii

And that should get it working again for you.

Telerik Controls in Web Custom Controls

2009-01-20T10:36:00.004+01:00

I work at a .Net Application Development company and the other day I didn't have anything to do, so I decided to change one of my User Controls into a Web Custom Control (ASP.Net Server Control) because I was told that we might want to use it in some of the other projects we have or are going to start in the near future.

I had never made a server control before and from what I had seen here and there I thought that this might be somewhat of a challenge. Thankfully it was easier then I thought it would be and I was successful fairly quickly.

Then one of my co-workers came up with the brilliant idea to make it's 'parent' into a server control, so I started work on that.

This 'parent' was a collection of a Fieldset with a legend, 2 radiobuttons, 2 instances of my new server control and 2 rad controls.

When I started building this control I did it all (as I was taught) in the RenderContents(HtmlTextWriter output) function.

The problem was that when it got to the point where the Telerik controls were being Rendered, they liked to throw some ReferenceNullExceptions my way.

After some looking around though I found an article in the Telerik Knowledge Base that said that I should add the Telerik controls in the CreateChildControls() function, so I did, and it works.

Check out the article here

Star Ocean: First Departure

2008-12-19T22:30:00.007+01:00

Star Ocean: First Departure is, of course, a remake of the first Star Ocean game which was released on the Super Nintendo. It is not unexpected that Square Enix once again did a good job at remaking an old game since they have been gathering as much experience as they possible can in it.

Talking of course about games such as Final Fantasy III & IV and even I and II.

This is not the best game they have ever made and it is highly reminiscent of the Tales of Phantasia game, which was also first released on the SNES, with it's main difference being that Star Ocean employed an eagle-eye (now isometric) view of battles.

Both these games seem to start out very similarly too, since you are just hanging out in your peaceful village when, out of nowhere, bandits (or other evil people) show up and start trashing the place. But that is where similarities end.

Compared to the old SNES system these graphics look like an impossible improvement, I'm a big fan of actually re-writing a game for a remake. It would have been fine for them to do the same as they did with Final Fantasy I & II, just update the pixelated low-res graphics a bit to be less pixelated high-res screens, but apparently this was not enough for them.

Even though they did this it still looks like it predates even the first 3D playstation games, which is kind of shameful after presenting a game like Crisis Core, which looked almost like it could have been one of the better looking PS2 games (FF XII), but then again you don't want to spend too much money on an easy money-maker, do you?

Gameplay is nice. The battles are never really hard as long as you train enough and the idea of specialties and skills (not to be confused with special abilities) has always been a nice addition in my opinion. These skills, when used properly, can very easily make your characters very strong in the usual way of nicely upgrading your stats, but also by giving you skills to get more exp and find more/less enemies and gain more skill points per level. These come in handy in almost any situation. Walking around an easy area where you only get 7 exp? Just avoid enemies. Need a copy of an accesory so that you won't be petrified all the time? Make one. Very nice.

Sounds are quirky. During battles there is a lot going on at the same time, which is not unusual of course, but the things they choose to play and keep out seem far too random to be intentional. When 2 people cast a spell only one can be heard, for example, but after every battle 2 people always have a little victory speech.

The music is nicely done though, in my opinion, it suits the game and during the somewhat more exciting parts of the game it will slightly elevate your adrenaline levels if you are susceptible to such things.

The FMVs they made are awesome. It has the perfect anime look and feel and it suits the game very well, my only regret and complaint about these clips is that there are not nearly enough of them. And they started out so very promising with the entire first scene having transformed from a gameplay scene to an FMV.

The characters really come to life in these in my opinion, kudos.

The game isn't tough. It is not even really annoying at any point. Though of course you can increase difficulty for yourself by not training as much as I did (I had train and look for enemies on almost all the time), or trying to solo it with your main character.

Private actions are another nice thing. They show funny/nice/intruiging/sad scenes between your party members, it is fun to watch them sometimes and they will affect certain scenes in your story.

All-in-all this is a very nice game and it is a nice distraction from your everyday dealings. If you are a star ocean fan then you can't allow yourself to leave this one and if you just like RPGs then your should most definitely give it a try. If you neither like Star Ocean or RPGs then you are probably better off not bothering.

These are some 30 hours that I have enjoyed very much.

Gfire on Fedora 9

2008-11-17T21:58:00.007+01:00

Updating or installing software that does not come from the regular rpm repositories can be a big pain in Fedora. Especially if you don't have a lot of experience, like me.
I've only been using Linux for a few months now, and I don't have the time to find everything out from the beginning, I'm just doing what I can when I need to.

Now today I wanted to update my version of gfire, since I hadn't in a while and it had been acting up. Most likely since every time xfire updates it changes something in it's protocols which make all other things just act wacky.

I went to the website and downloaded the RPM, which started complaining about missing a certain rpmlib. This told me that I might be using an older version of RPM (which I found out after some googling), so I updated my system in the hopes of getting a new version of the RPM package manager, but alas this was not to be.

Found out later in the gfire forums that it was because the RPMs they offer are made for Suse.

Somewhere along this path I had already tried installing it from source, but the source files kept complaining that the pidgin package was not installed, even though it was.

The fix in the end was simple.

If you are having the same troubles as me then just install pidgin-devel and libpurple-devel and try to configure/make/install. This worked for me, it might too for you.

su -c "yum install pidgin-devel libpurple-devel
or
sudo yum install pidgin-devel libpurple-devel

Depending on which you prefer to use.

And then to install gfire from source go to where you extracted the source files (for me this was '~/Download/gfire/gfire-0.7.1/' and type:

su -c "./configure;make;make install"
or
sudo ./configure;sudo make;sudo make install

Non-presenter ServiceDependency

2008-08-06T11:17:00.005+02:00

Well, ASP .Net developing can be a pain in the a$$ if you only have experience with windows applications in any language, but when the boss wants to use WCSF and the view-presenter model AND foundational modules, things can get even rougher. And don't even think about using Opf3 with that, it's fun, but you'll spend many hours researching stuff.

Case:

Opf3 uses an ObjectContext class to connect with the database and work with your business entities and such, so generally you should be able to access the static method you need to get this object from every single part of your application imaginable, right? So if you're working with WCSF you'll probably need to use a Foundational Module.
This all shouldn't really be a problem if you have presenters and views everywhere that derive from the Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb.Web.UI.Page class. Even if you have some pages that don't have a presenter you can make them derive from the CompositeWeb's Page class, so then your problem is fixed too. But what to do when you have a class that derives from MembershipProvider, or custom server controls?

Theory:

The ObjectBuilder goes through classes that derive from certain CompositeWeb classes and searches for attributes like ServiceDependency, InjectionConstructor, CreateNew and such. You can make a public property with a ServiceDependency attribute so that any dependencies are handled and your compiler won't complain about there not being an argumentless constructor.

Problem:

Classes that don't derive from CompositeWeb classes don't get the benefit of this ObjectBuilder.

Solution:

After many hours of trying, searching, researching and asking around I finally found out how to fix this. Being inexperienced as I am, though, doesn't make me at all certain if there's something wrong with this approach, but if you create an argumentless constructor and call the Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb.WebClientApplication.BuildItemWithCurrentContext(this) function, the ObjectBuilder will run through your class and use these attributes.

Code:

using System;
using Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb;
using Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder;
using Chili.Opf3;

namespace Your.Namespace.Here
{
  class MyClass : SomeClassItDerivesFrom
  {
    private ObjectContext _objContext; // The ObjectContext Opf3 uses to work with the database.
    private IContextService _objContextFactory; // The Service you made with the static function.
 
    [ServiceDependency] // This won't work without the function we call in the constructor
    public IContextService ObjContextFactory
    {
      set
      {
        _objContextFactory = value;
        _objContext = _objContextFactory.GetObjectContext(); // The static function you should have made.
      }
    }

    public MyClass()
    {
      WebClientApplication.BuildItemWithCurrentContext(this);
    }
 
    private SomeFunction()
    {
      ObjectSet objectSet = _objContext.GetObjectContext();
 
      // Well, you should know what to do next.
    }
  }
}

Comments:

Well, having never done anything like this before in my life I hope this is all and it might help someone. I've searched the internet for hours without any luck really, so maybe it will be helpful

Damn Apples

2008-05-15T01:43:00.003+02:00

I don't know if any of you remember or know the fiasco that was Windows ME (Millenium Edition), but it seemed to be pretty much a gamble on whether it would work. Of 4 people (including myself) that I know used it and of my own experience installing it, you had about 50% chance of everything working absolutely 100% fine (as far as possible with windows), and 50% chance that it would just barely start every morning.

It seems that Apple, known for their iMacs, iPods and of course the macbook air (among other things) liked this idea because they seem to have adapted it to their own stuff. I've had nothing but trouble with my aunt's iMac, which is of course mostly her own fault since she doesn't know the first thing about any kind of electronical appliance, so she messed it up a lot. But it was unfixable.

A friend of mine on the other hand has no trouble at all with his macs. Then my mom's fiancée can't get his macbook to work at all, my sis had 2 iPods die on her already within 1 year, though my girlfriend's old iPod lasted nearly 5 and her new one is already showing problems after a single day.

I seriously wonder how these things happen? Are they pressured so much as to bring unfinished products onto the market? Of course they're not the only ones who do this, Microsoft just did it again with their Vista.

Well, highly annoying, a brand new iPod given to her by me for her birthday and after a single use it seemed to have died (luckily it hadn't). They can't do this to people, it's shocking.

----------------

Now playing: After All - The Shadow Wall
via FoxyTunes

I beat my boss at Tekken

2008-04-02T23:17:00.002+02:00

And now I'm afraid he might fire me!

Naaah, but we have been playing Tekken on the train lately, he has to go a few stations in the same direction, so it's a nice 20 minutes or so of fun.

Usually, so far, he starts with winning big and often. But then when I've 'warmed up' after about 10 minutes or so, it becomes a real challenge for him.

I've always only had friends who were really good at Tekken, well, except in the beginning. When a friend of mine first got his Playstation and then got Tekken 3. We played that game to no end and he usually won, but after a while we played so much together that we did stuff we didn't even know was possible. I'd duck under a punch and grab him and stuff, it was crazy.

Now though I understand what I'm doing and we're up to Tekken: Dark Ressurection. In the beginning my boss would first beat me to a pulp and then I'd get my revenge after a while. Now he beats me to a pulp and only by the time he gets to his station I start winning some. But those few are very exciting. It's cool to finally have met an equal match instead of someone who's waaaaaay above me in skill.

I shouldn't beat him too much though I guess, otherwise he might just fire me, he got pretty pissed at me today because in the end I started beating him with a PERFECT. Ouch.

A lot of fun though!

The End of Final Fantasy III

2008-03-24T13:33:00.003+01:00

After 30 or so hours I have gone through the Crystal Tower and the World of Darkness, I've met the 4 warriors of Darkness, got the ribbons and apparently beat the living hell out of a cloud that looked like a twinkling star and fought like medusa.

A friend of mine had already told me that you get some items that negate the annoying part about the final boss, and it's true. But it was pretty strong, so my heart was still pounding, because I was afraid that I could die at any turn, which I almost did a few times, good thing though that my Devout had enough agility to be one of the first to act, so even though it was close, it was pretty easy. I was only lvl63, which is pretty low for any FF game I've finished yet. FFX of course didn't have the conventional level system, but FFVII I finished somewhere in level 80's or 90's using Knights of the Round which made it a total piece of cake.

It was a fun ride, but not one I'm going to repeat any time soon. It's time for a little change now from the conventional FF style game, it's Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles time!

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Some Semi Pre-Emptive Thoughts

2008-03-23T16:18:00.003+01:00

Over the last few days I've been playing 2 games almost non-stop. Final Fantasy III and the just recently released Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. The only reason I stop playing is to recharge my battery or just because I'm so dead tired and need to sleep.

A friend of mine played the japanese version for a bit, because he couldn't stand to wait as long as we had to for it to be released in US or EU. I didn't even want to see the japanese version, I wanted to be totally surprised and awe-stricken. And now that I have it, I'm totally surprised and awe-stricken.

I knew that it was going to be an action-rpg, but when I first got my hands on it and fought my first battle, I have to admit that I was disappointed in how slow it seemed to be. The army of shinra look-alikes (who seem to be put there for some nostalgic reasons) shot at me and I stopped. At that point I thought I would be very disappointed and wished that I hadn't had so many expectations.

But then I got just a little further. I had just beaten the first Behemoth and they started talking. I'd of course watched the intro and I have to say that it is very possibly the best intro I've ever seen. They talked and talked and talked and I wanted to see more of the game, though I wasn't really aware of time since I was still ecstatic about actually having it and being able to play it.

Well, finally I could walk around myself, I met Kunsel, one of the other SOLDIER members and he gave me some tutorials and stuff and then I was told about missions. So I went for it, I tried a mission. I won. I'm hooked.

I've gone through maybe 1% of the story (I hope) or perhaps even less (hoping more), but I'm level 31 now, and already completed 25% of all the missions. I con't stop going through them, they give very nice items and of course the chance you get to level up in them is very excellent as well. I got some nice summons from it (Odin, Ifrit, Bahamut) and I already have Firaga materia and such (I think all things that are actually way too high lvl for this part of the game usually) and some very nice equips too.

The game itself looks absolutely perfect. The in-game graphics are atleast as nice as FF12's and the FMVs are of Advent Children quality. And the awesome part about that too is that all summons are shown in such FMVs. And that is totally kick-ass dude!
It's also fun to see that they tried to stay close to what the FF7 summons were, because that just plain rocks. Ifrit still throws a giant ball of flame at you (or is the ball actually), Bahamut still shoots from the sky like a madman, and Odin still cuts everyone in half and jumps down from his cliff. Very stylish.

The story seems pretty strange, though it's cool to see Zack (who I'd only seen in the main story in FF7), it's awesome to see Sephiroth back in his 'sane' days and to see the human side of him, Hojo is pretty funny to see what he looks like here with his oversized sideburns and his too-cocky attitude. The Turks are back again of course, they're pretty cool, they not nearly as annoying now that they're on your side, they're actually pretty sympathetic.

The voice acting is the only thing I'd like to change really. I don't like the english voices. Sure they're not as bad as they could be and most other games usually are, but still I've seen some japanese trailers and they just sound cooler there (very possibly also because I don't understand what they're saying). But they're not annoyingly bad in my opinion.

It's fun to hear some of the old songs in their new packaging. quality of sound has improved in games since FF7 obviously and it's nice to hear that.

The slot system that they use in battle is still a little vague to me. It's awesome, don't get me wrong, but I don't know if I do have any control over it or don't, I just don't know. But the way the memory thingies work and the summons and the 'Chocobo Mode' is all very cool and awesomely done.

All in all I just can't stop playing and if you like action-rpgs and the Final Fantasy VII world, you might not either... Must... Play... More...

The GOD of GW

2008-03-23T12:49:00.003+01:00

Yesterday my girlfriend wanted to check up on her Guild Wars characters to see if she'd gotten any new birthday presents. She asked me if I'd like to join her, but I was right in the middle of a mission in Crisis Core so I was hesitant about leaving the most awesomest game ever made to get caught up in something that would involve me just standing still in a game and switching from town to town to see what she'd gotten.

But, since she did ask me and I knew she'd be disappointed if I didn't join her I thought 'what the hell' and joined her anyway. It helped that I'd just finished my mission.

After some 10 minutes of updating and then some more minutes of updating I was standing in Lion's Arch once again.

Damn did I like the look of it! Even thinking about it now makes me want to start playing again.

I asked her if she didn't miss it, we've both played that game a hell of a long time.
She said she did, but also she didn't like Nightfall or the Factions expansion and she hasn't played the Eye of the North expansion yet so she doesn't know if she likes that. That's why she quit. And eventually it was also why I quit because I didn't like playing alone even half as much as playing together with her.

But having revisited the past like that does make me long for the Good Old Days of Guild Wars.

But then I also think about Final Fantasy III on the DS and Crisis Core on the PSP and all the other games that I still want to play and finish. In that respect, I just don't have time to play never-ending games.

'It's better to burn out then to just fade away' is a saying right? It's better to love a game to death and be somewhat disappointed when the game ends because you loved it so much then to be able to play it endlessly untill it doesn't feel the way it used to. I like finishing my games. When I finished Final Fantasy VII I was excited because I'd been playing it for years without finishing it, but I was also kind of sad because that was the end of it. But because it ended where it did I kept loving the game. I loved Guild Wars, but because it didn't end, it was pretty much just waiting for me to get bored with it. 'Quit while you're ahead'

The Incredible Crashing DS...

2008-03-23T11:02:00.003+01:00

I was just stressfully going about my business in FFIII on the Nintendo DS, stressfully because I'd been playing for too long without escaping and saving my game, when I got to the top of the Crystal Tower and faced Xande. My heart was racing because I didn't think I'd beat this guy the first time. Though as usual I stressed over nothing because even though my main character died, I did beat the crap out of him.

But then that Cloud of Darkness thing came, and when I saw the damage that thing did to me my heart nearly stopped. When my party died I was mad at myself for going so long without saving, but then I noticed that there were people still talking. I was relieved to know that my efforts had not been in vein again. We were revived and we were sent into the world of darkness (which I thought they'd called the normal world already).

Of course, me being the stupid idiot that I am, I didn't listen to my own advice to go and save before continuing. Didn't seem like a big deal though, the monsters were pretty much the same as in the Crystal Tower and they didn't seem to hurt me all that much. So I went on my merry way deeper into the darkness, when suddenly a fight broke out... And my DS crashed...

All my hard work to get to the top, my death and rebirth, all for nothing... Now I have to do it all over again... Great...

Japanese Food

2008-03-19T23:21:00.003+01:00

We went to a Japanese restaurant today with the people from work. Everyone actually showed up, the boss who was at home because he had his wisdom teeth removed and was feeling pretty crappy and had this really swollen face because of his sedation and stuff. The Business Intelligence intern person even showed up for a day and the new kid actually ate!

It was one of those places where you sit around a big table with a cooking plate on one side that they cook the food on while you're watching and eating. It was very tasty, much better then I first expected, and we all had a lot of fun together.

We interns were all sitting in one corner as the 'associates' all sat in the other and our talks were pretty separated, I could hear them talking about mostly work stuff and such while we were kind of making fun of each other and laughing at the egg pieces thrown in our laps and the way they cut the shrimp's head and stuff. It was a lot of fun. We talked a lot about all kinds of stuff together too.

I was kind of surprised that one of the people at work isn't too fond of the new guy. I've spoken with him a little and even though he does seem somewhat socially awkward sometimes he seems like a nice guy, no qualms about talking to people about what he knows, possibly bragging a lot about what he's supposedly done.

He reminds me a lot about the way I was some years ago. Except of course that he knows more about programming then I do and especially then I did back then.

We'll see what happens over the next few weeks.

A New Face at Work...

2008-03-18T23:48:00.003+01:00

We have a new intern, or whatever you should call it, at work since Monday.

A little 18 year old kid who seems really knowledgeable about programming. Supposedly he's been at it since he was 11. I don't know if he's a genius, savant, autistic or just someone who studies really hard, but the others at work are stunned along with me. The work they gave him and planned a week for was nearly done when I left Monday. Today was a school day so I don't know what's happened today, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's done by tomorrow.

He seems to lack in social skills, we nearly had to twist his arm to get him to go to lunch with us, he didn't eat a single bite or drink a single drop. 5 years ago I would have done the same thing, the first day at work I refused to drink anything as well, although when I was invited to go to lunch with them after my job interview I went with them.

It pains me a little though that he seems to know all the things that I want to know, well, not all of course. It's times like this that it hurts that I'm as lazy as I am. Though it also helps of course, it gives me an excuse to know less then he does.

I wonder if he'll stay with us long. The people at work are afraid that he might not be enough of a team player for them.

I don't know yet if I like him, he seems ok, but he doesn't talk much or interact with anyone, but that might be because I've only seen him on his first day of course, we'll see what tomorrow brings as always. I find it interesting to see others, maybe programming wasn't the right choice for me? Perhaps I should take up psychology? Nah, code is what I like and code is the way to go for me.

All I'm hoping for is that he'll loosen up. I hope to make a friend out of it, at least for the duration of his employment there or mine, depending on which might end first. Perhaps I can even learn some stuff from him, maybe he can give me some tips on what to read or where to start with certain things. Interesting times ahead.

It has come to pass...

2008-03-13T20:17:00.002+01:00

Finally have I finished Tales of Phantasia, it is the first Tales of game that I have finished. Not the only one I've played, mind you, but I've never had the stamina to finish one (I was told they're extremely long games) and this time I decided I just had to.
It helped that it was the recently translated Playstation version and not the old SNES or crappy GBA version. It had some nice improved graphics, had a very nicely updated battle system. These things helped keep it interesting.

I wasn't sure if I could do it a few times, because there were some battles where the game would crash. The first time I remember was during the first fight with Dhaos. Which is of course a very bad time to have it crash, especially since it was going pretty well. I think then the 2nd time I died and the 3rd time I beat him pretty easily.
After that I only remember it in Dhaos' castle at the end of the game. Both SEAL EYE? fights were pretty annoying without the game crashing, I had to try some 5 times each before I could get past them.
I feel lucky that I didn't have any such problems with the final fight. If I had to do those all over again each time 3 in a row I'd have thrown my psp through the window I'm sure.

Though I was surprised. I was stuck on one of the floors of the castle and I scrolled down in the FAQ to see wat I was up against. I read that there's 2 forms that Dhaos comes in. So I was really surprised when the 3rd round started. Luckily I only died some 5 times or so in the first round, but once I beat him I was apparently on a roll because right after that I beat the living hell out of Feather Dhaos and the beat the angelic Dhaos form. Was fun, but it was a damn nerve wracking fight.
The end was nice, but I'm not going through that game any time soon again! It's awesome, but now I've seen it, I know the story and I'm just going to go on to the next game. Right now it's Untold Legends - The Warrior's Code is what I'm playing, but that's really only untill I can get my hands on Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. I think it's good that Square Enix wants to start releasing games worldwide, I hate knowing these awesome games are out there and I have to wait till they're released here or in the US.

Anyway, it was an excellent game and of course I recommend the game itself, but go through some extra trouble to get that playstation version fixed for translation, because in my opinion it is worth it. Scenes like Thor's rising from the sea and Yggdrasil's healing have been improved a lot (from what I've heard). So try it if you like RPGs.

Marty Friedman - Simple Mystery

2008-02-18T19:25:00.001+01:00

DMC 2 No More

2008-02-16T20:24:00.003+01:00

As of now I've also finished the 2nd disc from Devil May Cry 2. I think that this 2nd disc was more fun then the 1st one. Lucia has a pretty cool fighting style and she looks cooler in Devil Trigger as well.

It was pretty easy though, seems she's pretty strong too since I got to level 1312 or something with her in Bloody Palace, sure I skipped 100 levels each time, it's still pretty cool, usually don't get past level 7 in such things.

Disc 1 had it's annoying moments, though disc 2 was really easy, no trouble at all with anything, probably for most action game lovers it's just way too easy.

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Now playing: Eldritch - See You Down
via FoxyTunes

So much for Fate/Stay Night

2008-02-16T09:13:00.003+01:00

I've now seen all 24 eps of Fate/Stay Night, which I started watching because according to AniDB it had a relation with Shingetsutan Tsukihime (aka Tsukihime - Lunar Legend). Which I suppose is kind of true, since the kid in Shingetsutan Tsukihime had this strange power that let him see an object or person's life lines, which were lines that would cause anything or anyone to fall apart if you'd cut them. With Fate/Stay Night it's kind of similar, the main character has an ability that allows him to do the opposite of the other dude, he can identify the structure of any object or person (or being really) and reinforce it. Here's it's just regular magic that anyone can learn, but apparently it's so weak that nobody takes the time to learn it. But he excels at it, and as he later finds out he also excels at 'tracing' which allows him to create corporeal illusions of objects.

Anyway, it was pretty cool, he's a bit silly in that he doesn't allow his 'servant' to fight for him, which is all she really wants to do.
It's pretty interesting, though I think the translation I had was a bit off, since they were all called heroes and their special abilities were noble phantasms even though there were some real evil beings among them, like Rider and Caster. Of course you might live by the notion that there is no such thing as good and evil, which would fit since even Rider can seem like a nice person at times. But I think probably Legends and Legendary Phantasms would work better, especially with the 'King of Heroes' making an appearance whilst being probably the most evil being in the show, I'd personally prefer to call him King of Legends because he is pretty well known (as are some of the others). But that's just my idea, nothing to do with the show beyond that though.

It was excellent, I enjoyed it, can definitely recommend it.

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Now playing: Elegy - Poisoned Hearts
via FoxyTunes

Dante's Disc

2008-02-13T20:37:00.007+01:00

I've finished the first disc from Devil May Cry 2, aka Dante's Disc. I still think the game is very under appreciated. Sure the game has no story at all, but then again I didn't think that DMC 1's story was all that great.
The game wasn't at all tough though, took me 2 tries to get the final boss, and only 1 for the one before that (final boss this time being both Argosax the Chaos and Despair Embodied, or whatever it's name was). The toughest boss was the one from the building.

Anyway, I've just started Lucia's disc and played 2 missions now. Her style of fighting is pretty cool, I always like dual wielding and the air-combo capabilities (which I was told was never introduced until DMC4).
I'm gonna play through Lucia's 13 missions as well, but I don't think that it'll change my current opinion of it being a pretty bad game, but still under appreciated.

Devil May Cry 2

2008-02-02T13:00:00.001+01:00

Since I've finished the first Devil May Cry game I thought I'd start DMC2 as well. Even though I know that 90% of the people who liked DMC hated DMC2, I can't figure out why. Sure I've only just finished the third mission, but up to this point it's actually more fun then the first game.
I don't know maybe it becomes really bad halfway or something, but thus far nothing seems to be so bad about it that it warrants being called the worst sequel/prequel ever...

Devil Never Cry

2008-02-01T10:50:00.001+01:00

About a week ago I downloaded the Devil May Cry 4 demo for PS3 and was shocked by the awesomeness that it showed.
Almost 4 years ago I bought Devil May Cry for the PS2 because my girlfriend liked it and wanted to play it (she'd borrowed it from a friend once). And I tried playing it a few times aswell, but after a while I just stopped liking it at all.

But when I saw DMC4's demo, I just had to try again, and this time I didn't care at all about any challenge. So last sunday I picked it up again, dusted it off and hoped it would still work in my PS2.
I played for a few hours and yesterday I finished it.

I'm glad I didn't try normal because I don't think the game is all that good anyway. Sure the fights are ok, but the voice acting and the story are pretty bad. Characters too.
But it was fun anyway and the horror theme is always appealing and they did that very well. I've already got DMC2 ready to be played, which everyone tells me sucks, but I've found more games that everyone hates or dislikes that turn out to be awesome.
Crazy really, but maybe I'll get to playing that too someday soon.

Sylph

2008-01-14T23:54:00.000+01:00

Once again I am at that point in the game where you have to get your first summon. I remember getting stuck this early in the game a lot when I first started playing this game on the SNES.
This time though I know what's going on and what I'm doing.
I wanted to grab some good equipment before going after the Sylphs, but first time around on just another random encounter, my PSP crashed... And I had to start over again.

Did though later on, got the weapon which really eased the process of getting another 1600 gald to get 2 new berets. It's probably a little crazy to take all that time to acquire 2 pieces of armor that will only increase defense 1 or 2 points. But that's the type of person I am, I figure that if I fight those few extra fights I'll be just a little bit stronger, plus the equipment on it's own (the 1600 gald sword was damn nice) really helps me later on. Had this very same thing with Final Fantasy, but I haven't gotten through that one yet.

I have a feeling that I'm gonna enjoy playing this, I'm still pretty much stunned by the fact that it's so different from the SNES version.

Can't let go...

2008-01-14T23:44:00.000+01:00

I picked up Valkyrie Profile again today because I just can't leave it be. I've played it and hated it at times, but it is still very cool and the enemies that are the problem can easily be fixed by just running away. I've also discovered that using weapons that are less powerful but have more actions help a lot, since they add to your overall combo score and can start those overdrive thingies. These thingies are very handy in taking down enemies.
That plus the fact that I've also found out that the CT is the amount of time (in turns) that it takes to be able to take certain actions all really helps.

Still having a lot of trouble though, the game doesn't get any easier, but at least now I have made progress, I went to Lezard Valeth and spoke to him and saw the cool cut scene in his crazy-ass basement and stuff. The fight was pretty easy, but suddenly the game seems quite a bit more interesting.

I don't know if I'll actively pursue finishing it again, because I'm having this much trouble and it's only chapter 4 (of 8 I think). But I will at least be playing it sporadically. I am quite happy to find these things out.

Last Monday...

2008-01-13T13:57:00.002+01:00

Last Monday I went to the Helloween, Gammaray and Axxis concert in Tilburg.
And I think that the Gods of Metal were angry with my friend, because the way he had planned it we would arrive exactly on time, but in the end we didn't.

First the train from Amsterdam to Eindhoven (which we were told to take) was a few minutes late (not a big problem you'd think, it was only 3 minutes), but that caused us to miss our connection in Eindhoven, which we were 2 minutes late for.
Then the next train to Tilburg arrived 20 minutes later (also 3 minutes late, but not really a big deal at this point). We boarded the train and sat down and were waiting to leave. But then they announced that 'due to some technical problems we will experience delay of a yet unknown time'. Then 4 minutes later they announced 'due to problems with the railway, this train will not be departing today'. So... we missed one train and then another broke down. By this time we were worried if we would ever get there at all.
another 20 minutes after we were supposed to leave the 2nd time finally another train that would go to Tilburg came. This train did leave and we got to Tilburg.
We ran the rest of the way and found out were were 30 minutes late, which we thought wasn't a big deal, because Axxis would play first for about 30 minutes and then there'd be 30 minutes of break-time while the crew made sure that Gammaray's instruments were in working order.

When we got to there though we found that Gammaray was already playing, and this was the band we really went there for in the first place. So we were kinda pissed off about that, we were worried that they'd play first and then Axxis. But strangely enough, standing right next to us was a friend of my friend. He told us that Gammaray had just started playing and we came in during the first song. And also that they had apparently opened the doors and started the concert 30 minutes early, which he only got to see because he had arrived crazily early. He also told us to our great relief that Axxis had sucked, we weren't roaring to see them anyway, I only knew 2 songs and my friend didn't like them much either.

During Gammaray's show we were just standing and watching, listening, enjoying, when suddenly we were pushed aside by this girl that was standing behind us with her friends. She had been taking pictures over our shoulders with her phone for a while now and she decided that we (especially my friend) were too tall to stand behind so, drunk as she was, she took her place right between us and she took a lot of space. She didn't just listen and take pictures, she was kinda drunkenly dancing, kind of. We were kind of laughing on the inside because of her behavior and kind of thinking 'what the hell?'.
Well, we were too preoccupied with the concert to really care that someone was almost bothering us, so we just watched and after the show we kind of laughed about what happened and we talked a little with his friend about what was happening and why they were playing and such.

Then the Helloween show started and we were all ready to rock. But right before they started 2 guys were looking for a spot and decided that right in front of us was as good as any other spot, which I guess was true. We were again thinking 'what the...?' and were getting a little bummed because they pushed us back almost forcibly. Then it turned out that they were with the lady that had pushed us aside during the Gammaray show and they didn't like standing behind my friend because he's pretty tall and they weren't so tall.
So of course that drunken lady showed up again too and she took her space, and her friends gave her that space. She was also on the phone a lot with a friend of her, letting him hear the show through it, can't imagine he heard much though.

During Helloween show there was a dude standing a few steps in front of us and he was so drunk he could barely keep standing. So a few times he almost fell down on top of someone and one time one of those people got seriously pissed and pushed him back pretty hard. 10 rows of people, at least, were pushed back and probably most had no idea what was going on, but the drunk knew least of all I got the impression.

Helloween, like many (metal) bands had their drum solo halfway through, but these dudes decided they wanted to do a little more, I guess.
Right before the drum solo, the stage went dark and they apparently set up an arc with a curtain (like puppet shows). The drummer started his solo and after a few seconds the curtains opened and 3 of the band members were standing behind it on their knees in giant shoes, dressed like gnomes. They had high pitch voices and were complaining that they hated drum solos, so they challenged him to playing Smoke on the Water (which the guitarist then played and the drummer had to mimic). Doing this pretty well, they asked him if he could play 'this' and the guitarist started roaring away on his guitar, when the other guitarist (not behind the curtain dressed like a gnome) started objecting what was going on because he did like drum solos. So he took out his toy gun and shot the gnomes, giving the drummer his chance to play like crazy.

At the end of the show, during the 'encore' the members of Gammaray joined Helloween and they played a medley of the coolest songs Helloween has together. Which was absolutely awesome!

After the show we had to get home, so we went back to the train station, just barely missing the train we thought we had to take. By this time we'd lost track of that other dude and his girlfriend, thinking they did get on that train. So we waited for then next one we thought we needed.
But when the train before that arrived we saw that dude and his girlfriend get on, so we followed them because we knew that they had to go to Amsterdam too.

Turns out though that they read their planning wrong, he read the wrong time on the sheet they had. So we arrived at Den Bosch with no way of getting to Amsterdam or anywhere else.
My friend then saw a train which was headed to Eindhoven, where we remembered seeing a train that would go to Utrecht from which we could take a train to Amsterdam.

Unfortunately when we got there we found out that this train only runs on Fridays and Saturdays. So now we were stuck in Eindhoven and the last train had just left, but it went towards Venlo, which is the opposite direction of where we had to go.
So we were stuck, and then one of the employees of NS came and closed the station, so we would be stuck outside. We only had one option left, take a taxi home (staying outside and sleeping there was not really an option for us). A taxi from Eindhoven to Amsterdam would cost us €200. So we split it 4 ways and each payed €50. We drove past Den Bosch, so we found out that it would have been better to have stayed there.

Then we got to Amsterdam and each went our own way. I was home at 2:30 AM, so I emailed my co-workers that I wouldn't be able to make it to work the next day (didn't really feel like sleeping only 3 hours) and then slept for 11 hours straight.

It was an unforgettable show, not just because it ruled, but also because, of course, it was really expensive.

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Now playing: Trouble - Requiem
via FoxyTunes

Tales of Phantasia

2008-01-13T13:33:00.001+01:00

I can't remember how long I have been trying to tackle this game or how many times.

I've always been playing it on the SNES, but a while ago a friend of mine finally got a translated version of ToP for the PSX. Sure it's not like the full-voiced version for PSP, but that only just got released really and we don't expect a US/EU release, so that will take a few more years to translate I'm guessing. Though translators seem to be getting faster, since a few months after Monster Hunter Portable 2nd got released they'd made a pretty comprehensive patch for that too.

Anyway, I've been playing it these last few days, mostly on the train home from work on my PSP and damn it's different from the SNES version. The characters look different, their status profile images look very different, the battles are totally different (friend of mine tells me it uses Tales of Destiny 2's battle engine), and generally it's just gotten some sort of face-lift or something.

Haven't gotten very far yet, still in the first part, exploring where Dhaos is supposed to be buried, or captured really. But so far it's going much better then it used to. And I don't know if the defend and combo-hit features are from the ToD2 engine or I just never knew about them in the SNES version, but Cless can now hit 2x and like I first noticed in Tales of the World he can defend, which is a big plus really.
I seem to generally understand more now then I did then (I have that a lot with games I played a long time ago). So I'm using a lot of abilities more now then I did back then and just generally know how things work better.

So I am confident I will at least get further in the game that my last try. And Looking forward to playing more too.

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Now playing: Wuthering Heights - A Sinner's Confession
via FoxyTunes

Final Boss Fight

2008-01-13T13:11:00.001+01:00

A few days ago I made it through Beyond The Gate and got to Lady. I was then and still am grossly unprepared.
The first time around I forgot that Johnny didn't have anything equipped against ring abnormalities, so when Lady first used ring abnormality, I was kinda bummed out.

Then it got to be that she and her friend 'big ugly', aka Malice Umbral, got to use a combo attack. I don't know what the attack's names were, but total obliteration describes it pretty well.

I've been training a little almost every day since then, and though I can get a few more turns in before I die, once they use that combo I'm still dead no matter what.
So I decided to do some side-quests first. No biggie. But I couldn't really find many of them and I just want to finish this game and be done with it so that I can move on. So I looked them up on GameFaqs.

So now I'm working on getting everyone's ultimate weapons and armor and just get generally stronger. I'm only level 40-something, so maybe that is my biggest problem. We will see soon enough when I've trained some more.

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Now playing: Wuthering Heights - Lost Realms
via FoxyTunes

New chances...

2008-01-13T12:47:00.001+01:00

My sis recently bought a Nintendo DS and yesterday for the first time she left it alone long enough for me to borrow it and play some games on it.

I say games, but really it was only one game. I played a little bit of Megaman ZX.
I was on some kind of mission in Area J, the watery place. Good thing I had the Lx biometal (of course) to ease my traversal of the water.
I got to some beast that I had defeated before, but instead of hanging in a semi-safe corner to in which I hacked down everything that came my way, I stood upon it's head this time and hacked away. Went a lot quicker this time around, he sent out 2 sets of fish before just attacking me with it's tentacles, and then it was dead, easy as pie.

Afterwards I ran into the 2nd model L pseudoroid, which has to be the easiest boss I have ever fought against.
I didn't really yet know what was going on, but I started hanging in a corner near it's head and the first attack just completely missed and the second attack pulled me closer to it and damaged me a little, only at that time I started swinging Lx's weapon around and it couldn't touch me anymore. It slowly died little by little and I no longer got hurt.
After maybe 30 seconds it was over and I had beaten another boss.

Then I decided to try some side-quests. The first being 'purify the water'. Which was really easy, just had to dump some crates into the water for the cleaning solution to spread and clear the water.
The one I picked after that though was a different story. I'm still working on that one. I have to find some kind of flower in area A-1, but I suspect it's on some kind of ledge that I just barely can't get to...
If I get a chance I might try and find it some more today, but I can't see me figuring out how to get there.

The Humanity...

2008-01-05T17:12:00.001+01:00

So I'd entered the gate last time and had walked around a little to see what I was going up against. Later I turned on my PS2 to continue and the first fight I got in was against 3 Phobos all with 1 stock bar and more speed then me, so I had a few double attacks coming from those beasts, can't recommend it for recreation as it sure as hell will kill you and won't make you stronger.
But then finally today I got my nerve back enough to turn my PS2 on again to play this game.

I walked where I should, ran into a malice thing tree root thingy. Kinda weird to fight against a stationary enemy in this game. No real trouble though, but then Gilbert came along...

Not knowing what he was going to throw at me I was of course as always somewhat unprepared, but I never would have guessed that he would lower my SP so much as he did. I did find out before the fight with gilbert that Johnny is way stronger as Awaker and in healing too. His release ability combined with the flare brooch(?) reduces SP consumption from 4 to 2, which I'm sure was intended to be used in this way (used it with Shania first but she has a lot of SP).
So his increased power helped a lot and I found out that Tatan'ka's Howling ability is pretty nice aswell.
Even though I tried my very best, Shania and Johnny did go berserk 3x, which also is not so very healthy for the rest of your team.

With a lot of hard work and stress and feelings of loss, I did finally defeat him with all my characters sane and alive so they may bask in his experience. But I am glad I'm through with him, it seems that these bosses tend to get more annoying with each game, Shadow Hearts was just keeping an eye on your HP and SP and having the patience to beat god, Shadow Hearts: Covenant was easy most of the time and only the final boss gave you any real trouble, but this one here is just stress all around with every boss. I guess you could say that they are making the game more challenging, but being used to easy bosses and always getting stuck near bosses means that it's hard work for me not to just call it quits (but hey, I've finished both games before this one, I should be able to finish this one too).

As much as I hate these bosses and hate knowing the fact that I have 2/3 more on the way is really not boosting my morale, but I know that all games are finishable and if I just keep trying eventually I will get through it.

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Now playing: WASTEFALL - Sleepwalk
via FoxyTunes

Killer

2007-12-31T15:11:00.000+01:00

It was my turn to play again this morning. I could play extra long though because my girlfriend had to go to the doctor to get some medicine for something that now appears to be more then just a cold.
This did allow me to go through Johnny's memory though and after that to his old burnt down house (easy puzzle this time dude) and found out about him and his sister. And got Roger to take us up to the gate.

When we blasted off though I was shocked to find that my screen went blank and never returned to normal...
This is apparently a problem HDLoader has with this game, luckily though I searched the internet a little andn found that I had to press up on the D-pad during the HDL splash screen to enable MDMA0, which luckily did work.

So now I was at the gate. I walked up to Lady and Killer and killer showed that deep down, even though he was a serial killer named Killer, he was a good person who just wanted to be loved and to have his friend Lady's wish granted, whether it be to regain her humanity or to destroy the world...

First time I faced him I was (as always) grossly unprepared. And most of my characters were quicly disposed of by his instant death attack.
Afterwards though I took some more time to prepare and of course equipped Leonardo's Bear on everyone and something on Frank to stop him from being Sealed so he could Arc Heal everyone. Crazy thing about sealing that I learned is that you can Fuse whilst sealed, just not into any creature, just back to normal I guess.

After a long time and quite a few deaths and ultimate attacks (his attacks, not mine), we finally won. His Malice for really reminded me of Yuri's 2nd and 3rd fire fusion. But aside from my great wish of seeing one of the old characters back (I know roger is still here, but even in Shadow Hearts some characters crossed over from Koudelka) he was a real bad egg.
After he was beaten he kinda does look dead, but you never know with Lady around.

I have now entered the gate and I don't think I'll have much longer to go...

The Real World!

2007-12-30T22:20:00.001+01:00

I wen to Gysahl and talked to some people without much interesting happening or finding, then went to Cid to get my Airship fixed.
Then I was told to go to The Real World, so I did that.

Once in the real world I was confronted by pretty much nothing... So I looked around, found a temple and thought it best not to enter, then found a shipwreck that I somehow felt a need to enter... Apparently that was a good idea as I found Aria, some kind of priestess that wanted to save the world and was now sick in bed. Gave her an elixir to fix her up and then she asked us to take her to the temple I'd found earlier.
We went there and to my surprise there were no random encounters. We took a shard of the water crystal and then she asked us to take her to some cave to the north.
Inside this cave was the Water Crystal, but damn there are some tough creatures in there. Not that they do a lot of damage, but Paralysis and Petrification are not your friends!

Got through it though, and also through a whole lot of Gold Needles. But then I met Kraken and found myself unprepared. I died in 2 turns so I thought to call it quits for the day.

Argus

2007-12-30T16:35:00.001+01:00

I was roaring to go as I turned on my girlfriend's DS and started Final Fantasy III! I had just beaten both Salamander and Hein and I felt invincible!
There wasn't so much fighting to do yet though. I walked around a little going to some towns to see if there was anything I missed or people that still needed to thank me.
I went to see King Argus about the airship that I wanted Cid to build and used the thief's skills to open some locked doors I'd left behind. And I was about to go on my way to gysahl to see if there was anything of interest there, but alas, by now my girlfriend's DS's light had turned red and I needed to charge it, so no more Final Fantasy for the next few hours...

Gives my time to try other things though.

LF

2007-12-30T15:00:00.000+01:00

After having been through hell to get that Model H Biometal and then taking some time to explore and gather some stuff (I likes them energy tanks) I had to go to field F. I'd looked around a little for it yesterday and found it, but of course I died...
This time though I was determined to get through it! So I was a little more careful then I usually am and I took a little more time to see what's going on and stuff and eventually I got to the room with the data disc. And after seeing what the data disc had I was told that they would unlock the locked door... locked door? I hadn't seen a locked door in ages...
Luckily I remembered the door that I'd seen at the beginning of that field and went there which was of course the right place to be (I hadn't thought before on how to get there).

I went into some kind of waterish level and got through it with only minor trouble to eventually be met by the L boss... Some giant fish with the light/bait cord thingy on it's head. To my surprise this boss was farely easy to dispose of. Now I had the model L biometal and I could swim for real! :)
I then went on some more exploration and after having failed my mission by dying too much I decided 'screw exploration and items' and went on with the next mission.

This mission wanted me to go to area G, wth??? I had even less of an idea where G would be because I thought I'd gone almost everywhere I could in order to get to F.
After some searching I finally found it though and ran into a whole lot of fire! Had to go into a burning building and save everyone.
I climbed to the top of the building and then jumped over to the next and eventually found my way to another boss, which I was kindof expecting seeing as I didn't stop right after having fought the first boss.
since I was very surprised I'd beaten the first boss with the help of my energy tanks, imagine my surprise when I fought agains model F and won after only dying once! The world of Megaman is going crazy! Me being able to defeat 2 bosses in one try??

Anyway, after having beaten F and seeing my new bull-like outfit, I decided that I'd pushed my luck with megaman far enough for now and decided to give it some rest. I can always play more later today or tomorrow...

Graveyard scene anyone?

2007-12-30T11:23:00.000+01:00

I was happy to find that the puzzle I completed yesterday was one of the last. I went up to the next floor and found no puzzle, which was a nice relief. Then up one more floor and here was a puzzle, but I didn't need to walk around a lot for it, just light up a star. I opened both doors (first the dark one on the left, 80% of the time left is lucky, but right is right) and went up to the last floor, where they tried to place the rings, but were interrupted by Killer.
To my great surprise this was the first boss-fight in a long time that didn't actually kill me and needed me to try a 2nd time.

After he was beaten he tried to kill Johnny, who then magically transformed. Being the evil bugger that his transormation is, he starts knocking everyone on their asses and even hits Shania with the back of his hand (abusive right after the wedding?).
Shania then activates the shrine and Johnny is turned back to normal, except he's KO.

He then suddenly wakes up in his old room in his old house. This reminds me a bit of how Yuri always gets to his Graveyard the first time. I'm still rooting for atleast a guest appearance of one of the cooler characters (Yuri, his cousin, alice, the girl from SH2).

But then I found my save point and of course my girlfriend wanted to play her game so I had to stop playing again (dammit).

Salamander Hein

2007-12-29T23:46:00.002+01:00

I had finally convinced myself to play some more Final Fantasy III after having heard from a friend that job requirements are so bad in this game that he bought the official guide just to see which jobs he needed to have where. And since I'm not into buying or even very much reading guides (though I do from time to time) this was kinda unnerving as I could already see myself failing at every turn of the game.
The I read up a little more on how serious it was and was calmed down by the knowledge that 3 melee characters and a Devout are really all you need. So I was good to go again untill I came to a passage about the boss I was about to face, saying that it was the most hateful boss in the game... Salamander. So I got scared thinking I'd never beat him of course, but after having beaten him I can very hardly imagine that being the most annoying boss. He went down kinda quickly.

Then I could change my job to Knight, which I wanted to do for a good while now and was walking around going my merry way when I stumbled upon a stumbling and mumbling person who said that some town I'd visited once needed my help. So I went there only to be incapacitated by the friendly king's soldiers. I was taken to the walking tree that I had tried entering earlier without succes (no clipping?).
So I knew that I was semi-screwed because I did some stuff (nothing big) and didn't save because I didn't think I'd be captured upon entering the village. And anyone who's played FFIII knows that there are no save points in the game.
On top of that, 25% through my girlfriend notified me of her plans to go to bed (she's a bit under the weather at the moment) and I couldn't save! And I didn't want to give up my progress either. So I pushed on, trying my best to get through it as quickly as possible.
Luckily the dungeons aren't all that big (yet) in this game, so it didn't take long, but damn Hein was a tough cookie to bite through. 2x attack seems to be becoming somewhat of a trend amongst (boss) enemies. Multiple hits I can understand, but more then one action per turn is bordering on unfair.
I KO'd him in 3 turns, but I did lose my 2 strongest characters (kinda strange), using the Antarctic Wind I'd found.

Now it's late and I think my girlfriend is starting to feel the urge to give me the evil eye, so off I go again, into bed to waste another 8 or so hours on sleep that I could spend gaming or entertaining her... Oh well, life is sleep...

Half a Model H

2007-12-29T15:59:00.001+01:00

I guess 20x went by faster then I expected because I've beaten that weird flying Reptoloid kind of thing.

Afterwards I accepted a job which would lead me to Area F, no idea where that was though, so I started looking around a little. Fought some enemies, ran into this really wierd enemy theme park and went on some rides, fought a few enemies, found 2 sub-tanks (not there, but whilst exploring) and found out that these aren't used automatically when energy depletes which I'm very used to so I keep forgetting to refill my health.

I don't understand though that once you're frozen by those Totem-like things how you can get out of it, because whenever I freeze, I can't get out before I'm frozen again. So those things seem like a pretty good deathtrap to me...
I accidentally did a soft-reset, so I guess I'm going to do something else again...

Just a puzzle...

2007-12-29T14:24:00.000+01:00

Had very little time this time, so only could complete the puzzle for a single room. I could've played longer, but I knew my girlfriend wanted to play Suikoden III real bad, so when I finished the puzzle and saw that I could still easily reach my save point, I decided to let her play. So I'm still stuck on the 4th floor.

My First Serialization...

2007-12-29T00:16:00.001+01:00

When my study of Visual C# just started I set out to create an application that my girlfriend's mother could use to organize her game shortcuts and stuff.
Today, maybe 6 months later, I finally figure out a way to save the shortcuts into a file and get them out (I learned this a while ago already), but today I figured out how to each give them their own eventhandler.

I created a class that contains the information that I need to get the program to work and also 1 function with the Button.Click event handler signature. I made another class that contains a generic list of the first class.
I save this list through a serializer and call it when the application loads.
I run through every instance of the first class and create a button using the information from my first class and call the event handler from it. This evenhandler uses the info from this class to start the application.

This is probably no great feat, since I'm only beginning and still need to adjust to the idea of the written program and the compiled program. When I'm talking to someone about 5 apples I can't easily talk about each apple individually, but a well-written compiled program can because he doesn't just see 5 apples, but 5 instances of an apple each with unique names that it gave to them (right?).

4th Floor

2007-12-28T20:58:00.000+01:00

My girlfriend went off to watch some TV and actually had the option to save right before she had to go (she's playing Suikoden III). So I saw my opportunity to play some more Shadow Hearts, since I couldn't do all that much this morning except go to where I had to and buy some new equipment.

This time it was a little more productive, though it was very uncertain whether or not it would be during the first half hour since I couldn't find my way out!
In the puzzle with all the pillars and stuff in the first room it's never actually explained that you need to touch the white crystal to open the door, and as observant as I am (not), I overlooked it. So I was running around testing various combinations of raised and lowered platforms only to find that none worked... frustrations started building up just a teensy bit, and then I noticed it! All this might not seem like it is a lot (since there are only 3 types of pillars), but with the enemies going around there this can take quite a while.

In the end though I did make it, but only to stumble upon a room with seemingly no white switch. Thoughts were processed along with images and enemies so that I may find out that there was a white switch down on the 'floor'. So I rode one of the pillars and back up again to find that the switches also show what they do to which pillars. So the switch I thought was the end in sight (yellow) actually only sent the yellow ones down...
Looking around I found no 'up' switch, so I went down again, luckily finding the right switch.

So now I'm on the 4th floor and I don't know how many I have left to get to, but I'm sure it's no more then half to be tried again tomorrow...
These games seem to progress really slowly...

Oooooh, Ahhhh, pretty...

2007-12-28T16:40:00.000+01:00

I've got this old forum that I used to run (it's still around, just not being used at all) and I spent a lot of time there changing the way it looks to something that I still love to look at (but I think that's just me because other people always disliked things here and there).

But I've decided that I'll try and change the look of this page as much as I can to the look of my other page, just a little every now and then.

Curiosity

2007-12-28T15:52:00.000+01:00

Apparently the main character in Megaman ZX is curious about his enemies and what is going on, since each time you're beaten by that flying monkey of a Model H it tells you that curiosity killed that cat and now it's killed you.

I found out that at one point you could jump onto some kind of huge gears that would allow you to jump over a big chasm like structury thing that I always jumped right into and just walked by, but atop the other side of this structure (a place I couldn't get to before because of my own personal denseness) there are a few semi-secret passages that eventually lead to some kind of power cell that you can destroy, thus disabling the little shock things you see and some other thingies such as the shocks that I ran into last night and didn't know how to get past.
So now I got past all that and ran into that Model H dude. I've seen tough Megaman bosses and this isn't one of them, sure I need to try a few times and the fact that I only have 3 lives at my displosal is a little frustrating, but I'll make it soon and then I'll be a happy little camper and perhaps be able to fly or jump a little higher.

This game might turn out to be even more fun then I thought it would.

Salt Lake Tower

2007-12-28T14:02:00.000+01:00

I collected the other blue ring, which was way easier then I had expected, not even a single fight was needed.

Now I need to unlock the blue power to counter the red power so that Lady and Killer don't get their wish of her becoming human again (which is downright silly because she just wants to destroy the world!). I don't know if he likes her and is gullible or that he knows that what he's doing will mean the end of all living things on earth, but he seems convinced that he's doing a good thing and that the 'kids' are the evil-doers, even though he's the serial killer named Killer.

So I'm pretty sure that once I get up upon that tower I will have to beat (and possibly kill) him again. All this in a tower made of holy salt, I wonder if it can take such stress.

Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth

2007-12-28T00:36:00.001+01:00

Having been interested in this game for a very long time now and never finding either the energy or the time to play it, I decided when I finished my last game to actually try and get through it.

Right now I'm in some kind of tower, it's actually a story part, where someone is apparently in love with Lenneth and is thus killing beings and turning them into 'ghouls' in order to get her to come to him, presumably so that they make sweet love on the ancient wooden desk thingy that he uses to dissect his 'pray'. He might throw an elf he just captured in the mix to get it extra freaky, who knows with these people nowadays.

The tower is pretty damn rough from time to time, last time I tried I ran into some kind of Cerberus thing that had an attack that hit 3x and did both poison and freeze, so most of my party was incapacitated. This time around I met with a Fatal Glow thingy that used explode one too many time and 3/4 of my party died, somehow I recovered from this (using my last revive drinks) and am now on my merry way down to the damn sicko.

Too bad really that it is bed time and my girlfriend seems to be in a foul mood, because if that had not been the case I might have advanced my tries to get through it and found some freaky action on the way. ViMhoe is the word!

Descet

2007-12-28T00:34:00.000+01:00

After having tried that boss thingy I talked about earlier in Shadow Hearts 3 once more I can safely say that he won't bother me again. I killed him and I got the nice shiny blue ring. Unfortunately that was also the exact time I had to stop playing, because House was playing on TV and my girlfriend wanted me to watch it with her and her mom. We're all big House fans in this house.

Megaman ZX

2007-12-27T17:40:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I started playing Megaman ZX. I've always enjoyed playing the X series of Megaman and the Zero series too. Not so much the originals because they were just way damn tough.
So I decided to try the DS installment of this franchise to see if it was as much fun as the ones on GBA and PSP.

Fortunately so far it seems to be, but again it's pretty damn tough. Having trouble getting through the 3rd mission already. I don't care though, with some endurance and through trial and (mostly) error I will get to atleast a point in the game where I can say "I've played it".

I have to go to this powerplant right now and there's this one part where you have to jump on some kind of breaker that get electrocuted when it falls down because of your weight. This isn't all that tough were it not for the enemy that's floating there in mid-air. This beast is just a little too far to hit with your blade and I don't have full control over my cannon yet (this being due to my personal inability to grab the DS right).
I died a few times there and apparently went through all my lives, so I decided to try again some other time.

Kirby Squeak Squad

2007-12-27T16:34:00.001+01:00

Lol, had not expected it to go this quickly, but I started playing a little more of Kirby and I finished it! 100%
So this is my last post about Kirby.

I've been playing Kirby games since I was about 11 and I first found my cousin's copy of Kirby's Dreamland for the GameBoy. I started playing that and I couldn't keep from trying to get to and through that last level. After several tries I finally did ofcourse and this time with Kirby Squeak Squad I had nearly the same feeling as almost 10 years ago now.
It's a very fun game, with cool extras such as coloring your Kirby and getting extra life and such and even 1 extra transformation which I think might be my new personal favorite (Ghost).
The story is pretty funny, but it kind of turns out to be nothing, you set out to get your cake back and end up releasing and defeating the lord of the underworld and forgetting all about your cake. The evil-doers in this game just go away after that and they send you a new cake as an apology.
It's a very kiddy game, with not-so-subtle messages worked into the story, but this is always the case with Kirby and helps make it fun(ny).

Kinda too bad it is over already, but to date it's the most fun DS game I've finished (also the first one). Now on to other things!

Final Fantasy III

2007-12-27T15:34:00.001+01:00

Well, I've been playing Final Fantasy III over the last 3 days and I've been having a lot of fun. When I got it I didn't realise that they'd also made it 3D (as they are doing with FFIV now), which is cool since I'd never played FFIII before, but have played FF, IV, V and VI all in 2D and although 4 through 6 pull it off very nicely, 1 just didn't cut it. Now 3 being 3D I'm pretty sure it makes it quite a bit more accessible to me.

Yesterday though I was sent to retrieve the Ice horn from Gutsco the Scoundrel. But when I faced him, in the 2nd or so turn he used mini on all of us, I couldn't turn us all back in time and we died miserably.
Today I have tried again and this time I kicked his but. Good thing though that his mini spell missed a lot, that really helped. Too bad though Arc died right before Ingus tore him to shreds.

Ater that I noticed that I had something following me, which of course later turned out to be none other then Gutsco himself. Now I gotta chase him in another cave in order to get the crystal of fire.
I wonder what will happen when I have all 4 crystals, at this rate that won't take too long and afterwards what will I have to do?
Well, we'll see...

Kirby Squeak Squad

2007-12-27T14:22:00.001+01:00

Another day another world. I've been sporadically playing Kirby Squeak Squad on my girlfriend's DS for a while now and these last few days I've been playing it a lot more (been allowed to touch her DS more too).
I play a level (or World) and then I grab all the treasure chests there. So far they've been really easy to find. And I'm in level (world) 8 now! The one that doesn't originally show up on the map.

Well, I played through level 7 and the game is getting just a teensy bit tougher, I get hit a lot more, which is my main notification of it getting tougher, but it could also be because I'm getting more and more impatient to get through it or something.

The story is pretty funny, I mean saving the world (universe?) just because someone stole your pie!

Well I might play more this day so you might see another post about Kirby later on!

Shadow Hearts From the New World

2007-12-27T12:31:00.001+01:00

Well, I've been playing Shadow Hearts 3 for a while now and I'm still really bummed out that the original main character(s) aren't in there anymore. My hopes are still high that they might someday return to this franchise and kick ass again.

Of course it's typical that the day I think up this idea of posting what I'm doing in games would be the day that I spend an hour and a half playing, only to advance even a tiny bit in the last 5 minutes. So I've been walking around in circles all this time trying to find a ring in the Aito cave. Damn labyrinth with it's watchmen only allowing you through one-way.
Anyway, in the beginning of that cave it is explained that the red statues (magicians) would send you back, or atleast that's what I thought they said, but you're actually just transported somewhere else. So I also found out there that I've been walking around whilst already knowing the way to the next part, just without knowing that I knew this. So I tested it and the first thing that happens is that I'm sent right where I'm supposed to be.
Unfortunately given my current location (in the real world) I was only allowed to play for 1 hour and I had already passed that by far. Still, I was very curious about what I had to prepare for so I went on and saw the big centaur-like demon thingy protecting the itty-bitty ring.

There is something seriously wrong with these bosses. Always allowed to hit twice or more or just jump-start their stock on their own and stuff. I usually need atleast 2 tries to beat them now.

Anyway, I kinda lost after 3 or so turns and then decided 'What the hell, my time is up anyway' and turned off my PS2.

I am not looking forward to this fight whilst my last fight with Killer is still so fresh in my memory.

My new idea...

2007-12-27T12:26:00.000+01:00

Since I seem to love writing and think that I don't nearly post enough around here, I thought I might post my gaming experience to a more full extent. I hope someone might read it and perhaps even find certain things usefull or interesting, but I don't expect this. As always I know no one is reading or listening.

Sleep IS Necessary...

2007-12-04T15:18:00.000+01:00

I need to keep busy for a while. I haven't slept all night last night, and now I'm facing the concequences at work. I'm so dead tired that I can barely keep my eyes open and I'm pretty sure that my co-workers are slowly catching on that I'm just waiting to go home and that I'm constantly dozing off and stuff. Train back home is going to be a bitch again, I was constantly falling asleep on the way to work, suddenly woke up and realised I only had one more stop before I had to get off and I was still falling asleep constantly.

Now I just gotta keep looking busy for a while and keep myself from actually falling asleep for another 75 minutes. Torture...

Tekkaman Blade II

2007-11-30T10:45:00.000+01:00

I'm a big fan of the original remake of the series, so when I found out there was a sequel, I was psyched!

Now that I've watched it, I'm sad that there were only 6 episodes. Though the focus has been taken away from the coolest character in the series and it's full of inconsistencies with the original Tekkaman Blade (biggest being that Blade is actually moving, teksetting and remembering things, another being that Blade doesn't need Pegas anymore and that Aki now uses it, I could go on forever), but if you can look past that, it's a very good addition.

There's some excellent action schenes, the music is, especially during fights, pretty good. The story isn't really all that present and the character development is amazing, which is understandable since they need to do it in only 6 episodes, which causes one of them to be a complete bitch to one of the others in one episode and be her best friend the next!

It's a little weird, it shouldn't have been possible and really wasn't, but it was fun nonetheless!

Which Lego Star Wars Character are you?

2007-11-23T09:57:00.000+01:00

Lego Star Wars - The Complete Saga

Ikkitousen Dragon Destiny

2007-11-23T09:31:00.001+01:00

Being a fan of the first series of Ikkitousen didn't help prepare me for the shock that was to be this second series.
Maybe I just remembered wrong, but Ikkitousen was a lot of fun. It had a somewhat interesting plot, it had a lot of action that looked pretty cool and it was very funny.

This one however appears to have tried to focus more on the story and possibly ecchi-ness, which in my opinion didn't really go so well in either departments.
Sure I don't mind a little big-breasted female half-nudity in a show, but when it becomes depentent on it, it is a sign that they did something wrong.
Trying too hard to make the story really interesting and that being noticable is also not really all that great.

The OVA seems more like what it should have been after it chose the path it did, real nudity and lots of comedy!

The Black Mages - Those Who Fight Further

2007-11-18T22:16:00.000+01:00

Those of you who don't know these dudes yet and have played Final Fantasy VII should not be disappointed by this song. It is one of my personal favorite songs of all time. The only sad thing about this song is that they haven't made one out of Those Who Fight (normal battle theme).
If you haven't played this game or didn't like it, but like the music we all know and love 'Metal' then you will like this too:

Opeth - Bleak

2007-11-17T13:30:00.000+01:00

I just found out that Opeth posted this song online, so I went to look it up on YouTube. It's from 'The Roundhouse Tapes'. The duality of his singing is what attracted me to their music at first and opened the door for me to be able to listen to other grunters.

VAST - Touched

2007-11-12T22:09:00.000+01:00

Visual Audio Sensory Theater, a very strange band to say the least. This song was featured in an episode of Angel in the first season, I think it was the 2nd, where he first met Kate the police woman.

_{This is my first try at embedding a song from seeqpod}

Bruce Dickinson - King in Crimson

2007-11-12T21:54:00.001+01:00

Evil in the streets...

2007-11-12T21:30:00.000+01:00

As I was walking to the tram stop on my way to school I was thinking something that I had started thinking about a few days before that. It's amazing the thoughts that pop in your head when you're at work, step into an elevator and look into semi-infinity.

If Satan were what I understand him to be, then why does everyone fear him so? I know that he is evil and will supposedly corrupt your heart, ok, but if he were a person I am almost completely positive that he would probably be the friendliest person on the planet (or he'd be Dr. Kelso).
If you're a god-faring(/fearing?) man then you'll probably disagree with me now, yes?
Well, if Satan, or Lucifer, was indeed God's prodigal angel and was cast down from heaven and is looking for revenge, what do we have to do with that now?
We're alive, mostly unaware or unconcerned with the dealings of the afterlife and he would do us harm here?
If he would want to corrupt you, get you to join his side, should he scare you into it, or actually seduce you into it by becoming your best friend? And if God expects you to worship him of your own free will, would he not in fact try and push your faith to the limit by making terrible things and such happen?

And the harm part, would Satan kill you? What use are you to him? He is eternal, as is God. What use could he have right now at this moment to have 1 person more, or even a hundred or even a thousand?
How many people have died in the time that we live? And how many people die every day without anyone helping anything along? If they both were amassing armies, then would God really be so picky as to who gets in and who doesn't? If he were then would heaven not be nearly empty compared to hell? Would Satan not have an infinitely larger number of troops at his disposal?

I personally don't believe God or Satan exist, but I am agnostic, so I just really don't know, though it wouldn't make a lot of sense to me. I think God is just a way for people to absolve themselves from all responsibility and to run away from what they fear. Though even that doesn't go for everyone, I imagine there are a lot of people who genuinely also use their faith as an excuse to do good to others, though these people are rare.

Think about it, is your best friend Satan? Do you even live? What if this is the afterlife and it is all a big scheme to get you to join Satan's side, or perhaps you are the only real person and this is all just a test to see if you really deserve what you are supposed to get?
The possibilities of paradoxes and contradictions are endless, I don't understand how people with real faiths keep from going completely bonkers!

----------------
Now playing: Bruce Dickinson - Book Of Thel
via FoxyTunes

A Little thing called Californication...

2007-11-11T13:29:00.000+01:00

So, I watched this little thing called Californication the last few days, and just the like Red Hot Chili Peppers song of the same name, there's a lot of fornication going around in there. I'm half surprised that we haven't seen some prude that's constantly barraging Mr. Moody with terms as 'fornicator' and 'sinner' and whatnot.
According to the show itself there was also some kiddy-porn in the pilot episode. Of course this isn't really true, it's about a 16 year old girl (in the show) who's being played by a woman (girl) 1 year older then me (if I am to believe the DoB on TV.com) Madeline Zima (aka: Mia, Grace Sheffield). You see her having sex with Mr. Moody in the first episode and then later see him find out she's the 16 year old daughter of his ex-girlfriend's fiancé. She also turns out to be a big sociopath (according to Mr. Moody) and is constantly using the fact that they slept together to get Mr. Moody to do stuff. He forever refuses to have sex with her though, as any half-sane man should.
Mr. Hank Moody is a weird character for David Duchovny to see played. Perhaps not for the people who have seen him in his first ever movie appearance, which I'm told is one where he plays a transvestite hooker, but for me it is a little strange as I only know him as Mr. Mulder.

The will air here as of next monday, or it was aired last monday, I don't know. But it plays on Comedy Central here and I have to say that I wasn't laughing my ass of a lot in this show. There were a lot of times when it made me feel like shit too (though I may live too strongly with the characters in any show), but yeah it was fun and strangely interesting really.
I eagerly await season 2 which I've seen has been confirmed by showtime.

Oh yeah, and there is one thing that I hope to have learned from this how: Mr. Moody has a very good way with words, in my opinion, and his cynicism is inspiring as well. I hope I may now express my own thoughts with a slightly higher level of flair to you 0 people who read this.

Rock on people!
or as Volbeat so nicely put it: Rock the rebel, metal the devil! <-- makes no sense here

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Now playing: Marillion - Between You and Me
via FoxyTunes

Sonic PS3

2007-10-11T13:20:00.001+02:00

Yesterday I finished the PS3's version of Sonic The Hedgehog with Silver (I had already finished it with Sonic himself, and now it's Shadow's turn). I'm glad, Silver's episode, though fun, is tough and annoying.
His telekinetic abilities are awesome, I just love all the objects flying around and the enemies getting picked up by them and such, but compared to Sonic and what I've seen from Shadow it's really tough to get anything done at all. Sonic and Shadow both have homing attacks, and although Silver's attacks also go straight into his enemies, he can't jump at them.
Having no objects around would also not improve on ease of playing. Now I'm not hating it because I don't like a challenge or anything, it was fun, but somtimes it's too much at once.

Sonic's episode was mainly bothered by the fact that collision detection was sometimes way off. Sometime's you'd get a speed boost and immediately stop because there was a 1pixel difference in height between 2 drawn objects. If this happened whilst running on a wall, you were pretty much screwed.

It's still a fun game though, look forward to completing it with Shadow.

I would like to thank one of my friends for helping me though, she kicked that giant billiard ball's ass! If it hadn't been for her I'd still be stuck there, so thx! (I know, I know, nobody reads this crap)

On to Shadow!

Blind Guardian - Another Stranger Me

2007-10-10T21:41:00.001+02:00

Virgo - Baby Doll

2007-10-09T20:51:00.000+02:00

Shallow...

2007-10-07T17:55:00.000+02:00

It seems I have become a shallow music listener, which I've always accused others of being because they didn't listen to music beyond the surface of itself or of the pop-culture.
And sure I can't say that I only listen to the surface of music or only to the surface of pop-culture, but apparently I do listen to so much at such incredible speed that I can't remember what I've heard before. Ok, maybe I've just reached the point where I've listened too much music and whenever I hear something new, something old gets kicked out, thought I doubt this.

I don't know what to do, I already made a little application that randomly picks songs or cds from my collection and plays them for me to reacquaint myself with the music I have, but apparently it's not working well enough since the other day I heard a new CD for the first time, only to find out the next day that I'd heard it before already. And today I heard a song from my collection that I had just absolutely no recollection of and it sounded awesome.
I hope this doesn't start happening too often...
I was thinking of modifying my application to also just pick a few CDs (up to a certain size) for me to put on my MP3 player...

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Now playing: Rhapsody - Symphony Of Enchanted Lands
via FoxyTunes

1

2007-09-22T15:11:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-13T18:46:00.001+02:00

Everwood - The Past is Alive

2007-09-12T14:45:00.002+02:00

First usable project!

2007-09-12T00:08:00.001+02:00

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...

2007-09-11T02:44:00.001+02:00

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

2007-09-10T18:20:00.000+02:00

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...

2007-09-09T12:32:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-09T12:31:00.000+02:00

Opeth - The Grand Conjuration

2007-09-08T12:31:00.000+02:00

Dream Theater - Constant Motion

2007-09-08T05:57:00.002+02:00

My X-Files...

2007-09-08T01:30:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-08T01:04:00.001+02:00

My musical taste...

2007-09-07T23:00:00.000+02:00

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...

2007-09-07T22:13:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-05T16:49:00.000+02:00

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