Computing Archive

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A programming book? From me? Nah.

By
mike
– March 24, 2011Posted in: ASP.Net, Computing, Development

Being the wise, old, programming sage that I am (hahahahahaha!), I’ve built up a set of practices that I use in my development work. Such information has been gleaned from those old things with pages in, er, books, that’s it, and some from forums, and some from official guidelines and other official guidelines (it’s always good to have a choice of standards).

Anyway, I was thinking of collating them into a book, but then realised it would be more of a pamphlet, no-one would buy it, hard work and effort is meant to be free these days (thanks to the internet), etc.

I still might tho’, as I have a lot of real-world, pragmatic experience on how software development usually happens (badly in most places), and if you are able to introduce your own rules to your own work, it gives the illusion of control. It would be more of a tips book, with things like “Specs? Hahahaha!” and “Tab spacing is your friend”.

Well, it might help junior developers :P

Anyway, it’s more like a series of blog posts, so I’ll probably go with that, and then tweet the post URLs accordingly – stay tuned!

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Quick tips on IE8 tabs and Google Reader

By
mike
– September 15, 2010Posted in: Computing, Personal, Productivity

Seeing as I’ve had some time off recently and I’m a Bit Of A Geek, I’ve spent most of it in front of the computer :)

I use Internet Explorer 8 as my browser of choice, although I do also use Firefox as well for the excellent Firebug and Web Developer Toolber plugins, they really help with web development. Anyway, I have a number of sites I visit on a daily basis (Twitter, Facebook, Daily Telegraph, etc.), and I use have them in each tab.

When I start my daily browsing, I’m so lazy that I can’t be bothered to create a new tab and click each link from the Favourites bar, so I’ve found a way to kind of automate it. Instead of setting IE8′s home page to whatever you have set it to, set it to about:tabs. Then, when the browser launches, just click the Reopen Last Browsing Session link on the page. Hey presto, all your tabs get populated as they were when you last closed your browser. Obviously you need some open tabs to start with ;) Incidentally, use Ctrl+Q to access Quick Tabs, a visual representation of which tabs you have open, then pick a tab or hit Esc to close.

As I spend a lot of time in Google Reader (the RSS feed reader), I like to view it full-screen to maximise reading space. This is achieved by hitting two keys on the keyboard: F11 (in IE8) to go full-screen in the browser, and then f in Google Reader just to get the reading pane. These keys toggle, naturally. If you like keyboard shortcuts (who doesn’t?), just hit ? in Google Reader to get a pop-up, overlayed list of all the shortcuts you can use, e.g. s, l, j, k for star, like, next, previous respectively.

Hope this helps :)

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Ah, chroma-key, how you’ve grown

By
mike
– February 19, 2010Posted in: Computing, Films

Chroma-key, colour-seperation overlay, blue-screen, green-screen… It’s come a long way, and this vid proves it. I can’t believe how many shows now use it, even Ugly Betty – yeah, I watch it, so what?!

As you’ll tell from the vid, it’s from Stargate Studios, and is amazing work… It’s stunning how far special effects have come in recent years, e.g. the burly man brawl in that 2nd Matrix film that was never made, any number of kid’s films, Avata – well, almost ;-) Just need to get out of the uncanny valley ;)

H/T to Mike at The Raw Feed.

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8-bit + techno + Lego = awesomeness

By
mike
– August 24, 2009Posted in: Computing, Fun, Gaming

Seriously, you think you’ve seen it all, and yet people still come up with creative, amazing ways of entertaining everyone. This, from the Swedish techno-pop duo called Rymdreglage, is a real “retro” blast. If you grew up with loading games off tape, you’ll enjoy it:

H/T to Kotaku

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DivX / XVid on Xbox 360 (finally) – How-to

By
mike
– December 6, 2007Posted in: Computing, Gaming

One area I am rather happy with in the XBox 360 Fall Update is support for DivX / XVid. After applying the update tonight, I then attempted to play (via Media Center on the Xbox) some DivX movies I had. Much to my dismay, I kept on getting a message saying the codec was missing. After much faffing about with trying to discover the DivX codec used (for it to work on the XBox it needs to be encided with DivX 5 or higher), I hit the XBox forums.

Eventually, I found the answer in a thread, and I thought I’d post up my steps here in case it assists someone:

  1. Installed Fall update (of course)
  2. Installed Optional Media Update (Games blade – All Games – Optional Media Update)
  3. On my PC, set up Media Sharing in Windows Media Player 11 (Library – Media Sharing…) – it recognised my 360 as being present
  4. On the 360, on Media – Videos, hit X to change Source to Computer (unsurprisingly, it recognised my PC)
  5. Marvel at the list of movies from PC on your 360 (not 100% if you can “go higher” in the folder tree from My Videos) – play one!

It’s rather good to be able to stream my DivX files from PC to XBox so I can watch them on a proper TV, it’s certainly something I could have done with during my recent convalescence following my (not my fault!) car crash :( That aside, I can now turn my laptop into a DVR with the help of a TV tuner USB stick, GB-PVR (PVR software) and an aerial splitter. I always miss a few shows that I like (My Name Is Earl, Scrubs, Dispatches, etc.), so this will be a good solution until we upgrade all the TV-related gubbins.