PureBasic
I've been playing with PureBasic lately. This language is pretty sweet. I'm bummed that it's not fully OOP, but that's ok.
I looked at a few languages for a top secret project I'm working on, and PureBasic was the winner. I've been programming in DarkBASIC since I was a teenager, but I decided to make the switch to PB.
Here's why:
PureBasic offers multiplatforming capability. After looking through their built-in library, there's nothing being thrown out that's a kill for making games. I can make a cross-platform game playable on a Mac, Linux and Windows. Add to that, support seems to go all the way back to Windows 95 though I haven't tried it.
Their 3d engine support is good enough for most basic 3d games, and it's particularly suited for any 2d game.
The game I'm working on will be 3d rendered and using CEGUI for the gui system. Right now I'm getting the basic windowing system working. So far, it's way more powerful the DarkBASIC in terms of how you can setup the screen. I can have a much more professional presentation with PureBASIC than with DarkBASIC.
The second benefit, it seems to be very stable, though it is kind of finicky to program in, because things are done differently in this language than in most other Basic dialects.
I'm excited to play with it. I'll keep blogging my progress with the engine as things develop.
How to repair your PSU (Power Supply Unit)
You take out the PSU from inside the computer, unscrew it, take the casing off, and get yourself electrocuted and die.
Seriously, it's 40 bucks for a fairly nice mid-range one. Go buy a new one.
You should only repair one if you're trained to do so.
How to make your computer suck
5. Install AVG free on it.
Nothing's worse than AVG, except for Norton. Get yourself a copy of Avast if your cheap, or Nod32 if you're not. These are my personal favorites. They're fast, and configurable enough that they're even useful for us power users.
4. Run a Registry Cleaner.
It's not 1995 anymore. Stop running registry cleaners, you're just wasting your time and you'll probably break something. If your computer's being slow, check for adware and viruses, which leads me to:
3. Don't use Spybot Search & Destroy
You're just asking for trouble. C'mon, it's a free, easy to install adware checker. It's got a pretty decent internet blacklist that you can implement with one click, and if you do things right, it can take care of your system automatically.
2. Buy an inferior power supply
Nothing kills a PC faster than a cheap power supply. If you roll your own computers, get yourself a name-brand PSU, and make sure it has at least twice the capacity you'll actually need
1. Install toolbars and visit crappy ad networks to earn pennies.
What are you retarded? Stop it. Seriously. What is wrong with you? Why are you even reading my blog, go get a real job and get out of my blog. Thanks.
Top 5 Ways to Rock at Left 4 Dead (or Left 4 Dead 2)
You may or may not know this, but I am a L4D expert. I also have a personal friend who's gone pro with L4D. So when I type this article, it is with authority and extensive experience.
Now that we're clear, here's 10 ways to rock at L4D (or L4D 2, since they're pretty much the same thing.)
5. Respect the Firing Line
Don't move in front of your friends when they're firing or about to fire at a target. This is the worst! The best technique when you're following is to shoot left or right or above the person ahead of you. So if you're leading, make sure you crouch before firing!
4. Communicate
This is a game you can't play effectively without a microphone. Use your mic! Love your mic! Make sure you can activate your mic easily, like from your mouse.
3. Assault with force
When you're up against the horde or a Tank, make sure everyone's ready. When everyone fires at the Tank with assault rifles or fast action shotguns, he goes down in seconds.
2. Stay together
When you lead, your teammates can get left behind. Do not let this happen. Keep looking back, keep communicating. When someone gets behind, communicate it to the rest of your team!
1. Pub stomp
Playing with pubs can get annoying, but gives you free reign to improve your game. When you have a good team and are playing against a random group of pubs, you have room to explore and try new techniques. Or you can play seriously and have a laugh at demolishing the opposing team in the first 10 seconds of a round.
You should run a VPS, not XAMPP or WAMP
Are you a web developer? Do you run a XAMPP or WAMP or some similar system?
I recommend against it.
Why? Because it's not how your scripts are going to actually be run in the end. You can't easily add PHP plugins, you'll have no proper mail server or DNS server, and things will just generally be awkward.
What's the alternative? Run a VPS! If you already have a powerful computer, like a dual core anything, you have enough computing power to do it without noticing a difference.
Go get yourself a copy of VirtualBox or VMWare, stick your favorite Linux distribution on there. Install a minimal system, and install Virtualmin GPL which takes care of everything you need to get started.
You'll instantly have a production-ready server available, with a full GUI based control panel. A couple clicks and you have new plugins and services installed. You already have a full-featured MySQL server and editor. You have a full email server, DNS server, PHP5 installation with a minimal set of plugins installed by default.
You can write scripts that pipe emails right into a database. You can run an IRC server and pipe messages in and out through your scripts. You can run an SVN service and write scripts for that. You don't need to create some crazy mess of programs on your desktop, it's all running tidily in your virtual machine. Are you about to do something risky? Just copy the hard drive file, and if you fail, restore it back.
Production-ready server to develop on vs XAMPP? Easy call.
Get VirtualBox here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Get Virtualmin GPL here: http://www.virtualmin.com/download.html
My Top 5 Retro NES Games
1. The Goonies II
The Sequal to the Movie, I guess.
Who didn't love The Goonies? It's a classic. It's got all the best parts of what makes awesome movies. It's got pirates, treasure, bad guys and guns. It was great. I once asked my mom if girls really can be evil, like that lady in the movie. She said yes; that's what caused my distrust of women.
Then the game came along. Talk about the perfect compliment to the movie. It's got dragons, guns, running shoes, jumping shoes, guns and at least a dozen hours of gameplay. I played this game so long one time that I got physically sick to my stomach. I loved every minute of it.
You start the game with a yoyo and finish the game with a boomerang. You start with crappy shoes and end with sweet running shoes with wings on them.
When you beat the game and free the mermaid, there's no better feeling in the world. Sure the game made no sense. Why is it "The Goonies 2", there was no original "The Goonies" for the NES and there was no movie sequal. The only answer I have is that this game *is* the sequal to the movie. It's a worthy sequal at that.
2. Mega Man 2
Pew Pew!
Mega Man 2. It's the pinnacle of platformer perfection. I spent an entire summer perfecting this game.I still remember the password to get to the second half of the game. I still remember the best order in which to beat all the bosses.
The basic premise is to go and kill the bosses to take their powers. You get sweet weapons like ability to throw tornados, circular saw blades, leafs and various other weapons.
Your dog even gets upgrades. He can turn into a pogo stick, flying platform, or stepping stool. The only thing he can't do is fetch you a beer.
Then once you've killed everybody you have to kill the evil Doctor Wiley. You can use all the powers you've upgraded with. The easiest way by far to kill Wiley was to just use your Dog's pogo abilities.
Yeah, that dog was sweet.
3. Journey To Silius
Don't submit to the robots.
You start this game out with a scary intro movie, then you get right into the action.
This game has s0me pretty sick techno beats, and your character has pretty sick guns. You basically go around committing robot genecide.
Your first boss is a giant tank robot thing. He's super easy to kill.
You get to level two, and the boss becomes nearly impossible to kill. I think he was a helicopter or something.
Damn this game was hard, but the Game Genie makes this one enjoyable, just seeing all the levels. It's truly a work of art.
4. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Shave and a haircut...
I loved this game cuz you could punch Roger Rabbit right in the face. You could punch pedestrians right in the face. You could punch women in the face too. I showed my girlfriend and laughed. She wasn't impressed.
People complain about the taxi being hard to drive? What? You drive it like a regular car, dumbass.
Your objective is to get to toontown and defeat that evil guy who wanted to acid-kill all the toon characters.
This game was crazy hard, like most NES games, and most good games. It was a good mix of mistery solving, puzzle solving, and combat. Cat and mouse was thrown in for good measure. It's an interesting game, and should be played by all people who call themselves gamers.
5. Phantom Fighter
Kick in the face!
This game kicks ass. It's a fighter, primarily. There's eight levels in the game. Your goal is to kill all the ghosts. You have all kinds of fight moves and techniques you can use. You can buy items that help you kill them easier.
At one point in the game your partner can get abducted by a ghost, you then have to kill her if you want to get him back. That ghost is freaky. Her head comes off and she flies around all over the place raining death from above all over your face. I had nightmares.
Best horror game ever. Beats all others. Period.
SQLite vs XML vs MySQL
Alright, so I spent a few hours researching this little question. There's surprisingly little direct comparisons out there. Here's what I came up with:
SQLite:
- Fast for single process access with lots of SELECTS.
- If you have a single piece of software accessing the database, it's very fast.
- If you're using PHP, each time the script is called, it's a new access, it's slower.
- Lower overhead than most XML libraries.
- You can use most standard SQL calls.
XML
- Great for exporting from one application to import to another.
- High overhead when used as a database intead of as an export/import format.
- Great readability for the author.
MySQL
- High overhead compared to SQLite when used just for a single application that mostly uses SELECTs.
- Relatively low overhead when used by many applications.
- Pretty much any SQL call you could want to use is supported.
Verdict? If you have a project that requires to run stand-alone, with fairly low traffic (magnitude of hundreds at the same time), sqlite will do great.
Have a huge traffic site (hundreds of thousands) or a number of applications using the database, MySQL is better.
Have an application that needs to send data to another? Use XML.
SQLite seems to break down in usefullness when you've got a lot of simultaneous users, but it outperforms MySQL by quite a bit otherwise unless there's a lot of inserts/updates.
If you already have access to a MySQL database and so you're just going to not utilize it in lieu of SQLite, you should ditch that idea and just use MySQL.
If you have an application that needs to run away on it's own server without thousands of people calling on it at the same time, then SQLite is a fine choice.
Tooth Pain! :’(
So I have a bad tooth, and I have a lisp since I'm using this Hurricaine Spray stuff to numb the pain until I can get it fixed.
I spend my nights doing phone work, thso I thound thtupid on the phone.
This stuff works well though. The pain just drops away, and for usually for a couple hours.
The only home-made pain relieving method that I've found that worked at all for me was the salt mouth rinse. Take a few tablespoons of salt (just eyeball it) and drop it into luke warm water, stir it and rinse it over the bad tooth. This has been an instant pain reliever for me, but often only lasts about 10 minutes. Sometimes it lasts a few hours though.
Um, also, I'm no doctor, so you should probably go see a doctor before you try this stuff. Also, this crap cost more than my prescribed narcotics. Lame! Still, it's nice stuff:)
How to Get Image Resizing to Work in WordPress
When I was trying to upload some images to a sweet post I'm working on, I couldn't get thumbnails to work. Super lame. After checking into it, turns out I didn't have the PHP5 GD Library installed.
Simply install it:
For debian:
apt-get install php5-gd
For all other systems, check Google. 
The Spaghetti Cat test, medium-sized thumbnail:
Spaghetti with no sauce? WTF!?
The Best WordPress Plugins
This is the list of Plugins my WordPress blog is currently using. These are pretty much the list of plugins nearly all blogs should have.
This is a plugin you shouldn't live without. Period. It stops a lot of spam from coming through the comments.
Pretty much takes care of cleaning up any excess tags in my HTML, as well as taking care of some meta tag issues, and makes my title tag nicer.
If you plan on having any programming code on your blog, you should have this plugin. It highlights a whole host of different languages. It's pretty speedy too.
This just looks cool. I don't have any links yet, but this will grab the favicon for those links and add them next to the link name. Just makes things nicer.
This customizes the login widget. This allowed me to get rid of the WordPress and RSS links that are unnecessary, considering I have a link to my RSS feeds on the top of the page and at the bottom of most articles.
I haven't used this, but one day I may change my permalink structure, and having this plugin means I won't have to worry about it when I make the change. This forwards all traffic from the old links to the current ones. It's not good to remember to use this plugin after the fact, since you may get penalized by search engines if they can't get through to your links!
This allows commenters to quote other commenters. Pretty much standard feature on all (good) sites that take comments.
This puts all those neat little social bookmark links at the bottom of each post. Visitors find these handy, and help promote my articles.
This plugin puts the social links at the top left of my articles. They're a little bigger and more outstanding. This offers a little different functionality than the Sociable plugin. I recommend both!
Want your commenters coming back? Get this plugin. One thing I *hate* is leaving a comment and then not being able to view it later, because I forgot the website or can't find the article I commented at.
This is a nice way to reward commenters. The links are dofollow, so they get rewarded twice!
I installed this so visitors can view other posts that might be related to what they're currently reading.
This thing's pretty sweet. It automatically optimizes your database, and can email you a backup as often as you like. Super handy! I have my database emailed to a gmail account every so often. Now I don't have to worry about losing all my posts.
This gets rid of the "older, newer" links at the bottom of pages, and adds a numbered list instead. It's nicer to navigate this way.
This is pretty much a requirement for anyone who expects any kind of traffic. This caches your pages unless a change is made. This way, if you get slashdotted, or have any kind of visitor-base, your server can handle it.
Super neat theme! It allows you to cater to cell-phones, PDAs, and of course, iPhones. Makes navigation much easier for these users.