DotNetNuke Developer Chris Hammond : Gaming

Who is The Trashman?

Chris Hammond — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 03:15:00 GMT

Chris Hammond is The Trashman , yes, you heard it here first. I am known as The Trashman . Don't ask why, just understand when people call me Trashy they are referencing the name and not just calling me trashy, or wait, are they? So, if you're...(read more)

Xbox 360 Dashboard Update

Chris Hammond — Wed, 31 May 2006 16:29:00 GMT

http://on10.net/Blogs/TheShow/3340/

Marketplace Updates were the first thing discussed. It's changed quite a bit, hopefully making it easier to find things!

The first and foremost is the ability to queue up downloads! You can download and keep doing other things! That's the biggest beef with the launch dashboard, you could only DL and not do anything else. Now the DL will happen when you're not playing a multiplayer game, and pause when you're playing something online.

Autoboot to dashboard! Setting to allow you to boot to the dashboard even if there is a disk in the drive.

Memory management, easier to manage content on your harddrive.

Timelines for the media player now, ability to track into a song?

Fastforward through media with downloaded videos, before you could only play/pause video.

XBox Live Vision, a camera that will be released later this year and do video phone type applications.

Personal Pictures of your friends list, avatars that your friends can see.

My XBox360 is going to start blogging!

Chris Hammond — Mon, 01 May 2006 20:24:00 GMT

That's right, my xbox360 is going to start blogging!

When it does it'll be available at

http://www.360voice.com/blog.asp?tag=christoc

I think it may take a day or two for my 360 to know it can blog, we'll see what it comes up with for it's first post! Your 360 can get it's own blog at www.360voice.com as well.

Wow time to move things down a bit. Backwards compatibility update?

Chris Hammond — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:25:00 GMT

So this post is really just for one reason, to move some of the junk down, below the fold as they would say.

To do that effectively though, I need a good topic!

Perhaps I should talk about a little pet peeve? It's been over two months since MS put out an update for the Xbox 360 to update backwards compatibility? What's taking so long? I want to pick up the latest racing game, Toca Race Driver 3, so that I can practice for my upcoming drivers school and first club race at Gateway International Raceway, in Madison, Illinois.

But of course TOCA RD 3 is only available on Xbox, not the 360, and of course from what I read you can't play it on a 360 yet. So, Microsoft, when's the next backwards compatability update? I'm waiting!

As for my upcoming school and race, it'll be fun, I've yet to do any club racing, strictly autocross for the past 5 or 6 years now. I'm looking forward to the challenge, but not the increase in costs that come along with club racing. Just to do what the school and two races I'm easily going to eclipse my autocross budget for 2006, which includes 25 nights out of town at either National Tour, Pro Solo, or divisional events.

Hmmmm hope this worked! :)

CES Keynote

Chris Hammond — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 03:14:00 GMT

So far I'm not impressed with the CES keynote. I guess I'm just more of a give me something cool now developer instead of a dangle it out in front of me kind of guy.

Update: Directv and MS Windows Media Center Partnership announced.

That is going to rock!

Update 2: HD DVD recorder available in march for $499

update 3: Xbox360 update coming shortly!

update 4: third manufacturering partner announced for the 360.

update 5: external HD DVD announced for xbox 360

Win a free Xbox360!

Chris Hammond — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 14:44:00 GMT

So, I honestly don't think I have a chance to win this, but I'll give it a shot anyways :) Some of you with more active blogging are more likely to win this than I.

Check out Jake's site, and you could win an Xbox 360! I have one, but I think it'd be swell to have a second one!

Building a Ladder (Ranking) System, anyone built one?

Chris Hammond — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 05:47:00 GMT

I'm thinking about building a Ranking system, that takes results from Multiple events, and ranks people based on who they have competed against and how they faired against those other people.

Everyone would eventually be related to each other assuming they've ever competed with someone who has competed against someone else, who 's competed against someone else.

If user A beats user B, and user B has beaten user C, A would be ranked higher than C.

I imagine most of the logic would be on the database side, and the web front end would display the data.

Has anyone ever developed a system like the above mentioned? I believe there are systems out there for gaming, and most likely other events. I'm looking for ideas, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel for a system that's already been written.

Thanks for your feedback.

XBOX 360 Purchased!

Chris Hammond — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:55:00 GMT

Well, I "may" have been one of the lucky ones to get an XBOX 360 in the CircuitCity.com fiasco today. I spent the last 3 hours (shh don't tell my boss) trying to buy one on their F'd up website. They had ALL sorts of problems, I don't know how many times I hit refresh/back and submitted the same forms over and over again.

My CC got charged, so hopefully on Tuesday my system will show up! Though I think I'll probably miss out as the site said "sold out" before I was able to get my order to submit, unless of course I had one allocated in my cart. We'll see how it all plays out.

Plasma TV and XBox360

Chris Hammond — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 17:52:00 GMT

So last night I finally replaced my parents old 24" Sony Trinitron TV. It has done me well, though it was getting rather old. I believe, though my folks will disagree, that they had the TV when we lived on Guam, which would mean it's from 1987 or 1988.

So I went with a 50" Plasma from Panasonic. I ended up getting a great deal on a commercial unit the TH-50PHD8UK. It's the same as the TH-50PX50U but it doesn't have a few things. It doesn't have speakers, an HD tuner, or HDMI/DVI inputs. Being that I saved around $1200 by getting this unit I can live without the features, besides the only feature I'd need are the inputs, and I bought a card for HDMI for the unit for ~$120! So, with shipping, the card, and the cost of the unit I still saved probably $1200.

I mounted the TV to the wall last night, and hooked up my new Samsung DVD player with upconversion, I'll post more about that later.

The next thing on my list, after direct TV HD tivo, is an XBOX 360.

I'm excited as heck to see what the 360 will look like on this new monitor, if any of you softies out there have any hookups you be sure to let me know!

More info and pictures will be posted on my blog at http://chrishammond.com/ for now though I'm headed home for lunch to play with the TV!

Best bang for a Development Machine?

Chris Hammond — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 20:05:00 GMT

So all you other developers out there, what would you do if you had a $2k budget and wanted to get the best development/gaming machine you could?

It'll be used for some gaming, CS:Source and Battlefield 2, but mostly for development. Some video processing, image editing (took ~30k photos last year).

I'm currently on a Compaq 2.0ghz with 1gb of Ram and ~350gb of hard disk space (which is 90% full)

Build my own? Buy a system? Buy something from Alienware? Go 64 bit?

nVidia will be my graphics choice, I've got a buddy there, so I stick with those I trust.

I used to be a hardware guy, not so much anymore, don't know the details of what is good anymore.

I figure I need lots of memory, and a fast CPU, but what else do you recommend?

Red Sox win the 2004 World Series!

Chris Hammond — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:44:00 GMT

I got to go see game 4 last night, it was amazing to finally see the Red Sox win the series, and to get to see it in Person was that much better!

I've made a really long post for friends and family here.

I took 540 photos at the game last night.

If you are looking to purchase the DVD of photos, you can get it on ebay.

City Of Heroes anyone? Almost time to fly!

Chris Hammond — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 13:35:00 GMT

I realize this is a technology focused blog, but I'm reaching out to my tech bretheran here for a little fun.

Anyone here play City of Heroes? I purchased it last night and played for about 4 hours before I finally had to make myself go to bed. I have played a MMPORG in a long time, I started when everquest first came out and played for a few months. Played a little EQ on the PS2 during the beta phase, but stopped once it wasn't free anymore. Then I purchased Star Wars Galaxies and played it exactly one time!

City of Heroes on the otherhand will be getting played over and over again, I can feel it.

If anyone else out there plays, let me know, I'm on the “Guardian” server, name's Nacirema.

Wifi in my own house! MS MN-700

Chris Hammond — Mon, 24 May 2004 19:08:00 GMT

I went to Costco yesterday to buy some groceries. I ALWAYS end up spending WAY too much money at Costco, and yesterday was no exception.

I was walking through the PC section, looking at something to jump out at me, when I ran across the Microsoft MN-700. I've been meaning to get wifi in the house, so I can hook up my Tivo to it, which will then force me to buy a DVD-R. I just haven't wanted to spend $100 on a linksys 802.11g router. Well Costco here in St. Louis had the MN-700 for $39.99, along with a USB 2.0 Wifi adapter for $29.99. I bought both. I setup the Wifi as an access point, along with my linksys router, and had everything up and running in 15 minutes tops.

I had my laptop out in the garage yesterday afternoon while I installed speakers in my 350Z.

The next project is to get my Tivo USB ports activated and get it accessible from my desktop, then I'll be in trouble :)

In December I hooked up Wifi for my parents