David Cumps : IT

Modified MVC AccountController for Preview 5

CumpsD — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:09:00 GMT

I just downloaded the ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 bits from Codeplex and started on my first experiment.

One of the first things I did was to modify the default AccountController to use the new Form Posting and Form Validation features of the Preview 5, somebody probably overlooked updating those :)

If anyone else wants the reworked code, feel free to copy paste.

Note this was something done during lunch break in a hurry, it seems to all work logically, but it's possible I'll have to tune it a bit later on.

WoW - Multiboxing 101 - Introduction

CumpsD — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:35:00 GMT

When looking back at my World of Warcraft experience, I came to the conclusion that when added up, I've been playing this game for over 3 years already. I've even participated in the very first beta ;)

Over time, a lot has changed, I took a few breaks, leveled plenty of classes to the max level, had my days of hardcore end-game raiding (pre-TBC, Naxx), Reputation grinding, Honor grinding (pre-TBC, Warlord), war effort grinding (our guild opened the gates of AQ).

After a year and a half, I took a break from what had become a huge grind, before TBC came out. I returned a while later with some colleagues on an RP realm however.

I've seen the introduction of Blood Elves, the change in faction balance, the faster leveling, and the lack of instance groups at lower levels due to this, combined with the lack of understanding of game mechanics by an ever increasing number of new players (no time or groups for them to get the experience at a low level).

I've also greatly enjoyed doing all new TBC quests a few months after it came out, with less crowded zones, and now I'm liking the casual side of WoW :)

As part of staying on the casual side (casual meaning no hardcore raiding/grinding) I've given the geek in me more freedom to fool around with anything WoW related.

One of the first result of this was the C# World Of Warcraft Armory Library 0.1 I recently released.

The next thing I'm on, is trying out Multiboxing, which is the subject for today's post. There is a lot of information out there, a lot of misconception and taboo around it. Hopefully you'll have a better view on the concept after reading this, as well as an easy to follow guide to try it out.

Open-Source Disk Encryption

CumpsD — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:06:00 GMT

Are you concerned about the confidentiality of your files? Take a look at TrueCrypt, a great tool to create encrypted volumes.

Daemon Tools - The Disk Image Emulator

CumpsD — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 22:06:00 GMT

Ever wanted to install something but couldn't be bothered to burn it to a disc first? Like the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 discs for example. Daemon Tools is the answer!

Different Actions - Same Result

CumpsD — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:21:00 GMT

Long ago, I had a chat with someone about the fact that there are too many different ways in Photoshop to do the same thing. He believed this was a bad thing, while I didn’t find anything wrong with it. Having thought about this afterwards, I have formed my opinion about it, with arguments.

The Bits & Bytes Religion

CumpsD — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:05:00 GMT

Time for some Monday morning fun... These days we got so many religions, why not add another one? I give you the Bits & Bytes Religion!

Sync FLAC Library with iPod

CumpsD — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:55:00 GMT

Yesterday I explained how you could manage your iPod through Windows Explorer. Having this ability opens up more powerful ways of managing your iPod. One of these ways for example is the ability to automatically sync your master archive stored on your computer, with your iPod.

In my case it's stored in FLAC format to retain all it's quality, since FLAC is a lossless format. Armed with some libraries, I slapped together a small synchronization application for myself.

Manage iPod through Windows Explorer

CumpsD — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 22:10:00 GMT

Do you own an iPod? Are you tired of using iTunes? If you answered positive to both questions, read on! This article describes how you can manage your iPod through Windows Explorer.

Listen to High Quality Music

CumpsD — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:03:00 GMT

You’re an audiophile, and you wish to listen to music in the highest possible quality, but on the other hand, you don’t have that much disk space at your disposal to store everything as wave files. What are you to do?

Meet Free Lossless Audio Codec, or FLAC for the friends.

Fixing Virtual PC Keyboard Lockup

CumpsD — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 18:47:57 GMT

Lately I hear about a lot of people using VPC that their keyboard suddenly stops working inside VPC.

There are a different number of keyboard issues I've heard of so far:

Keyboard stops working all together.
Keyboard freaks out. (CTRL key stuck)
Keyboard and mouse lock up.

The first issue is the one I hear the most, and which someone managed to perform on one of my VPC's lately.

It's quite hard to reproduce, if able to at all, but apparently it feels to trigger the most from fullscreen/windowed switching.

But, no more chatting, the (very simple) solution:

Lock and unlock the host computer. Problem fixed, keyboard working again.

The first time someone had a locked keyboard again, I tried this, and it worked! :)

A solution for the other issues are apparently:

Freaking: A bug in VPC apparently prevents to let go out the CTRL key when you use the AltGr key to simulate CTRL+ALT (when switching to fullscreen?). Which means in practice Windows sees the CTRL key as being kept down. Rumored solutions are to press CTRL inside the VPC, or/and to use your Right CTRL to do special VPC operations instead of AltGr.
Keyboard and mouse lock up: Apparently there's a hotfix somewhere out there, or at least one exists but has to be requested. I remember it being mentioned somewhere, the only comfort I can offer is that there is hope there is a fix for you, but you'll have to search a bit.

Virtual PC Differencing Disks Hierarchy

CumpsD — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 18:36:19 GMT

A long time ago, I talked about Differencing Disks in Virtual PC.

Most people just have a base image and difference from that. A fairly basic technique by now.

The next step however, is to think about differencing from a differencing disk.

Using this technique you can set up the following collection:

Clean Windows 2003 VPC - Normal VPC HD
- Differenced disk with SQL 2000 installed
  - Your differencing disks if you need to test 2003+Sql2000.
- Differenced disk with SQL 2005 installed
  - Your differencing disks if you need 2003+Sql2005.
- Your differencing disks if you have no need for SQL (the basic differencing technique)

Clean Windows XP VPC - Normal VPC HD
- Differenced disk with SQL 2000 installed
  - Your differencing disks if you need to test XP+Sql2000.
- Differenced disk with SQL 2005 installed
  - Your differencing disks if you need XP+Sql2005.
- Your differencing disks if you have no need for SQL (the basic differencing technique)

Normally we just talked about a base image. The term I'm using to refer to the above setup (the non-italic HD's) is a base collection.

Creating these 6 Virtual PC Hard Disks and putting them on a share somewhere gives you a lot of flexibility if you need to test something on different platforms without having to use the undo disks as a differencing level to throw away after you're done testing.

You simply create a new VPC now, make a differencing disk from the platform you want (for example: Testing Community Server on Windows 2003 with SQL Server 2005), start it and install your software. And when you're done testing you can simply delete that VPC if you want. You can enable undo disks on this disk if you want.

Conclusion:

Knowing that you can create differencing disks from differencing disks will allow you to come up with some interesting scheme's.

What happened on August 27, 2001?

CumpsD — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:40:29 GMT

Internet Explorer 6 was officially released.

What just happened? After 5 years, we got a new version of IE.

Time for all webdevelopers out there to add the final release of IE7 to their list of browsers to test sites on. Now it has finally left beta stages, more people will probably start using the latest version, meaning more users that will see possible errors on your sites.

Internet Explorer 7 Download Page (current download version was 7.0.5730.11 when I downloaded it)

Extracting stored procedure content via SQL

CumpsD — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 19:46:00 GMT

Some nifty SQL statements I made last week:

Firstly, listing all databases on a server.

-- Get Databases
SELECT name FROM master.dbo.sysdatabases ORDER BY name

Secondly, a way to get all the user-created stored procedures from a database.

-- Get Stored Procedures
-- Type = 'P' --> Stored Procedure.
-- Category = 0 --> User Created.
SELECT * FROM sysobjects WHERE type = 'P' AND category = 0 ORDER BY name

Then we can retrieve the content of the stored procedure with the following query:

-- Get Stored Procedure Content
-- Name = Stored Procedure Name.
-- Colid = Multiple lines, their sequence.
SELECT text
FROM syscomments
WHERE id = (SELECT id FROM sysobjects WHERE name = '{0}')
ORDER BY colid

In C# you could concatenate the returned records to get the full stored procedure content.

However, do mind the encrypted column in syscomments. The above queries work fine when this is 0. So you might want to add some checking, and in case it's encrypted you could first decrypt it and then display it. But you'll have to figure out how to do that yourself :)

Starting DirectX Adventures

CumpsD — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 19:02:01 GMT

This week I started playing around with Managed DirectX (MDX) and it's a really fun thing. I attempted it a couple of times a long time ago, but never quite understood it, but now I have a good feeling about it, a sense of order and structure has shown itself in DirectX code.

I'll probably blog more about my experiences with it in the future, but here are some of the great resources that made me see the light:

Craig Andera's Direct3D Wiki
- 16 very clear chapters on what's involved about MDX. This resource gave me the basic understanding.
Kalme's Yaboc 2.5D Tutorial
- A step by step tutorial about MDX and Visual Studio 2005. Created the bricks game by using game states, utility classes and classes for managing multiple sprites has shown me a very nice structure on how to structure your solution for these kind of games. This will most definitely be the base I'm going to start from when trying to write Pong :)
The ZBuffer
- A huge collection of links to other's their tutorials and other resources. Most likely the first place I'll check when needing something.
Tom Miller's Blog
- An MSDN Blog about DirectX, need more explanation? :) This Render Loop article shows some of the posts on Tom's blog, definitely gave me a better view on the importance of a good render loop.
MDX info
- A very nice site with some good examples and ideas, and which I'll probably be using a lot when I'll learn the more advanced stuff.

These links were my starting point for gaining knowledge about DirectX, and I would recommend them to everyone wanting to play with DirectX.

Some other links I'm checking out and which will probably help me in the future:

Using Lua with C#
- Adding scripting to your game (inspired by an MDX Info resource about scripting).
Craig Andera's DirectSound Wiki
- The Direct3D part helped me build a nice background, when adding sound to a game I'll be using this one.
Lidgren.Library.Network
- An UDP C# Library which I probably will be using when I have to add networking to a game. Since DirectPlay is deprecated it means using System.Net to provide networking. Which you could either write from scratch, with bugs and which someone else probably already did before you, or use a library, this one seems a very clean one.

Blizzard Screws Up - World Of Warcraft

CumpsD — Sat, 07 May 2005 16:12:00 GMT

I strongly advise everbody NOT to buy World Of Warcraft!

My brother bought the game today, I installed it, and then I wanted to create an account for him. And that's when the trouble began...

It seems Blizzard does not care about money, since all it's account creation pages are unavailable, throwing errors everywhere.

Or wait, they get the money from you at the shop, and then make it unable for you to use what you bought an hour ago!

Judging from their own forums (which I cannot post on because I don't have an account, and cannot create either) this problem is going on for some days.

First a normal 'Service Temporarily Unavailable' error, indicating their servers can't handle it. Which is really very bad for their image, a company like Blizzard, which can't keep their main billing pages up and running? Normally it's the other way around, the 'we want your money'-pages always work

And then everything is just falling appart, have some errors:

[ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/authkeyView.jsp] /WEB-INF/jsp/authkeyView.jsp(86,18) Unable to load tag handler class "org.apache.taglibs.standard.tag.el.fmt.MessageTag" for tag "fmt:message"'
[ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/agreementView.jsp] File "/WEB-INF/jsp/base/language.jsp" not found' [ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/base/footer.jsp] Error running /usr/local/java/bin/javac compiler'
org.apache.jasper.JasperException: Unable to compile class for JSP
Error running /usr/local/java/bin/javac compiler

And if you happen to not get an error, it will simply tell you that your session timed out, after 2 seconds...

Slow poke! You took too long to complete the Account Creation process and your session has timed out. You will have to start again from the beginning. Sorry!

If you are persistent and can get through, to step 4, you notice you can select a game-card as a paying option. (After that, it dropped out again) But if you want to use the guest-account that comes with the box, that option is gone... It's a guest account to play 10 days, but they want your credit card info for that...

Don't expect any response from Blizzard either...

I'm really disappointed, 45 EUR for the game and then you can't play it!

Best thing, even their contact form is throwing errors. And nothing is mentioned on the main site, everybody has to figure it out themselves.

I'm going to start calling them starting from Monday untill I can create the account, otherwise they can give my money back and take their game back untill they get their crap together.

Good game, terrible service...

If anyone from Blizzard reads this: Try to turn this negative publicity into something positive...