Best movie sequels related comment comes from a movie sequel - in Scream 2, there is a scene where a drama school teacher asks students to name one sequel that is better than the original, not counting Terminator 2.
The only thing worse than movie sequels are games that tie-in with the release of a film. Up to now, I haven't seen a single one that does not suck.
But now we have The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, excellent FPS/horror/RPG from Starbreeze Studios. Not only that it looks as good as Doom 3 for example, it plays great. It does introduce several familiar elements from popular games from PC, but it also introduces more than enough original content.
There are many distinct characters, main one being practically identical to Vin Diesel (needless to say, playing the same character in the movie), including the voice. This gives, along with some clever camera work, great cinematic feeling.
Highly recommended.
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
It has been some time that agile methodologies, especially test driven development, has been hyped. But if you talk to your friends and colleagues you see “teen sex syndrome” - everybody heard about it, know what it is, would like to do it, but haven't yet ;)
Reasons given vary but most often are “lack of time“ and “complexity of XXX test framework“. Fortunately for all of us, Jamie Cansdale has recently launched
TestDriven.NET, Visual Studio .NET (all versions, including beta 2005!) plug-in that seriously simplifies unit testing. It has just right set of features, installs and works flawlessly, and makes test driven development as natural and easy as debugging.
As a matter of fact, it is exactly debugging time that is (in my case, anyway) saved when testing your code with small snippets instead of running the whole thing. I have not yet started coding “test first” but I get a lot more from this than just regression detection - lately I have found several bugs in my code that have been there from the very beginning, it's just that my regular scenarios did not exercise all code paths so I could not see them.
You don't have to use agile methodologies and/or test driven development as described in XP book(s) to enjoy benefits of this add-in - use it to the extent it suites you - highly recommended!
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
I've seen mixed reactions to Avalon - while some hail it as a breakthrough in user interaction, some just sigh and move on.
Here's one reason why you should not ignore it: pay attention to the screens of computers in any movie. Except for the fact that most run operating systems that don't exist and that people that use them type unreasonably fast there is one other common thing - they all run beautiful, often 3D GUIs.
That is not a coincidence. People like pretty applications, transitions and 3D effects. Fake movie UIs take it too far of course (real UIs would be much less simplified and less animated) but Avalon will enable us to have on everybody's desktop what was only few years ago considered sci-fi.
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
I have been watching previously recorded Webcasts like crazy these days. Turns out there were several great ones, I learn quite well by looking at examples so there you go. I was a bit irritated by the pacing but then I noticed I can easily increase the playback speed to double and decided to try it for a bit.
I've never looked back since. Now I watch most of the content at double speed switching back only for trickier code demos.
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
We had friends for dinner last night. The original reason to meet was unfortunately one misbehaving Windows XP Home machine. The problem was constant rebooting - it would crash during the boot and restart immediately.
I tried all the usual things - replacing and/or taking hardware out, disconnecting anything not critical, using excellent
ERD Commander to see if the disk is readable and check all drivers/services, noticing that mup.sys is the last thing loaded and remembering recent discussion on
channel9 about it (no go, it worked just fine here)... Nothing worked (before this, the owner tried repairing from the installation disk as well as checkdisk).
In the end, the machine will have to be reinstalled. I did a test try on my virtual machine and it looks like Windows XP cannot install over previous installation preserving registry. It did make the efffort to preserve all user data - in case you get two identically named users it renames the folder of the previous user into something like <old username>.WINDOWS. So the files are there, ready to be backed up, but all the applications will have to be reinstalled.
If you are wondering what triggered this all, we have no idea. The machine was running just fine then all of the sudden it crashed, and after the reboot the vicious cycle began.
I guess this is a reminder to us all to make daily backups...
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
I have recently switched my email server software. I was not really dissatisfied with my former choice
MailEnable Free Edition as it worked flawlessly for more than a year, but I started missing Web mail interface really badly and they offer it in their Professional Edition only which costs money.
Note that I don't use this email server for anything but weblog contact, note-to-self emails and as a contact for some freeware I made available. Thus I am the only one using it with just a few email addresses and very low traffic plus it runs on my home computer over my ADSL line (as does the Web server serving this page to you) - I don't think this warrants financial investment if I can get away with decent free choice.
The reason I switched is the recommendation from
Jeff (
thank you). I like blogger advice, especially from non-A-list bloggers, as it is usually not based on any agenda - people really do speak their mind.
I switched to
SmarterMail - free for single user and completely Web based (using ASP.NET), including the administration interface. It did require a bit of tweaking to do what I wanted, but it has a clean interface and even imported all settings from my previous server!
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5