I’ve just finished up some changes to a site I developed about four years ago - the Aussie Tender Centre. This was the first commercial site I ever worked on, and it’s been running almost constantly, with very few issues and quite a bit of traffic. Check out the Virtual Tour link on the top menu bar - David (the manager) gives me a little plug 
Carrie got me this great little espresso cup yesterday and this morning I made a macchiato. It was good
Slashdot has linked to an article Jeff Vogel has written on developerWorks called Six ways to write more comprehensible code. It’s focused on C+ and uses variable names with underscores and global #DEFINEs etc that I personally hate, but the ideas are spot on.
I just had a spanking new Dell start crashing. svchost.exe kept giving an application error on bootup:
svchost.exe … the instruction at “0x???” … the memory could not be ‘read’
In the application log & finding the error report for svchost.exe it reports that msi.exe (the Windows installer) was faulting.
This is an issue with an automatic update breaking the Windows installer. There is an update available from microsoft (I think it’s this one) but the page I found (Tech Blender: Windows Update Broke My Machine (svchost.exe — application error), and How to Fix It) gives a solution that works:
From the looks the machine is working now.
Sun has introduced the JavaFX platform, which looks like a bit of fun. It’s declarative, statically typed, and uses embedded HTML, so it seems to be a lot easier to develop than Swing. The openjfx community site has some interesting examples, but none are based in the browser (all in window forms), so I’ll have to have a play. There are some demos on the main page of the community site as well.
The wedding went extremely well, no major disasters We even got married. Here’s twenty pictures:
I’m about to pack up the laptop and take it out to the in-laws where it will serve as the jukebox. There’s no internet connection there so this is it. The last post (cue the bugle) as an unmarried man.
OK so it’s not much of a post. More like an a post rophe (lol, I hope my speech goes down a bit better). I’m actually looking forward to getting the whole thing over, Carrie & I have been living like a married couple from 3 months into our relationship, so nothing really changes. Our parents and us all have a little less money, we get to have a nice party with heaps of relatives and friends, and then we go on our first ever holiday.
I’ll post pictures in a week. I’m sure all two of my readers will really appreciate that.
I just tried out Second Life, which is a streamed, 3D, massively multi-user virtual environment. It doesn’t live up to the hype. Maybe the experience is better with a internet connection faster than my 1.5M ADSL, as I had some lag with movement and objects and textures were slow to stream through, and possibly my slightly older hardware didn’t help (but the graphics seemed fairly smooth once everything loaded). That doesn’t explain the buggy physics and skeletal system, when you walk onto an incline often one leg points 90° backwards, and part of my hair kept being separated from my head (which happens in First Life, so I guess that’s OK). However my biggest problem was the content. Every single thing in the world can be broken into one of four things: advertising things outside of Second Life, simulated virtual sex, and selling either virtual land or game objects (scripted 3D models).
There is of course nothing wrong with advertising, sex and rampant capitalism. In fact add alcohol and you would satisfy most of the population. But when there’s miles and miles of virtual terrain to explore, a richly scripted, user-created environment (it’s either furniture or clothing, and the scripting either starts you dancing or having wild polygon-based sex), and 5 million inhabitants to interact with (only ~20000 were online, and the ones I saw all stood or danced around while chatting in a fashion similar to your standard DC++ hub user’s conversational abilities), yet absolutely nothing is actually interesting or engaging.
Download it just to play through the tutorial, and the introductory help island. Some of the sights along that first hour of play are well worth it, and give an indication of what this genre of game is going to shape a virtual 3D internet into in 8-10 years, once we all have 100 mbit connections with bandwidth to burn. Then once you get to the Second Life mainland, uninstall, take the red pill, and move on.
So we’re getting married this Saturday. I’ve just started my first real holidays since finishing Uni (being unemployed doesn’t count) and we’re going on our honeymoon next week. Very exciting. I guess I should start doing something
My machine is fresh and shiny again, and I’m trying out OpenOffice.org rather than mess around with ye olde MS Office. I’ve also installed Visual C# 2005 Express and XNA Game Studio Express, and started messing around with the coolness of simple 2D and 3D game programming in managed C#, on my (now working) Radeon 9550.
I’m also using Thunderbird rather than Outlook, but it’s annoying me because it pops up an alert if there’s any unread mail, not when mail arrives like Outlook. Also there’s no way to minimize to the notification area. I just think that an email application should be like instant messaging, always on (unless you want to turn it off) but not obtrusive. I can have 15 windows open at a time just while working, I don’t want to have another tab on the bottom of the screen just on the off chance I get some blog spam. I should write my own email app (yeah right).
