Weeks start on Monday

Tonight I plugged my Xbox controller to my freshly installed Ubuntu setup. I have been using Windows Xp for at least three years, and I didn’t know it should work natively; so I started to look at existing drivers. I founded out that a project exists, but source code was two years old. I contributed to it and it seemed to work.

After encounting some problems I have to debug this driver. I’ll post any further information here.

Today I found a nice software into windows, which is very useful and handy: the Clipboard viewer. It’s located in %SystemRoot%\System32\clipbrd.exe. This great software doesn’t only allow to view, but also to erase, save and load clipboard content.

This morning I suddenly realized by waking up that I do “nested” dreams, and, in English, on the top of that! What I mean by “nested” is that I “pause” dreams when I encounter a impossible/illogical   thing/task/etc., and start a new dream from this point, in order to resolve the parent one’s issue.
I say, my soul is lost!

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer, create a new DWORD value named NoInternetOpenWith and set it to 1. Done. And, yes, it’s mostly a note for myself.

Exactly what I would like to do every time I see a such parked car…

From xkcd

Edit: As I write a post today, I also post a direct link to latest Nvidia drivers for Geforce 6, 7 ,8 ,9 and 200 series for windows XP 32 bit; since the download button doesn’t seems to appear on firefox. Note that downloading this file makes you accept the NVIDIA Software License Agreement.

As some of you have certainly heard: a prequel to the famous game “Portal” has been released, by a little mod-makers community. This “mod” might have been a nice one, and the idea of a “more difficult Portal” which happens “before” the actual one was good. Nevertheless, this mod is a TOTAL FAILURE. Since Portal is not an action game but a brain teaser, a prequel should have had the same kind of gameplay: one based on thinking. Instead of that, Portal: Prelude is an action game, with a reflex-based gameplay. Actually, levels are pretty simple, considering the puzzle, but insanely difficult considering timing and placement. That means, for example, that you understand the way out in few seconds, and then, waste half an hour struggling to reach this goal.

And, the reason why I labeled the game a “total failure” in bold caps, is the following: many things are well done in this mod, and, the ambiance is nice. But all this isn’t significant at all regarding gameplay. In fact, so grave are the gameplay issues that playing this mod becomes HIGHLY FRUSTRATING. This really prevent the player to have fun in any situation, and on the top of all, has driven me so crazy that I uninstalled the mod before finishing the ninth level, even through I was really interested and motivated.

So, if you ask me, I’d recommend you to not try this mod

Hi there, it’s been a while.

So, what’s about AS3 stage origin? Well, I tried to use the stage with this.stage.scaleMode = flash.display.StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE; associated with this.stage.stageWidth; and this.stage.stageHeight; to work with a non-scaled, just-in-time dimensioned stage; but I had a nasty problem: when I used this.stage.stageWidth; and this.stage.stageHeight; to get the stage dimentions, and set them to my objects (movieclips, sprites, layouts, etc.), with X = 0 and Y = 0 coordinates; they were stuck at some given coordinates, but not in the top left of the browser viewport.

Actually, the 800×600 stage was centered. It’s quite simple, you just have to set this.stage.align = flash.display.StageAlign.TOP + flash.display.StageAlign.LEFT; but if you don’t know that; you could waste a lot of time wondering why the stage origin is not in the top left.

The Large Hadron Collider is not gonna kill us all. At least for now and the next weeks. The last night was the very first time of my life I seriously considered the possibility of a sudden collapse of our world. And I have to say that it’s a bit disturbing. But today’s experiment was nothing more than a little warming round. The real threat (if it exists) will be in the next weeks.

Indeed, I do not know enough about physics and science to correctly estimate the risks with this experiment; but nevertheless, I think that a problem could be possible, since even if it is not the very first experiment of this kind, it’s the first one which will be that important, with that-near-to-light-speed speeds.

By the way, if Swiss aren’t so dangerous, we will stay alive longer. And there is some nice photographs of the LHC on the official website. And, if you like jokes, I found a nice music clip about the LHC.

Yeah, It was obvious that sooner or later, I’d come to speak about the attempt from Google to do a browser. Actually, I just tried Chrome. And after a short time of use, I know that this browser is not yet for me: ok it’s fast. But, it has too many lacks. Even if it could be skinned easily by replacing a dll file, it doesn’t support extensions, and has many missing features. I found a related google project, but the code is hosted there. If you want to compile it yourself, here are instructions.

Finally there are two bills on the subject, one by Lennart Regebro, and the other from “the independent”.

Note: for those who want to change the theme, just rename the file default.dll. I saw a theme changer on a forum, but it seems to be done in vb6, so you’d better get away from it if you don’t want to screw your Chrome up.

Giant Bomb is one of these websites on which you get used to spend time and time as days pass. Although this project is quite recent, it’s active and improved regularly. The main goal of Giant Bomb is to create a wide database about video games, using a kind of wiki software, a bit more specific to video games than usual ones. Now, let speak about the main thing: the systsem.

The system

So, the system is simple: anyone can create an account, and then log in. Once you are logged, you can start to edit pages. Actually, you can start to submit changes, because all changes are moderated, unless you have 1000 points. And that’s the point. You get points by editing articles, creating new pages, and adding images. But you don’t get those points easily, and most of users don’t have many. Indeed, you must follow guidelines to for your submissions to be accepted. So, a lot of pages are now created, and a lot still need to be done/completed. Even if there is nothing more to gain by having more points than to be able to edit (and then, after 5000 points, to create) pages without moderation, the concept of a specific wiki-site about video games is interesting; and it’s possible that one day, giant bomb may become the video-game-wikipedia.

Note: The site is kinda recent, so, it’s still buggy sometimes, and moderation is not always perfect.