Turns out the going is a bit tough and painful with a mouse and keyboard, thus I created this Xpadder profile that through a bit of level one seems to work pretty well.  You’ll want to zoom out quite a bit and turn off double tap to evade in the settings.

Grab Xpadder:

here for $9.99 (this is more responsive and has some new features) or

here for free (but you’ll have to run in compatibility mode on Windows Vista and later)

Then:

Grab the profile here

Watch this “commercial” for a good giggle:

Pardon the issues, I recently moved this blog to Azure. Please comment if you have any difficulties with downloads and thanks for visiting!

In a word, yes. You should give it an honest shot. It really is a great OS. Very very fast, somewhat easy to use, stable as all hell. But a bit odd at times. Seems like they need a UX service pack or something. Perhaps the RTM will get rid of some of the concerns.

How about that Tegra 3 image? Damn the wait!

So far, I’m digging Windows 8 Release Preview though. Here are some annoyances I’ve encountered:

• Apps from the Store may suddenly become uninstallable for no good reason (this happened on two machines – one is my four year olds and the other mine)
• Asus Xonar sound cards… Good luck with drivers. Neither the UniXonar or any official Asus drivers have worked in my attemtps. At least not after the first reboot. Also the “class installer” has refused to install blah blah error seems to appear regardless after the first install – if you try to reinstall the drivers
• Upgrading from Windows 7 may or may not cause random complete hang or other undesirable affects
• Using Microsoft provided WDM drivers with an Nvidia (ie GTX 670 or dual GTX 560 TIs) GPU and Intel (Sandy Bridge) integrated graphics for tri monitor support can lead to all black backgrounds in RT apps. The fix here seems to be a reinstall of the Nvidia drivers. This happened to me once or twice after enabling Nvidia 3D Vision as well as after upgrading to newer versions of Nvidia drivers

Also a couple of usability oddities:

• Scrolling with one finger or the mouse wheel does nothing in the start menu
• Navigation with the keyboard in the start menu is a bit odd
• Search is by no means complete for a gmail account with some 60k messages; if I am searching gmail – I goto gmail
• Searching as a whole is a bit difficult to access, would much prefer a persistent search box and more intuitive way to display results from wherever I may be in the search menu or an app. Why go to a separate page altogether?

And finally some very important questions.

• Why is it so damn easy to pull up the start menu and so damn difficult to exit it? Should be windows button to open, windows button to close period.
• Why is it so difficult to customize a tile? Why don’t normal apps use a big icon and small text if need? Why can I not see the full contents of a particular app’s tile by hovering? Again why can’t I customize a damn tile!!!?
• Why is it so annoying to move tiles around? Can’t I have some mass tile selection mode by right clicking and then left click holding? With alot of apps, its sort of unmanageable
• Why can’t I browse files — not pictures — FILES using the metro file browser?
• Why do I have to have the annoyance of User fucking account control (pardon the language but this one really burns my arse) and the incompatibilities associated with it just to run freaking metro apps?
• Why do I have to call it something other than metro after so long? Didn’t someone do their research?
• Why was it “metro” in the first place? That always makes me think of a someone shopping at the gap or banana republic…
• Why is the music app such a piece of shit? I only have 6k songs. That’s really not many at all.
• Why does the piece of shit music app – and any other “metro” music playing app semi mute when I go back to the desktop? Why is there no option to disable this? Sure you could’ve just made it an unintended value added side effect of switching auto volume lowering during communication…
• Why does it take an hour even with 50 mbps down to “enable” .net 3.5 features?
• Why does IE metro have NO MENU?!!?!? Really. Hiding it is one thing but that thing doesn’t have a menu at all. No history, no recently closed tabs. I’d almost switch
• Why do the IE dev tools still not allow me to change numeric values (say for size on a particular css property) with the arrow keys? Or navigate with the damn tab key. Its probably the only reason I don’t use the piece.
• Why don’t you integrate with GOOGLE TALK!!!
• Why do I click on a live tile because I see something interesting only to be taken to the home view of that particular tile. Don’t you know anything about click intention?
• Why did I seriously just type this many questions… Uhoh…

Download it

http://chocolatey.org

One of the coolest tools I’ve seen in a while.  You can even install chunknorris with it!

Also just about everything I mentioned on my Windows dev essentials post.

Grab nuget while you are at it.

Two boards, one chip. The ASUS board has bad firmware from a power loss during a firmware upgrade. Not bricked though, and we certainly didn’t by a dip programmer specifically for it or another board. Fixing the “bricked” ASUS P8Z68 was as simple as booting the junk Zotac board (which is a totally different architecture) into some random linux distro that included flashrom, downloading a bios update (.bin) from ASUS, and hotswapping, yes hot freaking swapping the motherboard’s EEPROM while in gnome with a terminal open (do this also if you can’t find a way to boot to dos for junk mobo bios updates – minus the hotswap of course).

After the swap I did the following:

  sudo flashrom -r bkup.bin
  sudo flashrom -w biosupdate.bin

Then I shut the junk Zotac off, put the EEPROM in its original owner and booted it up without an issue since.

• C#.  Java and Objective C are both garbage collected by delegates, dynamics, lambda and linq expressions.  Not to mention WCF, WPF, ASP .Net’s MVC, the entity framework, etc
• Windows - because your computer is simply not a toaster.
• Bluestacks – because no matter how you handle it the emulator is slow
• Xamarian’s Mono for Android
• MonoGame
• Nvidia’s Fx Composer for GL shaders (and their development environment)
• Desura and Steam – cause you have to have some fun every now and then
• The best text editor ever: Sublime Text 2
• The best code comparison utility ever: DevArt Code Compare – because it compares code, not text
• The best code editor ever: Visual Studio 2010 and 11
• The second best: MonoDevelop, buggy as it may be
• The best hex editor ever: HxD
• The best developer tools ever: Anything by Telerik
• The best performance tracing application for .Net: Telerik’s JustTrace

and ignore nosql for games, unless you are talking about a backbone for your backbone.

Have fun!

Update Soon with support for They Bleed Pixels

On top of all that great news below,

I’ve added a new game to the loader: They Bleed Pixels.

As with Terraria, you need the original game to play it and my update (once I release it).

Buy it from Steam and then stay tuned for the release.

I’ve got a revamped sync manager, no more batch files, the memory reduction ready, controls fixed… amoung other things. Now when you install there are two buttons to click, everything happens automatically and you are faced with a minor bit of crucial info. Installation still requires a pc for now.

Did I mention its ready for release?
Good news right! I am thinking based on how this goes that I’ll stick it in the market soon as well.

Also, check out my composition. I’m no musician, and this is my third piece ever.

Feedback is always appreciated!

In the past month I’ve been working seriously on getting this other ball rolling and well, so far, I’m doing the entire production myself. I’ve learned alot so far and progress is steady. But a couple of days ago I took a break to focus on Branches.

Branches conversion and installation process video tutorial can be found below. Thanks a bunch to DroidNerds for posting it.

Sorry to all of you following this post for the delayed update. I’ve been so busy I’ve not had the time to even glance at this in a couple of weeks. I’ll have some awesome news at some point in the future, and will try my absolute hardest to focus on getting the updates to this regular.

Finally got the new tile engine stable.  This is great news because in my testing I’ve successfully played a large world with memory usage not exceeding 112 MB except for a small spike of 240 MB during the actual load.

I’ve also finished my fixes for the missing button, more intuative error messages, etc.  Look forward to this update sometime tonight.

Forums added

Release notes (7/3/2012):

• Fixed character creation (somewhat) – can get to the screen now but image is off center and keyboard is required
• IMPORTANT: Select settings, and then Lazy Load Textures to see this benefit: Memory usage reduced to about 253 MB on a small world. It might even work on the Xperia now.

Also fixed my convert/copy script. Apparently it was set to copy to the root of a device connected via adb. Sorry.

NOTE: If you have this working now, uninstall before installing. The patch that is applied must be deleted for you to get this update. Then grab the loader.patch and stick it in /sdcard/branches on your device.

Thanks for those of you who provided assistance and a simple reminder please don’t link to copyrighted content here. If anything use something created by a third party. I still don’t see one thing wrong with this app with regard to copyright though…

Remember, I was going to finish up my sync tool and this would all be automatic. Though comments got a bit too deep on my nerves so I rushed it.

Free! Source might appear soon. It’s not obfuscated regardless. Please donate if it works and you feel like supporting the work.

Here’s to the lovely comments. Good luck.

This will only run on devices with > 512 MB of RAM (at least ~350 MB free after booting)
I may or may not provide answers to questions. You can thank AceSmythe and others for that.

Install this apk: Game Loader
Grab this zip: Conversion

Install Perl for Windows (Strawberry)
Install Python for Windows (Python)
Install your android device’s driver and adb (Sdk)
Extract the contents of Prepare.zip
Copy “Content” directory and main executable into the folder you extracted in step one
Copy Players and Worlds from “My Saves” (your save game location) to the folder you extracted in step one
Double click or execute ConvertCopy.cmd

Run the app, make sure you select xnb for the image format. Also no need for the desktop app at this point or dropbox unless you want your saves and content to sync.

Not so much a fan of the fact it doesn’t support themes as Visual Studio or have the well put together interface for extensions that Visual Studio does.  I mean – it uses the shell.. why not?  Either way, in an attempt to add theme support – I’ve found that extensions work pretty easily (at least the color theme for VS 2010 does).  See the screenshot above – do the following to replicate it on your box.

Note the use of the dark expression theme: http://www.nerdpad.com/visual-studio/visual-studio-2010-dark-expression-blend-color-theme

The source VS 2010 plugn: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/20cd93a2-c435-4d00-a797-499f16402378/

Unzip this to your SQL Server Management Studio path in the extensions folder ( for me was C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\ManagementStudio\Extensions).

Start/restart SSMS, and customize the theme as necessary.

Also note that you can easily import existing syntax color themes from wherever (http://studiostyl.es/) as well.  I’m currently digging VS11 – Dark.

Have fun!

Basically the gist is to have a regex that can be run on a bunch of insert statements to turn it into an insert if not exists – with some primary key.

Run the regex on this SQL insert statement:

INSERT [dbo].[Dummy] ([id], [name], [description], [listOrder], [dateCreated], [dateUpdated]) VALUES (N'87901F8E-5595-4A95-8AEA-45A61B5A65D2', N'Doofus', N'This one''s stupid', 10, getdate(), getdate())

Outputs the following SQL insert statements:

INSERT Dummy ([id], [name], [description], [listOrder], [dateCreated], [dateUpdated])
SELECT N'87901F8E-5595-4A95-8AEA-45A61B5A65D2', N'Doofus', N'This one''s stupid', 10, getdate(), getdate()
WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM Dummy WHERE id = '87901F8E-5595-4A95-8AEA-45A61B5A65D2')

The regular expression is:

• INSERT \[dbo\]\.\[(.+)\] \((.+) VALUES \((N\’([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)\’\,.+)\)
  
• INSERT \1 (\2 \nSELECT \3\nWHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM \1 WHERE id = ‘\4′)\n

That’s it… Have fun!