I started a new job on Monday, so updates to this blog will likely slow down a bit. What I’m working on is all under NDA agreements so I’ll only be able to talk about small projects I’m working on in my spare time. All I can really say is I finally have the generic title of Game Developer which is a position I’ve been trying to get for a long time now.
Here is V1.0 of my Deviant Art RSS feed gadget. It doesn’t have that many features, but it gets the job done.
Simply find a collection on Deviant Art which you like, take the RSS page URL and paste it into the settings dialog box. You can set the time that you would like each image to show up in milliseconds and if you want any adult images to show up or not. Click OK and it should just start with the latest images first. When it hits the end, it will cycle back to the start.
I visited the AGO today to check out the building now that the new renovation is done and I noticed that they have these little touch screens beside some of the paintings which have a half phone attached to them so that you can listen to audio describing the works. You can also dial a 1-888 number and then enter a three digit code to listen to the same audio on your phone.
As it turns out, with my luck, I came across one that crashed. It dropped out of the audio application and back into Windows Mobile. Internet Explorer showed that it was running some sort of Asus hardware with GPS ability. I tried, but it didn’t have a net connection. My guess is it was something along the lines of this or this in landscape mode.
Followup: Just in case you feel like hearing about a random work of art, the phone number is 1-888-244-4184. Enter 210# if you want to hear about St. Johns Head or any other random 3 digit number followed by a number sign.
I ran into a snag the other day with my Gadget and was forced to look into using a debugger. Unfortunately, I was unable to figure out how to do it with Visual Studio Express for Web Developers. If anyone knows how please let me know.
I did however find another way to write out messages and it’s a lot cleaner then the VBScript from JavaScript method. The trick is to follow the instructions here and install a small application from Sysinternals which shows debug messages. After thats done you can write to the window by typing System.Debug.outputString(msg); in your script. It’s no debugger, but it’s useful none the less.
I feel dirty.
Vista Gadgets have disabled Alert and Confirm dialog boxes to avoid annoying end users, but when they did this it also made it hard to quickly debug the gadgets as there is no easy way to output exactly what is going on. Yes, I could install Visual Studio and use its debugger, but I’m lazy right now and just want to know the value of a string. I tried writing to a <div> but it was problematic because I didn’t know if the issue was I just couldn’t see the <div>, it wasn’t writing to it, or the data was an empty string.
The solution was to call Visual Basic from JavaScript. Icky, but it worked. While Microsoft stopped JavaScript alerts from working on the desktop, apparently they forgot to stop Visual Basic from loading MsgBox dialogs in the same instance. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature!
I’m working on a custom Gadget for Vista which reads in RSS feeds from Deviantart.com and displays images in the sidebar. It’s an Automatic image browser. Just watch it and it hunts down new images to look at.
I decided to use jQuery to get to know it better and ran into an annoying snag. DA stores its image information in a custom media namespace and jQuery was ignoring it. I made some progress with Withering Tree’s solution which was:
$(this).find("[@nodeName=zc:location]").text()
But it stopped working at some point. In the end this is the code that worked:
var content = this.getElementsByTagName("media:content");
It didn’t even use jQuery, just standard DOM calls. I have a couple more features I have to get right before I can show off version 1.0, but it should hopefully be coming along soon.
I’m close to finishing the drawing now. Does anyone have any critiques? I’m not sure about the background, I just threw it back there quickly. I should probably work on it a bit more.
It turns out that I had time to work on the image all day today. After adding some more detail on the gloves, I modeled the torso and skirt in 3DS Max and then imported it as a new 3D layer in Photoshop. From there I painted on the model using the standard tools.
I learned that Photoshop doesn’t like it when you use the smudge tool on a 3D models texture. It caused the program to think for a long period of time, and when it finished it looked as if nothing had changed.
The other issue I had was trying to see what RayTracing was like. I left my i7 going for about 10 minutes before ending the process because nothing was happening. If you want to raytrace something, I suggest you use 3dsmax and not Photoshop.
Not much to say, other then I’ve gone a little further working on my Photoshop image. No new techniques yet.
A couple days ago I noticed that the fans on my case weren’t shutting off when the computer was put to sleep at night and it got very annoying after about 10 minutes of listening to them. I traced back through what I had installed on the computer in the last day, printer drivers appeared to be the culprit, so I uninstalled them and shut down again. Nothing changed.
After some searching on Google I found out that people were having issues with Windows Media Player. Apparently it wants to be able to play a video even if the machine is in sleep mode, so it keeps the fans running. And it just so happened that I saved an image to the Pictures folder. I guess I triggered something by storing a photo there.
To stop the fans in this case, this is what you do. Go to the control panel. System and Maitanence. Power Options. Change Plan Settings for the setting that you are currently using. Change advanced power settings. Multimedia settings -> When sharing media -> Setting: Allow the computer to sleep.
Put your machine into sleep mode and your fans should stop.
Interesting things I have found.