I’ve been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks, but you know me. I figured I had better do it before it’s completely gone from the theatres, at least.
If you’re into computer games at all (with particular emphasis on the old 8-bit Nintendo games, but any gaming interest is probably good enough), then Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is definitely a good movie to go and see.
On the surface (and for the first 20 minutes or so), it’s basically just your boring average run of the mill cheesy teen romance stuff, although occasional glimmers of interest peek through sometimes (and it’s really hard to like the main character at this point; not sure if that’s intentional or not). Once you get past that part, though (basically shortly after Ramona first appears), the action heats up and things just get insanely awesome.
I guess it has a bit of a niche audience (which is probably why according to most reports it’s been fairly mediocre at the box office), but for those people squarely in its niche (like me), it’s one to be remembered.
And, just for added awesome points, here’s a fan trailer combining video from the Matrix series with audio from the Scott Pilgrim trailer (which works out surprisingly well):
(Well, look at that. I did manage to write another Programming post after all.)
One of the really great things about WPF is its composable UI structure and dynamic layouts — the ability to replace one set of controls with another on the fly as things happen (eg. when something is selected by the user) and have everything adjust accordingly. The data binding engine is one of the most important elements in this, but closely linked to it is the templating engine.
In this post I’ll cover a little bit of background behind DataTemplates, but the primary focus is going to be on the DataTemplateSelector — what it is, why you might want to use it, a way to make it easier to use, and finally a better alternative to using them at all. Continue reading Templates Galore
Oh, and it’s now on sale via Steam’s Midweek Madness for US$2. So anyone who doesn’t get it is crazy. (Or already has it, or didn’t see it in time.)
And I promise I’ll make a real post sometime soon. It’ll probably end up being another Games post though; I’m a bit out of ideas for Programming topics at the moment.
I don’t have anything particularly exciting to say — I just felt like posting that it is now the vaguely-numerically-significant time of 2009-08-07 06:05:04. Woo!
Not that anyone will notice for a long while later…
As the more observant of you have probably already noticed, the site has just had a fairly major update, to both theme and the backend software.
One unfortunate side-effect of the change is that the generated wavatars will now be different (it uses a slightly different algorithm than it did before), but I don’t have too many commenters yet so you probably haven’t grown too attached to them…
I’m still not entirely convinced about the layout of some of the things in the sidebars (eg. which should be on the left and which on the right), so I might still do some tweaks in the future. But for now I’m reasonably happy with it. Feedback is welcomed.
I’ve been meaning to post something about the Sam & Max games for quite a while now, but never seemed to quite get around to it. But I’ve recently been reminded of it, as I just received word of some great deals available briefly. So let’s get the advertising spiel out of the way first:
In celebration of Telltale Games’ fifth anniversary, Sam & Max seasons 1 & 2 (and incidentally also the new Strong Bad season) are available at 50% discount from Steam — but only until May 18th (US time) — which suggests that I probably ought to have posted this earlier, since that’s later today
Another offer comes from Telltale themselves: if you use the coupon code EPK-9VX-3ZN-WRH at their store then you can get any individual episodes for US$5 instead of the regular US$9ish. (Note that this doesn’t apply to the full-season packs though, sadly — though it does work on more than just Sam & Max.) This one lasts until June 17th (US time).
Ok, now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to a discussion of the games themselves. Continue reading Sam & Max
I’m not going to make a habit of announcing these, but this one is just too big to pass up a comment on.
As you may or may not know, for a while now Steam have been running weekend deals, wherein each weekend they will offer a game (or sometimes a game bundle) at an extreme discount (usually over 50% off). Obviously, if you’re even remotely interested in the game being offered, these deals are hard to pass up.
The only conceivable reason I can think of for someone to not immediately buy that (assuming of course that you didn’t miss the sale) is if you’ve already got it. Portal alone is definitely worth it, let alone all that Half-Life goodness.
Today’s topic is fairly basic, but hey, it gives me a chance to moan about something weird in the framework, so it’s not all bad
Windows Presentation Foundation. WPF. Essentially it’s a long-overdue reboot of the child window model coupled with a powerful data binding engine (though not without its own quirks). And I love it.
The data binding model, though, does tend to result in the proliferation of little helper classes. In this case, I’m referring to value converters, those classes built solely to take a property value, convert it for display purposes (usually to a string), and optionally back the other way again. Continue reading StringFormatConverter
I use Vista at work (with UAC enabled; as a programmer I believe that for all the hassle UAC introduces it’s still a step in the right direction — a position that only gets reinforced when I hang around software installation forums and listen to all the sob stories from “developers” who bemoan that their software mysteriously doesn’t work on Vista any more), as I might have mentioned before.
One thing about it that does seriously aggravate me though is the dumbed-down (and fundamentally broken) Network and Sharing Center. Everything works wonderfully if you have exactly one network adaptor which acts as your gateway to the Internet — which admittedly probably covers at least 60% of the public (with most of the remainder being covered by people with one wired and one wireless connection [eg. laptops], each of which could be the gateway to the Internet, but only one at a time).
Stray from this model, though, and you’re in for a world of pain. As it happens, my work PC has an extra network card (used to connect to embedded devices on a dedicated subnet, both to avoid cluttering the main network and to more easily talk to devices with fixed IPs), and it also has VMware installed, which creates two or three extra adaptors of its own. Continue reading Vista Networking
Tags: 
Category: 
Leave a comment
Popular