Author: tim

We had a nice storm Thursday which knocked out power to one million people. Unfortunately, this outage also took my Comcast High Speed Internet connection with it. And there’s been so much news that I missed in such a short while.

1. Top news: Microsoft posted the December 2006 DirectX update which includes a peak at [DirectX 10].
2. Microsoft is hosting an XBox Live Arcade [programming contest].
3. If you want to compete in the contest, it would be handy to have an XBox Live Arcade compiler. You may find the [Express XBLA compiler] that Microsoft just released useful.
4. If you don’t know how to program the console that is ok too. Microsoft just released about how to program the XNA.
5. Microsoft released their [Robotics Studio]. Robotics Studio gives the programmer a handy library to do embedded system programming.

Usually people harp on Microsoft, but this week we can see some good news.

I had registered the domain name: [TGraupmann] a while back to host my portfolio and to do some website experiments. I decided to experiment with [SimpleViewer].

SimpleViewer takes an XML gallery file, so I wrote a handy Perl script to auto generate the gallery file:

#perl

print '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "n";
print '<simpleviewerGallery maxImageWidth="4096"
maxImageHeight="4096" textColor="0xFFFFFF"
frameColor="0xffffff" frameWidth="20" stagePadding="40"
thumbnailColumns="3" thumbnailRows="3" navPosition="left"
title="SimpleViewer Title" enableRightClickOpen="true"
backgroundImagePath="" imagePath="" thumbPath="">' . "n";

while (<images/*.jpg>)
{
   $_ =~ s/images///;
   print '   <image>' . "n";
   print '      <filename>' . $_ . '</filename>' . "n";
   print '      <caption>' . $_ . '</caption>' . "n";
   print '   </image>' . "n";
}

print '</simpleviewerGallery>' . "n";

I killed about 3000 spam comments on my stories with a single SQL statement. Beware any spammer from considering spamming me again.
delete FROM `gl_comments` WHERE 1
delete FROM `gl_storysubmission` WHERE 1
UPDATE `gl_stories` SET comments = 0 WHERE 1
DELETE FROM `gl_users` WHERE uid > 50


Also disabling comments worked wonders.

We went to the [Penny Arcade Expo] last night. Strange setup at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA. The event had a $20 one day admission fee. The event filled all three levels of the Meydenbauer. We got a bag of free stuff walking thru the door. The event had bean bags everywhere. Every bean bag had a kid on it playing on Nintendo DS lites. Most of the DS handsets where white. We saw a few teal imports. They had a few panels going, we saw a show on Women in the Game industry. Most of the rooms had consoles going. A lot of people playing Street Fighter and Guitar Hero. One dedicated guy in the courner was playing Geo Wars. They used the big room to play the movie [The Wizard]. Next door they were setting up the exhibits for the Expo for Saturday and Sunday. We snuck in and saw all the exhibits while they were setting up minus the rush of people.

We saw one new style of game called [Eets].

[WPF] is Microsoft’s latest challenge to be equivalent to Flash.

To be able write and install WPF websites and apps you need to install: