Manic Code Monkey

You have Peanut Butter, you have Jelly … hmmm

Manic — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:28:16 +0000

Sometimes when you put two things together, the results are just magical. Two of my favorite things from the 90s were the PC games Diablo and Doom. In one of the games you battle demons from hell, and in the other game you battle demons from hell … IN SPACE! So in quite possibly the most epic mashup that I have ever seen, someone has put Doom in the game style of Diablo. The game is called Doom: Fall of Mars and it is still in Pre-Beta form right now, but its still very awesome.

I don’t have particularly high expectations of the final game, the mere concept it enough to make me smile, but it surprisingly good in its current form. The has all of the animations and references to little things in the original Doom which makes the memories flood back. Blue health bottles and solders that collapse into a bloody piles is just awesome. The funny part is that I always disliked playing the characters in Diablo that use ranged attacks, but for some reason the gun feels really cool here.

On a small side note, I discovered this game through the site Rock, Paper Shotgun which is quickly becoming one of my favorite new sites.

Where credit is due

Manic — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 05:44:10 +0000

I have not been known to be very kind to Apple. The products they make are ok, but to me they usually felt kind of gimmicky and way too expensive and incompatible with the things that I already have. There are a few features that they have with actually merit some credit, and are also available on Windows.

Rocket Dock: The way that the Apple dock is implemented is kind of irritating to me. I really don’t like how an application remains open after I close the darn window. Combine that with the new transparent ‘glassy’ look in the new version, and I cannot easily look and see what is running because the fuzzball next to the application icon is too hard to identify. Minimizing open windows to the dock is also pretty lousy because the live view of the window is too small to make out the differences between windows. Everything looks like gray boarder with white background and some scribbles in the middle.

Ok, so, what is the Dock actually useful for? Getting icons off the desktop as an app launcher. I like to keep as clean desktop as possible. I do not autohide the taskbar, but I turn off the quick launch and minimize the amount of icons in the system tray to give as much space as possible to open windows on the taskbar. Previously, I would add icons on the desktop to launch to apps that I use most frequently, but they get in the way of the desktop background or the gadgets that I have running (more on that later). Today, I have moved those icons over to Rocket Dock which accomplishes the same role as app launching icons of the desktop.

Switcher2: Everyone that I have spoken to agrees that the Vista Flip 3D features is a gimmick and does not feel like it belongs in the desktop experience. It is also not very useful to task switching between windows because the view of each windows is partially obscured by the other windows and the tilt. The live previews added to the new alt tab (Windows Flip) helps, but its still too small and only useful with the keyboard. There is a trick to making the size of the previews bigger. But this is still not the best way, I need a way to view open windows that is good for both the keyboard and the mouse.

Apple’s operating system has a feature for task switching open windows called Exposé switch layout out open windows open screen with no overlap so the user does not have an obscured view on the contents within the window. The window that you want can be selected from a keyboard shortcut or by clicking on it with the mouse. The user can activate this feature either by pressing a pre-defined function key or moving the mouse to a corner of the screen, a feature called ‘hot corners’. I hate hot corners. On a big monitor, or multimon setup, I would need to move the mouse too far for the feature to be convenient, and since Apple has been waging a war against buttons, there are no mouse buttons to map the feature to.

Along comes a program called Switcher2, which provides similar functionality to Exposé. I have this program mapped on the keyboard to a shortcut, and on the mouse as the 5th mouse button for quick access without ever needing to touch the keyboard.

Two Finger Scroll: This program is my new found toy. Apple has a feature on their notebook PCs called touchpad gestures. Newer synaptics touchpads have support for gestures, but they are not turned on for Windows. The only one which I found actually has a decent utility is two finger scrolling, in which a user places two fingers on the touchpad anywhere and moves the fingers up and down to scroll up and down on an open program. Usually on windows there will be a section of the touchpad along the right edge for document scrolling, but I have found this to be imperfect since I want to use as much of the touchpad for pointing and selecting as possible. Accidentally activating the right edge scrolling is too frequent so I turn if when I can. But now, I find that I rarely activate two finger scrolling when I do not need mean it. The app is a little strange, since it is standalone with no installer, yet there is an option to launch the program when Windows starts. So when downloading and launching, it is advised to find a good place to keep the program.

Windows Media Center done right

Manic — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:44:26 +0000

After talking about it for a very long time, I finally subscribed to Netflix. I think the excitement for the new Xbox 360 dashboard is the reason, but sadly it was playing the game Scene It and not knowing questions about recent movies is the straw the broke the camel’s back. The Netflix online streaming is cool, but I don’t want to do this in the browser, I want it in Media center. So I looked into the plugins that force feed the control into the Media center UI. While doing this I started looking into some other plugins that are really cool.

vmcNetFlix: I think this is the best Netflix plugin available because it does streaming to media center extenders. This point will be moot when the new Xbox dashboard comes out, but its handy in the meantime.
My Movies: This is very good looking tool to organize the DVD movies that you have ripped to your hard drive. It’s very nicely integrated into the Media center experience
EmuCenter: It’s a front end UI for video game emulators on the PC. Its a bit of a pain to setup and configure correctly, and you do need to download and install the game emulators yourself. But, once everything is configured its a good looking way to browse some good old games.

There is always room for Jello

Manic — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:39:08 +0000

I am very excited by the announcements from E3 this year. There were several things that were not mentioned at all by Microsoft during their conference for the upcoming fall update, one of them was Xbox 360 game installs. The more important thing (to me) is XNA community games. They had a fantastic showing of community games in early spring, and I was expecting to see more. While trolling around the Internet looking for more information, I discovered the website for one the community games developers, walaber. On his site, the developer already has a 1.0 version of the game JelloCar that had a demo on the 360. Apparently this game was also developed for the PC as well, very cool. Check the link to download the game and try it out.

Lifehacker’s AboutThisSite extension using activities

Manic — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:28:57 +0000

I’ve professed my love for the site Lifehacker in the past. The site has gotten into writing and publishing their own software. It’s really good stuff, mostly Google services which I don’t use, but I still try out everything. About a year ago, one of the main editors of the site Gina Trapani, posted a Firefox extension called AboutThisSite. The extension usage column describes how it works

“go to a web site you want to get more details about. Right-click and choose “About This Site” from the popup menu to view your lookup choices”

The workflow for this is almost exactly the same as IE8 Activities. Similar software has been floating around the net, but there were not any others that were as configurable as this.

I decided to create the services listed in the extension as activities. In doing so, I was able to add the favicon for the sites. Unfortunately I didn’t find anything that could work for the preview window, hopefully sites like these might see value in activities and add their own. Activities previews and the sites that they navigate toward are domain locked for security to prevent spoofing attacks, so I cannot make up preview windows on my own site for them.

Site Report	Related Sites	Bookmark	Cache	Other
Snapshot from Compete.com Install Activity (View XML)	Google Install Activity (View XML)	del.icio.us Install Activity (View XML)	Google Install Activity (View XML)	Site owner from Whois.net Install Activity (View XML)
Netcraft Install Activity (View XML)	Alexa Install Activity (View XML)	digg Install Activity (View XML)	Wayback archive Install Activity (View XML)	What’s this server running? from Netcraft Install Activity (View XML)
Kinja Card Install Activity (View XML)	Technorati Cosmos Install Activity (View XML)	Simpy Install Activity (View XML)		Alexa Traffic Install Activity (View XML)
McAfee SiteAdvisor Install Activity (View XML)	Open Directory Install Activity (View XML)
Url Trends Install Activity (View XML)
Wikipedia Install Activity (View XML)

Answering a call to action

Manic — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:46:55 +0000

At work, I’ve been spending a lot of time on IE8 Activities. I’ve been a pretty regular lurker on the Microsoft run website Channel9, and a forum post caught my eye. Someone there wanted a Paste and Launch Button for the address bar, so they could take a URL that they just copied, and launch it immediately. While I cannot solve exactly what this person want, I think I can get close. Using an activity from IE8, I can take a text selection from a webpage, and send it some website. So, if the selected text is a URL, then I can send it to a site that will perform an HTTP redirect.

It just so happens that Yahoo does this for their search results. When you search for something on Yahoo! Search, the results are always prefixed with http://rds.yahoo.com. It also does this for their affiliate like AltaVista. So I made an activity to send a URL there.

And so here it is:
Launch URL activity

And here is a direct link to the XML that describes it:
View XML

Don’t waste your time in online forums

Manic — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:24:13 +0000

XKCD is an awesome web comic, and this really hit home

Let the sarcasm flow

Manic — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:34:53 +0000

I’ve been in a sarcastic mood lately. Maybe its because right now is the middle of winter, or maybe its a lack of spicy food, who knows? In either case, I’ve found all that I need to ensure that I never get excited about anything ever again. Take a good look at despair.com, a site dedicated to the demoralization of anything that might make someone happy. The site is most popular for it’s take on motivational posters, but they have expanded to books, clothes, candies, calendars, just about anything you would find at a Barnes and Noble. My new favorite part of the site is the Parody Motivator Generator, a DIY section for making your own posters in the same style that they produce. If you are interested in making these things offline, there is a similar tool I caught off of lifehacker, called Poster Forge. The hardest part for some reason is getting motivated to actually do something with these tools, weird I know.

Skip Commercials in Media Center

Manic — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:59:15 +0000

I bought myself a new tv recently, and I am setting up a Media Center box to replace the awefulness that is the cable company DVR. I looked around at some the more well known sites for plug-ins to media center, but eventually I stumbled across the bomb shell. True commercial skipping. If I can get HD shows recorded as they are being aired, and remove the adverts, then I believe that I have achieved the perfect lazy American Dream.

This is why I will not move to San Jose

Manic — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 20:46:35 +0000

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/div>";" alt=""/>

Personally I think that this video is pretty telling for the times that we live in. And there is an added bonus of mocking the stupid crap that comes out of Silicon Valley. Thanks Kara.