Dan’s Space on the Web

my brother convinced me to give GTAIV a try, since he had a copy of it and it seems that many have named it one of the top games of 2008. I inserted the DVD and started installing 1.5 hours ago.

I still haven’t played it yet.

steps to install GTAIV (DVD Version) on a PC!

1. install from DVD. 2 DVDs. bah. I hate having to come back to the PC and see it prompt for the next disc. And then at the end it needs the first disc again.

note: at the start of installation it tells you
installation of GTA4… requires installation of Rockstar Games Social Club, Sony DADC SecuROM, Adobe Flash, Microsoft .NET Framework, Games for Windows – LIVE, Internet Explorer, and DirectX.

Wow, that’s a long list.

finally, after installing game files…

2. check online to see if game release date has passed
3. enter serial key and activate online
(what if I don’t have an internet connection at the moment?)

wait! another thing before you play…

4. need to sign up for Rockstar Social Club.
note: I just realized that maybe you don’t really have to, you can opt to run in offline mode. However for the purposes of today’s lesson, we’re aiming to get the full experience out of the game.

5. need to link rockstar social club account to windows live account for achievements (i think that’s what its for)

finally, got that all out of the way… can I play the game now? No.

6. need to download and install (manually) the latest Games for Windows – LIVE update.

I wonder if the Steam version has similar problems. I’m pretty happy with Steam’s services so far.

Update: Woohoo! The game finally launched. Well something did. “To save your progress and achievements you have to sign in to your Live account.” OK, sounds good. “An update for this game is available. you will have to update it before you can play it with Windows Live.*”
!@#$%^

*I can’t remember the exact wording. but it was something along the lines of “update it or you can’t get the full experience”

Why can’t they just check and slipstream the update during installation? they already require the net to check for release date.

http://www.econsultant.com/i-want-freeware-utilities/

http://www.econsultant.com/i-want-open-source-software/index.html

Popup Plus only provides the popup service – to actually get notifications (eg. new message), need another plugin such as Message Notify.

trying a new setup by forwarding all my mail to my private gmail, thereby eliminating the need for thunderbird. Instead, to get email notifications, decided to grab the Gmail Notifier. Immediately I noticed one thing:

It only asks you if you want to enable auto-start at startup during installation – after that, there isn’t anywhere for you to change this.

Having recently moved hosting to Dreamhost, I moved enhancedseed.com’s email hosting to gmail as well. I usually have all my @enhancedseed.com email setup to forward all email to my private gmail address, so I did the same for the new hosting.

Interestingly, when I sent an email to fake12@enhancedseed.com to test the forwarding,  the email never made it to my private gmail’s inbox. Instead, it got immediately marked as read and archived.

To further figure out what’s going on, I sent another email to the same address, but from my school email account. As expected, this time it worked fine, arriving and sitting in my inbox like any other email until I opened it.

So what’s going on? Initially I thought that perhaps GMail was “smart” enough to see that the from: entry was myself. However this is not the case, because if I were to send an email to myself directly (not that I write emails to myself as a friend wrongly intepreted)  it was happily sit in the inbox, unread, until I open it. Then, I remembered what happened a few days ago when I had setup my Thunderbird with my gmail via IMAP, and had mapped the Drafts folder to gmail’s Draft “folder”.

What happened when I mapped the Draft folder accordingly was that I started seeing many emails being downloaded there, when I had no Drafts being stored in my account. Upon inspection, turns out these emails were drafts that were auto-saved while composing my emails in the gmail web-interface.

I concluded that since GMail does not use the folder structure but instead applies Labels, it probably “sends” these saved drafts to my account, immediately archives them and labels them “Draft”. How it knew that it was an “incoming” draft was by looking at where it came from: myself, which brings us back to the start of this article.

By sending an email to fake12@enhancedseed.com and then having it automatically forward all mail back to the same account, I suspect that GMail saw the forwarded mail as coming from me and treats it similarly as a draft.

However, why didn’t it label the email as “Draft”? Perhaps when “sending” the draft emails it has some header information that my forwarded emails as lacking, and so the labelling part isn’t triggered.

I also realize that this method of sending yourself draft emails to store them is pretty silly, so it’s probably some hand-waving magic going on internally within the server that doesn’t quite literally do what I say it does.  Of course, I don’t have information on what exactly happens with drafts, so it’s hard for me to figure out exactly what’s going on with my case. I will have to think about this a bit more and maybe carry out a few more tests…

Update: I noticed that chat logs are stored as read mail as well. Also thought about Sent mail – are those just being labeled as well? Also, the behavior in question was replicated by sending an email to a googlegroup I am registered for but under a different email that forwards back to the account I sent the email from (email.A -> group -> email.B -> email.A).

edit: wait, the googlegroup repro was probably due to a filter I created for emails sent to the googlegroup (the filter is meant to catch emails sent to the group email).  On the other hand, the filter isn’t supposed to automatically mark it as read.

[click on above images for full-size] Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something I’ve been working on…

using base fooLars2 by lassekongo83 .

primary mods:
- stop after current button
- added playlist switcher and graphical browser
- added “mini-mode”

minor custom tweaks:
- last played works with default foobar2000 0.9.5 statistics
- album search method
- grouping method

still working on it, final version will probably be featured in my next desktop.

I ran into a couple of problems when attempting to compile the code provided by the Source SDK. I’m using Visual Express C++ 2008, and I thought I was being stupid when the compiler kept crashing midway. My google-fu failed me when I first encountered this a few weeks back, and I even tried reinstalling VEC and the Microsoft SDKs.

Fortunately, I then decided to flip through the Talk page for the Valve Developer Wiki page on Compiling with VS2008, and found out that it was in fact a reported bug. Soon, the article was updated to include a fix for it.

However, I still couldn’t successfully build the object,  as I was getting Linker errors. I then realized that the Wiki article had left out a minor detail – when modifying the properties for the solutions, you had to configure them for Release configuration, not the default active Debug mode. You also then need to set the project to build for Release.

Finally, I ran into one final error. During the output phase, I got the error “PRJ0007 : Could not create output directory …” a quick search through the internet and I found this . The solution was correct, but I was still getting the error “PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from “Copying to destination folder”" (of course, there were a few more details given, but I forgot exactly what they were). I went to check to see what’s up with the directory it’s trying to copy to. The permissions were correct, path was correct… then I realized that somehow, due to the initial error, a bin file had been created (rather than a bin folder). This seemed to prevent the compiler from creating a new bin folder, so I deleted the file and true enough, I finally got it to build correctly.

That’s one thing I would fix in Windows XP: the taskbar doesn’t allow you to re-order opened applications.

What’s the use of keeping it in fixed order? So that I can remember in which order I opened my applications? Maybe, but that’s not very useful. It would be a lot more useful if it were the other way around.

[click on above images for full-size]

VS: Kemikal – lassekongo83
Wall: Guild Wars – somewhere in Arbor Bay (screenshot by me)
Winamp: Ebonite by WinstonGFX
MirandaIM: HUD Port by chaodam and GoneDark for ieview (slight mod by me) note: currently miranda site down, cannot retrieve link.
Rainlendar 2.0: aerial RL by danillooc
Icons: Guild Wars Dock Icon by aphaits and Chakram by apathae

Icons are Guild Wars, Music (folder), My Computer and Firefox (from left to right). I finally got around to using GCalDaemon to sync my Rainlendar and Google Calendar. I also have my wallpaper scheduled to automatically change when it’s day (I set it to right after I wake up) and when it’s dark. Check the day shot here (yea, I spoofed it just for the shot).