Update Twitter, to Update Facebook and Blog

I finally achieved ultimate status updates.

When ever I update Twitter, either through SMS or via the web, my blog and facebook status gets updated aswell. Sweet!

I did it in the following steps:

1. Register an account with Twitter and link it to your phone.

2. Add the Twitter Facebook App to you Facebook account.

3. Add the Twitter Widget to your blog.

Good Luck!

Xbox 360, PS3, Online Games, Addons

I've have had some time playing with the PS3 and have connecting and playing games online is second nature to me. It works very well and its free!

But I wanted to play some games that are only on the Xbox 360. After about a year of trying to decide whether to buy one or not, I finally took the plunge and bought it. I got the 60GB premium version with Burnout Paradise, Trivia Pursuit, redeem code for Connect 4, extra wireless controller and Lips with Microphones.

After playing Burnout extensively, I have grown to love the x360 wireless controller. Its big, the triggers are perfect for driving games and my hands don't get tired from holding the controller, unlike the PS3's Dualshock 3 controller. But the love stops there.

The problem is I have to pay to play games online. After spending money on the console and buying the games, I am left with a big f**k you from microsoft asking me to give them even more money to be able to connect to friends and play games online.

What value does this subscription give?

I've read in forums and blogs that people think that xbox live has better service, faster servers and all that crap. I am wondering whether people just bought into the bulls**t of microsoft. I am comparing this to playing online games on a PS3 that works just as well. Everything is integrated well into the game and you can easily buy game addons. Someone please tell me why do everyone just put up with microsoft charging for xbox live gold subscription!

Everyone should just cancel their xbox live gold accounts and make a point to microsoft that it is unacceptable to charge people to play games online!

This also reminds me, when have games become a shopping mall? What makes it okay for game publishers to charge ridiculous amounts of money for a game, and then charge even more ridiculous prices for game add ons, which should have been for free.

For example, Stuntman Ignition, I got the game on special for 9 euros (retail would normally be something like 40-50 euros). I was browsing through the store, and to buy a car it costs 300 microsoft points which is equivalent to 3.60 euro. If I buy 3 of new cars from the store, it will cost more than the game! WTF!

People stop using these services, cancel your xbox live gold account and make a point to microsoft, the money sucking machine!

Difficulties Parting With My Hard Earn Cash!

Second go at buying this (ST9320421ASG) seagate hard drive and same result as first. Unknown time for delivery!

These companies should fix their website so they have real time stock information instead of some fake number to lure customers in!

The first website to avoid http://www.hardeschijven.com/ their parent company is http://www.mapp.nl

In mapp you will find a list of websites that they own. Avoid those aswell!

Emails take 24hours for a reply and it has been 2 weeks already, I am still waiting for me money to come back.

Second website to avoid http://www.zercom.nl

On the day they told me they didn't have any stock, their website still says they have 4 avaliable and delivery time is 1-3 work days. WTF!! At least they have fast email response.

A word to these companies and other similar companies. Stop wasting my time!

Update: Got my money back from mapp.

Update 2: Recieved my money from zercom.

Love Hate Relationship with Macbook

Six months using a macbook, I only have one comment, it is the best laptop I have owned. Until yesterday.

When I got home and boot the macbook up, I was pleasantly greeted with the Stop Sign/ Prohibitory Sign and it went straight to the windows partition. WTF?

After searching around, I came across this article. After following all the steps, I finally gave up. So I started to backup all my files and preparing my macbook for a rebuild and cursing at the sametime how long it will take to get the laptop back where it was.

3 hours later, all files in the Drobo, I popped the OSX DVD into the drive, and started the installation process. 4 clicks later, the installation started, this can't be right I thought, where are all the options, but I didn't question it anymore as it was already installing.

About an hour later, I was at this registration screen which I clicked through, and I was presented with the OSX desktop! WHAT!! No drivers to install and everything was working! That is a good OS install, I am happy to do it all again.. well maybe..

After this experience, I just hope in another 6 months, my macbook doesn't suddenly bite the dust again, but even if it does, I know it will be easy to fix.

Microsoft Technology Rant!

As I try to build more and more complex applications, I am starting to find incompatibilites between various microsoft technologies.

First one being ADO.NET DataServices & Silverlight:

Since I am building a Silverlight application that uses RESTful services to get data, I wanted to make sure the packets that I am sending are small. Comparing JSON and XML packets, JSON packets in general contact less crap, and hence the reason I choose to use JSON string instead of XML. At the sametime I wanted to be flexible, so I designed my webservices to be able to return JSON and XML based on the ACCEPT header (which is exactly how ADO.NET Data Services swtiches between the two formats).

I am now discovering because of a restriction on WebHeaderCollection, I can't switch between the data, and probably will now be forced to use XML!

Another restriction I discovered is that the silverlight plugin is restricted to POST and GET request methods. The decision is for this restriction is because the plugin is designed for the lowerest denominator of where the plugin might be used. I can see how this makes sense, but I want control over this not microsoft.

When I develop software, I know what kind of computers and software I am targetting. I know the limitations, so I want the flexibility. To get around this, I needed to implement POST Tunneling into my webservice so that I can do a normal POST and an extra Header called "X-HTTP-Method-Override" with the real request method I want.

AARGH!!

New Phone, K800i

Death to the O2 Atom!

For some reason as soon as I landed in Heathrow, my atom decided to play up. Touch screen stop working, phone turns itself off and crashes all the time! It had to happen when I needed my phone the most!

So out I went and bought an El Simple phone! no more touch screens just a phone with buttons and one that can do the main function, make and receive calls, something which my Atom couldn't do.

The more I play with this phone, the happier I am with it. The interface is quick and responsive, it has all kinds of connections and it has a 3.2 mp Cybershot camera with xenon flash! Perfect for taking photos when I don't have my real camera.

The quality of the photos are really good too! Here are some examples...

The voice calls are also amazingly clear, unlike that atom where I have always had broken up conversations.

In my opinion its a great buy.

btw, for my friends at work in DEWR reading this, check it out, Kings Cross Station.

DTS (Database & Team Foundation Sidekick)

I decided to make this tool to help with the database management in Team Foundation Server. There is a massive gap between TFS and SQL Server Management Studio. SSMS can communicate with TFS but the SSMS environment is so limited.

Current features of this tool:
- Generate Scripts from SQL Server 2000/2005 in SQL 2000 format.
i.e. If exists then Drop then Create.
- Save output to file.
- Save output to TFS
- Find changes from TFS in a defined folder.

Future features:
- Compare 2 different databases and script the changes into TFS
- Compare lookup data of 2 different databases and script the changes.

You can download it from here.

You will need the Visual Studio SDK 2005 installed.

Nintendo Wii

The Nintendo Wii, what a machine... It doesn't have the best graphics, and its doesn't have the best sound, but it makes up for that in pure design innovation!

Firstly, the games are not controlled in the normal fashion of button smashing. It is controlled by the movement of the control and to move the control, you have to move the remote through the air. It also detects the speed of the control movement through the air, so depending on the game, the faster you swing the remote the faster the movement will be in game.

One thing I noticed is that the Nintendo Wii doesn't have digital sound. I didn't read up on the console much apart from the fact that swing the remote is the control. Not having digital sound didn't matter because the remote has a little speaker. In Wii Sports, the tennis game would trigger the remote make a noise every time you swing the ball. This gave the game more realism as it feels and sounds like you are actually swinging a real racket! Amazing!

I can't wait for the developers to take full advantage of the new control method of the Wii. I heard from a friend that the ninja turtle game coming out for the Wii will have new ways of using the remote. There are also combo moves in the game. It should be interesting how that translates to real life control.

I highly recommend this console as it brings a whole new level of game play not brought by any other console. It has the capability to bring the non gamers to play games. Awesome stuff!

Kyosho MiniZ AWD

My AWD MA010 SP chassis kit finally arrived. Put it all together as soon as I got home and started driving around. This thing rocks! The drifts you can do with this thing are awesome. I've put my AE86 Toyota sprinter body on it, to recreate Initial D drifting scenes.

To buy next, a faster motor and some bodies for the other Mini Z's.

Thoughts on Hewlett Packard Photosmart C7180 printer

YAY!! I have a photo printer! The decision was based on the fact that I want to be able to print out some of the photos that I have taken and be able to experiment with the colours and such... If I was to do the same thing by taking the adjusted photos to the shop and printing them, it would have required more time and the large prints would have been more expensive.

I printed three prints in total last night, to see what this printer was capable of...

The first print was a portrait picture of my girlfriend. The colours were mostly dark apart from the face. It was printed on HP advanced photo paper. Most of the photo was reproduced flawlessly, apart from the top right corner. In that corner I noticed some obvious noise in the blending of the reds and darks. I had a look else where on the photo to see whether the other reds had the same kind of noise. Near the center of the photo, next to the guy in white, there is a pinkish tint window with a white background. There is hardly any noise in that. These are observations of the first print I did, more 4x6 prints with different colours needs to be done to check out other colour blending.

The second print I did was an A4 print of the top of Aiguille Du Midi in Chamonix. This print is composed of mostly blue and white colours. There were no noticeable noise on the picture at all! This is quite amazing, but I am guessing there isn't the same kind of blend as the first print, the redish and darkish blend.

The final print I did was quite similar to the second print, and it turned out to be about the as the same as the second print. Almost flawless!

All in all, I am quite happy with this investment. I still have to play with negatives scanning, general scanning and printing more photos of different colours.

Finally, bring on more devices that connect to the computer via wireless ethernet! There is only one wire going into this printer and thats the power cable! awesome!

Miniz Problems and Voltage Comparison

Last night I decided to take out my Miniz racer and decided to take it for a run around the house... To my horror, it stopped working, just like it did before... no motor movements, no steering movements (the first time it stopped working was when I installed a FET upgrade to it (2x3 of FET 7389) but it started working again 3 years later without me fixing it).

I took the thing apart and found that the negative battery has snapped off and the negative servo wire has snapped off too.. strange I thought.. on closer examination, it turned out that the wires has become brittle from heat generated by the electronics. I don't know the cause of the excessive heat, but I didn't really want to know anyway...

I replaced all the faulty wires on the board and put the batteries back in and viola, it started to work again...

My girlfriend asked me which miniz's out of the three that I have was the fastest one.. my natural answer was the one with the FET upgrade (the Subaru body)... Then I decided to experiment and find out which pushed more voltage to the motor...

The Miniz's

Subaru WRX

FET upgrade (2x3 7389 plus the stock FETs)

and other various hop ups

MR01 chassis

Ferrari F40 - Japanese electronics

Stock car

MR01 chassis

Initial D Toyota Trueno AE86 - Japanese electronics (I am guessing)

Stock car

MR015 chassis

As it turns out, the Trueno gave 5 volts to the motor, WRX gave 4.81 volts to the motor and F40 gave 4.79 volts... Keeping in mind that I bought the F40 and WRX at about the same time, I was actually quite shocked to see that the electronics of the WRX and F40 gave about the same voltage. Whats more shocking is that the Trueno I bought recently, gave more voltage than the other two miniz's...

I do remember when I first compared the WRX (before upgrading) and F40 years ago, the WRX was noticeably slower then the F40...

It seems the Japanese have the better electronics right out of the box... but more experimentation is need to conclude this...