devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

I switched from Sprint PCS to T-Mobile about a month ago for cell phone service as they seem to have the cheapest plans that I’ve seen. So far other than a few spots where coverage could be better, it’s worked just fine for me.

Something I think which is pretty cool is that you can actually SMS people who are on T-Mobile service in Germany, too! Very cool! I haven’t tried any one else in Europe as I really only know one person that lives there. I’d be interested to know if this works with other wireless carriers there, such as Vodafone.

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I spent many hours as a young shaver playing the fabled games of Sierra On-Line such as Space Quest, Kings Quest, and yes, even Leisure Suit Larry (any versions since 1996 or so do not really capture any of the classic elements of that game). There are definitely some good games out now, but I still think my favorite all time game series would be playing the role of Roger Wilco, a janitor turned superhero, in SpaceQuest.

I think one of the main reasons these games were so fun was because they were so humorous. Modern games really do not compare at all, as they have to have a lot of bling-bling to keep the kids interested.

Apparently the CEO of Sierra On-Line during the period which it actually put out games has a fan site up, and actually answers questions in the forums from time to time. Good stuff!

If not, there are plenty of clever ones at HackADay.

I’ve been playing Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source quite a bit this weekend, and noticed a few quirky things such as some textures on walls being a solid red, etc. When opening up the console to enter commands, there would be various errors such as mp3’s and graphics files unable to be found.

Yesterday Valve released a slight update to Steam which will allow you to check your game cache to make sure it’s valid. I just did this for the above 2 games, so hopefully it fixed-up those little problems.

In an attempt to get the machine clean in hopes of fixing the Half-Life 2 stuttering problem, I’ve been doing a bunch of disk maintenance this evening.

Every since installing a second hard drive on this machine and moving around files from an old drive to the second hard drive on this new machine, I somehow ended-up with a bunch of wacky files on it (long story.. basically I had to use a utility to grab files off an old drive that was formatted as a dynamic disk because XP couldn’t read it), and I could not find a way to remove them. I tried changing their attributes, deleting them in DOS, using file wiping utilities, doing 8 billion CHKDSK’s, etc. When I’d try to delete them, I’d get a “cannot find specified file” sort of error; it was bizarre.
(more…)

I have one last thing to add here for Eclipse as I’m pretty much done configuring it on my new workstation. Here is how you can setup block indenting in Eclipse (being able to highlight a group of text, and shifting it to the left or right):

• Click on Window, then Preferences
• In the “Preferences” dialog box which pops-up, traverse down the tree on the left to Workbench > Keys
• Click on the Modify Tab
• Towards the bottom, change the “When” pulldown to “Editing Text”
• Under the “Command” heading in the “Category” pull down, select “Edit”
• Under the “Command” heading in the “Name” pull down, select “Shift Left”
• Under the “Key Sequence” heading in the “Name” pull down, enter the key combination in this box which you’d like to use to perform the action of moving a block of text to the left. I used Ctrl+Alt+[
• Repeat this process only using “Shift Right” for the Name pull down under “Command”, with a matching key sequent to use for the action
• Click “OK” to finish

I never seem to remember what I need to install to get the optional <ftp> task in Ant working when it’s time to blow away Eclipse and start a fresh install. Here is the basic information you need to get it working:

For Ant 1.5, you will need to download NetComponents.jar.

For Ant 1.6 (Ant 1.6.2 is current in the Eclipse 3.1 Milestone as of this writing), you will need commons-net.jar and the Jakarta ORO JAR file.

Grab the applicable files above and put them in your $ECLIPSEHOME/plugins/org.apache.ant_$CURRENTVERSION/lib folder. You’ll then need to add the file(s) you copied to this directory to the Ant classpath which you can do by going to Window > Preferences, traverse down the tree on the left to Ant > Runtime, and use the dialog box which appears to add them. I usually use the “Add External JAR’s” option myself. Click “OK” when done,and then you should be good to go. You may however need to restart Eclipse.

I’m setting up a new workstation here at work, and noticed that after a long period of network silence, a new version of Zempt was released. What is Zempt? Basically a simple Windows application which allows you to post to your blog from your desktop rather than a browser using XML-RPC. It’s good stuff, and I’ve been using it for quite some time for all of my posts.

This seemed to float by the CF blogosphere without much coverage; Ben Forta uncovered a few more juicy bits about Blackstone and it’s new application event mechanism.

Although this article is not geared towards ColdFusion necessarily, someone who’s using the Apache HTTP Server or thinking about using it in a production environment with ColdFusion might find some of these tips to be valuable. There are also a couple of other bits about PHP and MySQL as well.