Mr. Pig’s House of Bacon

I caved, got a twitter.

We will never speak of this again.

Recently, without a reason, my entire start menu got cleared. All shortcuts within C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu and the C:\Users\<user name>\…\Start Menu got deleted. Being the intelligent man I am I instantly thought “OH I BETTER START RECREATING THESE NOW!” So I did. Sadly, when I realized I should have downloaded an undelete program I had already overwritten those sectors on my hard drive.

In order to recover my deleted start menu icons I wrote an application in C# to help. It scans the various “Program Files” directories (or any others you specify) for .exe files and presents them in a list. You select the files you want and edit the default folder/name options and press “add selected” and the program automatically creates all the folders and short cuts in the start menu.

This application only works with Windows Vista.

In case anyone else runs into this problem, the app can be downloaded below.

Start Menu (Re)Builder Version: 1.0

Spam. It is no fun.

This blog of mine gets quite a lot of spam – and has been recently. In order to protect it from such senseless attacks I run Spam Karma 2 on top of Wordpress’s own anti-spam tool. Currently – between both systems – I have a total 33,750 of spams logged (40 days later the total is 34,459). I recently upgraded wordpress to the latest version and I was having some problems configuring Spam Karma – which lead me to notice the spam count.

And now for something completely different…

Hopefully, within the next two weeks, I’ll have some interesting updates for the XNA engine I’m writing. Work has stopped as other things have taken priority – hopefully it will resume shortly. Maybe within a month I’ll have an interesting app for everyone to play with. Only time will tell.

Finally; last.fm!

With the release of the Windows 7 beta I began worrying how dual monitors would play along with Microsoft’s new “super-bar”. However, it seems like Microsoft has been paying attention to the multi-monitor crowd creating some new shortcuts (and features) for multi-monitor users. Hopefully, by the time Windows 7 is out of beta, we’ll have reports that will make me certain UltraMon will no longer be necessary on Windows.

[New Key Commands]

I recently got deferred rendering working after struggling with it for some time (my friend Tasky managed to find that I had a negative sign missing somewhere). Defuse lighting, ambient lighting, and specular lighting are now implemented and everything is progressing nicely.

That’s right, I built a new computer. It is sexy. Specs follow:

• Intel Core i7 260
• GeForce GTX 260
• 4GB DDR3 1333
• ASUS P6T Deluxe
• 2×250GB SATA HDDs
• 850W Modular Powersupply
• HUGE Case with 2 25cm fans

It is fast. I am happy.

Yup; so I’ll be starting work on a PHP dBase memo file reader… I will most likely tie it into an existing dBase PHP class I found.

Good news for any working with dBase files and PHP: I’ve recieved permission to release the class under GPL once it’s complete.

God hates them.

dBase ahh… the pain. I’ve been working a lot with dBase files recently for some PHP projects and they are starting to really get on my nervs. It may just be the atmosphere (work) that I’m approaching them with… and perhaps if in some other dimension I approached dBase files with a lighter attitude I may have been able to love them. Sadly, for dBase files that is, I’ve grown to hate them and everything their file specification stands for.

Just when I thought I was done dealing with them and that my existing code would be able to handle all my dBase interfacing needs, I learned that I will need to add support for dBase macros (.dbt files)… goody. This is something that not even PHP’s module for dBase files supports.

Sounds like I’ve got plenty more dBase love coming my way…

Wish me luck and no – I have not died. Schools over so hopefully I’ll be starting some interesting projects soon.

A new version of the best game ever made… errm Mod I guess. Will be coming out soon.

Frag.Ops is a total conversion mod for UT2004 and in my opinion is one of the best games ever made. Check out their site and new video; links follow…

http://www.frag-ops.com/

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/78631.html

Personally, I love Xfce4 mainly because of it’s ability to be a robust desktop and window manager without using much ram at all. The only problem I have with it is it’s menu editor. Xfce4 has a system menu which appears when you right click on the desktop – in itself, a great feature. However, if you do not have a package manager that adds .desktop files to your system Xfce4 does not offer any way to add applications to the system menu. So, time and time again, I find myself typing in command after command in my terminal because I fail to remember where the fuck the .desktop files go. When I finally give up I spend about 10 min searching Google until I find a web page that has the file string. So for anyone that wants to add anything to their Xfce4 System Menu (or any other menu in any window manager) do the following:

1. Open the terminal
2. Login to a super user shell (su)
3. cd /usr/share/applications
4. nano .desktop (replace with something you will be able to identify the app with)
5. Add the following to the file, save and exit:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Name to show in menu
Type=Application
Comment=Tool-tip Text
Exec=Command to exicute
Icon=IconIfYouHaveOne
Categories=Application;OtherCategories;