And the reign of twitter begins

So i know Steven loves twitter and he loves blogging (most of the time when he isn’t working ).

So here is something i implemented just for him ,i dont think anyone follows my twitters besides him :( , its simply a plugin for wordpress that allows u to directly twitter from wordpress.

Not sure how many people would like but seeing as there are so many people that advertise there blogs via twitter , why not just intergrate them anyway. Please note this can only be done with a managed wordpress. i.e. one that is not hosted on www.wordpress.com.

So here goes the first one.

Awesome Radio

Thanks to my bud Pavel First(hope the spelling is right ) for showing me this awesome site .Ayland
. Its basically a radio station that play Zx style music ( the stuff you heard in old games ) . I am not sure exactly what you call them but i will get the name for you :)

Music4Games

So in response to my emotional music in games and series post i have a small follow up .I recently came accross this site which basically as part of its many functions is to analyze the music in games. Head over to their site (Music4Games) to see what i am talking about

Emotional Music

So i am not sure how many of you know but i love the Smallville TV series ,its one of the better TV series that i watch :),besides the fact that its based on super man and his whole child hood era,the cast of actors actually do the story some justice. So the one thing that i picked up after watching alot of tv series and i mean a lot of series is the way that they actually use the music. There is the standard change of tune whenever something is about to happen . But what really struck me is the music that they use at the apex of certain parts of the storyline.

This for me can some times break or make the episode for me.Make it and i will never forget the episode or the song that ran with it.Break it and i will never remember the series unless i had to watch it again for what ever reason.

This has been happening in the series as long as i can remember in the series which is why i am surprised that its not used that well in other series and more importantly in games. In the last episode right at the end of the when Clark is faced with a major emotional decision(sorry no spoilers here) the music so accurately reflects his emotions i could not help feeling the same way he did.

Now a quick look back at gaming ,if a game could do this to the player then just imagine how sold the player will be for the entire franchise .No mater how good or bad the rest of the series is the player will always come back for more. From every angle this is benefiting to the game , you will now have a constant source of people interested in your product which is the end product of most games, this leads to better production values in future and the cycle will continue in this way.

To me a prime example of a game that got it right is the hugely successful Guitar Hero and its follow up Rock Band .While these games do not actually attach the gamer to a specific avatar instead promoting the gamer as the greatest thing there is in the rock world its still a step in the right direction.

While the concept is not new its just not used that much these days ,the only other game that i remember a theme song attached to my character is halo 3 .This again is my personal opinion.If you know any other good characters or games please do let me know

Halo 3 …. the online goodness

So recently i started playing halo 3 again and man is it just as fun as ever ,i just seem to have one problem randomly the that i enter will really lag even if i have a yellow to green ping .

Yet there are times when i play with a red ping and i have no lag at all .Keep in mind most of the time when i play online its with either of my bro’s split screen.While i understand this can take more bandwidth it still doesnt make sense to me.

Yes i have also read up on how one of the players will actually host the game and depending on the host i will have different speeds.But what i want to know how can i be the host or atleast get a smooth connection. If you have any tips please let me know.

Also i have stopped all downloads and made sure no one is on the net. I am using a lan connection directly to the router so wifi range is not a problem.

Look forward to seeing you online.

First Xbox Live Baby !!!!

This was to good too miss up head over to Kotaku to read about it.

Update: This was really big , even made it onto official Xbox live  new blade .But its soo cute i guess u cant not want to advertise it

Cheap Ass Gamer :)

Ok so i am not really sure if i can use that header title since its already taken by the great guys over at cheap ass gamer . I must say that i have started to listen to there podcasts about a month back and it kicks ass , its saved me many a boring drive in the traffic home.Now onto the topic of choice,cheap ass gamer covers mostly US prices and releases ,so what i wanted to know if there is a South African site where i could do the same. I know that i love buying my games as cheap as i can ,normally i stick to the likes of BT games South Africa since they are the only convenient place at which i can buy second hand games. The games are always in great shape and the price is almost a third of the original price at times (BT Games Site). Go to the pre played section to find the pre-played games (always order online and pick up from the store as you can save more in this way).

The other play that i tend to have a look at now and then is the local xbox 360 website (More Specifically their forum) as there are always some one willing to do a swap or sell a game .You believe the amount of bargains that you can pick up there, in my experience most of the guys on the site know what they are doing so you wont have to worry about getting ripped of or the like (again this is my opinion only ).

So once again if you know any where else let me know cos i love cheap games.

Express Debugging Part 2

So once again to over come a small limitation in the Express edition of Visual Studio ,The specific limitation if you can even call it that is that the quick watch has been removed .This is something that i used alot in Visual Studio when i had it.

So to get around it i am going to discuss something that i see alot of my friends overlook , not even sure if some of them know it exists.What i am talking about is the immediate window. This to an extent does the same thing as the quick watch with out really displaying the results .How the immediate window works is that it will execute what ever code you type in against the current code that is running.

Example:

You need to test a new insert statement using code that you just wrote but you want to test it against a live server as a client is complaining it does not work.

Start stepping through the code till you get to command execute and pause processing , now switch to the immediate window and create a new transaction against the command.Once that is done execute the code as normal and once you are sure that all is fine , simply rollback the transaction .In this way no data is committed to the data base but you are still able to test your code .

I hope this helps some one with a bit of debugging as i know its saved me countless hours

The equivalent of select distinct in .Net 2.0

So a while back my bud Ewoudt Kellerman asked me how to take a list of strings in .Net and get a distinct list from them.At the time i was busy and gave a kind of half hearted answer that while it got the job done was long and not very autonomous .I had a few minutes today and whipped this up an thought i would share it with everyone that was looking for a good example on how to use Predicates and Deletegates. I must say before i most this code that it is not the greatest and more a proof of concept and might need some adaptation to use .Also i know there are beter ways to do this in .Net 3.5 and linq but i needed it in .Net 2.0 and i think he did as well.

using System;

using System.Data;

using System.Configuration;

using System.Web;

using System.Web.Security;

using System.Web.UI;

using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;

using System.Collections;

using System.Collections.Generic;

///

/// Please dont kill me about the naming or

/// any other standards , this was just a quick

/// class to demonstrate proof of concept.

/// There are surely beter and newer ways to do it

/// in .net 3.5 but this is aimed at the .net 2.0 crowd.

/// Thanks

/// Jameel

///

public class DisctintTest

{

///

/// Constructor For the class nothing special here

/// just calls the test method automatically on creation

/// so that testing is quicker.

///

public DisctintTest()

{

Test();//Call the method

}

//This will contain the last checked string ,starts of as blank

private string lastItem = "";

//The output data that can be inspected to view the cleaned data if u actually want to run this

//example

public List outputData;

///

/// The test method

///

private void Test()

{

//Create a new string list to load with values.

//By using a string list u can add strings that will be sorted

//alphabetically or use numbers which will be sorted by order

List myList = new List();

//Add some data

myList.Add("a");

myList.Add("a");

myList.Add("c");

myList.Add("c");

myList.Add("b");

myList.Add("d");

myList.Add("b");

myList.Add("c");

myList.Add("e");

myList.Add("f");

myList.Add("1");

myList.Add("1");

myList.Add("2");

myList.Add("3");

myList.Add("3");

myList.Add("2");

myList.Add("1");

myList.Add("4");

myList.Add("5");

myList.Add("2");

//Sort the data so that when we remove the data comparisons are easy

myList.Sort();

//Use the removeall to remove the duplicates by using a predicate

//that calls a delegate.

myList.RemoveAll(new Predicate(RemoveDuplicates));

//Set the output data

outputData = myList;

}

///

/// Removes Duplicates from the list based on the last item.

/// It is important to use the sort first or the end list

/// will not be entirely cleaned.

///

///

///

private bool RemoveDuplicates(string currentItem)

{

//Check if the current item we are comapring is the same as the last.

//If the list was sorted and there was a duplicate this would be true.

//And the list would remove the current item

if (currentItem == lastItem)

{

return true;

}

//If not continue and set the last item to the curent item

lastItem = currentItem;

//Return False so as not to delete the current item.

return false;

}

}

helpe

helpe