Hooking up on Subversion

So one of the many things that i have been meaning to do for ages is to create my own Post Commit Script. While this may seems scarily easy i have just never tried it.

Firstly a few things to note i will be using Visual SVN which is a free windows subversion server that makes doing everything we want very easy. Secondly all the hook scripts will be created using C#.

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Magic The Gathering

All i can say is why wasn’t this done sooner. So to all of you that don’t know recently Magic The Gathering was released on XBL.

The game itself is brilliant since it is good old magic the gathering that you are used to but with the added benefit of all the next gen technology that has been available for a while now.

First of all the developers have stuck with the tried and tested method of only fixing what needs to be fixed. So for one the game has not made any changes to how you play the game , there is no 3D battles that take place as seen in some of the previous versions on PC. You play the game how you would have done in real life, you have a deck of cards and that’s it. The art looks clear and crisp really makes the task of playing for hours quite enjoyable.

Secondly the game makes full use of XBL and as such getting setup in a quick match is really easy, the only downside that i have found so far is that there is no ranking system .So when ever you are playing you cant really know for sure how good the player you are competing against is.

But other than that they have made the game extremely fun with the addition of a separate co-op campaign and custom duels i think this has to be one of the best games i have bought on XBL in a long time.

There has been talks of releasing DLC which i await eagerly but until they do that there is roughly 8 decks (it might) that you can unlock to play with. Also once unlocked each time you play and win with a selected deck you unlock a card for that deck and with 17 unlocks per deck , that’s quite a few games you can play before getting tired of the game. I should note that while you cant create your own decks you can customize the decks available to you.

Overall i think its a awesome game to pick up if you can afford it or if you are a fan of MTG.

If you have the game send me a message if you see me online as I’m always up for a duel.

~stalkerh

Stackoverflow Gives Back to the community

This just has be so excited , some time today Jeff from stackoverflow with the help of other users from the site have released a data dump of pretty much all the public data that is available on their site.

For those that are intrested the dump can be located here its a torrent that you will need to download. The download isn’t very big (200mb) but if you download it please do everyone a favor and seed the torrent.

Ok so now onto the cooler things ,here are some of the things that are made available from data extract

1. badges
2. comments
3. posts
4. users
5. votes

Now alone this data is already pretty awesome but to get the most out of it you need to do a little mining and by mining i mean data mining . Now sadly i am not the best when it comes to data mining i kinda suck a bit so i am going to point you to a very nice post that i found on twitter (soz i cant remember who twitted it). The tutorial basically explains how to do things like extract stats about what the top users post and see what makes them awesome.

Now the final and last idea that i had as a use for the data is to basically make a local only copy of stackoverflow on your pc. Well while this might not sound like a very useful idea the real use of this comes to light when you live in a country like SA. Basically you can never guarantee that you will have a Internet connection so when you need to access stuff like stackoverflow it becomes a bit of a pain.

Basically you can write a basic site that will access the data and allow you to access all of the answers on your PC. The obvious problem with this is that since they dont release the data often (im not sure) you cant keep your local DB updated.

Well there are so many things that you can do with this amount of data. So as always let me know what you think and if you have any different ideas i would like to hear them.

~stalkerh

E3 News (My 2c)

So yesterday Microsoft announced a ton of stuff of the xbox 360 which is just awesome.

For one they are the first group to announce social network integration. So now (when they release the updates) you will be able to login to twitter and facebook from your xbox 360 and post updates. While this is all grand i just hope it doesn’t slow down the xbox any more cos at some time it can just be frustrating to use (the online features).

Also i want to see how Nintendo and Sony respond , because basically anything they announce now will seem to be done just so that they can say we do it as well.

Finally a ton of game updates have been released which is looking just as awesome. If you haven’t already done so go check them out on www.gametrailers.com

~stalkerh