Gibbocool's Blog

Windows 7 Review

I will open by saying I’m very impressed with Windows 7. So far, it’s been as quick as XP and feature rich as Vista. They’ve definitely got it right this time. I’m running 7 Professional x86 RTM (Release to manufacture) which isn’t out to the public yet – I got it through the MSDNA (microsoft developer network alliance) as my University is part of that alliance.

The box I’m running it on is a little old – AMD athlon64 3800 with 2gb ram, although I do have a GeForce 9800. I’ve been using XP on this box (I was finding Vista too slow) and I notice that windows 7 is very comparable in speed to XP – quite nippy indeed.

What do I like about 7?

• The new task bar! It’s quite different to even Vista’s, as apps are organised by icons and you just hover over that app family and choose from the windows available. It’s hard to explain but it’s pretty intuitive.
• The search indexer isn’t enabled by default – this was a big slowdown in Vista and looks like they’ve learned from that mistake.
• The user account control is much less obtrusive – I haven’t been compelled to disable it (yet)
• Libraries – 7 automatically manages all your stuff into libraries. Such as your music library, video library, document library etc. Makes it so easy to find things.
• All the niceties of Vista (search from the start menu, superkey+tab, organisation of apps)
• 8.5GB hard drive footprint – much better than the 15GB bloatware that was Vista
• My harddrive doesn’t work it’s ass off all the time for no apparent reason (unlike Vista)
• The system is nippy – no unnecessary lags
• IE8 – can’t flaw it. I only use Firefox because of it’s great addons.

What I don’t like

• For games that I had installed on XP on another partition (so I don’t need to reinstall after every format) I have to change the folder security settings to allow myself to run the game.
• Slightly less FPS in games – EDIT: I fixed this problem, I ran windows update and it found an update for my Nforce4 pci-e bus, now my games are as fast as they were on XP

Jägermeister does not make you drunk

A while back I was having a nice relaxing evening with some mates, and we decided we would hit some Jägerbombs. I had 6 Jägerbombs, and one of my other friends had 10 Jägerbombs, in little more than an hour or 2. We found that we were not nearly as drunk as we expected to be, in fact we could go as far as to say that we were completely sober.

Recently I decided that I would put Jägermeister to the test once and for all, I bought a nice big bottle of the stuff and myself and a different friend went at it like Germans on a cold night. I had a couple Jägerbombs, but got bored of drinking so much red bull so I just started doing straight shots. I counted 11 shots including the Jägerbombs, in roughly 1 hour. My friend only had about 5 or 6. We then waited a while for any effect. I felt a slight effect just after doing all the shots, but it soon subsided and my friend and I could swear that we were COMPLETELY SOBER AFTER 11 SHOTS!

I did some digging into Jägermeister and found that it’s made from sugar cane, herbs and spices. It was originally intended as a cure-all (digestive problems, coughs, anasthetic) in the 2nd world war. So it makes sense that it doesn’t really make you drunk because it wasn’t intended to in the first place.

iTunes problem – certain MP3’s not importing to iTunes

Well I just found a weird problem where some of my mp3s were not being imported into iTunes – whether I added the folder or just dragged them in they were not showing up. I tested to make sure they could play in QuickTime and yes they played fine.

I found the problem – the ID3v2 tag was corrupt. What’s an ID3v2 tag? It’s just a little thing in the mp3 that tells iTunes what the name and track info the song has.
It seems iTunes absolutely hates bad ID3v2 tags (whereas every other media player gets by..)

So to fix it you need to re-write the ID3v2 tag. I used Winamp to do this:
- right click the problem mp3 in winamp
- view file info
- ID3v2 tab
- Uncheck “include ID3v2 tag in file”
- click OK

Now you can drag it into iTunes and it should work. Of course you can use some other program to edit the ID3 tag, but I didn’t feel like downloading one (just google for one, there’s millions of them out there freely available).

Explosions and Boobs

This site is awesome!

http://www.explosionsandboobs.com

Pi to 1 million digits

I give to you my avid readers, a little piece of the internet. Or should I say a big slice of pi. You think 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592 is alot of digits? Think again. Here is pi to 1 million digits. Yes ONE MILLION DIGITS OF PI!

http://www.gibbocool.com/pi.html

HalfLife2 Fritzl

Well I’m sure you all know about Fritzl the dude that raped his daughters in the basement etc.

Well it seems HL2 predicted the story…

Code quality

How do you know if your code is good? Have it reviewed and then record the wtfs/minute:

code wtfs

A programming language overview

Now a popular question I’m seeing around programming discussion boards is “Where do I start programming?” or “What language should I use?”, so here is an article to try and help beginners understand programming better and be able to pick a language. This article is more a synopsis of main-stream languages out there to help you choose a language.

Now first things first, all of this is just one Software Engineer’s perspective and I’m sure there are those out there with different opinions.

The first question you should ask yourself is who is going to be using your program / web application. If it’s just you then you’re set to go as you know what you want. But if it’s going to be used by others then you really should ask potential users about what they want to see in the application, and how they want to use it. This will give you a great start for planning. And yes planning and design is very important as it saves you so much more time finding problems in a design than in the actual application.

This article will be split up in two main areas: non-web based and web based programming.

Non-Web Based Languages

This includes areas such as compiled and interpreted languages. What’s the difference you ask? Well compiled languages need to be converted to machine code or “executable” before being run, whereas interpreted languages are just scripts that get interpreted into machine code when they are run. Traditionally, compiling code makes it far more efficient and quick.

C

C is an extremely popular, and extremely powerful compiled language. But because of its power it is relatively hard for first time users to understand. Having said that though, many a first timer has started with C and had good results. C is an old language (1972) but is likely to be used for a long time in the future.

C is a good choice if you want efficient programs to be run from the command-line (DOS prompt or unix shell). I say command-line because it is quite difficult to actually get graphical C programs going. Much more difficult than using Windows Forms in C++ as discussed below.

C++

C++ was originally an extension to C, and so the syntax is largely the same. The difference is that C is not a proper object-oriented language, although it is possible to do some object oriented aspects. C++ is a fully fledged object oriented language that lets you make classes of objects which is very useful for such things as games and larger applications. But saying this, C++ does not force you to be object oriented. Additionally any command-line applications are just as easily created in C++ as in C.

When you couple C++ with Visual Studio, Microsoft .NET and Windows Forms, you have a very easy way to make a graphical interface for your program. I won’t tell you exactly how to do it, there’s tutorials out there for that. But get Microsoft Visual Studio and you’re well on your way.

Java

Java is another very popular language. It is both similar and different from C++. It uses similar syntax to C++, and is very object oriented. Java has a huge code base of libraries so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. When C++ is used with the .NET framework, it too has an extensive library base.

Java is more of a interpreted language and can be slightly slow to use sometimes. Additionally, the huge library base can make your program feel cumbersome sometimes compared to C/C++. But the great thing about Java is that the same code can be run on almost any computer or device out there that has the Java Runtime Environment or Java Virtual Machine installed (except in some cases). C/C++ however need to be compiled for different systems. For example you can’t run Windows executables on Linux or Mac.

Java is a good place to start learning programming since it takes care of low level memory operations, something you have to always be aware of in C and C++.

C#

C# (C sharp) is Microsoft’s answer to Java. Syntax is very comparable, and methods of development very similar too. C# makes large use of the .NET framework libraries which are very useful and powerful. In my experience, C# is a great language because it has many of Java’s features, but it is also compiled and so it’s nice and quick.

Although C# is largely associated with Microsoft, it is platform independent and can be run on Linux and Unix machines.

I highly recommend C# if you want a great language, plenty of support, great control over your application, and a quick responsive application.

Python

Python is a very good programming language for beginners. In saying that, it is also quite powerful as you can do just about anything you want. It’s power and ease of use comes from the fact that it is a “batteries included” language – everything you need is all included without having to spend a long time searching for / installing / learning new packages etc.

Python is quite different in syntax from the above languages, but it is a syntax that is simple and intuitive.

Web Based Languages

The Internet is growing extremely rapidly, so why not contribute your part? Many applications can be written in both web based and non web based forms. But web based has the huge benefit of being easily accessible by the rest of the world. I see many applications being taken to the Web in the future to reap these benefits. All of the below languages are useless if you don’t know HTML. HTML is the foundation of the web, and luckily it is quite straightforward. All things take practice though. When HTML is complimented with CSS and JavaScript you have the opportunity to create a great website. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are all interpreted real-time by the user’s web browser. I think it is quite important to have a good idea of how to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript before you continue from here.

You need something on the back-end doing some work and processing to give you dynamic content. This is done with server-side languages – i.e. languages that get run on a server and their result returned to the user.

PHP

PHP is a fantastic web language. You have huge control over everything you do, and a great set of libraries to use. PHP is a language that just flows and lets your site be extremely dynamic and interactive. It requires very minimal installation, and can be run on many systems.

ASP.NET

ASP.NET is largely used with either C# or Visual Basic. Visual Basic you ask? It’s a language that is quite popular, but personally I don’t think it’s a great language to start with since C# can be used instead, and as far as programming languages go Visual Basic has quite different syntax and so it can be hard to switch from Visual Basic to C, C++, C#, Java, and even PHP which all have somewhat similar syntax.

ASP.NET is Microsoft based, and is very powerful. .NET does have a linux/unix implementation called Mono. When ASP.NET is used with Visual Studio you can practically create a web site without knowing any HTML, CSS or JavaScript at all. I don’t advise you do this if you want control over your website, but the option is there if you’re in a hurry to get something done.

Note that the .NET libraries are accessible from all .NET supported languages.

JSP

JSP or Java Server Pages are basically web based Java. This is great if you are familiar with Java already as you can just dive right in.

Python and <insert web framework here>

Python can be used with web frameworks to create fairly powerful, complex and efficient web sites. Such frameworks are Django or Pylons. Choosing the right framework is important as it depends on what you will be doing – each framework has its strengths and weaknesses.

Conclusion

There are far too many languages to talk about, but I hope I have given you an overview of the programming world so you can make a better decision as to where to proceed. There are plenty of tutorials out there, and Google is your biggest asset.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Brendan

Well it’s that time of year, that jolly season when Brendan is all the rage and Boydism is a national passtime. How can you get involved with Brendan season? You could ask people if they are angry all day. You could grab people and forcefully manhandle them without warning. You could even inform people when situations become awkward. It’s up to you, everybody identifies with Boydism in their own special way.

How are you spending the Brendan season? Let us know in the comment section below.

Why did the site change?

I’ve just switched from Joomla to WordPress. Why? Because I don’t like Joomla. And it kept getting hacked because the Joomla coding team suck! And besides, I dont need all the features of Joomla, all I really need is a publishing site.. like this. Welcome!