To all who have checked out this site earlier in the week to find nothing, my apologies. Unfortunately, the service provider DreamHost had issues with a loss of power as well as restoring their datacentre to regular service. Because of this, the site is having some problems, such as much slower load times and problems with PHP. There have also been e-mail problems, so if you've sent me anything to my @coldacid.net, @slylabs.com, or @torontoigc.com addresses, please resend (if possible, to my GMail address). Again, sorry about the problems.
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Thu, 01/03/2007 - 20:02.After a while of major problems with the site (too long a while), about the only problems left are slow load times and the ubiquitous missing download issue. I'm still working on the download problem, but as it shouldn't be happening (works on my test system at home) I just don't know what to do. *Sigh*
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Tue, 06/03/2007 - 13:40.One of the great new features in Windows Vista is the Game Explorer. The Game Explorer (or GameUX, as taken from the C++ header file for the component) makes it easy for Vista users to quickly and easily find the game they want to play or administer. Unfortunately, when Microsoft released XNA Game Studio Express, support to add XNA projects to Game Explorer was not added. I'm currently writing an article that explains how to add XNA projects to the Game Explorer, and so far I'm about half done. I expect to have the article completed by this time next week, or perhaps even earlier.
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Tue, 06/03/2007 - 17:13.Michael Klucher, a program manager at Microsoft working on XNA, recently posted to the XNA Team Blog about updates to Game Studio Express and the XNA Framework. In his article, Michael mentions that bitmap font support is being added, as well as improvements to the math API and XACT. Also, GSE will finally have official support for running on Windows Vista.
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Thu, 08/03/2007 - 17:40.It's taken a while, but thanks to a certain bug report for the Drupal project module, I've been able to get project downloads finally working. So you're finally able to get Alarm Clock, cIRCulation, and DirectSetup for Inno.
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Sun, 11/03/2007 - 03:16.The game that has since become UFO Panic! is finally available for download. The TOJam organizers have made my old Alien Abduction! game online on their site! It's certainly seen much improvement since then, although I'm going to hold off for a while as I await the update to XNA that I mentioned a little while ago.
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Sun, 11/03/2007 - 05:08.I've recently added an events calendar to the site, and even populated it with several of the regular get-togethers I attend. Unfortunately, it seems that I'm the only one who can see them. Testing the site from the view of both an anonymous and regular user, the events don't show up in the calendar, and directly visiting them results in an "access denied" error. I'm working to fix the problem, but unfortunately Drupal doesn't come with an ACL tester/debugger.
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Thu, 15/03/2007 - 06:22.The article on integrating Game Explorer and XNA is finally up and available for your reading pleasure! Included with the article are two sample projects, one which demonstrates how to integrate the metadata Game Explorer uses into your project, and the other showing how to register your game.
Read it, and tell me what you think!
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Thu, 15/03/2007 - 18:06.Some time ago, I was more or less dragged onto the social networking website Facebook. And while I don't like the site (personally I think a system like FOAF? is better) I've actually found myself updating my profile there and actually thinking about finding everyone I know (or used to know) on the site. This all because a person I used to go to high school with had found my profile and confirmed that I was indeed myself.
Well, I'm on Facebook, and while I shall continue to limit my use of social networking sites, I might as well just bite the bullet with the ones I do have accounts on, at the least.
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Mon, 19/03/2007 - 00:34.Because of a problem with erroneous "access denied" messages being sent instead of pages, I've disabled server-side caching, which seems to have been the culprit. You might find that the site takes more time now to display pages. Sorry about the continual problems; I'll get on to rewriting Drupal myself when I have some free time.
On the upside, the events calendar is finally coming through clear as day! I might later on allow friends with site accounts to add events to the calendar, too, but that's yet to be seen.
Submitted by Chris Charabaruk on Mon, 19/03/2007 - 00:45. #