sacah

Firefox 9.0.1 Error: uncaught exception: TypeError: args.shift() is null

2012-01-16T11:19:00.001+10:00

So looking at a site we're developing this morning in FF 9.0.1 and some pages didn't work on some peoples machines, though worked fine on mine. After installing Firebug to see what was going on the pages would work fine.

I uninstalled Firebug and looked at the Firefox Error Console to find the following error.
Error: uncaught exception: TypeError: args.shift() is null

Was a weird one, after much poking around I found it's a poor handling of arguments supplied to console.log, hopefully this is a bug in FF9.0.1 and will be corrected in the next release. For now to quickly get things working I've just extended my console.log handler to set console.log=function() {} to cancel console.log functionality until it's fixed.

If it's not addressed in future versions I'll have to look into it further to detect if Firebug isn't active and do some alternate handling for development.

Hope this helps, if you have further info please leave a comment.

Dungeon Siege III - GFX Files

2012-01-02T19:42:00.001+10:00

GFX files are basically SWFs, to edit them rename them to a *.swf file and with a hex editor change the first 3 bytes from CFX to CWS, then any Flash Decompiler will happily open them.

I've opened them up and inspected the Actionscript which all worked though I'm yet to try editing one, my guess is you should just be able to change the first 3 bytes back to CFX and rename it back to an *.gfx file for it to work, though depending how it modifies the SWF it might break something extra that GFX files have that SWF doesn't.

Let me know if you've had any success, or more info, I'll update this post as I find out more.

Dungeon Siege III - Enable Console

2012-01-02T18:59:00.002+10:00

So just bought Dungeon Siege 3 and was horrified with the unchangeable camera angles. So I set about having a dig around the game to try and find a way to change the camera, while digging around I noticed a console file, and the Dungeon Siege III.exe had a number of console commands in it, so I replaced the Help Topics file with the Console, so now when I'm in game I can press Esc, click 'Help Topics' and the console will appear.

After playing around with all the console commands I could find in relation to camera none seemed to have any effect, though most other console commands works, such as adding money, items, XP, levels etc. So cheating is easy in Dungeon Siege III, but changing the camera angles isn't )-: Hopefully I'll have more time to play around with them and work something useful out.

I grabbed the Dungeon Siege 3 OAF Files Extractor and unpacked the files to a temp directory, unpack data_archive.oaf first, then unpack data_archive_2.oaf into the same place, the files in data_archive_2.oaf overwrite some which is how the game works too.

After looking around my first step was to get console working, I copied gui\console.scn and gui\game.gui into %steamapps%\common\dungeon siege iii\data\gui

Rather than having to repack the archives after editing just drop the files you changed here and it will pick it up rather than using the archived copy.

To make things easy I have zipped the files, you can get them from http://www.mediafire.com/?sa7a3gepx3ea4f5 and unzip them in your %steamapps%\common\dungeon siege iii\data folder. My full path is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dungeon siege iii\data. Once it unzips you'll see a gui folder with the help_topics.scn and game.gui files. The game.gui is for a game with the DLC.

Now rename console.scn to help_topics.scn and edit game.gui. Find the line

help_topics.scn parsefunction GUI_command_parser_help_topics

Change to

help_topicx.scn parsefunction GUI_command_parser_help_topics

Then find the line

console.scn parserfunction GUI_command_parser_console game_flags 1

Change to

help_topics.scn parserfunction GUI_command_parser_console game_flags 1

Orange signals what was changed for ease of reading.

Now run the game, while in game press Esc, in the menu click Help Topics and you'll have access to the console.

To get back to the game type modal_close_all and press enter. You can also type mod and press TAB to auto-complete. As we've hacked the console into an unusual place, things don't appear in it's history straight away, so if you press top_down_mp_ and press TAB, because there are multiple options it won't display anything. After you have pressed TAB, just delete the text and type modal_close_all, then enter the console again and you'll now be able to see the options for your previous commands, so we'll see all available options for top_down_mp_ console commands.

I'll add the console commands and explanation here slowly as I find them, though I can't test them all so some might not work, let me know if you find more, descriptions are wrong or they don't work and I'll update this list.

avoidance_scale
avoidance_range
avoidance_count
avoidance_collection_range
avoidance_collection_interval
avoidance_sideways
avoidance_active
ai_attack
aggro_decay_rate
ai_draw_perception_radius
avoidance_when_stopped
area_notification
area_notification_duration
add_money - Add money to your character
add_xp - Add XP to your character
ai_enabled
add_to_party
ai_revive_debug
ai_loot_pickup_delay
ability_bind
ability_purchase
ability_dump_all
ability_dump
auto_grant_empowered_attacks
ability_autoassign
attract_enable
allow_auto_level_up
allow_skip_level_up
attract_movie_name
attract_movie_delay

batched_lighting
brightness
base_stats_print

combat_knockback_duration
combat_knockback
combat_friendly_fire
combat_damage
combat_print
contrast
con_queue_disable
companion_perception_buff
connection_reset
changelevel
combat_hard_threshhold
companion_alternate_cooldown
camera_remote_interpolate_dist
camera_shared
critical_override
camera_center_on_object
camera_mouse_sensitivity
console_close
console_toggle
console_open
camera_auto_rotate_deadzone
camera_auto_rotate_scale
camera_yaw_max_velocity
camera_yaw_damp
camera_yaw_speed
camera_recenter_delay
camera_multiplayer_control
cost_divider_for_enchant
credits
clear - Clears all previous console output

exec - Run console scripts, located in global\console_scripts\*.txt Eg: exec global\console_scripts\bad_ass
endgame_disconnect

fade_draw
fade_aggressive
find
float_text
float_text_exp_y
float_text_exp_x
find_games_receive_invites
find_games_party

gui_delay_load_sleep
gui_delay_load_name
gui_mem_report_detailed
gui_mem_report
get_global_variable
gui_resource_dump
gui_trace
gui_timescale
gamma
give_unlockable
gui_warning
god - Toggle God mode on player
getpos
game_mode_reset_on_exit
game_mode
gui_quest_filter
gui_split_screen
gui_ingame_character_select
gui_show

human_attack_bias
heal
hide_spinner
hud_fade_duration
hud_show_names

infinite_resource
interpolation_tolerance
if
item_spawn
inv_drop
item_print_by_id
item_print_by_tag
inv_print
inner_warmth_time
inner_warmth_dmg
inner_warmth_hp
ingame_scn_mp
inv_mark_viewed
inv_show_remote_companions
inv_show_remote_players
inv_show_defaults
ingame_screen_fade_duration

journal_load
journal_save
journal_play
journal_stop
journal_record

knockback_prediction_hold
kick
kill

load_art_objects_only
load_game_objects
level_debug
load_spinner_delay
loot_spawn_from_template
loot_random_spawn_from_template
loot_print_template
level_up_delay
level_scaling_dlc
level_scaling_difference_threshhold
level_scaling_target_range
level_scaling_enabled
loading_screen_fadeout_duration
load_full_party
loot_points_per_enchant
load_level_filter
load_level_test

max_combat_channel_dist
mission_open_list
mission_list
mission_set_end_state
mission_set_status
max_auto_target_ui_dist
multiplayer_remote_enabled
multiplayer_local_enabled
modal_close_all
multiplayer_stuck_warp_delay
multiplayer_tether_range
max_players
multiplayer_ai_idle_time
multiplayer_tether_others
multiplayer_remote_warp
multiplayer_tether_screen
minimap_enabled - Show/Hide minimap, top right.
minimap_scale - Change level of zoom used in the minimap.
minimap_rotate
minimap_yaw
minimap_alpha
main_menu_load_level
main_menu_credits
main_menu_dlc
main_menu_find_game
main_menu_continue
message_box_ok

net_interpolate_max_stopped_time
net_extrapolate
net_interpolate
net_position_offset_z
net_position_offset_y
net_position_offset_x
net_activation_delay
net_predict_knockback
net_predict_reaction
net_ip
net_port
net_loopback
new_game_data

objective_set_status
objective_list
overheal

projectile_impact_fx
platform_speed
platform_accel_dist
path_blocker_disable_all
platform_predict_movement
play_anim
player_additive_speed
player_min_health
player_damage
platform_delay
pause
party_add_xp
party_set_level
party_restrict_class
party_single_player_limit
party_default_companions
player_ai
player_name_from_class
player_add
player_level
print_loyalty
player_class
popup
post_charselect_new_game_data

quit -Quit game completely, back to Windows.

render_csa
reset_tutorial
render_hit_flash
rumble
revert
revert_all
respawn
retry
reconnect
rcon
restart_server
respawn_interval

script_list
script_run - Runs AMX files located global\scripts, followed by the function name and arguments. Eg: script_run global\scripts\00_intro\00_intro CamShake will result in the screen shaking once you modal_close_all. I haven't looked into AMX files yet, will do a follow up post once I find more out.
set_light_set
set_global_variable
stats_print
speedy
show_all_damage_numbers
subtitle_notification
seek_fullscreen_movie
stop_fullscreen_movie
start_fullscreen_movie
status_effect_apply_to_player
scale
set_level
set_resource
set_health
status
startcell
startlevel
startlevel_data
stream_proximity_radius
survival_creature_set
say
start_conversation
screen_shake_move_camera
session_type
save_load_enabled
show_spinner
save

timeline_reload
toggle_tutorial
tutorial_enabled
toggle_pause
target_ui_neutral_player_index
target_ui_hostile_player_index
target_ui_neutral
target_ui
top_down_mp_fov
top_down_mp_distance
top_down_mp_pitch
top_down_yaw_offset
top_down_collision_mp_pitch_speed
top_down_collision_mp_decay
top_down_collision_mp_hold
top_down_collision_mp
top_down_collision_sp
top_down_zoom_all

unpause
unlock_all
user_setup_delay

warning_notification
write_file
warp_to_player
warp_to_position

yaw_offset

Atrix for 7 months Review

2011-10-12T12:59:00.000+10:00

So after 7 months using my Motorola Atrix I can say I still love this phone. Stock it has been capable of lasting a full 24hrs with Wifi, bluetooth and GPS active, and spending 14hrs in a quite low signal area.

After a few months stock to make sure the hardware wasn't faulty, I rooted me device and have been able to tweak it to give me minimum two days battery life, though in times of light use it will stretch to just over 3 days.

While I initially thought the Finger print scanner was a gimmick, after using it to unlock my phone for 7 months now I still love it, so quick and smooth while still being secure.

As far as apps I've found that has really made the phone experience great:
GoLauncher, awesome home screen with App menu replacement.
GoSMS, SMS replacement that is amazing.
Folder Organizer, used to create easy to use folders on home screen.

All the other apps I run are specific to my needs such as weather widgets, exchange rate widgets, firewall etc.

So while the new Galaxy has been released, I'd still get this phone, it's smaller size let's it fit in my one hand easily for using, the Galaxy doesn't really offer anything extra in the way of performance that any apps are actually able to use.

So I'd still recommend this phone to anyone looking for a new device.

First time, big trip, traveller - Guide to planning

2011-10-12T12:39:00.003+10:00

So I've taken many trips, been to a few countries, but only ever for a few weeks. When I started to look into a few month long trip to Europe, my mind felt like it was about to explode with all the information, places to visit, things to see, transport options to get around etc etc.

This is the method I have used to help me get a plan together, and de-clutter my mind on Europe.

First log in into either Bing Maps or Google Maps. I choose Bing as Google Maps had a bug with their Saved Places list and it took about 2 months to fix. Create a Saved list called 'Places to visit'.

Now you have somewhere to store all these places your interested in, so spend the next few months reading guide books, browsing websites and reading forums. When you come across a place of interest, do a search for it on the map, and save it to your 'Places to visit' saved list. Make sure you save notes with this place of interest, for example, how long you need to visit this place, how much it costs, transportation options to get there, opening hours, special events etc.

For me, I lurked on Lonely Planets Thorn Tree forums for months reading the many threads people would post asking various questions about Europe. When I would find someone mentioning something interesting I'd have a quick search on the item, and if it seemed like something I'd also like I'd add it to my saved list.

I borrowed guide books from my library on Europe, the Shoestring guides were really helpful too, most guidebooks have estimated budgets for cities, major festivals and sample itineraries, which really helped me add things to my list, and had lots of useful information I would add as a note on the item.

I also searched for 'x top 10', x would be whatever country I was interested in, so 'france top 10', or 'paris top 10' to find other peoples suggestions on the top places to visit.

After a few months you should have a map full of pins, and a much better idea about the places you're going too, you should have a good idea of the budget needed for each place, and time of year for different places if they are date/season specific.

Grab a map of the Eurail, I use this one http://www.eurail.com/planning, to help work out a general route I can take, figured where ever the Eurail goes is mostly popular, so there will also be other forms of transport from these places to branch out if you want to take a detour.

For me, I had a look at the Bing map, and could notice some areas that had a few pins in close proximity, so those became locked in places in my rough route, I then looked at the Eurail map and found a route between the locked in places that best included other pins along the way. Because each pin had a suggested time to see it, and an estimate budget, cost for travel between etc I was able to tally a rough budget to know either where to cut some things that didn't rate too high on my list.

Now don’t go off and book the itinerary you come up with, things will change, even while you're on the trip, so leave things open where you can. If you're attending a festival, or a city during peak time, most guide books/forums will have advised you if you need to book ahead, these are unavoidable and should probably be booked ahead to make sure you don't miss out.

Playing with my new Motorola Atrix

2011-03-15T22:32:00.000+10:00

So it was time to upgrade my phone again, my Samsung Omnia had been a great phone, manually updated to WM6.5, but like all my phones nearing their 2 year mark are on their last legs. So I began my extensive review process to figure out my next phone from the quite large variety we have to choose from now.

First choice would be the OS, Apple is just too restrictive and lacking, Microsofts new WM7 was the forerunner until I read more and found out they were being a bit restrictive too, not allowing native applications(goodbye firefox), and using a blend of IE8 and IE9 just wasn't what I wanted in a phone. So that left Android, which I don't think is as polished as Apple or Microsoft, but it's fairly open and I like that.

So while digging around looking at what Android phone I'd choose I came across the Motorola Atrix being reviewed at CeBIT and it blew me away. Now I just had to wait for it to come out.

After not too long waiting it was released in the USA and I imported it to Australia, used SwiftUnlocks to free it from AT&Ts grips and I must say I'm impressed with it. Have been using it for 3 days now and it's amazing, I am happily surprised at how good Android it, how many free quality apps are in the market, and how long this battery lasts. After a full day playing with it, GPS on logging as fast as possible for 7hrs, downloading tons of apps on Wifi and the battery ran out. Normal use, few text messages, few phone calls, logging my walk home, bit of foursquare and email and this thing will do one and a half days, even with the amazing matrix live wallpaper!

The phone feels solid, the screen is amazing, the soft keys at the bottom aren't as responsive as normal buttons but you get use to them.

Only issues I have is getting my Google Account to register that I have a mobile device using the same login and that my account includes a Google Checkout account, so for now I can't buy anything from the market place, and things just stay open with no simple way to close them, you end up every day or so running a task manager and killing heaps of stuff, though with the dual core and 1gb RAM it doesn't really slow anything down.

Filter Keys jQuery Plugin

2011-03-01T21:47:00.000+10:00

To help users fill in a form, you can filter out keys you don't want them to try and use. If it's a numeric field, supply the data-filterkeys='[0-9]' and they can only enter numbers. If it's a price, use data-filterkeys='[0-9$\.]' and they can enter numbers and $ and .

I have written it to also use a class of .filterkeys on each input, rather than just searching for inputs with a custom attribute, simply because the class search is faster. If you really don't want to have a filterkey class on all inputs requiring the filterkeys functionality, it's an easy change:

$('.filterkeys', this)
to
$('[data-filterkeys]', this)

Download from BitBucket

Javascript: Long loops without blocking UI updates

2011-01-30T22:49:00.002+10:00

Browsers like to finish running JavaScript before they update the UI, which makes sense when majority of JavaScript is dealing with DOM manipulation.

The problem this causes is the UI becoming unresponsive when JavaScript takes too long to execute. Many times it's looping through an array of objects and performing the same operations on each object that causes this the UI to hang.

So for a new project I'm working on I decided to write an easy to use looping library that would take care of the pausing of loops to allow the UI tasks to complete, thus stopping the browser from being unresponsive during big loops.

It has 3 functions, sl, loop and asyLoop.

sl is short for Start Loop, you pass it a settings object that contains

fn which is a function to do what you want to each object, this function can accept one parameter, which will be the object if the loop is passed objects, or the current count if it's passed cnt.
objs which is a list of objects, though you don't need to pass this if you simply want it to loop through, by passing it a cnt setting. You can also pass a function that will return a list of objects, this function will be run when the loop starts.
cnt is how many times it will loop through executing the fn
async is a Boolean, letting you decide if it should be a blocking or non-blocking loop
debug is a Boolean, which will output to console.log when a task starts, and finishes, run time and when it shifts from the looping queue
callback is a function that will be called once the loop has completed

sl will decide which loop or asyLoop to call depending on the async option passed.

So what's the difference between loop and asyLoop? loop is a normal blocking loop, asyLoop will pause the loop every 50ms for 35ms to allow the UI to update, after 35ms the loop will continue for another 50ms.

So why have a loop when it doesn't pause looping? It adds the operation to the queue, for the times you need a function to occur after other large loop occurs. This could also be accomplished using the callback option.

How long extra will loops take using asyncLoops? It depends on how long the UI events take each time we pause. If the person isn't doing anything on the page it will be about 35% longer, if the user is scrolling the page up and down it took about 50% longer. For point of reference, to append the 25,000 DIVs it took 2,135ms for loop compared to 3,251ms for asyLoop and I was scrolling up and down while it was occurring.

Is this script optimised? No, I will release a minified, optimised version shortly.

Download the script at BitBucket

Thanks:
I've been reading through some Javascript blogs lately, not sure why I've never looked for them before, and found DailyJS: Let's make a framework. I noticed he checked if the window object existed and either passed it, or this if window doesn't exist, so the library would work outside of browsers, something I hadn't considered before.

Javascript: Finding jQuery bound functions (bind)

2011-01-13T19:02:00.000+10:00

When using jQuery to bind events, such as click, mouseup, mousedown etc jQuery stores them in an object, using Firebug plugins that detect bound functions will usually just tell you a function is bound, but using Firebugs console you can find each function and it's actual code.

jQuery('#id-of-object').data('events')

This will show you an object which contains all bound events, such as click, mouseover etc, that are currently bound to #id-of-obj.

Object { click=}

jQuery('#id-of-object').data('events').click

Displays an array of each function bound to the click event of #id-of-obj. There is only one function bound to this object.

[Object { type="click", guid=2}]

If you click on the object in the Firebug console you'll see it has a few properties, 'data', 'guid', 'namespace', 'type' and 'handler'. The one we're interested in is 'handler'.

jQuery('#id-of-object').data('events').click[0].handler.toString()

This will output the code of the function bound to the object. If there are more than one function bound to the click event of the object you can find each one by incrementing the array number.

jQuery('#id-of-object').data('events').click[1].handler.toString()

This will get the second function bound to the #id-of-object object.

So hopefully this will help anyone trying to debug a site using jQuery and bound functions, let me know if you have any further questions.

Javascript: Format Number, Price, Amount

2011-01-04T20:19:00.003+10:00

After looking around at many different number formatting scripts, I figured surely the joy of regular expressions could do this is far fewer lines of code, so off I set and below is my creation. First is the two line function, below that I have put each statement on a new line for ease of explaining what/how it does its formatting.

function formatNumber(number) {

number=number+'';

return number.replace(/[^\d\.\-]/g, '').replace(/(\.\d{2})[\W\w]+/g, '$1').split('').reverse().join('').replace(/(\d{3})/g, '$1,').split('').reverse().join('').replace(/^([\-]{0,1}),/, '$1').replace(/(\.\d)$/, '$1'+'0').replace(/\.$/, '.00');

}

formatNumber(-1234.56);
formatNumber(1234567.890);
formatNumber(123.3);
formatNumber('4423897544352423434');

Output

-1,234.56
1,234,567.89
123.30
4,423,897,544,352,423,434

function formatNumber(number) {
    number=number+'';
    return number.replace(/[^\d\.\-]/g, '')
      .replace(/(\.\d{2})[\W\w]+/g, '$1')
      .split('')
      .reverse()
      .join('')
      .replace(/(\d{3})/g,'$1,')
      .split('')
      .reverse()
      .join('')
      .replace(/^([\-]{0,1}),/, '$1')
      .replace(/(\.\d)$/, '$1'+'0')
      .replace(/\.$/, '.00');
}

number=number+'';

Simply converts number into a string.

return number.replace(/[^\d\.\-]/g, '')

Replaces anything that isn't a digit (\d), a full stop (\.) or a minus sign (\-) with an empty string (''). This will get rid of dollar signs, already existing formatting like commas etc.

.replace(/(\.\d{2})[\W\w]+/g, '$1')

Detects the first 2 digits after the first full stop (\.\d{2}) and captures this info. Then detects all characters after the first two digits till the end of the line [\W\w]+. All this gets replaced with the first match. eg 100.1234 (\.\d{2}) matches .12 and [\W\w]+ matches 34. Then .1234 gets replaced with .12

.split('')

Split the string into an Array.

.reverse()

Reverse the array.

.join('')

Join the array back into a String.

.replace(/(\d{3})/g,'$1,')

Match groups of 3 digits (\d{3}), and replace them with the matches text followed by a comma $1,.

.split('')

Split the string into an Array again.

.reverse()

Reverse the array again.

.join('')

Join the array back to a string.

.replace(/^([\-]{0,1}),/, '$1')

Matches 0 to 1 occurrences of a minus sign ([\-]{0,1}) at the start of a line (^), followed by a comma. This gets replaced by the first match, which is either an empty string or a minus sign. -,123 becomes -123.

.replace(/(\.\d)$/, '$1'+'0')

Matches a single digit following a full stop (\.\d) at the end of the line ($), and replaces this with the full stop and digit plus a 0. 1.1 becomes 1.10

.replace(/\.$/, '.00');

Matches a full stop at the end of the line, and replaces it with .00

Canon Pixma MP495 Printer Review

2010-12-19T21:51:00.000+10:00

Wireless setup was easy on Windows 7, connect the USB cable, run through the CD setup process, it picked up the wireless settings from my computer and automatically configured the printer, I pretty much just had to click Next.

Installing on a Vista laptop was a bit of a problem, it found it over the network but reported an error installing the MP files. Inserted the CD and ran through the same installation, minus the USB cable, at the end of the installation it again reported the MP file copy error, though the printer was installed and worked fine.

At a cost of $99 it's pretty good from the reviews I've read of other wireless printers, we even got 15% off and half price inks so we stocked up on black inks.

I really like having it in a central location, no where near a PC.

Moved to Sydney

2010-12-17T23:00:00.001+10:00

So, I love Javascript, out of all the languages I know, it's the most fun, the loosest and most rapidly changing one in existence. Though on the Gold Coast/Brisbane there are very few companies large enough to hire a specialist front end/javascript person, so I have to be a jack of all trades and cover everything from SEO to Graphics Design, Server maintenance to back/front end building, help desk and sales all rolled into each and every day.

Given I wanted to focus on Javascript I looked around and Sydney was the place with the most jobs specialising in Javascript, so I applied, got one and moved down.

Took us a few months, but now my wife and I have finally settled in Sydney and my new job. I currently have a 5month contract with Bupa, who own MBF, HBA and MC and do health, car, house, boat, caravan, life etc insurance. I've part of an awesome front end team who are transforming the three sites into a common system and revamping to bring closer to today's web application look and feel.

Very heavy dependencies on jQuery, though still some room to develop my own components and scripts so it's quite enjoyable breaking out of frameworks for a change and doing raw Javascript.

As we're in a new area there is so much to explore within a few hours from here, so my travel blog should get a work out, and as the money is fantastic hopefully it will allow us to travel some more outside Australia. Keep an eye on my travel blog for more on our adventures.

GetGaming Australia - Wii Game Rentals

2010-09-09T19:44:00.000+10:00

While downloading some demos from AusGamers I saw an ad for GetGaming Australia, they are a company similar to Netflix or Bigpond Movies where you rent games, they send them to you via mail and once you've finished you send them back by the included return envelope. You can keep them for as long or short a time as you like.

I've done the DVD renting this way a few times before, but never had enough DVDs in my queue and frequently didn't get anything as others hadn't returned them yet, but so far with the Wii games it's been different, I've found 35 games to add to my queue, which at 2-3 per week will last me quite a while, and by then I'm sure new games will be out to keep me going.

Compared to the $7 for an overnight Wii game rental at my local video store, $31/month for unlimited rentals, with 2 out at a time is great, so far I'm getting 2 a week, which works out to $3.50 per game, and I can keep them for 4-5 days, though if I get a dog of a game and send it back straight away I might do 3 games some weeks.

Great idea, they also have PS3, XBox360, PC, DS, PS2 and PSP games for rent all via the same rental plans. Not sure how the prices compare but you can also buy the games direct from them.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare Reflex - Wii Game Review

2010-09-09T19:34:00.000+10:00

I really don't like FPS on the Wii, though I haven't yet tried an on-the-rails on the Wii I think this is the only shooting kinds of game I'd like with it's limited controls.

I started playing thinking it might be different, and 15minutes later the game was back in it's envelope ready to send back. Graphics were good, gameplay was good, everything was easy to pickup and understand, but the Wiimote just isn't a viable mouse alternative for my liking.

Make sure you rent a FPS for the Wii before you buy one, you might be sorely disappointed.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 - Wii Game Review

2010-09-09T19:30:00.000+10:00

My first rented game from GetGaming Australia was Super Mario Galaxy 2, I was quite eager to play it as all the reviews were quite positive.

It was an impressive game, did an excellent job of the platform to 3D conversion that hasn't been done successfully many times before. The controls initially are fairly easy to get a handle on, there is lots of new skills to learn and things to collect and each level is well designed and thought out to keep increasing the difficulty.

Played it for about 5hours before sending it back, like so many Wii games I just can't get a handle on the camera angle and at times you can't change it at all, which as levels got harder left me frustrated at falling off edges that I couldn't see coming because of the angle of the camera.

As a casual gamer, and not having forked out $99 for this game, this was enough frustration to cause me to stop playing, and until it's on the bargain bin I won't be buying it.

Rabbids Go Home - Wii Game Review

2010-09-09T19:24:00.000+10:00

I was interested in seeing what all the fuss was with these Rabbids, and thought I was in some something awesome when it got the the starting bit with the Rabbid inside the Wiimote.

Once the game started I found it quite easy to figure out the controls and get around, it was cute and funny but got old very quickly. After 46 minutes I turned it off and was very thankful I'd only rented it. It's probably good for kids skill level, though not sure if you want kids controlling a g-string wearing rabbit who scares peoples clothes off.

After a few levels I found it didn't get more challening, no new abilities, or puzzles, just the same old same old.

Good for a bit of a laugh, not much else.

wamp "MySQL Server has gone away" after 60seconds

2010-08-19T22:16:00.000+10:00

So working on my local wampserver with some large MyQL databases I was often getting the MySQL has gone away message, and timed it to occur after 60seconds. I binged the message and got a number of suggestions to increase the timeouts and cache sized of MySQL, but this didn't help at all.
So I looked in the php.ini and found under the MySQL section there is a mysql.connect_timeout=60 I increased this to 600 and the problem went away.

Hope this helps others having this same issue.

Purchased a 1TB Seagate Expansion External Drive

2010-08-16T19:35:00.000+10:00

My current internal drives are getting a bit old and had me worried about loosing data, so I started looking around for a 1TB external drive, Aldi had a Medion for $87 but my local store didn't get any, Good Guys had an Imation one for $97 and Clive Anthony had this Seagate one for $99. I feel a bit more trusting of Seagate and when it's only $2 separating my decision was to got for the Seagate one.

Once I got it home and opened it up I was pleasantly surprised that it came with power adapters for Australia, USA, UK and Asia, while these adapters aren't expensive it's a nice bonus to get.

The drive itself is nice shiny black, perfect for fingerprints. Very quite apart from a little squeak when it spins up from sleeping, pre-formatted NTFS gives 931 real gb.

Storing GPS Coordinates - MySQL, Spatial, Flat Files

2010-08-07T19:00:00.003+10:00

I'm working on a new project that will require storing peoples location, and allowing others to browse a map and see those peoples locations. In order to test which would be the best solution I wrote a PHP script to generate random clusters of GPS coordinates and store them in the tables.

The two tables I used were MySQL tables, one with an id(int), lat(decimal) and lon(decimal) columns and the second with an id(int) and coords(Point) columns. The script would save the same generated point in both tables so I could be assured the same data was in both. After generating 118 million coordinates the spatial table was double the file size of the decimal lat/lon table.

Next I cleared the data and created indexes on the tables, the first one had an index on lat and lon, the second had an index on coords.

Due to the speed issues on the Spatial index I only ran the GPS generator on one table at a time, first on the lon/lat table, it generated 604,734,087 records, weighing in at 25.3Gb(45bytes per record). Starting at 30,000 inserts per second, then as more records were inserted speed decreased as you can see in the graph below, though you can see only 3 times did it dip below 5000 inserts per second. Y axis contains the number of records, X axis is the number of inserts per second.

Next I ran the generator on the spatial table, it generated 17,160,836 records, weighing 1.6Gb(100bytes per record). This table started at 26,000 inserts per second, and quickly dipped to 39 inserts per second at the lowest point.

I was a bit surprised at the difference, though figuring the Spatial one would do much better in queries that the insert speed and filesize didn't bother me too much. I ran the following query on each table.
SELECT id FROM latlon WHERE (lon>7.1 && lon<8.1) && (lat>12.2 && lat<13.2)
SELECT id FROM spatial WHERE (X(coords)>7.1 && X(coords)<8.1) && (Y(coords)>12.2 && Y(coords)<13.2)

latlon query took 1.35 seconds, spatial query took 44.2 seconds, and remember the spatial table only has 17 million records compared to the 600 million in the latlon table. Very surprising results, I under stand the cool things you can do with selecting points that intersect a line, or are contained within a shape etc with the spatial tables, but given that our users will always be browsing via a rectangle map, a simple query like above will do fine.

If anyone has any ideas about things I might have done wrong with my spatial setup to result in it being drastically slower please let me know.

Next I thought I'd try flat files. I'll post more over the coming days about my tests with them.

Wii: Kung Fu Panda Game Review

2010-06-27T20:44:00.000+10:00

This seemed like a fun game when we rented it, and it was marked as 2 players. Once the disc loaded up I tried to start the game and could only manage to get 1 player, back to the menu I went through and found a 2 player option was only under the Challenges, which were small side games.
These were interesting to kill an hour or so, but we quickly bored of them, and understandable as they are only side games.

I enjoyed the main game, despite it being only 1 player, controls were easy to pick up and use, action was fairly constant and finding your direction was very easy to follow.

I'd pay no more than $50 for this game though.

Wii: New Super Mario Bros

2010-06-27T20:41:00.000+10:00

Having played this game on my cousins Super Nintendo many moons ago, and reading a few reviews, I figured this would be a pretty safe game to buy for both of us to play. It's got quite a bit of single play value for casual gamers, and even my wife doesn't mind going back and doing previous levels trying to get the big coins from time to time.

The game is as expected from previous games, though the game freezes for a split second when someone dies, which is really off putting if your character is half way through the air, or trying not to fall off a small post, while not often some maps you will feel cheated by your death because of the freeze.
I also found myself changing from standard Wiimote to nunchuck for different levels. For most the nunchuck addition makes it a lot more comfortable, though when vines are involved I went back to the Wiimote as I found myself pushing down or up as I was swinging side to side with the nunchuck joystick and falling off the vines!
And for the levels where you have to carry something, neither control option makes it comfortable.

This has been the solid game we've played out of all we have, and well worth full price.

Finally gave in and joined the Wiiing population

2010-06-27T20:23:00.000+10:00

I've been a long time PC gamer, apart from an Atari 2600 and a GameGear I've shyed away from consoles as for overall bang for your buck I don't think they can hold their own compared to PCs. Once I got married my gaming time was sharply reduced, so I tried to get my wife interested in gaming, but to no avail.

So as they came down in price, I thought it might be a good way to get her into gaming too. I had a look around at the different consoles and their offerings, Wii seemed to come out infront for casual gaming and had the ability to use custom written applications through HomeBrew so that's the one we chose.

As many people have said previously, once you buy the Wii it seems you have a never ending list of accessories you need to buy, and find somewhere to store them!

We've bought a few accessories from eBay, like classic controllers, Active exercise leg straps and tension strapsand these have been great and cheap so look there first, just as always read sellers feedback first and make sure the quality is on par with what you're after.

Regarding HomeBrew, make sure you try the games, there are some amazingly addictive games on the list to download.

Wii: Metroid Prime 3 Game Review

2010-06-27T20:20:00.000+10:00

After hearing many wonderful reviews about this game, I started playing with anticipation. While the game was reasonable easy to pick up, I was quite often annoyed at the controls not going where I wanted them too, though I think this stems from my FPS experience on a PC. The Wiimote is great, but it's no match for a mouse in FPS IMO.

The opening scenes of the game you use the Wiimote to push buttons and control levers, which is clever use of the Wiimote, but the panning using the Wiimote just annoyed me time and time again. Once you actually get into the game it's more like a standard FPS with only small parts utilising the Wiimotes capabilities.

I was able to get around reasonably well, there were no hard to maneuver points where my character got stuck and no glitches that leave you feeling cheated. Though doors took a while to open at times and it was easy to get side tracked and have no idea where you were meant to be heading, both played on my nerves a few times leaving a sour undertone to my gaming experience.

All in all I'm glad I rented it and didn't buy it, though when the price comes down I'll probably grab it and try it a second time.

Wii: RedSteel2 Game Review

2010-06-27T20:19:00.001+10:00

I wanted this game since buying the Wii but at $99 and only 1 player there were other games higher on the list. While browsing through Dick Smiths sale the other night I found a copy marked down to $30, and it included the MotionPlus! Purchased it was!

I've played it for a few hours and think it's greatly constructed and planned out well. The difficulty in controls that I found initially with Metroid Prime 3 have been overcome in this game by taking some control off you. And the auto targeting system really helped my get the hang of using the Wiimote rather than a mouse for FPS.

The action is pretty constant, with increasing hardness and there are plenty of things to smash, shot or crack along the way to keep the action flowing. There is a perfect blend of movement to button pushing controls and the safe cracking really adds some fun without going overboard.

The training system to teach you how to do all the moves is well constructed, fun to do and pretty good at helping you remember the combination. The map system it very easy to follow to your quest destinations, and onscreen prompts to aid you are well signed and easy to understand most time. There are a few glitches like an on-screen prompt appearing when the object is through walls, or one point I fell off buildings and plunged deep into blackness, but didn't die. All in all, I'd have to play it some more to tell you if it would be worth $99, $30 it was a steal, and so far I think it would be worth the $99.

Get your own sacah.net subdomain

2010-06-18T20:32:00.000+10:00

So I've been using afraid.org for my free DNS for about 3 years, and as part of making their service free others can request to have subdomains from your domain.
So if for some weird reason you want a sacah.net subdomain, head over to afraid.org for dns for free, signup and once you login click 'Registry' in the left menu. Then search for sacah.net and request to add a subdomain, or look through the thousands of other domains on there and maybe you'll find one you like better (-: