I just finished the three day mad php dash that now is TF2Stats.net, check it out.

Things have happened. This website hasn't.

1) I bought a car. Brand spankin new Honda Civic Si. I <3 it. Yes, it's fast. No, I'm not going to race you, or any other dickwad who revs his engine at a stop light. Though I might play along long enough to see you go barreling down the road while I leisurely drive away.
2) I don't play WoW anymore. or any MMO for that matter. Been playing some TF2, and it's pretty awesome.
3) Watched a lot of anime. No comments.
4) Found a pretty awesome artist. Check out she. He has a nice mix of electronica, ambient, industrial, etc. Most of his music is free, and it's pretty damn awesome.
5) I just now realized I should probably be using HTML lists. Blah.
6) hl2.exe error I posted about before can be fully solved by running windows updates. The problem in question is some issue with pre-sp1 Vista x64.
7) Got a ATI Radeon HD4890. Some clever beards modified the 4870 EFI rom to work on 4890s, so one reflash and a minor driver tweak later, I'm rocking some awesome graphics on the mac pro.
8) Played Aion. it's pretty good. But MMOs... Mehh.
9) I wrote a bunch of random TF2 scripts for stuff. and stuff. You can find them around here.
10) If you visit OCRemix and want to download a lot of songs, but not the whole damn torrent, you can use this bugger i wrote to pick and choose from all of the torrents. it auto-seeds what you have, and doesn't mess with what you don't want. Kind of nice if you just want every chrono trigger remix. Ever.
11) I have proof that Robin Walker from Valve isn't a robot. Or at least he's a really well built one.
12) It looks like I'll be headed to MAGFest this year, so drop me a line if you're also coming.
13) I didn't proofread this at all.
14) Bacon.

I've been running TF2 on a mac pro for a while, and I kept randomly getting that damn 'hl2.exe has stopped working' at random times; generally shortly after a level switch. I'd also get some textures turning black at times.

Well, I FINALLY found a workaround for this. Under graphics then advanced, disable multi core rendering, then tone your texture detail from 'Very High' down to 'High'. I don't know the reasoning behind these changes working, but I've not crashed since. The lost texture quality is sad, but it's better than crashing.

I've been a bit busy these last few days, sorry for the neglect here.

Been working on this:

I was going to write something.

I really was.

And it was going to be interesting and informative and generally awesome.

But I have NO IDEA what I was.

So instead, some other news.

I've set up a Left 4 Dead server, you can use it directly by opening the console and typing 'connect fireslash.net'. It'll be added to the OCR server group if I ever get the key.

I've added an uploader for original song works in progress (mainly for use by OCR, but I suppose anyone could use it. Any copyrighted content will be deleted, and songs are auto-pruned after 3 weeks. You can check it out at ocrwip.fireslash.net.

I'm running an IRC bot now on the EnterTheGame IRC network that does channel stats among other things. If you'd like stats run on your channel, email me.

I've written a very simple and very rudimentry web admin for stasiscl. It should probably be cleaned up a bit, but if you want a copy, email me. Right now it lets you upload zipped logs via a web interface, and automagically parses them out. I find this favorable to popping open an SSH window every night after raids,and I don't trust anyone else in my guild with shell access.

Oh, and John Stewart is my hero.

I was implementing a rather aggressive layout design that used a lot of images tucked up next to rounded corners. Normally this would be an image slicing nightmare, but my good friends CSS and PNG were here to help. I simply placed four alpha'd PNGs (one per corner) at -1,-1 offset to cover the edge, and replace it with a smooth border.

This created a very nice effect, and worked fantastically in every browser... Except IE6.

I can't blame IE6 for not supporting the alpha's PNGs; even if I did there are several workarounds. No, my problem is that apparrently IE6 isn't entirely sure where right and bottom even are.

Observe this demo: http://fireslash.net/~fireslash/devel/csstest.html

Now try it in IE6. (Don't have IE6 installed anymore? Try IETester)

Notice the misplacement of the corners? It only gets worse as the layout becomes more complex.

I've heard little but praise about Windows 7 over the last few weeks, so I finally broke down and downloaded it. The ideal test system was my laptop, which did not take to Vista as well as I'd hoped. While it is an improvement over Vista, it's not nearly as good as people have lead me to believe.

1) The dock is kind of annoying. Visually it's hard to tell at a glance what is and isn't running. Some apps alter the background color to indicate status (such as while downloading or copying files) but the normal 'running' color is simply hard to distinguish at a glance. Also the window focus functionality is kind of annoying.

2) Aero is still ugly. I was hoping they would either clean up or flat out trash Aero, but it's still here. My problem with Aero has always been he amount of wasted space it adds, and how poorly it integrates with other applications. Even IE looks completely out of place inside an Aero frame.

3) Performance is better, but it's still not good. It's nice to see that dwm's overhead has been shaved, but the general responsiveness of the platform on somewhat dated hardware (Turion TL-32 on 2gb of ram) leave something to be desired. Windows should have tuned down the effects a lot more than it did (Or maybe they simply can't be disabled? I've yet to check)

4) The start menu still sucks. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to cram everything in a staticly sized frame really needs to die.

5) For some reason, 64-bit IE is not the default browser, the 32 bit version is! Granted I don't use IE, but this general behavior makes me wonder about MS's confidence in their 64 bit OS.

Back to Linux for now...

Something along the lines of HTML 4.01 transitional (and not compliant) to this...




Have a nice day :)