Thushan Fernando

Half-Life 2 & Delphi 2005

I finally finished Half-Life 2, just a note to those still reading the old blog about Half-Life 2 being banned it turns out not to be so true. (sorry i didnt pick this up earlier when i got hte final release).

The final verdict? The physics was awesome, graphics heavenly but story line.... maybe not too ingenius. But dont take my word for it, buy a copy (dont pirate it:p) and find out... I bought the collectors edition that has HL2,  original HL1 wrtiten in Source (havent played yet) as well as my all time favourite Counterstrike written with Source. Unfortunetly CS has become so played by so many users that i feel so ashamed to start playing again... I've lost my CS skills after leaving highschool now i feel like an adult playing CS for the first time:-(

oh it comes with a T-shirt for HL2 as well...

Borland Delphi 2005

Finally bought Delphi 2005 and let me tell you ITS F'ING AWESOME! The new IDE is very sweet and the fact that i can write managed and unmanaged delphi code is brilliant, theres so many things in this release that would take *ages* to write about. If you are yet to consider moving from 6 or 7 (or even 5) this release of Delphi is probably the most revolutionary in comparison to previous releases. Read More about Delphi 2005. Now i need to think of excuses to explain why I lost $5,800 from my account this month to IT illiterate(at least in development) parents;-)

Just a brief handful of some cool stuff:

• REFACTORING (probably the best time saving feature!)
• Generate P4 SSE3/SSE2 instructions (yayy! you can include OpCodes for newer p4s)
• XML Documention generator (Similar to .NET)
• Support for nested types
• Multiple debuggers
• Designer for ASP.NET code

and much more... i'm still trying to get over the new IDE enhancements:-O

Java Security flaw (must read) affects Windows and any OS the JVM runs on

Security experts have warned that millions of computer desktops are at risk from a newly discovered vulnerability in Sun Microsystems' Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

IT security firm CyberGuard claimed that the Java flaw, which is present in the JVM on most desktop computers, "poses a significant security threat because it will not be closed by the usual Microsoft update process".

Read More Not sure if a patch is available, i spent an hour looking through the Sun site but no luck...

While on the subject of Java, why do i get the feeling that Java is trying its best to compete with .NET by copying them? Java Studio Creator *COUGH* a lame ass VS.NET clone(or atleast a wannabe-clone)... Java Faces (something *NEW*) which tum te tum... seems like a stab at making JSP more like ASP.NET!

McNealy bags .NET like no tomorrow and ends up drawing more inspiration from it... are the enginners at Sun that unoriginal? Is it okay if i start bagging Sun just like Sun-lovers bag MS for copying Java for C# (wtf?)?

Interop between VB6 and VB.NET

The DialogFramework in HotHTML 3 exploits the use of COM to allow third party users to create addons (or dialogs/extensions) for HotHTML 3. Although the SDK ships with only the VB5/6 sample code I was curious how to achieve things with VB.NET. It would still require the .NET Framework (duhh!) but if you can get the SDK ported to VB.NET you can make use of the .NET BCL and write some kick ass stuff...

Well just today on the MSDN Flash newsletter (Frank's back! w00t!) I noticed a KB Article that explains how to effectively allow VB6 to run/call .NET assemblies and .NET assemblies to call VB6 COM objects. See it here.

A similar article was published on CodeProject a while ago, this article seems to put in concrete how to achieve this layer of compatibility. Wonder what the overhead would be?

CodeMax v4.0 on the horizon *AND* HotHTML 4/CodeDev notes...

Well the next version of the very eagerly anticipated CodeMax release is coming! CodeMax v4.0 has just been posted as an annoucement on the WinMain forums.

Some cool new features:

• Autocomplete (heavily requested)
• Tooltips and autocomplete emulation like VS.NET
• Brace matching (I requested that:P)

Thats just the start... Learn more!

I guess its time to announce that HotHTML 4 will be written exclusively with CodeMax v4.0 (previous alpha builds ran 3.0) so this will add autocomplete to the list of features for the upcoming v4.0 release. It will also be split into two seperate products:

• HotHTML 4 Professional
  Similar in the way HotHTML 3 currently works only it will be heavily focussed on the web development scene. This will include quite a lot of new stuff as well as upgrades to existing features in HotHTML 3
  
• CodeDev
  CodeDev is more of a development tool for non-web developers, this was brought on to seperate the web from the rest of the pack so these features will be heavily tuned for platform developers, C/C++, VB, C#, VB.NET, Pascal(delphi) to name a few.

More on these two products as time goes on. Release dates? Not sure, but aiming for a Beta 1 around March/April or maybe June/July'ish.

Hotmail launched in the UK!

Some good news to those in the UK:

British users of Hotmail accounts now have a better chance to get that email address they always wanted. Microsoft is introducing the @hotmail.co.uk address to make it easier to think up a new name and not one of the 187 million hotmail.com addresses already spoken for.

Other countries to get their own Hotmail domains are Germany, France, Italy and Japan.

so if your quick you can register colinharman@hotmail.com or paulfp@hotmail.com or even james@hotmail.com before a million others do! Source.

PC Setup, xbox, halo 2

finally remembered to take a shot of my setup so colin can finally rest in peace knowing i dont have 6 monitors (but damm i wish i did) i have 4, two of which you see... dual monitor is only on the main desktop (which is mising that monitor) but its all thanks to this hack allowing Sapphire/ATI All In Wonder 9700 users to have dual monitor setups. if you do have a AIW 9700 Pro and your considering dual monitor (if your not you should get beaten with a stick) i'd seriously recommend you reading that article.

Life Gallery

A few friends came over for a while to play some halo 2 together (we obviously dont have better things to do on weekends) so things got moved around slightly (like the halo 2 box is magically there now:-O) but if your after a closer look at what the collectors edition looks like its here. and yes i too only got 2 DVDs not 3 as someone had mentioned somewhere...

PS. When someone is coming around - Eg for a dinner - things are alot cleaner, most boxes are stored inside cupboards as well as excessive computer junk that 8-16 year olds may find interesting;-) Today's saturday so its not too messy, usually around wednessday its a jungle of papers, books and odd computer parts hanging from places...(and clothes all over the place)

Creative Declares war on Apple (Weapons of Mass iPods the target)

Well you know Weapons of Mass Destruction was failed excuse the Jnr Administration coined up to goto Iraq (which failed miserably and casted an even bigger threat on western countries) but did you know that Creative is actually about to embark on a war too? Although unlike the pointless political war to control oil in the “real world” this war is being fought in the media and its not your money their spending to fight!

Creative is arming up to spend close to (or over?) $100Million of that american currency to attempt to get their Nomad's out there like Apple have done with the iPod. And its about bloody time too.

Digital music player maker Creative has pledged to spend $100m to out-market Apple in a bid to take the market away from the iPod. And not just Apple. Speaking in Singapore this week, Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo bullishly pronounced: "I'm planning to spend some serious money - I intend to out-market everyone." "The MP3 war has started and I am the one who has declared war," he thundered.

The company's goals are undoubtedly ambitious. Sim said Creative is looking to take 40 per cent of the worldwide digital music player market in 2005. During the Q3, it managed a mere ten per cent. Apple stood at 17 per cent. Those figures show there's plenty to play for, and indeed, Creative is on track to sell over 3m devices this quarter, Sim said. That, he believes, will push it ahead of Apple. "It's our target to beat iPod in this quarter," he said. But a number of analysts have already forecast sales of over 4m units during Q4.

Well grab some popcorn and monitor what freebies, commercials and emails come your way from Creative in the next couple of months. Unlike a real war we wont have people pointlessly being killed because of idoitic politicians that should really be fighting their own wars themselves. Go Nomad, no-one knows audio like Creative does in the PC realm!

Read More.

Seagate 400GB Hard Drives

seagate has just announced 400GB drives... this is the news i've been waiting for for almost a year now to upgrade the xbox's internal hard drive (currently 250GB) which is being chocked up...

Seagate Technology LLC said yesterday that it has started shipping a hard disk drive, targeted at PCs, that offers 400GB of storage space.

As more and more people use PCs for multimedia applications, particularly editing of home videos and downloading of movies and TV shows from peer-to-peer networks, demand for larger capacity hard disk drives is growing. In addition to offering high storage capacities, such drives need to be able to read and write data to the drive fast enough to keep up with real-time video.

The drive is the fourth member of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 series and is available in two versions, one with an Ultra ATA/100 interface and one with a Serial ATA interface. The rotational speed of the disc is 7,200 rpm, with an average seek time of 8 milliseconds.

The Serial ATA version supports a technology called Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which allows the drive to manage multiple commands from the PC in whatever order it deems most efficient. Until now, drives handled read and write requests in the order they were received. With NCQ technology, users of the Serial ATA version of the Barracuda drive with systems that support NCQ will see performance closer to that of a 10,000-rpm drive than that of a 7,200-rpm device, according to Seagate.

Of all things, for desktops that have SATA support NCQ will be interesting. cant hardly wait (trademarked to some movie company)

Hopefully someone from ExplosiveLabs will get one to review. In the meantime heres the whole story.