I’m currently experiencing some problems with the syntax highlighting script after upgrading to Wordpress 2.9.1. I will try to sort it out tonight but I’m afraid it might come to going back through all posts and editing them. Stay tuned!
This is mostly a small note to myself. I keep having problems with the input language changing when working with an application run via Citrix, seems like the guys (or gals for that matter) over at IT-services didn’t uninstall the default languages (I’m Swedish and sincerely miss some of the Swedish letters when writing) so I keep hitting this hotkey-combination that I can’t ever remember. Next time I’ll just look here.
To change language (when you can’t or don’t want to use the Language Bar) you press the following:
Left ALT + SHIFT
Just thought I should write a short one about a current project of mine. I decided that I wanted to try to make a game (a real game, not just that old pong-clone I made while learning C++ all those years ago) and since I work mostly with managed code it felt quite natural to build my game using a managed framework. For those who don’t know about the XNA Framework I would recommend a visit to XNA Creators Club for some more information.
The game I’m working on (with a tiny bit of help of a friend of mine who still has about 70 lines of code that I haven’t touched in the project) is a realtime strategygame built around the towerdefence concept. Some sort of enemies tries to get from point A to point B without getting killed. To kill them you build different types of towers along the way that hurt them in different ways and hopefully enough to not let them through. For each creature that get to point B you lose a life and when enough get there it’s game over for you. If you want to know more about this type of game http://www.towerdefence.net/ is a great place to go looking.
Below is a short video I recorded from the latest build of the game. It currently only features one type of tower and one type of enemy and they both use some placeholder graphics I made in Paint.Net so don’t expect to much of that. If you happen to have some graphics skills and would like to help out then you are very welcome!
And another thing, it’s also best viewed in fullscreen mode since the video was recorded in 800x600 resolution. Hope you enjoy it!
It’s been three weeks since I quit my old job now. Three weeks and I finally feel that I’m getting back to coding for the fun of it. I’m currently going through my old projects seeing what needs to be completed, tidying up my svn repositories, fixing this blog (more on that below) and so on. I’m also working on a small techdemo for a small game I’ve been working on with a friend of mine using XNA that hopefully will turn out as a really fun project and a really cool game. More on that in a later post though.
I’ve been doing some work on this blog the last few days, I changed the url to get it closer to my main site, updated Wordpress to 2.7 (whoa, suddenly I’ll want to write things just to see their awsome GUI), added some stubs to articles and codesnippets that I feel I want to post and I’ve finally added my feed to feedburner to get some stats on my subscribers aswell (and avoid the hassle for everyone to change their subscription url if I decide to move again). The new url to subscribe to is http://feeds.feedburner.com/crazybeavers/blog.
Oh, and I’m home sick today so if this post doesn’t make any sense to you I’ll blame it on my cold.
I’ve decided to move the blog to a new adress at http://blog.crazybeavers.se/. The old url is still valid for a month or so but I decided not to renew the domain. If you subscribe to my rss-feed (yeah right, like someone does) then you’ll have to update the url to that one as soon as possible.
I found this link ages ago and wrote a post with just the link but never came around to publish it. It’s still one of the coolest things I’ve found on the internet the last years so I hope you enjoy it!
Last week I started wondering how many downloads my products really had had throughout the years. Seeing that I didn’t have complete statistics over the downloads since I’ve rebuilt the sites lots of times and moved servers and such. Currently, these are the download stats from CrazyBeaver Softwares homepage:
Looking at this it seems quite clear that Imager Gallery and Imager Resizer would be the best candidates for downloaded products. These stats are just for the past few months though but if they’ve had similar numbers since they were released during 2004-2005 it would give quite a lot of downloads. Lets elaborate a bit further though, most of my old ASP and ISAPI/COM applications are listed on HotScripts and Aspin aswell, lets look at their popularity there to the calculation.
Now thats some numbers, over 22 000 views of Imager Gallery on HotScripts and almost 27 000 on Aspin. If we go a bit crazy and assume that a third the of people (probably it would be closer to a quarter of the people but that isn’t as fun to count with) also downloaded the script we would have 16 000 downloads of Imager Gallery there! If we then add the numbers we would have 17 000 assumed downloads which is quite a lot. Still, Imager Gallery is only the second most downloaded of my products. The true winner, and the only product which I know for sure how many times it has been downloaded, is CrazyBeavers Winamp Controller. Counting in at 25 239 downloads since January 27th, 2005 its by far the most downloaded product I ever created and one of the few that I don’t use myself!
This article was just a little ego boost for myself but it feels so damn good that people actually seem to appreciate my work enough to download it over 20 000 times!
It’s been a while now since there was a new release from CrazyBeaver Software so I thought I should make some fuzz about it and talk about it here as well.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked if I knew any way to save a video from YouTube onto his harddrive so he could use it in his school presentation. A quick search on google turned up few services that could download the .flv for you which was pretty neat though not enough since it would require that the schools computers could play .flv, which they can’t. My idea then was to make a simple wrapper for FFmpeg (a great open-source tool for recording and converting audio and video streams) and let him use that for conversion. The goal at this time was to make it easy for him to do this without my help in the future and maybe to let my other classmates do it as well. It worked out pretty well in the end and I now have a really neat C# wrapper for FFmpeg.exe which I hope to release some day for everyone to use. It was however not really satisfied with this, my application only did half the job, and the easy part was what was missing. I went looking around the net a bit for solutions on how to download the .flv-files from YouTube and found several ways which had their advantages and drawbacks. In the end, I borrowed a few ideas from most of them and got my own working solution for getting the .flv-files.
The result of this was the brand new CrazyBeavers YouTube Downloader which was released yesterday as version 1.0 and earlier today as 1.01 (just love the early bugs, so simple, so devastating). I’ve seen another program out there that does the same as mine but seeing the page I found it on i didn’t really want to download and run that .exe so hopefully this will be of use to more then just my class now.
With this release I also returned to NSIS (NullSoft Install System) for the installation which works a ton better then the Visual Studio setup projects I’ve used for BeaverSFV. I’ve scripted it to check for .Net 2.0 and if not it will download and install it. It also checks if the system is x86 or x64 to decide which package to get. Hopefully I’ll get around to discuss that one some day as well since it turned out really great. But until then, enjoy my new application!
Lets see now, on the 10th of June I moved into my new apartment and on the 26th of October I got my internet connection installed. Thats about four and a half month without an internet connection. About a month ago lightning struck and fried a few parts in my web server so I had to replace them, this caused the Windows 2003 installation to fail so I had to reinstall everything which took ages. Since I didn’t have an internet connection at home I decided against putting the server back in it’s original place until I could monitor it closely (and install everything properly since some parts had to be downloaded again). This led to some massive downtime for beaverblogg, crazybeavers.se, beaverpage and a few other sites of which most are restored now.
I’m currently worked up with school and some other (paid) projects but I also have lots of cool stuff coming up for CrazyBeaver Software. First of all I’ve setup my own Subversion server on which I will host most of my new projects making the source available to everyone! To start with I will be the only one who can make commits but that might change if someone shows a real interest in helping out. I’ve also setup Trac to help managing the larger projects (such as ImagerGallery.Net) by giving me a great platform for handling bug and feature requests. Hopefully I’ll have all this aswell as the new CrazyBeaver Software up and running before 1st December but since I don’t know how much I’ll need to do for school and my other projects. Keep watching this spot (maybe subscribe to my RSS feed?) for more info!
It’s been quiet around here lately. I moved to a new apartment a bit over a month ago now and won’t get an internet connection for at least another month it seems so things are going a bit slowly on the development front. I’ve managed to put together a few things though which might be of help to some.
First of all is a .Net library (and client) for working with DynDns services named DynDnsLib (and CrazyBeaversDnsUpdater for the client application) for people who want to add support for DynDns services to their applications. More information (and sourcecode via SVN) can be found at the link below.
http://beaverdnsupdater.devjavu.com/
Second up is an implementation of the Akismet (spam detecting service that WordPress and a few others use) API for .Net 2.0. It is a quite basic implementation that could be extended a bit more if someone wants to but it should be working fairly well as it is. More info (not much) and source at the link below.
http://akismetlib.devjavu.com/
None of these projects are in their final version, but both works fairly well at least. If anyone want to contribute to any of these projects then send me an email to karl.sjogren@gmail.com and tell me what you want to implement/change and I’ll consider giving you write access to the SVN repository.
When thinking about it, checking out source from an SVN repository might be a bit tricky unless you know what you are doing, maybe I should put together an article for that aswell some day if people seem to want it.