Sciguyryan's Blog

Unfortunately my Future Jobs Fund (FJF) placement has now finished – which is a real shame since it was a really good scheme. So I am now once again looking for a job until the funding for CCC comes through.

I should have more time to post here in the interim in any event.

Hi everyone!

I am once again contributing my spare CPU run time to the BOINC PrimeGrid project once again with my new PC. And I have the cool signature image to show for it:

Keep an eye for my new contributions and milestones!

Hi everyone.

Just a quick post to let you know that my new PC has arrived and it is stunning, not to mention fast. It has:

• A 64GB SSD primary hard drive
• A 2TB secondary hard drive
• 12GB of 1600MHz RAM
• An Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 graphics card
• An i7-930 processor

And much more!

Hi everyone!

Well. I have finally ordered my new PC and it is going to be a monster. It will have 12GB of 1600 MHz memory, a solid state hard drive and liquid cooling as an i7 processor. I can’t wait for it to come back, it should be here sometime next week.

I will post about my experience with the new system when I get it.

Hi everyone!

Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently. I have been quite busy with CCC related work. Now that we’ve sent off the 90k bid to the CoalFields Regeneration Trust and the 45k bid to the Rhonda Trust I have a little more free time. I will be getting a new computer in short order and then I should be able to continue work on CSIT (and hopefully provide some updates for you guys!).

Hopefully I will talk more soon!

Hi everyone!

I just thought I would stop by and share some thoughts with you on localization with WPF. I have spent the last few hours working on making CSIT localization before I add to much content to make it worth while. This is the first time I have ever made the effort to make an application localizable and I must say that it was not as painful as I thought it would be.

Eventually I decided to use a simple XML file and bound elements to it using data binding and XPath. Some things could not be bound to however and I had to implement a class that would read strings from the file and load them so they can be used later in the processing functions.

So far however it seems to be working just fine. And as proof here is a screenshot of the current CSIT interface that uses the new localization system.

The current CSIT Interface (v3)

Hopefully I will be posting more on this shortly. Once I am sure that the code works as intended I will try to release the code for others to use.

I spent a good few hours yesterday trying to figure out why my code to extract the Windows key from the registry was not working. The key was there but the code would not read it! It was infuriating.

After taking a little time to sit back and think about the problem – it dawned upon me. I am using a 64-bit operating system. This means that although the key appeared to be present in the location I was checking, it may indeed have been under the WOW64 part. After digging there it was.

With only a few modifications to my code, it now works successfully. I am quite pleased that Microsoft added a method to the register editing features in .NET framework 4 and for those who are interested I used the OpenBaseKey method of the RegistryKey class with the RegistryView attribute set depending on if the operating system is 64-bit or not.

The code now works perfectly. Let that be a lesson to you – focusing on answers to simple problems gets you nowhere fast!

Hi everyone

I have just spent a little while playing with the new WebM and HTML5 experimental support in Mozilla Firefox and I mus say. I am quite impressed. The 760p video samples I have seen are truly quite impressive. I would suggest that anyone capable should get their hands on a browser with experimental support and give it a shot themselves.

But for those of you who are not so daring – here are a few screen shot of what a video looks like in 720p with the new experimental features. For those who are a little more daring, see the information at the bottom of this page about where you can find the experimental Firefox builds.

WebM Sample 1 (720p)

WebM Sample 2 (720p)

WebM Sample 3 (720p)

Firefox Experimental Builds

1. First you will need to go and get yourself a Firefox nightly build, or a nightly of your favourite browser. If you use Windows then you can get a build here. For Mac you can get a build here and for Linux you can get it from here.
2. Install the nightly build. Note that if you are already using Firefox you may wish to read this before you install it!
3. Load the the video here and try out the different resolution settings and enjoy!

After reading a very interesting blog post by Rob Sayre from Mozilla I was pretty irritated by Apple’s irresponsibility.

HTML5 is a cross-browser standard but Apple are using it as a marketing tool to try and peg their own browser by making it seem like other browsers are not compatible – when in actuality they are if Apple made an effort to include the code for other browsers and not using cheap browser detection scripts.

This is a move I would expect from Microsoft rather than Apple and I find it quite disturbing that they have done something like this.

Hopefully they will correct this issue since it will do their image no good to keep things the way they are.