Granted, I’m slow to find this stuff, but EGM has a couple of hilarious articles where they have kids from today play classic games like Space Invaders and Tetris. The reaction of the kids is too funny and makes you feel kind of old.
I wrote a couple of days ago about having to re-image my work machine. Got an interesting email from a fellow named David Groves about an application that may be the answer to my issues: HyperOS. Looks like it’s sort of a cross between ghosting and multi-OS booting where you can have several copies/versions of Windows running on one machine and easily back up/switch between them.
I’ve considered running my development environment in a virtual machine but I’ve never wanted to incur that overhead. Even with all the optimizations in the world, with the hardware I’m using the overhead of a VM makes it noticeably slower than running natively and I need more speed, not less. This HyperOS application looks like it gives you the best of all worlds. Maybe I should try it out.
Perhaps once every six to twelve months I end up flattening my work computer and getting the IT folks to drop a fresh, clean image on it. I install, uninstall, re-install, and generally mess around with the thing, so after a time it really starts running slow and unreliably.
This time, my problem ended up being that I installed Notepad++ (which I’m not linking to so no one falls into the same hole I did). Turns out if you use the menus in Notepad++ to associated document types with it, it deletes the old document type and creates one central type in the registry that it associates with the document extension. So if you associate XML, LOG, CONFIG, and TXT with Notepad++, they all become “Notepad ++ Documents” and if you change one to do something, all of them change.
This is particularly troublesome in the case of “BAT” - batch scripts. I associated “BAT” with Notepad++ and it removed the ability to execute batch scripts because “BAT” became a “Notepad++ Document.” I futzed around with the registry and trying to recover from backup, but it was no use. Time to re-image.
I got the machine re-imaged on Friday at around 2:00p. I was up until 1:45a Saturday re-installing everything that wasn’t included in the image. After final tally, there were over 45 applications, utilities, and other tools I installed. And that didn’t count doing things like checking out the source to all the stuff I have to build.
But, hey, it’s running totally fast now. Hehehehe…
I blogged before about the Burger King video games for Xbox, but I didn’t know they also have a Dance Dance Revolution tie-in. I’m not sure if the game marketing thing is ridiculous or a stroke of damn-well genius.
I realize I’m probably the last to get on the boat with this one, but I came across the Yahoo! UI Library this morning and it’s pretty cool stuff. It’s an open-source set of UI components for creating rich web applications. Items I know I’ve had to write that are included:
They have a lot of other neat stuff, too, like menu controls, treeviews, animation libraries… it’s pretty slick. I’m going to have to play around with this and see how it works. It looks promising.