Recent Posts

651

General Software Discussion / Re: books/blogs on database design?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 29, 2008, 10:09 AM »

It depends what your level is...

Paul Dubois' Mysql book is one of the best written introductory technical books I have ever read, although it only covers some of the basics on database design. It has great tutorials in perl, php and python (iirc) and will cover things like indexes, stored procedures etc. beyond pure database design and into practical performance. But it does not go in depth. It is a good book even if you dont use mysql, really, because it is concise, well written - it can help someone get started in database-backed web development, picking up perl or php etc. You are probably beyond it, but i thought I would pimp it, I always made trainees read the perl or php chapter there when they had to pick up the language.

Joe Celko's books, starting with "SQL for smarties", are some great books to learn how to do very sophisticated things with SQL (I have the data mining and the binary tree books and there are some great tools in there, although he tends to be a bit single minded about them). They are not about performance and intelligent design, they are more about things you thought you needed to do in code but actually can let the database do...

After that it is about picking a book about the particular database you have chosen, since there are a lot of quirks. If you use postgres I can recommend a few but for others I cant help much

652

Living Room / Re: Microsoft Bid for Yahoo - Interesting Development...

« Last post by iphigenie on February 29, 2008, 05:06 AM »

Although I happen to like Yahoo and to think that they don't need to be gobbled up - they still have a lot to go for them and can easily start growing again...

653

Living Room / Re: Microsoft Bid for Yahoo - Interesting Development...

« Last post by iphigenie on February 29, 2008, 05:05 AM »

I always find it interesting how people worry about Microsoft but nobody seems to worry much about google controlling so much of what happens on the net - what people find, their email, their documents, what they look at, analytics on a huge number of sites, advertising, lots of content (maps, scanned books, collections), quite a lot of backbone operators etc. etc. etc.

654

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by iphigenie on February 29, 2008, 05:00 AM »

I'm pretty sure keeping the landscape deformations in sync between 12 people playing online is quite a challenge.

Red faction multiplayer is still going well after all these years, there's still servers and people. The same goes for descent 2!

655

General Software Discussion / Re: Monkey Dash: Play test my game!

« Last post by iphigenie on February 28, 2008, 05:22 PM »

I totally agree with you on board games - nothing beats an evening with friends and the right game!

I have a bgg search set up in opera. nuff said 

656

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by iphigenie on February 28, 2008, 04:38 PM »

Descent is more a shooter than a flyer, but thats what makes it such a classic - simple gameplay, total freedom of movement and action. Descent 4 is still on my games wishlist even though it has been dead years. One can still hope!!!!

There are some great things around descent 1 and 2 due to the games' sources being released, so it can run under xp and vista etc. Also you can play descent 1 in the engine of descent 2 (graphics and AI)  I gathered some links under http://iphi.net/index.php/games/descent/, http://iphi.net/inde...php/games/Descent_2/ and http://iphi.net/inde...php/games/Descent_3/

Theres also a doom3 mod trying to build descent as a doom 3 mod - made me look at doom3 on ebay!

I recently found the descent soundtrack and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like meeting an old friend

657

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by iphigenie on February 28, 2008, 07:22 AM »

I finished HL1 but never HL2 - I gave up in one of the driving episodes. HL2 is one of the games I had to give up because they made me seasick, the other one was Descent 3 

This year is the year where I catch up on old games I missed years ago, and finish some I never finished, such as Baldur's Gate 2... I might give Descent 3 and Half Life 2 another go, with new hardware I might be able to get the refresh rate to a level where i dont get seasick.

I recently grabbed up Red Faction to give it a whirl - I orginally bought it because it was, after all, what Descent 4 had turned into. I remember playing the demo and having it on my tobuy list for years.

I am trying to build a list of all the games I own, to figure out which ones I want to replay, but it's a pain: sites which offer the option to list your collection are usually incomplete, and I dont want to create a separate catalogue...

658

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by iphigenie on February 27, 2008, 08:43 AM »

I wish they would remake ... M.U.L.E.

-wraith808 (February 15, 2008, 01:35 AM)

Same here. I was looking around recently, and saw this site: http://www.worldofmule.net which references an OpenMULE project: http://www.codenautics.com/openmule/.

Unfortunately, it looks like development of the game has stalled (one thing about open source projects that you can frequently count on) and the version that was left doesn't really do anything interesting.

-CWuestefeld (February 15, 2008, 05:23 AM)

did you guys ever try space h.o.r.s.e

http://www.shrapnelg...es/Space_HoRSE/1.htm

659

General Software Discussion / Re: Xobni beta - Outlook Mail indexer and organizer

« Last post by iphigenie on February 24, 2008, 11:44 AM »

One thing xobni makes really easy to find is attachments sent to or received from a person.

It even remembers the attachment after you have deleted it, which can be handy when checking history of things

660

General Software Discussion / Re: What are your favourite Outlook plugins?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 24, 2008, 11:41 AM »

I'm away on a family emergency at the moment but when I get back I will, good idea

661

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by iphigenie on February 15, 2008, 04:17 AM »

Bullfrog 

I once had an interview and a lunch with someone who had worked on all these Bullfrog games - populous, syndicate, dungeon keeper, magic carpet... was a very interesting lunch and I think my enthusiasm for these games might have helped

I chicked out on the job in the end - one of the hardest choices I had to make - changing country and industry at the same time was a tad much

662

Living Room / Re: advice needed: weird lockup/freeze (process/dll/disk/cache?? issue in explorer)

« Last post by iphigenie on February 15, 2008, 03:13 AM »

I disabled all context menu extensions - if i dont experience the issue by Monday then i will re-enable some and so on.

These nirsoft tools are good! Interestingly, there were some things left behind in these extensions that none of my tools had shown - although I had uninstalled regrun in November so possibly this would have shown it.

663

Living Room / Re: advice needed: weird lockup/freeze (process/dll/disk/cache?? issue in explorer)

« Last post by iphigenie on February 14, 2008, 01:57 PM »

oh, cool, thats way easier than removing them all 

664

Living Room / Re: advice needed: weird lockup/freeze (process/dll/disk/cache?? issue in explorer)

« Last post by iphigenie on February 14, 2008, 01:07 PM »

what makes this annoying is that the frozen apps/windows just cannot be killed with anything i have tried

665

Living Room / Re: advice needed: weird lockup/freeze (process/dll/disk/cache?? issue in explorer)

« Last post by iphigenie on February 14, 2008, 12:48 PM »

This is still happening but less

I have uninstalled both stardock's windows blind and the qt add ons (i wondered about the qt add ons because i installed them recently and the history mentions quite a few "right click" related fixes so it was at least possible)

As I type this I have a fully responsive windows xp, including task bar etc. EXCEPT that I have an open folder windows which is frozen, as I made the mistake to right click on a file to delete it. There was a bunch of disk activity but no context menu appeared.

I won't be able to open another file manager window now, but all applications still work, i can go on and start something else, or finish my work. I also i can still open total commander - until i right click on something in there and it locks up as well - and in most cases any application where i do something that would open a file open/save dialog will also be locked up.

It has to either be disk related or an explorer add on

I'm leaving process log running in hope i can spot something, but that logs sooo much how could i ever spot anything.

using hijack this or other analysers I just dont see anything in what is configured, and if l look at processes I see nothing that rings alarm bells.

Any idea how I can trace this, what to look/filter for in process log, for example?

666

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Scanahand RC1 Released

« Last post by iphigenie on February 14, 2008, 10:42 AM »

This is a cool idea, could almost make a "techy" last minute valentine's gift too!

667

General Software Discussion / Re: Do You Purchase Software on Impulse?

« Last post by iphigenie on February 11, 2008, 08:57 AM »

If it is discounted enough I might kind of skip the 4 steps I normally do

* "do i need it?"
* "dont i already have something that does it?"
* "arent other tools that might do it better/cheaper?"
* "should I test it to make sure first?"

and just buy it. Then use it 3 times and park it, more often than not.

668

General Software Discussion / Re: Managing projects with OUTLOOK

« Last post by iphigenie on February 11, 2008, 08:52 AM »

I have been looking around this topic again and found the following 2 interesting projects. They don't exactly do what I want, but I think it's worth sharing them here. I looked at about 20, downloaded about 4 and only 2 are worth mentioning so far.

1. Jello Dashboard
http://www.jello-das...board.net/wordpress/
An open source single person GTD add on. Quite a few people around here are into GTD

2. Taskline
http://www.taskline.com/screen.asp
I like the idea of this one, it does the "juggle tasks and fit into calendar" that Above & Beyond does, but within Outlook

I'm going to struggle using it at the moment since most of the tasks in my outlook tasks list are tasks that others must do and I am aware of and checking on - also I often have a task for, say, 200 hour for an entire project (just to capture that) then other tasks which are subtasks which are a chunk of said 200 hours

Obviously if the software tries to juggle all these as real tasks i must do, things get messy (schedule ended up well into 2009)

669

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: ActionThis - Task management for teams

« Last post by iphigenie on February 11, 2008, 08:33 AM »

It looks quite slick but it seemed a bit slow to use on the web - too slow for me to consider putting the 20 projects and hundreds of tasks in :S

a quick note: using it from outlook I didnt like that things i sent via the action this add-on did not appear in "sent items" - that's a big nono to me, i need the "when did i set up this tasks and mail it to XYZ" tracking

I havent used it long though, but I suspect I am not the target public - what i imagine from the description would be a different app altogether

670

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Wrike - the most practical project management tool

« Last post by iphigenie on February 11, 2008, 08:28 AM »

I spent over an hour setting up folders for my projects and divisions (I like the dynamic idea to have different hierarchies and have tasks appear in multiple places - although I dont like the way this pollutes the timeline with bars for every folder and subfolder)

I could only add one task  - after I added 1 task it told me that I have used up all 10 tasks that my demo allows.

I have figured out that it must be the tasks in your quickstart/help folder, but how many customers might not bother to try to think it through? Also it would be nice to be able to keep that reference around so have them not count towards the 10

PS: 10 seems a really low amount as well to really test a tool, especially since in agile methods you generate LOTS of tiny tasks

671

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by iphigenie on February 10, 2008, 06:19 PM »

I played that through 2 of the chapters - great story and atmosphere but the gameplay felt clunky to my pc-accustomed ways, and I gave up

672

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera M2 + Gmail + IMAP = not recommended

« Last post by iphigenie on February 09, 2008, 08:06 AM »

thats totally different 

673

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera M2 + Gmail + IMAP = not recommended

« Last post by iphigenie on February 09, 2008, 08:02 AM »

I had that with the beta, but the truth was that it was going further while appearing crashed, and eventually would make it to the end after a dozen or so attempts

Although for me it wouldnt crash, just totally freeze - and once i decided to let it frozen for a while it eventually came out of it with all my mail imported. I had been killing it thinking it frozen but actually it was just struggling with the stuff

674

Living Room / Re: The Best Games You've Never Played

« Last post by iphigenie on February 09, 2008, 04:22 AM »

The list has an action-rpg/ action-adventure bias

Out of the list I played the recent ones: Outcast (great storytelling) - Planescape: Torment (everyone should play this) - Beyond Good and Evil (too much of an action-adventure for me)

I'll agree about System Shock - 2 was also very good but more on the scary side - I dont usually like scary-ish games but this is so well done! One of the few games to make me nearly fall off my chair in a surprise (the other is an old game called Skynet), tells you how immersed I was

Other games I thought were great but not enough people played (totally biased to the ones I played!)
Sacrifice
Magic Carpet 1 & 2

675

Living Room / Re: Find names for old games...

« Last post by iphigenie on February 09, 2008, 04:00 AM »

Talk about weird coincidence... just read a review of a new game in that family: http://www.gamersinf...ndex.php?art/id:2107 I dont think i would even had understood it had i not seen this thread recently.

PS: this site manages to review a totally eclectic mix of mainstream and independent games