Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

The Biggest Article Yet

if you haven’t looked at it yet, the recent programming article, 20 issues of porting C++ code on the 64-bit platform, is the largest article I’ve personally posted to date. In fact, when I uploaded the entire HTML content to the database, it spat at me:

Quote:

WARNING: ARTICLE CONTENT IS OVER 60K

I dunno if that’s a bad thing or not, I guess Richard will have to chime in on that. Why should I care if an article’s content is greater than 60K? What limit is that? Anyways I thought that was cool.

Hopefully I don’t get any comments on it about how it’s written in “bad English”, because it’s really not. Sure there’s some backwards grammar and slightly incorrect verbage and whatnot, but it’s still readable and understandable. I get rather ticked when people complain about things not being grammatically correct. Not everyone’s first language is English, tho many of us who speak it feel that is the way it should be online. It’s a very helpful and informative article so take the slightly extra effort to read it if it’s up your alley.

Oh and you may also notice this article goes against the editorial policy (if you happen to know the editorial policy) of being featured content that is not less than 30 days old or previously unpublished. From time to time I will be bending the rules to feature quality articles I want highlighted, that also lead back to a site that houses more quality articles, as it the case for Viva 64

New Issues Tracking Software

Richard mentioned this briefly in his blog a few days ago and it’s been nice using it to track improvements, bugs and features on the site. Any problem or suggestion I see on the forums gets added to the list, so be sure to point things out. Don’t expect any faster turn-arounds as a result of using this software, but at least your requests won’t get lost in a sea of email and PMs and forum posts.

IGC Coverage

In just under a week I’ll be boarding a plane out to Eugene, OR to attend GarageGame’s IndieGamesCon. I’ve been itching to get to this event nigh on 3 years now. I was ready to go last year but they didn’t have one. Now I’m finally set to jet out there. One of the IGF finalists I met at GDC last year happened to have moved out there a few months ago and agreed to put me up for a few days. Maybe he’ll be willing to help me out on the coverage, but I’d also like to know if anyone else from around here is going to be attending as well. I posted a poll on the main page and so far 11 of you have said you’re going. So if you’re one of those people reading this let me know! The one and only thing I’m totally bummed out about is that they’re having a TGB boot camp the Sat following the conference – and I fly out Friday nite!! They announced this like a week or two after I bought my flight. They have a TGX boot camp on Friday, and TGX is similar in many ways to TGB so I suppose that will have to suffice.

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On the personal side….

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Small Change

Crazy enough, I’m still getting some change in royalties from my Game Design Perspectives book contributions. The check that arrived a few days ago totaled $12.34 for the first and second quarters of this year. Hot damn I’m going to go buy me… uhm… not much. Eh, there’s two-three days worth of food. That’s something.

Action Star Update

In case you missed it, I’m filming a short action movie with a fellow stuntman. I’m still hoping to shoot the final two scenes of me on my motorcycle this Friday night. The weather’s holding out really nice – as it stands now they’re predicting a low of 65 degrees that night – perfect temperature! The one glitch that arose was my bike’s tail lights going out over the weekend. This has happened twice before and whoever installed these things in my bike (before I owned it) needs to be drug out into the street and shot. Luckily I managed to isolate the offending wire this time without have to strip off my entire rear fairing and reduce my rear end to chassis to remove the light assembly and repair it like the last two times. Still, only the left light is really working in terms of full LED tail/brake lights and turn signal. The right light has only a small cluster of LEDs active, no brake lighting and the turn signal just blinks the active red LED cluster on and off. But it’s enough cause they’re LEDs and they’re bright as hell. Luckily shots of my bike will be from the left so you won’t even be able to notice my right LED is shot to hell. I’m going have to start looking for a replacement tho. Argh.

Gaiiden’s Links: Compression

You won’t find a lot of originality in this section unfortunately, but here it is none the less. Still working my way towards the good stuff.

ALZip – If you don’t like getting nagged by WinZip to buy it, then here’s the best free alternative that doesn’t nag
WinRAR – I found even ALZip can’t handle some RAR archives, so it’s always nice to have a backup tool. It nags, but not as bad as WinZip does.
WinZip – The archive daddy. Free for a while, then nags like hell to get you to buy it.
WinISO – if you need some help opening ISO files that ALZip can’t handle for some reason, here’s a decent app to di it. Not for free though.

Previous Links

Communication
Audio

And as usual, hit the comments for additional archiving suggestions!