Oberonix's Blog

Corporate SOPA mess

oberonix — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:46:35 +0000

Love this article tracking gaming companies and their stances on SOPA, the best part is that some companies take both sides depending on the business unit (see Sony) and many are subsidiaries of companies supporting the bill. Somehow I doubt those guys will come out against it publicly…

The wonderful world of CEF

oberonix — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:57:32 +0000

I’ve read a few articles recently about embedding Chromium into traditional desktop apps to leverage the best of both worlds. It stuck with me as an idea that may have something to it, you get a fixed browser to develop for with a smaller performance hit than going pure web and can add custom plugins and such to do more fancy things outside of the (increasingly less) strict web environment. I know some game companies are starting to build their internal tools using this technique and it is also what Valve used for Steam in order to facilitate Mac support. Either way here is a link to the library which enables this:

http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

THQ bets the farm

oberonix — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:35:51 +0000

I’m always baffled why companies would bet their entire business by making dumb assumptions about sell-through rates. Especially when it’s a crappy, single-use drawing tablet with a predecessor coming soon… I would rather produce a very limited run and see if they sell out, seems like a reasonable way to test out a new platform. I hope THQ pulls this one out but producing million(s) of these things for non-Wii platforms seems like a really poor decision.

THQ might go broke

More Last Guardian drama

oberonix — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:13:26 +0000

Looks like another high-profile departure, seems like there is some serious drama happening on this project, probably to do with upper management and a prolonged development cycle. Sadly we’ll probably never get the full story, but MAN do I wish we would…

Last Guardian drama

Windows store economics

oberonix — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:11:03 +0000

Interesting how MS is attempting to position their new app store for the desktop, there’s slight pricing differences and more flexible subscription options. I think that most developers will have to continue supporting at least 3 other versions of the OS which makes it a bit of a tough sell, wish they had back-ported it in some form to help with that. Curious to see how it works out, I think it will do big numbers for them and I’ll probably play with the idea of making an app, wish they would have been more aggressive on the pricing front though to really get people interested from the start.

Windows store pricing announced

Olympus

oberonix — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:17:37 +0000

I remember when the Woodford thing went down and was convinced something crazy was happening behind the scenes at Olympus. The whole story is a really fascinating study on the differences in culture, loyalty, and honor in America vs Japan.

The shit-show at Olympus

Android name generator

oberonix — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:06:43 +0000

Android phone names have always baffled me, I don’t know how they expect them to sell with such forgettable jibberish names. Unless of course you are pumping out 50 models a year and need to have names like this to keep it all straight…

Android name generator

ASP.Net partial views in Webforms pages

oberonix — Sat, 15 May 2010 16:41:48 +0000

At work I’ve been migrating our site from the webforms world into the modern era with mvc. One of the problems is that while embedding webform controls in mvc views is fairly easy, going the other way seems to be a bit more difficult. This is because all of the new context that drives an mvc view is completely missing. The solution involves mocking it up and is not super easy to find with just a cursory google search. I found the answer over at stackflow, here is the gist of the code:

public class WebFormController : Controller { }

public static class WebFormMVCUtil
{

    public static void RenderPartial( string partialName, object model )
    {
        //get a wrapper for the legacy WebForm context
        var httpCtx = new HttpContextWrapper( System.Web.HttpContext.Current );

        //create a mock route that points to the empty controller
        var rt = new RouteData();
        rt.Values.Add( "controller", "WebFormController" );

        //create a controller context for the route and http context
        var ctx = new ControllerContext(
            new RequestContext( httpCtx, rt ), new WebFormController() );

        //find the partial view using the viewengine
        var view = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView( ctx, partialName ).View;

        //create a view context and assign the model
        var vctx = new ViewContext( ctx, view,
            new ViewDataDictionary { Model = model },
            new TempDataDictionary() );

        //render the partial view
        view.Render( vctx, System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Output );
    }

}

This basically mocks up the context needed for the mvc partial view to render properly. You can then embed it in the page using the following syntax:

<% WebFormMVCUtil.RenderPartial( "ViewName", this.GetModel() ); %>

This allows for a bit of an easier time replacing webforms sites with small mvc controls. There are people posting about viewstate issues but there appear to be a couple of solutions out there.

PowerCommands for Visual Studio

oberonix — Mon, 10 May 2010 04:21:31 +0000

I often struggle to find good add-ins for Visual Studio, and it’s unfortunate because other than it’s horrible speed and defaults it’s a pretty decent IDE. Hopefully with 2010 and future versions they consider this. One that I do use a lot and consider a must have is the PowerCommands add-in. It enables a lot of really simple basic extra commands that as a power user you wonder why they weren’t just included to begin with since they are so damn useful. Here is the link, hopefully you get as much mileage out of this as I have.

Ubuntu and the cloud

oberonix — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:06:36 +0000

I’ve been playing with Ubuntu again recently on my netbook and just upgraded to Lucid Lynx. As usual it’s not an earth-shattering update given that they release like clockwork every 6 months. With that aggressive of a release schedule they tend to be more iterative, which I actually prefer to the multi-year schedules of something like Windows which changes dramatically most iterations. Either way this recent update brought some neat messaging unification changes that along with Ubuntu One signal the direction things are headed.

Ubuntu One was new to me when I jumped back in but I love the idea that cloud syncing is built in to the operating system and supported by the manufacturer. I think this is going to become commonplace and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple and Microsoft rip this off in future versions. Hopefully Canonical manages to open up the API and allow other services to run on the same framework so that users could choose their cloud storage provider, but maybe I’m thinking a bit too far ahead with that one.

The new messaging system allows the user to see emails, facebook messages, instant messages, and twitter updates all from a single interface built right into Gnome. You can also do a simple status update that can broadcast out to all the services. I think this is really powerful and is a super cool feature to modernize the operating system a bit and make it more aware of the services that most people spend a lot of time with every day. It’s taken a while for email/IM and I’m honestly surprised it took so long to be integrated into an OS this well. Expect to see more services/features added to the list over time as they all have really well established APIs.

I’m excited to see where this interoperability and seamless integration will go, I think that less application installation/configuration and more cloud service integration will definitely make all our live easier and more portable.

Setting Asp.Net MVC routes to override existing files/folders

oberonix — Tue, 04 May 2010 02:26:33 +0000

One of the small tips I’ve picked up that helped save a bunch of time in the website that I’ve been working on is how to set the RouteCollection.RouteExistingFiles Property. Normally Asp.Net and IIS6 choose existing folders over defined routes. Setting the RouteExistingFiles property to true (overriding it’s default of false) will allow your routes to take precedence. Previously I had been going through the painful act of renaming and moving legacy webforms folders to get the route names I wanted, had I known about this I would have been able to avoid that completely. I love the flexibility and configurability that routes offer and would prefer to use them over the file system any day.

Here is the MSDN link to the property for more info.

How to reset a Mac OSX admin account without the install disc

oberonix — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:33:07 +0000

I recently had to reset a MacBook to which the password and the disc had been misplaced. Usually you simply have to use the reset utility that comes on the install disc, but missing that I had to look for other options. Luckily GigaOm had a short article that has the following steps:

Reboot

Hold apple + s down after you hear the chime.

When you get text prompt enter in these terminal commands to create a brand new admin account (hitting return after each line):

mount -uw /

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

shutdown -h now

After rebooting you should have a brand new admin account. When you login as the new admin you can simply delete the old one and you’re good to go again!

Hope that helps, I know it was a total lifesaver for me.