I’m attending IEEE VNC 2010 next week, to see what lessons/idea’s from the car world can be repurposed to the heavy machine industry.

After banging my head against the MSDN documentation* for a few days, it turns out that TrackPopupMenu and TrackPopupMenuEx (in CE 5.0 the former maps to the latter) are not in Menu.lib as per the documentation but in Coredll.lib.

Also causing problems was the macro redefining TrackPopupMenu to TrackPopupMenuEx was not working due to I believe Afx.h, so I just manually swapped to using the Ex function.

*MSDN url: ms-help://MS.WINCE.v50.en/wceshellui5/html/wce50lrfTrackPopupMenu.htm

After a year of planning to buy a Playstation 3, two weeks ago we purchased the Xbox 360. What changed? Kinect, it just looked so cool, and you can have multi-player without needing to buy yet another controller.

Dance Central is killer application in our house hold, my daughter loves the game, and the rest of us enjoy it greatly, but we get beaten mercilessly by her.

The reasons I was leaning towards the Playstation originally were:

• Region free games. This was a big issue for me, as our New Zealand Wii does not play US games and paying $90 USD for a NZ new game, which costs $55 here is annoying, waiting for shipping from NZ and not been able to pick-up cheap second hand games adds to the frustration.
• Free online gaming. I’ve seen lots of PS3 vs. Xbox fan-boy arguing over this issue, and I’m just not sure what $60USD gets me, or $99 to allow the family to play online.
• Xbox prior quality problems.

Now we have the Xbox, there are little things that annoy me:

• The endless advertising on the menu’s. I guess 50% of the panels on the system menu are advertising, and the start screen is always the ad’s
• Home game development cost $100 a year. It’s almost like Microsoft want $100/year from me one way or another. What with the online game fees or this, if you plan to get more than 20 hours of fun from a game (thus avoid buying another) MS wants their share of the lost pie
• The Facebook application is crap. Just show it in a freaking browser, the Group feature is missing and that’s the only way we use Facebook, thus it pointless and ugly.
• Movies costing 4-5 bucks to rent. No thanks, I’ll drive to Red Box and pay $1 thank you. I’ll admit that penalty/late fees involved with normal rental operation discounts the upfront movie cost, and it convenient not having to move from your sofa, but surely not by $3 dollars per movie.
• Being a southpaw, the buttons are on the wrong side of the controller in shooters. But I’m guessing this problem would have been present of the PS3 also.
• I really dislike my avatar’s name being my Xbox Live handle. We had four users with each person’s name, and now it’s ‘AttrachedSpore3 vs. Mahalia’ in dance central, nice touch. How about using my online handle for online stuff, and my chosen name for in game stuff. Please!
• MS Point, 400 for $4.99, but 800 is $9.99, so either to just took an extra cent of me for doubling the points, or the real price is more, and your just generously gift me one cent. Oh how nice, or maybe you’re playing the .99 price game. Also there is not volume discount, why not? It just seems very backwards.

But I’m mostly over that now. I had been keen to make some homemade games, but not two new games a year keen. Not sure where I sit on the pay to play online, it’s fun, other than I suck and I’m really struggling to adjust to not using a mouse and keyboard in FPS games. I’m completely ignoring the region locking of the games, which is so pointless, as the games are all playing on HD TV’s so it just about price control. Grrrr.

The reason I’m over it, the family has so much fun playing on it. In fact I can hear them arguing who’s turn it’s next, and I need to enforce the ‘Dad’s Time’ rule, like ‘Daddy Tax’ but for games, instead of food.

Version 1.1.5 of Curse of the Azure Bonds is now up on the Google Code project site (just the Windows build again).

Fixed in this version:

• Issue 57 & 52, Fixed crash in game script engine
• Issue 58, Fixed crash when removing Ring of Wizardry
• Fixed spelling and formatting mistakes

Any issues found, post them here in the comments, email me directly (simeon.pilgrim@gmail.com), or post on the issue list.

Executive Summary: The 2009 Nissan Sentra base model works with a 3 button remote entry device.

Longer Story:

When I got my 2009 Nissan Sentra (used) I took it to the local Nissan Dealer, to get it serviced and look at a few things.

Specially that the drivers door lock didn’t lock/unlock all the doors like the manual says it should and could a remote be added.

I was told, “No the base model cannot have a remote added (the ECM didn’t support it)” and “The door locking feature is not on the base model also, I even took the door panel off, and could see the lock cylinder, and there were no wires coming off it” thus proving it’s not an option.

Last weekend, I read on this forum that the 2007 and 2008 base model Sentra’s could have remote entry, but the 2009 had not had success reported yet.

With doubt in my mind I took the door panel off myself, and you cannot see the lock cylinder, as it’s covered by metal. Thus the lock looks like it’s removed from the outside?

With all this doubt over the dealers words in my mind, I purchased a used remote off eBay ($9 + $6 postage), which arrived today.

IT WORKS, following the Nissan remote programming instructions with a base model 2009 Nissan Sentra works.

I’m so happy, but also so sad that the local Nissan dealer’s lead technician lied straight to my face. Why would he do that? I liked having them service my car, I though servicing was where the money was made.

Remote Details:

3 button remote: lock, unlock, panic (all work with car)
FCC ID: CWTWB1U415
P/N 28268EA

eBay trader: keyless4u

[Update July 2011]

I was given a 5 button fob from a friend, and programmed it for my car.

5 button remote, lock, unlock and panic work. Trunk/side door do not.

FCC ID: KBRASTU51
MODEL NO.: ASTU51
IC: 2111B-ASTU51

For the Gold Box Explorer project on CodePlex, and I was wanting to help improve it’s graphics handling, so I downloaded the code via TortoiseSVN and made my changes.

When creating a patch some of the .cs (C# Code) files would not generate a difference and just showed:

Index: Common/Viewers/ImageFileViewer.cs
================================================
Cannot display: file marked as a binary type.
svn:mime-type = application/octet-stream

Looking at the SVN properties for the file you, see that it has the binary stream property set:

My first idea was to remove that incorrect property (via above Remove button), and then I tried create the patch again, but still the base file property was noted as binary, so SVN would not generate a patch.

As this code tree is a working copy to create patches from, I decided to hack the core of the problem. SVN thinks the file is binary because of settings in the .svn\prop-base for each file in that directory:

Thus if we delete all those files (only because I checked and they were all just binary stream properties, which are invalid for code files), then the base properties are gone for those files…

Now when you select your file to patch, SVN will happily create a code difference as expected:

You now can submit it to the CodePlex project.

I assume the incorrect properties are due to some SVN bridging TFS interaction, not sure how to test that out, or where to report it. It might be interesting to if I had commit access to see if you can remove those properties and committed those change if that stuck, or if it’s more of a dynamic bridging problem. Homework for the readers. ;-)

Ok, this is getting a little inbred, but I found it funny that the Google Ad on this page was the same You Tube video, maybe Microsoft could just pay me directly…

The new look for Google Feedburner now makes the product actually useful.

I love the use of the per time slot breakdown, like the stock value component on Google Finance. Also being able to view intra-day times is very neat.

If only I had way more feed followers, then I could spend longer delving into the data to gain magical insight*.

But as it is, Hello: United States, New Zealand, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Denmark and Cuba.

* not sure what magic insight would provide, as I don’t have it yet.

Just found the solution to making podcasts into permanent/normal music entries while clicking around in iTunes 10 today.

I’ve wanted to-do this for a while after listening to some talks I really liked, and would to keep those, but not the bigger podcast they were part of:

First select the tracks you wish to keep, right click, and choose  “Create MP3 Version”:

Then wait for them to process, and they appear in you normal music library, tagged and every thing:

Right next to your Red Hot Chile Peppers ;-)

I finished my Estes U.S. Army Patriot M-104 rocket in time for the scheduled rocket launch on Saturday, but the weather was not on our side.

Here are some photos of the rockets construction:

Jacob’s rocket is built but needs painting and decals applied, will post pic’s once it’s done.