Aspirations, thoughts, and Operator overloading

More important things have happened over the week but the one thing that stands out at the moment is this little tidbit:

Cleaning a volume control knob with alcohol. I would probably have never thought of that.

Freaking awesome.

I’ve been having trouble with my Creative Inspire 6.1 6600 for several months now. Heck, it’s probably been about a year. I would set the volume to somewhere between 3 and 5 and it would start fading out, then back in and then out again. Lately it had been really all over the place.

I finally got fed up with it and decided I would reapply solder to the circuit board in the wired remote but that didn’t do any good.

In the end it is a simple fix – Alcohol. This shouldn’t surprise me as this is what we had to do with Nintendo games (as my wife reminds me) years ago. The contacts evidently get grime on them and don’t conduct like they’re supposed to.

Now if the popping will go away.

Ugh.

I had no idea just how badly my knowledge of C programming was until I attempted to read a single value from the registry.

In the end I found that the majority of my problems were because of UNICODE being defined for Windows XP and Windows Vista. For all I know it’s probably defined for Windows 2000 and newer.

I “cheated” in a way and used the ANSI versions of the functions due to my inexperience. Hopefully I’ll be able to revisit the project in the future and fix it the way it should have been to begin with.

I was plowing through the emails I’ve let pile up (quite a few are from myself – content for here or the wiki) and came across this:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated “Dungeon Siege (Jewel Case)” or other games in the PC Games > Role-Playing category have also purchased “Barbie Horse AdventuresTM: Riding Camp”. For this reason, you might like to know that “Barbie Horse AdventuresTM: Riding Camp” will be released on October 21, 2008. You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

Barbie Horse AdventuresTM: Riding Camp

Activision

Price: $29.99

Release Date: October 21, 2008

Uhm, no. I don’t think so. That couldn’t be further from what I’m looking forward to next.

Waaaay off there Amazon.

Update:

No word yet on the DRM used (let’s hope “none!”)

Today was an interesting sort of day. I fixed the last remaining issue from the implementation yesterday of a Python script to configure printer settings and demoed a project to regulate volume levels for public access systems.

I almost couldn’t believe that I finally got the project working; albeit the code is ugly and error checking is scarce but I’m impressed that I finally managed to build something useful with C++. You can only get so far with Hello World. It was also great to see people nod in appreciation when I demonstrated it.

It’s nice to feel useful every now and then.

Oh yeah, I also ruined a batch of Cream of Wheat. It turns out I didn’t burn it – I just didn’t add enough Cream of Wheat. When it failed to thicken after 2.5 minutes I chalked it up to the lack of salt (a bonehead conclusion on my part). I didn’t realize that I grabbed a 1/4 cup instead of 3/4 cup. Oh well.

I also received a very thought provoking email reply from my brother. I’ll have to mention that again when I feel like writing more.

View Article

Virginia Supreme court rules that spammer has the right to send spam under the Free Speech Clause. As you can imagine, there is an appeal to that ruling.

I rushed outside this morning (running behind) to find the air crisp and feeling very much like my favorite season on the way.

Work was “work” and progress seemed to crawl along. I managed to complete (let’s hope) a Python script to inject binary values into two registry keys depending on what system it runs on. The keys represent “mail boxes” for locked printer jobs.

The hex encoded binary string is 8176 characters long (only stating it because I’m sort of amazed at the length) and contains all settings for that printer. I wonder if the devs realized that breaking individual settings out into subkeys would be a good thing?

Oh well.

I’m also making good progress on an audio volume limiter (governor). It’ll run every X seconds and make sure that the various mixer volume levels are within a set threshold. If not the volume controls will be lowered to the maximum allowed.

The concept and pseudocode is pretty simple, but dealing with the WinAPIs is another story.

Thankfully I found an article showing how to set the master volume and I managed to get the waveOut code from there. I had no idea just how ugly working with ALL CAPS TYPEDEFS CAN BE. IT’S NOT LIKE IT MAKES IT HARD TO READ OR ANYTHING. I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

According to various sources, including the developers, today The Witcher Enhanced Edition is released.

They’ve mentioned that the update pack for the original release will be available on Sept 19th. Pretty awesome of them to do this and make things right with their customers. Hopefully they will forever avoid EA.

It’s amazing what B/W photography can do.

See more puppies

View Site

Pretty cool.

They’ve also placed a timeline on the site as well.

What a time for dyslexia to kick in.