The IM Failure

This is completely insane. First, Microsoft has rendered its new Windows Live Messenger (previously MSN messenger) almost completely useless.

• No more handwriting
• No more setting your name to anything other then your first and last name.
• All links you click on redirect you to a page from Microsoft warning you about the dangers of the internet, requiring you to click a link to proceed.
• All photosharing is now incompatible with previous versions of messenger, and instead of actually just sending the file, it will instead fail completely.
• Any youtube video, image, or any other link you copy paste into the window will automatically trigger a sharing session whether you like it or not.
• It will, at times, randomly decide none of your messages are getting through.
• You can no longer have a one-sided webcam session. WLM will simply leave your webcam as a giant, useless blank image underneath your conversation partner, demanding that you buy a webcam.
• It's new emoticons must have been influenced by H.R.Giger (you can't turn them off and leave custom ones on).

Naturally I wasn't able to put up with this for very long and moved to pidgin. Pidgin has many issues of its own, including an ass-backwards UI design and this really annoying tendency to create a new popup window to confirm every single file transfer, among other truly bizarre UI design elements. I was willing to put up with these, because honestly pidgin is designed for Linux and just happens to work on windows too, and their libpurple library is the basis of almost all open-source IM clients.

Pidgin, however, has now stopped working as well. It now spastically refuses to connect to the MSN service because the SSL certificate is invalid. I can appreciate it trying to protect my privacy, but there is no way to override this. So, pidgin is now out of the question.

Well, how about Trillian? During its installation, Trillian informed me that "The Adobe Flash 9.0 plugin for Internet Explorer could not be found. This plugin is required for some of Trillian's features."

Trillian is no longer on my computer.

After digging around on wikipedia, I came up with Miranda IM, which seemed to be my last hope for a multi-protocol service that didn't suck total ass. It supported WLM, AIM, and... not google talk? Not XMPP, the most useful extensible open source protocol? Um, ok. Its UI design is more compact then Pidgin but arguably even worse, and it doesn't support custom emoticons or hardly ANYTHING on the WLM protocol. It served its purpose by at least letting me log the fuck in like I wanted to, though.

This is driving me up the wall. If anything else happens, I'm going to snap and simply make time to work on my own IM client implementation that doesn't have glaring design flaws like every single other one. Honestly, requiring the Internet Explorer flash plugin to run everything? What the fuck are they smoking? What the hell is wrong with these developers?!

If only D had a good development environment, then I could write my IM client in it.

How To Train Your Dragon

...takes its place as one of my favorite movies of all time. The characters are brilliant, the story is superb, the music is divine, and the cinematography is breathtaking. It was so good it gave me the last bit of inspiration I needed to make this (WIP), and as a result my attempts at finishing CEGUI this weekend were thrown out the window. Tomorrow I'll try a first draft of the drums and possible a couple of effects before extending the main chorus. These new samples are amazing - it's like I can do everything I ever wanted. Now the hard part is figuring out what I want. I threw in a bunch of binaural sounds thanks to the free sound project, which has been added to my mental list of useful resource sites.

I finally got the entire CEGUI dependency chain statically recompiled and have wrapped everything into a giant megadll with no dependencies. I then discovered that for all this time, PlaneShader's Release mode had been defaulting to __fastcall. I have no idea how it has even been compiling with my other projects; the reason I don't change the calling convention is because it breaks absolutely everything. For good measure I threw a few extra BSS_FASTCALL into the really high traffic functions.

So, if it weren't for my sudden musical inspiration, I'd be rebuilding the GUI in CEGUI, although I also need to figure out how the heck it renders text, because I need a text renderer, and I can't just require CEGUI's to be used. I need to build a very basic but supercrazyfast text renderer, because holy shit is directX bad at that.

After that I finalize a midpoint release of planeshader and move to reimplementing Decoherence's GUI in CEGUI, then FINALLY get to those joints that were supposed to be done ages ago.

Of course, I also have a midterm wednesday. Fuck.

Album For Sale! [Renascent]

Due to Bandcamp's sudden threat to turn all of my free downloads into paid ones, I decided to go ahead and start selling my music properly. Renascent is now available for $3, or about as much as a gallon of milk costs. It contains remastered, super high quality (lossless if you choose to download in FLAC format) versions of all 14 songs, in addition to the original FLP project files used to create them. If you have ever wondered how I made a particular song, this might be another incentive to purchase the album. Note that these FLPs are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, so you can't go running off with them like free candy.

Track List:
1. On The Edge (2:56)
2. Renascent (4:06)
3. The Boundless Sea (6:49)
4. Duress (2:40)
5. Seaside Lookout (4:54)
6. Sapphire [Redux] (2:20)
7. Absolutia (3:04)
8. The Plea (3:46)
9. Now (2:34)
10. Alutia (4:10)
11. Rite (5:20)
12. Crystalline Cloudscape (4:04)
13. All Alone (3:06)
14. SunStorm (4:12)

Total Time: 56:44

Listen and Buy It Here

Portland and Zaron

On Wednesday, Zaron mentioned that he was heading to Kumoricon (anime convention) in Portland, Oregon on Friday, but that the actual convention didn't start until Saturday. So, I figured this was a great time to be a gigantic hilarious fanboy and be like "I CAN MEET ZARON IN PERSON!!!!" Getting there and back in one day wasn't feasible, so they said I could crash with them for a night, and I ended up riding a train there.

I took a bus to the train and everything was peachy, except the guy next to me was apparently very social. As a result, me not talking vary much and just looking out the window eventually prompted him to say something to the effect of, "Do I make you nervous?" Well, now you sure fucking do!

Got off the train, found light rail station, tried to call Zaron but he couldn't hear me, then proceeded to be scared shitless of what I can only presume are gang members hanging around there with boomboxes cranking out distorted hiphop. Meanwhile, I am a skinny, white middle-class male with luggage who clearly doesn't know where he is. Zaron called back while I was there, having apparently moved to a quiet location, and I told him that I would just call him back when I got to the hotel. Now he knows why I said that.

I was glad I scoped out the area with Google streetview first because my stop wasn't named what I thought it would be named. Finding the hotel with the convention, however, was very easy.

"Is that.... Is that supposed to be Cloud? Is that hair blue? What the f-"

The convention was a hilarious disaster. Zaron's friend, LardMan, recorded them starting at the beginning and walking all the way down to the end. It took 2 and a half minutes. They had been there about a half hour before I arrived, at which point I just laughed and wandered around the convention, staring at all the crazy costumes. There was inu'yasha, umbreon, like 4 people with keyblades, and this guy with a GIANT PLASTIC SUNFLOWER. A few girls with cat ears and the wackiest hairdos I have ever seen. I thought some of them had found a way to violate the laws of physics.

Almost the first thing Zaron gave me was this. The night before they left for the convention, he said he was drawing something and couldn't find his markers and would have to use crayola so I laughed at his misfortune and wondered aloud what pointless thing he was drawing. Then he told me "You wouldn't be laughing if you knew what it was." Hence, upon viewing the amazing masterpiece that he made just for me, I, of course, exclaimed "YOU ASSHOLE!"

The irony.

After it took them like an hour to get all registered, we all went out for dinner. I convinced them to go to subway (a whole 2 blocks away) and learned that I walk very fast when excited. Zaron let me flip through his sketchbook and various other things while I asked embarrassing questions and fanboy'd over all the pictures. Their printer failed in amazing new ways because the red ink didn't work, so they are probably printing out greyscale business cards now. Then we went to see SCOTT PILGRIM which is one of the greatest movies ever made and anyone that says otherwise will DIE in a HILARIOUS MANNER.

Then we did stuff and went to sleep.

We were woken up by the cleaning lady going "Oops sorry!" as she closed the door on the hotel room. We then watched a stupid TV show for an hour and I said goodbye, went downstairs, slipped through the crowds and vanished on to the street. Got to the train station and hour early, did stuff, went home, everything was peachy.

And then I realized that I had paid for absolutely nothing the entire time because the only money in my wallet was enough for a bus fare. THEY are the ones with money problems, not me :(

BUT HEY I GOT PORN A HAND-DRAWN PICTURE FROM ZARON SO WOOHOO!

_{I am totally not creepy at all.}

WavSaver

There is a documented bug in windows 7 that has pissed me off a few times and recently crippled a friend of mine, where a .wav file with corrupted metadata causes explorer.exe to go into an infinite loop. My friend has a large collection of wavs that somehow got corrupted, so I wrote this program to strip them of all metadata. Due to the nature of the bug, the program can't delete them (you must use the command prompt to do that), but rather creates a folder called "safe" with all the stripped wav files inside of it.

Hosted in case anyone else has corrupted wav files they need to save. Just stick it inside a folder and run it - it'll automatically strip all wav files in the same folder as the executable.

WavSaver