Website may be up and down over next few months. I'm currently doing a complete overhaul of everything. Going back to simple individual .htm pages, new overall site theme, sanitizing and cleaning up html of all pages and blog posts, attempting to implement a new tooling and publishing system etc etc.

Shwing!

Published 2/23/2008 by createdbyx in News | Programming | XNA
The xna team just announced on Feb 20, 2008 that they will be finally making it possible to publish your home brew games on xbox live.

But wait that's not all. They are also bringing the xna platform to the ZUNE!!!  Un-freaking believable!!! Two thumbs up! WAY UP!

As I was looking on the neat for ways to hook up my wiimote controll to my bluetooth laptop I came across Jonny Chung Lee's wii projects page. In a word it's freaking awsome! Ok that was more than one word but still you should check out the amazing possibilities that are cheap to implement and make you realize just how much more versatile a wiimote can really be. Click here to visit the site.

The Last Mimzy

Published 1/29/2008 by createdbyx in News | Reviews
I just finished watching The Last Mimzy again and I have to say that I think this movie truly re-captures those feelings I felt as a kid watching movies like Back to the Future, The Goonies, and Explorers. It holds that same sense of adventure. So if you were a kid in the 80's remember to check out The Last Mimzy the next time you are in the video store or renting a movies from Zip.ca or NetFlix.

RPG objects

Published 1/28/2008 by createdbyx in Example | News | Programming
Tags:
I have posted a RPG objects example application on the projects page. The example code was written so that I could use it as a thinking tool. It implements a very basic RPG item system. Click here to get more info.

New projects page added

Published 1/22/2008 by createdbyx in News | Programming
I just finished adding a projects page to the site. You can find it here as well as the xImageSV image browsing application.

This xna code snip allows you to draw text, with the option of having that text word wrapped to the specified rectangle or you can specify text alignment info like weather or not the text should be drawn anchored to the bottom right of the rectangle or top right etc.

 You can find the code for the DrawString method here


I have not abandoned this site I'm still here and still playing wow, as a lvl 54 hunter named landasoar. I have also, believe it or not, started to write a little bit of code again. This time I have written some mmo related code for handling items and character knowledge (aka skills). It's just some code I wanted to write to get the feel for how complicated or simple it would be to write an item and character knowledge system. Turns out it rather easy and simple. That was until I broke the code earlier today trying to move it over from vs2008 to vs2005 and xna as well as add a few more features.

I will try to finish the port and get a simple working demo uploaded to this site ... whenever I can stop playing wow for a few hours.

Also, I still keep forgetting to upload the remaining 2 gigs or so of 4mp pictures I have taken these last two years. You can see what I have uploaded so far on the gallery page.

Don't expect much from me...

Published 12/10/2007 by createdbyx in News | XNA
Ugh! WOW is taking over my days. I managed to get my Zider project setup with the Codeplex Team Foundation system. But like 2 days after I did this, blogs were saying that the xna beta 2.0 beta was ending soon. After I just got my code ported to the beta! Grr shoulda just waited for the official release.

So now If I can just stop playing wow for a few days and start balancing my time I might actually get done some much needed coding.

Have I mentioned ...

Published 11/25/2007 by createdbyx in News | Programming
... how I hate web development. Everything always works perfectly fine on my local machine but as soon as I upload it to the server, Poof! It all goes to shit. Oh I'm so glad that I am getting near the end of this fiasco. As you can see the new site is up and running. Kind of. There are still issues with performance and it has not been fully tested yet but it is pretty much feature complete.

I am using the blog publishing system I implemented using MSDN My.Blogs code to make this post. So hopefully when I click the post button, it will work this time and not give me another bs security error. Here goes nothing ... Click

( EDIT: Grrrrr another frikin' error! IE: this post was made by editing the feed file directly! )

NEVER AGAIN!!!

Published 11/20/2007 by createdbyx in News

OK, time for a rant. NEVER AGAIN! I am never going to use another content management system again or so help me! grrrrr. Maybe I should start from the beginning...

Problem Number 1: Starting back around the beginning of august 2007 I noticed that I could no longer make blog posts or add any new content to my website that uses dnn. I think it may have had something to do with how godaddy was moving there "Value Applications" over to there new "Hosting Metropolis" service.

Any way I could not make updates to the site and with the mushroom picking season only a week or two away I was not going to worry about it too much. So around late September early October I got back from picking mushrooms, then too a short trip over to burns lake for a few days to help put up a tin roof on a pole shed. And as I figured when I got back dnn was still not allowing me to add or edit content on my site. I am actually making this post by editing the sql database directly

It was then that I started writing my own site in asp.net 2.0 again, for which I have now almost completed. And that's when the all the real bullshit started.

OMFG! Whoever thinks creating asp.net websites is easy, should be slapped, spanked, hung by there ankles, followed by the standard tar and feathering. Problem Number 2: Writing web applications is a nightmare compared to writing desktop applications. There are file path issues, view state, security, post backs, Linking problems you name it, it's all bullshit.

Problem Number 2: Bullshit publishing system in visual studio. I had my site relatively done, and wanted to publish it to my godaddy hosting server for testing. So I decided to use "Publish Web Site" under the build menu in visual studio having never used it before. The mother f***er deleted the files off my godaddy hosting server so it could have a direct one to one copy of the code I had on my local system. WTF!

Problem Number 3: createdbyx.com self destructs! So here is the thing, I installed dnn as a "Value Application" meaning that godaddy installs dnn on some other file store that I do not have access to. When I installed dnn I installed it under a dnn folder. That's why when you visit the createdbyx.com site the url always started with http://www.createdbyx.com/dnn/. So I was thinking that by publishing my new website it would not affect the existing dnn install and users could still visit the old site. Nope not so easy. Not only did it break by dnn install but my new website would not even run. Turns out putting a web.config file at the root of createdbyx.com screwes up dnn.

Problem Number 4: AJAX = Bullshit. Turns out godaddy is has shared hosting accounts setup with medium trust privileges. Meaning bullshit AJAX headaches I did not want to deal with. So I tried looking around the net for a solution but could not find one. The new site worked but only partially and there were path issues where only some pages would get skinned but not others. After struggling with trying to get it working I gave up and decided the I really didn't need to be using ajax anyway.

Problem Number 5: Began major rewrite of the new site stripping out all ajax code. So partly through rewriting the new site My brother decides to throw salt on the wound ala "Google does not like query strings because they will not index anything past the ?" F**K! My whole site was using query strings to pass data between pages and for deciding what to display. So then I started to re-write the re-writes!

http://rss.createdbyx.com/ Hateful distractions. My brother owns world of warcraft. I think you can see where I am going with this. I do not know weather or not to like or hate this game. It is not my type of game in the first place but I played Warcraft 1, 2 and 3 so I though I would give it a try. Four days later as a level 18 Druid I am finding my self having to make the decision weather to stop playing or buy the game and a subscription and finish the game.

Problem Number 6: I despise Blizzard. Specifically any company that incorporates a pay to play subscription model. I find no reason for it other then to rake in the cash for minimal work done. But that's just me. The real issue I am having is that if I do buy a subscription it means I will end up forcing myself to play because I do not want to waste my money by not playing and paying for a subscription that I do not even use.

So now that I have stopped playing world of warcraft or a few days, I have had the time to get more work done on the new website and will be testing it at createdbyx.com again within the next few days. I'll be crossing my fingers and and praying that all goes smoothly this time, but with my luck we'll just have to wait and see...

I would also like to mention that if you subscribe to me blog feed that I will be changing it's location to http://rss.createdbyx.com/ once the new site is published.

 *sigh* Thank you. I feel much better now.  :P


Created by: X

Just another personal website in this crazy online world

Name of author Dean Lunz (aka Created by: X)
Computer programming nerd, and tech geek.
About Me -- Resume