Lego Star Wars - Problems with wide screen

A little while ago I bought Lego Star Wars to join my other copy, Lego Star Wars II.
There were initially some problems getting the joystick to play nice, but after removing the override settings in the joystick configuration and deleting the SWLEGO.BIN file, everything was sweet.

Until I noticed issues with the screen resolution. You don’t actually get to select what sort of wide screen you want to display, some how it just picks it up for you. I would set the screen detail to max (1600×1200), quit, start the game up and somehow, it was displaying 1920×1200. I could tell because it wasn’t shifting my wallpaper on my second screen like some low res games do (Starcraft for example).
You would think this would be alright. Except the next day when I would play the game, it wasn’t wide screen anymore. It wasn’t even 1600×1200. It was back to the simple 640×480 mode. When I set it back to 1600×1200, quit and re-open: it would be at 1600×1200. I was missing out on the wide screen.

Solution
After deleting the SWLEGO.BIN file a few more times and making sure that it was reproducible (at least on my machine) I worked out that I could copy a certain version of the SWLEGO.BIN file (when I had changed to 1600×1200 for the first time) and it would start up at the right resolution with widescreen. I was about to head over to the Batch file section on the wiki to write me a script that would do the copy automatically (not much really) when it dawned on my *make the file read only*. In the process, I was concerned that if the program was writing to this file on startup, a read only config file may cause it to barf. But it didn’t. It’s great. As long as I don’t have to change anything else I should be set.

Finding help on the game has been a little difficult, as the official website http://www.legostarwarsthevideogame.com/ doesn’t seem to be configured.
The first time I visited http://www.eidos.com/ to see if there were any patches or forums I was running into trouble on a) how to find the game and b) where are the on the page are the downloads. On second viewing (when writing this post), it seems a little more accessible.

One thing I found funny in the readme

Make sure you do not have any Anti-Virus utilities (like Norton’s AntiVirus) running resident prior to playing LEGO Star Wars.

Is this really the sort of things that professional companies should be pushing?

Anyway, I hope that someone else finds this interesting. I’ll see if I can raise a bug with eidos or possibly decode the binary file to find out why it is forgetting the screen resolution.

Another toy

Who needs words when you have a picture like this…

This should keep things interesting for a little while although I really need to find a good place to put it.

For all of you following the progress of my broken helicopter, it is still in two, but I know how I want to fix it now. It has only taken a couple of months to work out what I want to do :D

Belated last day

My last day at hyro was a little busier than I had hoped. So busy that I had to finish up my documentation on the weekend.
But that didn’t get in the way of having cake.

You may have noticed that the cake was in the shape of some shorts. The joke being that you were eating my shorts. I got a laugh at of some people. Most just thought of it as a typical Russell joke.

The great cleanup has begun, but it was only a small dent yesterday. I love not being in a rush to do anything.

-= Comments
1. Mark | December 4th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Your photos always get a laugh at of me

2. Daniel Mullens | December 6th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Hey Russler,

Was bored at work so I thought I’d scope out your site again.

Quiting your job? Kudos. Must be rad to turn your back on the man and enjoy a prolonged vacation. And what a way to celebrate - with arse cake…

Probably see you at the Mullens Xmas Festivus.

Peace.

Working with XSLT

The project I’m supposed to be working on is going to have a large focus on XSLT. So a while ago I looked into it and had a play around.
Then did some XSLT related to the project. All was good.

But you never really learn anything unless you use it for your own requirements. So I thought: “html should be valid xml. I should be able to apply XSLT to a html page and get some values out of it”. The wiki we use at work supports an xslt tag and the page I was going to target was bash.orgs latest page. On my first few attempts, I only got errors.
So I simplified it to use a working example (just to make sure that the XSLT engine was working in the wiki); all was good.
I changed the XSLT to be as simple as possible. still good.
I then changed the source back to bash.org and it failed. Turns out that the site is invalid. Pitty.
I have a feeling that the web will change and become quite interesting when everyone adheres to well formed html.

Anyway, to the interesting point.
At one point, I was parsing an XSLT document as the source of information (since XSLT is well formed XML anyway).
It got me thinking. Could you ever write an XSLT transformer with XSLT? (probably not)
But the funny thing I thought of, the first bug tracking system. If it was done in an agile fashion, version 0.0.1 would only support creating bugs, and the bug list would look something like
* Cannot edit bugs
* Cannot resolve bugs
* Cannot assign bugs to person
* Cannot tell who created bugs
* Cannot distinguish between bug and feature request
ah, distractions. Probably should get back to work.

-= Comments
1. Mark | November 16th, 2007 at 11:03 am
“html should be valid xml. I should be able to apply XSLT to a html page and get some values out of it”
Valid XHTML is XML and you can apply transformations, but HTML isn’t well formed.

“I have a feeling that the web will change and become quite interesting when everyone adheres to well formed html.”
I don’t think we’re going to get there any time soon, when XHTML is actually supported in browsers I forsee a big shift in the way markup is generated and used, XHTML must be valid or it just dies. So people won’t be typing long strings of XHTML by hand but rather parse it with other proccesses that ensure valid, well structured markup.

It’s hard too see where we’ll end up though, while Web Standards is gaining ground - so are frameworks where the bottom line is productivity, and web standards isn’t on their prioirty list. I think we’re going to lose of people to the Flex, good luck parsing that! ASP.NET encourages you not to work with / think about the generated markup, the controls are that abstracted. This is another reason I’m really enjoying Rails at the moment, it generates clean markup, and it encourages best practice in the front-end coding.
–
But you can still use DOM to walk the tree of a document, even if it isn’t completely valid. Thinking about it you should be able to request a page with HttpRequest and then traverse that with DOM..maybe

xhr.open(’GET’, ‘http://www.bash.org/?latest’, false);
… do things..
var content = document.createElement(’div’);
content.innerHTML = xhr.responseText;

// Get all links In page
var linksInBashLatest = content.getElementsByTagName(’a');

It’s not as efficient or as nice as XSL but if you need to get parts of the document you should be able to it with javascript..perhaps

How not to start a long weekend

Low life, pathetic scum.
I think it was done at the Bayswater car park, but I didn’t actually notice when I got in the car to drive it home.

Gaa

-= Comments
1. Mark | November 8th, 2007 at 10:00 am
VINCENT
You know what some fucker did to it the other day?

LANCE
What?

VINCENT
Fuckin’ keyed it.

LANCE
Oh man, that’s fucked up.

VINCENT
Tell me about it. I had the goddamn thing in storage three years. It’s out five fuckin’ days — five days, and some dickless piece of shit fucks with it.

LANCE
They should be fuckin’ killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.

VINCENT
I just wish I caught ‘em doin’ it, ya know? Oh man, I’d give anything to catch ‘em doin’ it. It’a been worth his doin’ it, if I coulda just caught ‘em, you know what I mean?

LANCE
It’s chicken shit. You don’t fuck another man’s vehicle.

From hyro to ....

I’ve put this off for a while but it is worth noting now.
Lucien picked up that I added an end date on my employment history on the wiki. Now I get to say why.

I originally join HotMagna, a small agile company that focused on simple Java solutions to technical issues. About the time I joined they were bought out by hyro. Like any joining, there was a little turbulence whilst the company worked itself out and I was happy to sit through it and assist in its transformation. hyros focus has been more on creative solutions and assisting companies in advertising their services.
For the past year or so, hyro has gone from an interest to buying Synergy, acquiring Synergy and starting to integrating their business into the hyro “family”. This is where things started to get hard for me. We now had 3 companies that approach different problems and internally, solved problems in very different ways. Whilst I have no doubt that once the company as a whole works out its direction, it will be an interesting company and place to work; it has got in the way of me coding.
And there focus is definitely on me.

I want to code. I miss the days of Uni where I would wake up early Saturday and code through day and some of the night until I needed to sleep. I can’t do that in a standard business because budget is always going to get in the way.

Many have pondered what I will be doing after I leave. The most direct answer I can give is sleeping in. After that, I’m not sure.
There are a couple of options that I have available:

• A couple of friends have caught wind of my intentions, and would be happy to work with me (more development).


• My brother is always looking for more people to join him as an air conditioner architect.


• I’m tempted to find out how hard it is to make money out of google ads on a website.


• I could also chase the dream of building entry level websites for small business owners.

I’m probably not going to look for anything in December since most people will be gearing down for Christmas. I am going on holiday with the family in January so I won’t be looking for a job then either.

If I come up with anything else that might be relevant, I’ll let you know.

-= Comments
1. Andrew B Coathup | November 6th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Leaving your first job is very hard.

Leaving and not having anything lined up is a big step.

Enjoy the summer break. There are companies out there where you can just code. If I had more time in my day then I could do that where I am. Don’t give up the coding.

I know people who have lived the dream and set up there own companies. There is still lots of money (and fun) to be had doing applications for very niche markets. The VB boys did that for all of the 90’s.

Good luck. You have made a big step.

I did the same 2 and a 1/2 years in to my first job and went travelling.

2. Xavier | November 7th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Nice one. It really annoys me when people complain about their jobs but won’t quit.

Steve Pavlina has some really good articles on making money out of a blog (and life in general), which I’d highly recommend.

Also, come along to the melbourne ruby meetup next thursday. Always companies looking for good people, plus it’s a good crowd to have a drink with. And it’s ruby! Also, I am doing a presentation

I don’t know why cyclists get a bad name

I have nothing against people who ride bikes on the road.
Sometimes it would be nice not to have them there, but they normally don’t do anything wrong.

Then I seen this guy.

Yup, that’s right. On his bike and using a mobile.

-= Comments
1. Mark | October 8th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
You always have a camera at the ready

You just solved a riddle though, this morning I wondered why the exhausts on busses shoot out of the right side and fill my car with fumes.. It’s for the benefit of the one armed cyclists talking on mobiles, I mean he couldn’t possibly stay on his bike AND talk on the phone AND breathe fumes…

2. Matthew Delves | October 8th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Most cyclists do use a handsfree.

As for me, just as when I’m driving, I refuse to answer the phone.

Thanks,
Matthew Delves