Three Cards to Midnight somehow involves Tarot cards and possibly conjours up some form of horror/mystical gaming elements. A teaser trailer has been released on the Unofficial Tex Murphy website where a Quicktime version may be dowloaded here. It offers no detail on the game itself (mechanics or story) but I’m sure it’ll be a must have as the Tex games had great stories.

The official game site is only a placeholder at the moment but be sure to keep an eye on it.

Adding OpenSearch to your site is very easy. Create a file with content as defined by the OpenSearch Description Document Specification and then link that file in for all pages from your site (typically add it to a file common to all pages such as the header) using the <link rel=”search”> directive.

At the same time I’ve expanded the search scope to all site content rather than just the posts using the ‘Search Everything’ plugin and added a favicon which should be displayed in the address bar when visiting the site.

Any issues then please let me know.

Unless you completely obsess over the temperature of your CPU or the voltage rate of the 5V rail this type of utility is only run one in a while to check all is well (typically before/during/after an overclocking attempt). Today I happened across a very lightweight tool from the team that provided the equally excellent cpu-z. It’s called Hardware Monitor (catchy name!) and is provided in a 355KB archive. Very small but perfectly formed it is!

Hop over to their site and grab a copy of HWMonitor. If cpu-z is anything to go by you may to keep checking back as they’re usually quite a prolific bunch!

Never been to a rock concert with props and actors previously so didn’t know what to expect but these just served to enhance the Mindcrime story. All members of the band (including Pamela Moore who reprised her original role of ‘Sister Mary’) put on an impressive performance. Even the Mindcrime II material played well live and I came away with a different level of appreciation of it!

It wasn’t all as good as could have been however. The sound system was distored and the equalisation between vocals and music wasn’t as good as it should have been - some of the lyrics were too easily lost in the music. Whether that was an issue with the Colston Hall (Bristol) or the sound setup who knows! The crowd didn’t put a lot of effort into the Mindcrime material as they could have done but that was probably because it was seated. Queensrÿche rounded off the night with two tracks from Empire which thankfully got the crowd going albeit 2 hours too late…

All in all a great evening out with SWMBO and a couple of friends on a special day of the year :cool:

.NET Release History

.NET 1.0 was a good start but the development environment (VS2002) was dreadful.

.NET 1.1 brought about a few fixes and shipped with VS2003 which was only a slight improvement in developer experience. I wonder if they know the “3 strikes and out” rule?

Thankfully the next release skipped a year. Shipping with VS2005 it was a huge improvement over the previous releases. Not perfect but altogether more rounded - basically, it’s what .NET development should have been from the start! Migration wasn’t painless but the new language features were just too good to miss!

Then common sense seems to get lost…

.NET 3.0 was nothing more than a few (albeit very very good) additions (WCF, WF, WPF, Cardspace) to .NET 2.0 so why wasn’t it just called 2.5 - it even needs .NET 2.0 installed :confused: Obviously marketing people got involved (hey, I know first hand what that means given I work for some of the ‘best’) and probably wanted a ‘new’ product to sell. There wasn’t an update to Visual Studio for this release but instead Microsoft released a poorly put together (some of which remained as a CTP) set of VS2005 extensions.

Roughly a year later - Nov 2007… What did they release but the latest version as .NET which is now 3.5. This is actually a complete package that, in comparison to .NET 3.0, has not a great deal in it. Also in this case the ‘.5′ doesn’t really mean add-on to existing - the download size is a now bandwidth sapping 195MB. Man alive, they really need to get themselves sorted! They also shipped a new version of Visual Studio, 2008.

Visual Studio Support

Each major version (excluding the misguided branding of 3.0) of .NET has shipped with a new Visual Studio version. Historically this has meant that an upgrade of the developer toolset was required to develop against the latest .NET Framework.

Well, just to confuse the picture further, this isn’t the case with .NET 3.5. Nope, you can develop applications that target .NET 3.5 using any VS2005 installation. Simply reference the new assemblies manually (Add Reference, Browse to file) and you’ll soon be doing snazzy things like making use of the System.AddIn namespace or maybe integrating LINQ to turn computer-geek ‘foreach loops’ into something more readable (not as if I personally had any issues with the former). Hell, you can impress your colleagues with your new found skills :cool:

If you *do* decide to upgrade your toolset (perhaps you’ll be wanting to use the XAML editor or more likely have a much improved user experience with .NET 3.0 facilities) you should also be happy to know that .NET 3.5 still uses the .NET Framework 2.0 runtime at its core. It includes a bunch of updates in the form of Service Pack 1 so there should be no breaking changes. Whether you consider the upgrade cost a worthwhile one depends on the features you use I guess.

Team Foundation Server

To round off, TFS was also updated and instead of being a significant evolution what shipped was merely a lightly polished update to TFS V1.1. Not exactly earth shattering and somewhat surprising given the level of uptake in medium-large organisations (i.e. not that many, quite a few have ‘plans’ but perhaps fail to see the benefits of a few products (SQLServer/Reporting Services, Sharepoint Services, SCM) held together with gaffer tape and bits of string).

Hopefully next time, 2010? things will be better

Some of the old site’s facilities have been removed [for now] and will probably make a reappearance some time later in the year. I’m looking a new gallery so that will probably be next on the list to complete.

Enjoy your stay - even if it’s just for a few nano-seconds. Feedback is encouraged and can be posted as comments to the site. No spam, warez, pron, sob stories from Africa or other rubbish like that please.

We were right at the front and their stage presence was simply stunning!

If you have the chance to see them then I’d recommend going. Check out the tour dates here.

During my working day I find that the most important items are never too far away. Back in the days of Windows 95, I was a convert to a small ‘Powertool’ that went by the name of ‘DeskMenu’. The idea was simple - add an icon to the System Tray that when clicked would present the set of Desktop icons as selectable items. This worked great up until Windows XP where it became outdated by not displaying the alpha channel of icons. As an aside, it also didn’t support folders that made it a bit more limiting. To the rescue was Microsoft with their new ‘Desktop’ toolbar which is/was a great idea! Shame is that even though I’ve persevered with it for a couple of years (more fool me!) it highlighted an extremely annoying bug that wasn’t going to be fixed any time soon. So this evening I’ve written a very simple utility that provides me with the functionality I’d want. Feel free to download/try/keep/reject it as you see fit. As you can probably guess it’s a .NET application (V2.0 Framework required) so isn’t the lightest utility around!

Download: DeskMenu.NET

I picked up a standard size B with [soft padded] arms, lumbar support and finished in graphite. I spent the first couple of weeks with the chair adjusted to suit my working environment but I just didn’t feel fully comfortable! After re-reading the ergonomic seating position material I had, I decided to take some fairly drastic action and wielded a saw at my desk! A couple of hours, adjustment of monitor and chair to suit and I now feel much better!Simple lesson is that more than one thing may have to change or order to improve your working from home experience! I’d certainly recommend the chair but be prepared to adjust your use to it rather than make it fit as is

Download: Filtered Debug Viewer