I'm a VB guy. BASIC runs in my veins. I was programming in BASIC on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ when I was 4. But suddenly, I find myself trapped in a world of C#!

The project was a highly customized blog running the dasBlog engine for Michele Leroux Bustamante. The problem is that dasBlog is all in C# (1.1/2003!). I have done very little work in C#. And now I know why.

Just getting a simple data editing webform to work is like battling a Krayt Dragon while being blindfolded! I did manage to finish the work, but it was painful! Now I'm led to believe that one of the following is the case:

• Visual Basic users are spoilt and can't live without autocomplete and automatic code formatting
• C# is terribly unproductive
• I was drunk and I didn't know it (quite possible) or as they say in C# [quite possible]
• C# just plain sucks, while VB just plain rocks
• VB just plain ROCKS, while C# just plain sucks
• I had a terrible dream, like the one where I'm being chased by angry country singers
• {your opinion here}
• {your other opinion here}
• or as a C#'er told me, "try C++, then you will see how easy C# is"

'Nuff said.

Carefully look at the picture below. On top, marked in red, you will see the title of application. On the bottom, also marked in red, you will see an advertisement for the application itself.

C'mon, how hard can selective/filtered advertising be? This is like a commercial of a TV show being shown WHILE THAT SHOW IS ON. I mean, that's just stupid. Where the hell is all the personalization we keep hearing about, huh?

So today I *finally* got the delivery of my new Samsung 997DF 19" monitor. The dinky little 17" looks so small next to it. I got tired of waiting for the 23" inch TFT's prices to go down, and just got the 19" CRT. It will do me good until they start shipping Athens PCs.

Now all I need to do is figure out how (and if) I can get my on-board AGP working side-by-side with my 128MB GeForce FX. Or just get an extra graphics card if that doesn't work. Then I will have THREE monitors.

The new version of the site will be launched on 1st January along with a ton of new content - including a new MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY gallery, and the new series of paintings entitled "Liquid Carnage"

... when Dad starts imitating the Grinch ... or maybe its a natural pose. :-P

My blog has always been reflective of nukeation.com, and nukeation.com has always been reflective of my current "mood". With Vista and Aero and Avalon taking up most of my mental bandwidth, I crafted Digital Exile to look like the upcoming Nukeation.com "skin" which is reflective of Vista and the new "glass" stuff I've been experimenting with.

I also wanted to remove the clutter of the previous design. I finally added a slideshow in this upgrade. It's Flash based, and runs on XML, so I'll be updating it often.

Another addition is the ANNOUNCEMENTS panel where upcoming projects in which I'm involved are listed (and linked, if possible).

As always, please feel free to send comments about how you love or hate the new design.

Have you ever noticed that there is a very thin line between cute and creepy when it comes to children's things. For example, CLOWNS. They scare me!

Maybe it has to do with growing up watching the Joker on Batman. Then again, if you take in the 60s Batman show, well, Batman scared me more than Joker in that one.

Darth Maul, the guy who scared everyone, was inspired by conceptul artist, Ian McCaig's fears of clowns.

Forget clowns. Take any nursery rhyme. Empty the stage, add some soft hollow music, or worse a simple monotonous piece of piano music, and with just a small twist in the voice, you can make a cutesy-pie children's song into something that will haunt you for the rest of your life.

If the children are the future, and an asset we need to safeguard, then why subject them to such cruel things?! If I had a kid, I would feel much better if he or she had a Darth Vader doll and practiced force-choking people than have a clown with shiny eyes!

Excuse me, I gotta go throw away some of my niece's toys!

If you can hook up a security camera with a face recognition software and some minor hydraulics to change your normal welcome mat with one of these... hmm... it could work. Would be nice. "Selective welcome insults".

Since Beta 1, I've been trying out the cool custom control features of Visual Studio 2005. And along the way, I've made some controls for in-house applications and some other projects. Now, you know me - I'm graphical to the core. These are super sweet looking eye-candy controls, and with solid functionality (as far as I know!).

Take a look at some of the controls:

Nukeation Navigator was inspired by VISTA and Microsoft's corporate site design. It has back-next navigation in a single control with 6 different themes ("Aero Glass", "Pure Liquid", "Jungle", "Nuke" [of course], "Lava", and "Rainbow").

Nukeation Progressbar is a chunk from the upcoming software NukeBall. We use this heavily for simple progress display. Very cool looking.

Nukeation Panel is a subclassed version of the standard Panel control. But this one has a gradient background, dropshadow, and a TITLE and DESCRIPTION property - ideal for wizards or dialog headers! Supports custom colors, 6 in-built color schemes, or OS-theme.

nProgress is old (from 1.1), but was ported to 2.0 and had some new functionality added to it. This is a fixed-size progress control with some seriously cool graphics! The "downloader" of PwopCatcher created by Carl Franklin uses this very progress bar.

I'm trying to fix some problems in nRange a range meter that shows 3 different ranges (ex: blue 5-10, green 8-23). If that is done, I'll pack it in.

Uhh... pack it in to what? Well, NukeControls! A freeware pack of cool aforementioned controls for .NET 2.0!

 

These controls will be released under the "I don't give a damn what you do with it, but some credit would be appreciated" license. More on this later.

Let's start with the "symbolic" big-wig of Vista - the ROUND Start button. It seriously looks cool, and I spent a hundred clicks on it just to see it light up.

When you jump into "COMPUTER", formerly "MY COMPUTER", you are greeted by the new cool Hard Drive icons (the Flagged Drive is a leftover icon, I think, from the previous builds).

This weekend, I might install 5270 on my HP TC1100 Tablet. Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on how fast (and if) I can restore to my EXTREMELY customized settings. But when I do install Vista on the Tablet, the EXTRA LARGE icons will be a big blessing!

Alright, I'm too tired to go on. I need some sleep and then back to work. More soon!

PS. The customizable AERO interface is much sweeter!!

By the Force! This build rocks. The installer looks better, the startup process is looking better, the new round START button just plain rocks!

They finally added the RUN feature right into START SEARCH. I need to install Corel Capture and start taking screenshots! This is the most bloggable thing since... since... build 5231. :-P

Seriously tho, they've really improved Windows. There's still no sidebar in this build, as far as I know.

Damn... too excited to write anything. Need to get some work done. Will blog again (with screenshots) before I go to bed. Arrgh. This is too exciting for my poor ol' ticker!

13MB left ... 3 minutes...

preparing to write DVD...

feels like morphine.

Yes, I'm a big freakin' corporate monster lover who loves Microsoft and IE, and hates the underdogs like Google and Firefox (which is just plain dog than an underdog). Yes, I'm evil. Get over it.

Paul Thurrott's story AOHELL - Google Sells Soul to Stop Microsoft just made my da... night (its 1:30am).

Google is just as bad as the rest of 'em (and Firefox is not that far away either, people!). This is like politics or law. People may enter to change the world, but when they get a taste of power, or get tangled in the tangled webs they weave, heh, it's all the same. Don't get me wrong, there are good politicians (!= "W") and there are good lawyers (like mine). But there are plenty of bad dudes out there.

In any case, now you know. Google s-u-c-k-s!

"Google is not the trustworthy corporate giant that some people imagine, though the company's track record, including its close work with China's totalitarian government, should have already made that clear." -- Paul Thurrott

Yes. I have DSL this time. Build 5270 (of which I'm an official beta tester who was just given his Christmas gift 5 minutes ago) is now downloading on a 512kbps line (much better than the 64k I had the last time around). 11 hours and some minutes to go.

Or just plain go see a psychiatrist?

Today, I desiged the 234th design of Nukeation.com. Yes, 2-3-4! While we have published only 14 or 15 (I lost count) versions, I have created (and scrapped) so many other designs. No one from my team is allowed to touch the nukeation website without my supervision, and I always make the site myself.

Are these early signs of OCD? Maybe. Should I be proud that I've made over 200 designs in roughly 400 days in total? Or should I check in to the nearest psychiatric clinic?

Sigh. Well, in any case, Nukeation Studios is updating all of its network sites this 23rd - including nukeation.com and nukeball.com. Perhaps digitalExile.net too (the 3 people who see the site will be very happy).

I might even start documenting how I make these websites - might be fun to let others into the depths of my weird imagination and totally bleak mind.

...sucked!

3 Dwarves felt Happy. So Happy got up and left.

 

I didn't create this! Don't punch me!

It's 2:45am. My eyes are watering, my hands are cold (its freezing!), I still have a ton of work to do, but I haven't been this happy in a long time!

Less than 10 minutes ago, we just added complete support for Managed Visual C++ 2005 in NukeBall!! We had six VPCs running with 12 different builds and we finally got the code done.

Yes, the colors are AWFUL, but don't worry, we'll use Windows Vista based screenshots on the official site when we update it on 23rd December.

I'm happy that we will be able to give the power of NukeBall to the *ahem* "serious developers" (yup, we VB'ers just have fun, we don't do any REAL world ... hoo boy).

It's that time of the year again. Last year I started doing websites for Carl Franklin. Carl and I worked together to create a cool componentized website which sort of became an engine that was reused on many different websites including Mondays, the upcoming 64-bit Question, and many others.

Nukeation is currently working on revamping all the existing sites and upgrading to ASP.net 2.0 as well creating some brand new ones. See Carl's blog for more info.

The new year will be .netalicious! I for one can't wait to see PwopCatcher in action.

See how to achieve minute control over positioning in HTML or ASP.net pages.

When the Darkness took the Galaxy, and the Jedi were being purged, Yoda told Qui-Gon:

"My failure, this was. Failed the Jedi, I did. Too old I was, too rigid. Too arrogant to see tht the old way is not the only way. Changed, has the Galaxy. Changed, the Order did not - because let it change, I did not."

The Dark Side holds a key to great understanding, which Yoda learned much later - after he died, quite possibly. "The brightest light casts the darkest shadow."

The way of the Force is balance. The Jedi became more conservative over the years as Jedi left the Order and fell to the Dark path. They only wanted to protect their own. But life cannot be contained, and the Dark Side is just as much part of life as the Light. The Jedi started becoming too righteous. The younger ones and even some older ones - including Yoda himself - started seeing Light as the only right - and in that itself, the Order was doomed.

Decades later, a young Jedi of the Skywalker bloodline, Jacen Solo, metaphorically threw away his lightsaber after fighting the Yuuzhan Vong and learning great secrets of the Force. He went on a "pilgrimage" of the Force. Wandering the galaxy and learning of the White Current, the ways of the Aing-Tii, and others. In his fight with the Yuuzhan Vong, and especially in his captivity on Yuuzhan'tar, Jacen learned of the Dark's reality. He helped Luke (and other Jedi) realize the greater concept of the Force. That it is the action that is "Light" or "Dark" - the Force itself is complete and inseperable.

Luke Skywalker is no stranger to the Dark Side. But the new understanding of the Force - something even the Old Jedi Order didn't have, or perhaps long along the way - the Jedi are more powerful and dangerous (to themselves as well). Luke hurled Force Lightning while saving Jacen and Jaina on Yuuzhan'tar (a few moments before Jacen saved the galaxy and understood the higher levels of the Force) and will probably be seen again in The Swarm War.

The Jedi Code is now invalid. The Sith Code is now invalid.

But the Light Side and the Dark Side still exist. They're safer, yet they're more dangerous. Can a Jedi truly flirt with the Dark and remain clean?

Only time will tell.

To be continued...

You just *have* to read this blog post from Ted Neward about the "World's Dumbest Spammer".

1 Minute

283 Words

345 Typos

Guess what the record is for.

A being "lost" to the Dark Side is shown as a typical maelstrom of anger-hatred-selfishness-ruthlessness. Through the ages - Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker, Exar Kun, Vos, Dooku, Ventress, C'boath, Malak, and many others. But the Dark Side goes much deeper and has many faces.

This panel is from Republic #50. That's Anakin. "ought to be" is the key. Many turn for the more raw darkness, some fall victim to the Dark, like Anakin. His only dream was to bring peace, and save his love from death. It's difficult to see the terminator line. And even when you see it sometimes, it is difficult to know which side you are on. Padawan Bariss Offee described the Dark Side as "feeling very right".

Yes, anger fuels the dark side, but there are many who go over for willingly and don't show their rage. Emperor Palpatine was very much like that. He fed on pain. His only anger-filled outbursts were when Mace Windu and the other Masters came to arrest him, and many years later when Luke said "You have failed, your Highness. I am a Jedi. Like my Father before me." But even that lasts less than a few seconds.

Palpatine's manipulative powers spanned outside the Force as well. He hardly had to use the Force to turn Anakin. Which is a scary thought. Because if a non-Jedi can do that ... it can exist in our world.

But back to my original point, the popular image is that once Anakin did the things he did, he became a monster filled with anger and hatred. But that anger had the scent of death in it. It wasn't raw psychopathic anger. It was not the essence of who he was, but rather a permanent effect that had settled on him. He had lost his mother, then Qui-Gon - the only man who saw him for who he truly was, and any others. Even the person who he thought of as his brother turned on him and left him in lava pit to burn to death. And he lost Padme, the only person who really loved him. The person who has his balance point. And every living moment he blames himself for failing everyone he loved (except maybe Obi-Wan) and his anger is towards himself and his frustration - his failings.

Matthew Stover described this best:

   And there is one blazing moment in which you finally understand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker.

   That it was all you. Is you.

   Only you.

   You did it.

   You killed her.

   You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were thinking about yourself. . .

   It is in this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith-

   Because now your self is all you will ever have.
  
   In the end, the shadow is all you have left. Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself-

   And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame. This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker. Forever . . .

To be continued...

I have two lawsuit possibilities in this title. I can see it now Gates & Lucas vs Pandhi. Hon'ble Judge Ackbar presiding. All rise.

Anyways, like I said in my previous post that my psychological condition is getting worse, it's not just the day job either. The too much Star Wars is also affecting me beyond the exclamations.

I had a dream last night. I am in a (Microsoft?) office somewhere (Redmond, maybe) and I'm pestering Robert Hess (why HIM?!) about giving me some secret code for WPF. He is adamant and denies having the code at all. So, I call up Governor Tarkin who comes with the Death Star and threatens to destroy Hess' planet (which looked quite like Alderaan). Torn between varying emotions and loyalties, Hess gives up and says "The codes on Dantooine." But Tarkin goes ahead and destroys the planet. The noise of the explosion was muffled by Robert Hess' screams.

But the thing that stayed with me and horrified me more than I thought possible was when Tarkin grabbed Hess' chin and said "how can someone so beautiful be so foolish?"

There comes a time in every true geek's life when work takes over your mind. Something like that happened to me last night.

I was working inside a DirectX based application that prevented me from seeing the Windows taskbar. I never keep a clock in my personal office, I don't keep my cellphone on at most times, and I don't wear a watch. But I needed to see the time every 10 minutes so I didn't forget an important webcast I was supposed to participate in, and I was loathing the large timespans needed to task-switch between DirectX mode and normal Windows. At that point, a stray thought entered my mind... "What if you could make a small digital device that runs on batteries and shows you the time".

I stopped breathing for four seconds. Then I switched off my DirectX app, reenabled the net connection and went online to search for a good psychiatrist.

This is what I am going to label the Sadness Paradox. Listen carefully ... I've been playing KOTOR over the weekend so I'm still in RPG mode.

Avalon will be more appreciated by the end-users than by developers. But end-users will be able to appreciate Avalon only if the developers appreciate Avalon.

Wrap your grey matter around that one.

If you are a regular (and believe it or not, I do have some regulars) you have heard me boast about this wonderful new product we were gonna release in Q4/2005 called NukeBall (www.nukeball.com).

But it all went quite. The September public beta was never released, and the site hasn't been updated either. What gives? Well, I think we did a bit too hard to be like the geniuses behind Windows Vista, and we wound up with the added disadvantage of delays as well.

The truth of the matter is we are not a giant corporation. We are finally making the transition from service-oriented work to retail products. It's a big leap. The crux of the matter is that we don't want to provide half-hearted service to our existing and new clients, nor do we want to release a not-so-good product to customers. That's why we decided to delay the release. We have been squirreling away code, however, and NukeBall is more feature-rich than before. Alpha builds are being used in-house for our projects and we are happy to say that it is a robust product.

What next? In the next couple of weeks we will release a beta version to our beta testers (email beta@nukeation.com to get involved and recieve goodies and free software). Immediately after that, we will release a CTP of NukeBall Express which will have a full license for anyone who wants to use it in their current projects. Hopefully, by the end of the year, or in early January, we will make the final builds of NukeBall Express and NukeBall Professional available for the masses.

Subscribe to the feed on www.NukeBall.com to be notified when we update the site later this week.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, cons- uhh, I mean ... ever wonder where that latin blurb people use comes from? You're probably smarter than me so you already know. Well, I went looking and found all sorts of neat info, as well as a "Lorem Ipsum" generator at http://www.lipsum.com. Check it out. Cool site!

Recently I made a small app called "Pixel Counter" and let it loose on all the images Nukeation Studios has published. Each image's pxiels (height x width) were counted. The result came down to over 78 billion! That's 78 followed by 9 zeroes, ie, 78,000,000,000. If put in a straight strip with a height of 1 inch, this would go on for more than 390,000,000 inches - that's 32,500,000 feet!

To celebrate this, a cool, custom made Nukeation T-shirt is available here. Usually a price markup is added, but this shirt is available at the base price (we don't make a single penny on it).

 

Get yours now! Free shipping is available until Dec 6th!! Enter coupon "FreeShip".

Okay, so I've gone far, but not far enough. This is gonna take me far enough. What you ask? A conversation with my best friend, Parvez, on MSN right now has convinced me that I should do this.

<drumroll>

I'm restarting the work on the long lost thesis on The Force. I started writing this a few years back. Now I intend to finish and publish it. I might even put it up for consideration for a literary or philosophical degree at some university even - not sure about that tho. But it will happen.

More to come on The Force: a thesis.

Take a look at this baby! My first "real" animation with Vue 5 Infinite. The wind feature of Vue is kriffin' fantastic!

Check out the whole WMV file at: http://shrinkster.com/9ey 

I tell my client that I mentioned him in a blog post (see Designer vs Developer post) and he writes me back saying:

I did see that and thought it was me!   --- out of all my witty and insightful comments/questions that's the question that get's me a blog post???

So, here I am trying to find one of those "witty and insightful comments/questions" to blog. Can't have good clients pissed at you, right? Right.

But the only problem is... I just went through like 20-30 emails ... and ...uhmm... can't seem to find the content with the specified criteria.

Seriously tho, I'd like to give a shout out to Andrew Eick - the cool dude who introduced me to SlideshowPro (which you will see in many of my upcoming sites) and told me that VS2005 was available for download on MSDN. He's also a very talented photographer. I will post a link to his site as soon as he updates it with the version I helped design.

As technologies converge and new frontiers are born, so are new roles. WPF (fka Avalon) is creating a new role for the designer in world of software development. Previously, the closest a designer would get to programming was if he or she was a Flash artist (or "Flasher").

The couple of weeks ago, I was helping a buddy of mine learn Flash (remotely via MSN!). Now, this guy is a pure designer. You give him a piece of paper and a pencil, or maybe even tablet and Photoshop, and he's the best. Now he finds himself in a new environment that requires him to script. No GUI tasks in that. And if you have done Flash you know its pure coding that makes it work. Not to make fun of him, but he found having to write stuff like...

stop();

on(rollOver){gotoAndPlay("Over");}

on(rollOut){gotoAndPlay("Out");}

... difficult. He almost gave up Flash because of it! He's now getting better at it of course.

Let's go over to the other side. A client of mine likes to dabble with Flash now and then. We were talking and he told me how dull and unproductive the Flash IDE (imho, it's hardly a DE, let alone IDE) was. He was asking me if it was worth it to upgrade to Flash 8. I doubt any "true" programmer (or !=0 programmer ) would be comfortable in a IDE that has only 600x200 pixels worth of coding area.

If you're familiar with the fantasy genre (no I don't play D&D) there are mages and there are warriors. Warriors fight with their senses and the "physical" world. Mages work with the abstract and create wonderous as well as horrible things. Warriors = logic, and Mages = abstract or intuitive. And thus, software developers are like warriors, while designers are like mages.

And as we know the both don't get along too well.

This is a topic in which I'm quite well-versed. For you see, not to brag, but I'm one of the rare Warrior Mages. I've been programming since the age of 3 or 4. I've been designing/drawing since 3 or 4 - maybe earlier. There are others like Nathan Dunlap (www.designerslove.net) who used to be a designer only and is now getting quite good with .NET thanks to XAML and WPF.

I don't know if WPF (and /E) will be able to kill Flash or not, but it will certainly require all of us to learn how to better work with Designers. I suppose people who work in web development teams have a headstart on this.

As it will soon be announced on the official site, this month Nukeation passed the figure of 78 billion (that's 78,000,000,000+) pixels published. That is the count of pixels in the images we have used in projects. And it gives me great pride to say that more than 12 billion of those have been for software-based graphics. A few million from that figure belongs exclusively to Borg.

Software with great graphics are really more successful (provided they have actual functionality too). If you haven't tried XAML and WPF yet, go do it now. If you're a developer, start learning how to work with a designer. If you're a designer, start learning about logic.

In the game industry (which has the most active designer-developer interactions) there is a liason role - a person who knows about programming logic and design tactics. They help bridge the gap and help both parties work nicely with each other.

Unfortunately, this will not be probable or possible in the normal software development community, I think. Not at the budgets we (the "average" devs) work with - in terms of both time and money. Maybe Microsoft can afford it, but I think more than 90% of the industry would not be able to.

So the best thing for everyone is if they learned the "physics" of the other's work. If nothing else, just learn the limits of the technologies involved and what's possible and what's not. It migth save everyone a lot of time.

If you have any designer/developer stories, I'd love to hear 'em!

Happy cod(esign)ing.

I'm still trying to get the hang of this software. It's still better than Terragen at any rate. The EcoSystem and plants are the best! I might make a small animated video (2 minute max) around the holidays in my free time.

 

I got a copy of Vue-5 from E-On Software. This thing boggles the mind. If you're into 3D you have heard of either Bryce or Terragen - or both. I have used both and am fond of them, but I didn't know about Vue about until a few hours ago.

This thing has a powerful renderer as well as a feature-rich set of tools. Bryce becomes too "plasticy" at a point, and Terragen is too technical-sounding and not really that much fun to use - not to mention it is still not a full release yet!

If you are not into 3D, you don't know what a pain it is to create natural terrains and scenes in normal 3D apps like 3D Studio MAX, Maya, or Softimage. Paramount used Terragen 2 (TGD) for the Romulus opening scene in Star Trek X: Nemesis.

Vue has a more standard interface (with a fantastic skin!) that is found in most 3D apps. It has the best of Bryce and Terragen, and not to mention some seriously cool stuff of its own. I'll be blogging more about Vue as I go through the trees and other cool animation stuff. In the meantime, check out this link for a visual feast.

My first render on Vue:

Yes, I am now finally moving a faster pace. I got 512k DSL! For most of you out there, it may not be a big deal, but I spent slaving over a 115k modem for the past few years, so I am happy.

A wallpaper fashioned after this image is coming soon! Just trying to get my hand set on 3D MAX again.

As of November 8, 2005, I have read 117 Star Wars books - and retain over 80% of the material. As a side (or direct) effect, I now use exclamations such as "Sithspit!", "Sithspawn!", and "By the Force!". When subordinates don't work properly, I almost use a Force grip to choke them and say "The Force is with you, young one, but you're not a Jedi yet!"

A person I had delegated a project to said "If we don't deploy locally, we don't deploy at all." to which I replied "Only the Sith deal in absolutes!"

I even answered a client's IM by saying "What is thy bidding, my master?" Thankfully, he said "Rise, Lord Vader."

I even put an audio-clip in the Outlook alert for a particular powerful client that says on incoming mail, "I see you becoming the greatest of all the Jedi"

But even after all this, the Force still leaves me when I get up to find some snacks, sit at a different position, and forget that the remote is out of reach. I try to use the Force to reach the remote, but... well, the remote is too remote if you know what I mean. :-P

The Force is weird in this one.

I've been wanting to make my own hand-crafted lightsaber for a long time. That time is coming near. After successfully defeating Tavion and the spirit of Marka Ragnos on Korriban, I think I am finally ready for my own ligthsaber. This blue-bladed "adept" lightsaber will complete my training as a Knight.

All I need now is a Sith lord to chop up!

The idiot is back on the blog-wagon!