I recently heard of a site called movielink. It is a site that is backed by some of the movie studios. The service it provides is legal, paid, movie downloads. I admit I was excited when I heard about this. I quickly went to their site and was greeted by an error message saying the following:

Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must have Windows 98/SE, ME, 2000 or XP, which support certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies. We do not support Mac or Linux.

Hmm, well, if they do not support me, I cannot support them. I find this immensley frustrating. Both Mac and Linux have been around long enough that there is no technical reasons for this. The only reason to not support the three main platforms – windows, mac, and linux – are laziness, incompetence, or short-sightedness. Supporting multiple platforms allows you to quickly determine if a problem is in your code, or in the platform you are using. You maximize your customer-base. You ultimately future-proof yourself.

Fortunately most of the web that I encounter is not as short-sighted as movielink. Hopefully a competitor will offer up a similar service, without short-sighted and stupid policies.

-Synwan

A while back, I started a project with a friend of mine. We started a little web calendar project. It didn’t really go anywhere. No worries though, because we ended up with some webhosting space. I used it for a couple of other pet projects, and just a random place that was globally accessable. Well, we’re going to close the site down now. Again, no worries. Instead what we’re going to do is start up another hosting account and put codenoise on it. It’ll be our little corner of the web. Nothing really ambitious, just a place for webmail, my blog, some smallish projects, and whatever else we want to put there. So, to all the millions of neurons that compose the interpreter for the two eyeballs that read this, things will be changing. Whether this will be a good thing, bad thing, or nothing is yet to be determined (though that last one seems the most probable)

So, look forward to the new and improved codenoise.com, coming to a browser near you!

-Synwan

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned anything about XML. Well, I just released XMLNode. It’s a library that I’ve been using at work for the last few years. It’s basic purpose in life is to give us a clean interface to data-driven XML documents that we use. It has adaptors to allow us to use STL algorithms to parse, or manipulate the XML. It also provides a straight forward, object tree that represents the XML.

XMLNode is by no means complete. It currently has some destructive tendencies. If you read XML into XMLNode, then use XMLNode to write the tree back out, any comments, or extra white space are removed. We have plans to fix this, and to have a lower level interface that is more DOM like. XMLNode will then become a light wrapper to the DOM that allows STL manipulations, as well as more straightforward object traversal.

I’ll try and post some examples here shortly where XMLNode shines.

-Synwan

Back in the day (ok, it was like 8 years ago, but in computer terms, that’s back in the day.) demo’s were a big thing. No, not game demos, or shareware apps, but multimedia demos. They were short graphics clips illustrating the skills of a graphics developer, or team. Sometimes they would have music, sometimes they would just be pretty patterns on the screen. I don’t know what happened, probably me getting busy, and paying less attention, but it seemed that demo’s faded. Oh sure, you’d still find one or two, but it seemed that the heyday was over. Well, perhaps it is, but the demo community seems to be alive and well. A friend of mine sent me a link to a fun demo called Codenoise. No it has no affiliation with me in any way. It’s just a random demo with a cool name. Here’s a link to go check it out. Enjoy!

-Synwan