Lately, I started an order of Ms Office 2010 Academic Professional. Everything went fine up to the paying options which were Credit Card (Don’t have one), transaction (Didn’t want to wait) and Click and Buy which is a one-click-pay service.

Since I didn’t want to wait 3 days until my money arrived on their bank account I closed the order (by closing the browser) and registered on Click and Buy first. Sadly it needed me to verify my bank account by sending 1 Cent to it with a special unlock-code I have to enter later. So I had to wait anyway (1 day actually). Well what can I say: After I tried ordering Office 2010 again it told me “You already have ordered too much copies of this product” while I just started an order, clicked on pay (where I couldn’t pay) and closed the browser. I asked the reseller which is selling Office 2010 for Microsoft and they told me they can’t do anything about it but waiting for Microsoft to create an alternative account for me.

Well, I thought: Let’s just create a new account by my own. Microsoft verifies that you are allowed to receive Academic Professional by a valid University E-Mail and I had actually two addresses. The second address worked but ordering failed once more (WHAT THE FUCK?). Now I’m pissed and going to get Ms Office 2010 somewhere else and that fast since I actually needed it days ago for a seminar I have next Monday.

Some may say “get Open Office” but I need MS Office 2010 for two reasons:

• At my work, everyone uses MS Office and it’s fucking annoying if you can’t read their documents and vise versa. Especially annoying if you have to do orders.
• Once I saved my slides in Open Office and after opening the file the next day every single Image in the presentation was corrupt and I had to do (the slides) from scratch – Took me one more day of work doing it.

So what have we learned? Don’t click on “buy” in an Microsoft online order when you haven’t set up you accounts yet, or you have to wait a Week until MS “fixes the issues”.

Edit:

It worked now! Wow! But only with my alternative login and only on Internet Explorer (OMFG). And I had to make my sister the buyer (she is studying too so it’s fine) instead of myself. So actually she bought it for me with my money. If Microsoft is ever answering my request allowing me to buy it myself and if my sister ever wants to by Office 2010, I’ll buy it for her.

I lately bought the HTC Desire as new Phone and after one month of playing with it I thought: “Hey, let’s write a little review”. So here it is.

Instead of writing the common bla bla which you already find on other websites (like performance tests and usability) I’ll write a little bit about the apps I accumulated in that time.

Silent Time Lite: One of the most useful apps I know so far. It allows you adding daily profiles by time which simply will put your phone silent, on vibrate or at full ring volume. I don’t turn my phone off anymore. It just stays on and does everything else on it’s own. Definitely a must have. It nearly takes no CPU time and therefore doesn’t drain the battery.

Task Manager: Basically a Task Killer with Auto-Kill option. This is incredible useful: Add those apps you don’t want to run in background all the time once you activate screen-lock. This will safe you memory and especially CPU-time and therefore battery if that app stays active in background.

I also have put apps to the Auto-Kill-List like the Android Market, which results into an auto-kill if the phone switches to screen-lock automatically. But for this you have…

Keep Screen: This app stops your Phone locking the screen if a certain App is running in foreground. I use it for the Browser and Android Market and others. This is a perfect combination with Task Manager: I added apps (which drain CPU if running in background) to the Auto-Kill list but as well to the Keep-Screen list. This ensures that the app keeps running once started and the phone is not going to lock the screen (and therefore killing the app while in use).

Dolphin Browser: The stock-browser of the HTC-Desire is quite limited in browsing concerning tabbing. This is where the Dolphine Browser comes to compensate. It also supports addons and different themes, is as fast as the stock-browser and does support flash (like the stock-browser).

Meebo: Meebo is an instant messanger which supports several network types like ICQ,AIM,MSN,Google Talk,Yahoo,Facebook and Meebo. I’m registered at mostly every of these networks so it’s a must have for me also. It supports contact-grouping and displays every user in a small line. This allows you to have 15+ contacts on the screen at once. Other messangers like Nimbuzz or eBuddy either don’t support grouping or the contacts are incredibly big so you only have like 5 buddys on your screen at once. This is a no-go for me because I have > 150 contacts in all my networks.

More Local 2: Have you bought your phone in a foreign country like I did? Doesn’t your phone have the localisation for your native language? Then get this App. It enhances your Phone to nearly every language you can think about.

System Manager: Do you want to know which App took the most CPU or RAM? Want to kill those apps? Then you need System Manager. It shows you much details about CPU, RAM and Net usage.

Top Application: As alternative, you can use “top” to see, which app is using how much CPU at the moment. But apps are listed by they java-package-name like com.google.maps.

Network Monitor: Are you limited to 2G/3G traffic? Then you must have this App. It takes stats about your network usage and counts the MB. It takes little less CPU. Don’t put it on a Task Killer list.

Astro File Manager: This is one of the best filemanagers I know. It allows you to browse you SD Card and Android System. It has various Extensions like SFTP over OBEX (BlueTooth) and SMB (Microsoft Windows Network). You can select multiple files at once to perform an action on it and browse zip/tar files.

cab4me: Have you ever been in the city at night and the tram didn’t come? If you know what I mean or know different situations then simply turn out your phone and open cab4me. It will find those cab companies which are next to you (including their phone number).

Connect Bot: Do you own a Server which allows you accessing it per SSH? Do you want to mess around with the Terminal of your Android Phone? Then Install Connect Bot. It also allows using private RSA/DSA keys for key-authentication.

Remote Desktop Client: But if you don’t own a server with SSH (Linux System) but a Windows Server instead, then install this App. Works perfectly with every Windows Version which supports RDP.

Shazam: Do you hear a song in the radio and don’t know it’s name? Use Shazam! It listens to the song, analyzes it and compares it with those in it’s (online) database. It will find it in most cases.

Xiia: And if you like music and can’t stay a minute without your favorite online radio, then use this grandious app. I suggest using 128 kbit/s MP3 streams instead of equivalent 48 kbit/s AAC streams. MP3 just managed to take 25% CPU (causing my CPU not to increase it’s Clock) but AAC used 30-40% CPU (while the CPU clock increased by one step causing to drain more battery).

Those were the most important apps in my opinion you’ll learn to love. I also have different other Apps installed (Compass, Google Night Sky, Calc, Galery, Steam Companion, Cracked Screen, Bluetooth Remote, VZ Netzwerke) but aren’t that important to get noted.

My old phone (Sony Ericsson) fell down the stairs a few weeks ago and some keys aren’t working anymore, so I need a new one. I decided to take a good one now with a touchscreen and other cool gimmicks. I got my mind set on the iPhone 3GS very long but noticed how limited it is concerning “software-freedom”. So I looked for alternatives and found cool Android powered beasts by HTC (they also build the Nexus One for Google!) but I can’t really decide which to take.

The HTC Legend is a really cool phone: It’s using Android 2.1 Eclaire (latest version) as OS plus an additional GUI called HTC Sense, which gives the phone a very cool look. Here are some technical details:

• 5 Megapixel Camera
• OELD Multitouch screen 320 x 480 pixel
• Aluminium unibody
• 600 MHZ ARM CPU
• 384 MB Ram
• Standby/Talk: 560/440
• Up to 32 GB extendable internal space
• HSPA,GPRS,UMTS support for various frequencies
• Wireless LAN

On the other side there is the HTC Desire, which only differs on a few aspects to the Legend:

• OELD Multitouch screen 480 x 800 pixel
• (Dark brown) Plastic body
• 1 GHZ ARM CPU
• 576 MB Ram
• Standby/Talk: 390/360

So you see, it’s the more powerful one and there have been tests between both phones concerning their web-browsing speeds (the main task I wan’t to use it for) and the Desire (photo galery) was quit always ahead. The Desire also has nearly 4 times the resolution of the Legend but is a little bit bigger and weights more. But my main argument against the Desire is, the Legend (photo galery) simply looks much better.

So, what to chose? Both have good arguments for them and good against the other phone.

Edit:

Ordered the Desire today. Found it on eBay for 380€ instead of the 410€ (with Branding) or 460€ (no Branding). It was a phone someone got due to warranty and he sold it now.

Don’t get fooled today.

I’ve resetted my DNS-Zone 2 days ago because I had problems with the E-Mail relay.

It turned out, the reset damaged half of it and it took more than 24 hours to make the entries “repopulate” in the world. Sorry. Everything should work now again.

I lately bought Battlefield – Bad Company 2 and I really dislike how they implemented mouse input control. The game doesn’t feel like the majority of the games I own, and here is the reason why:

Instead of using mouse input directly from Windows (including every feature it has on the desktop such as acceleration etc), they read out the mouse movement from the hardware instead, so they can fuck around with it. This is a really bad idea because it will make every game doing the same feel differently due to different implementations. That’s stupid. The right way would be just taking the mouse input of windows and multiplying it by a sensitivity multiplication for the game (and adding a checkbox which temporarily turns off Window’s mouse acceleration for those who need it).

This brings me to Mouse Acceleration: Many gamers like to say “disable it“, where I like to have it enabled: This allows me using a small sensitivity for precise accuracy while a fast movement maneuver gives me the ability turning around by 180° without moving the mouse 5 times over the pad. Sadly some games force acceleration off with no option to turn it back on.

Here is a small list of games which do it right:

• Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead 1/2 and every Source Engine bases game
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Crysis
• Killing Floor

And these are now some of the black sheep:

	Battle Field – Bad Company 2 You can at least turn on mouse acceleration and adjust the acceleration parameters. But you can neither modify the acceleration threshold nor switch back to “Windows”-like input. So any settings you do here in order to make it feel like in other games are condemned to fail or take ages until you found the one you need.
	Unreal Tournament 3 Here you even can’t enable mouse acceleration at all. You can only try messing around with a config-file but this hasn’t revealed any settings for me yet which allowes me making it feel like e.g. Half-Life 2 (which uses Windows mouse input).

In the past two weeks, I have been working on gm_mount2, an adaption but also totally rewrite from scratch of this addon for GMod.

My intention first was making it mount games automatically if you install it serverside (the way it is in that link needs heavy modifications to make it run) and an easy integration into GMod’s default mounting-menu.

This was done really easily and I started thinking about “why can’t garry make GMod mount L4D?”. I took some more deeper research into it and found out, that L4D and L4D2 don’t use GCF-files to store their models, sounds and everything in – They use VPK files which are unsupported for mounting in the OrangeBox version of the Source-Engine where GMod runs on.

Luckily it rushed into my mind that Nemesis, the coder of GCFScape, has a library called HLLib which allows reading from VPK containers. It took me around 2 hours to figure out how HLLib works and I made my first successful attempt in reading from VPKs.

But now the torture began: How shall I tell GMod to read from VPKs? My idea was overriding default FileIO functions of Source which are stored in the interface IFileSystem and IBaseFileSystem. My idea was using MS Detours which is known to be detectable by VAC so I searched different ways for about 3 days before I got told “VAC in GMod is active but does not ban” (yet).

So the plan was clear: Detouring the methods of the interface and intercept if a file within a VPK is requested. It was all so clear and easy in my head but I got beaten down by reality really fast again. The methods of the interface I have to hook/overwrite are virtual, which makes them a pain in the ass to hook. It took me 2 days with the help of mainly Jinto before I was able to hook those. If any developer is interested in, you can find my VDETOUR script here.

Hooking now worked but I first had to figure our a fast and efficient way of tracing opened files so I can tell it’s either a file within a VPK or a “normal file”. This took me 3 more days.

Yes, I suck at ragdoll-posing - In the console you see what the filesystem has done etc and in the background you see Francis

Today I had my first successful attempt reading a file from within a VPK in GMod with GMod’s lua function file.Read but it just read about 500 letters at max – how silly.

Recapitulation: It was a pain in the ass to implement. Especially because my lack of knowledge of GMod’s internals. It could have been so much easier to implement if I’d be the mod-coder.

Update:

Today I made the successful attempt in loading a model of L4D in GMod using my module. It works flawless! No crashes etc. Now I only have to implement some minor stuff like file-searching and the lua-interface. Maybe one ore two more days and I can release it!

I’m currently busy as always with University. In about 1 week I have my first exam of 6. Once this is done, I’ll have time again for “work” – In two ways.

I’m working at my Institute where I did my Bachelor-Thesis. It’s a mini-job with max of 400 € (Just needs me to work for about 28 hours a month. This costs me about one day in the week – and I love my job!

Another thing I’m on is a Trillian plugin which allows chatting with Steam Friends (while Steam is running in the background). It uses Open Steamworks.

One more thing is a new mount-plugin for GMod which shall allow mounting third-party games easily. I know there are about 2 plugings already around, but both have messed up code (They are a sourcemod-plugin and a lua-plugin at once which is shit-code) and are not really userfriendly. My plugin is meant to work easily on clientside and is also meant to mount all available games it finds serverside if you host a dedicated server.

And of course I have to finish #45 of Stargate: The very long expected new release to my famous stargate-mod for Garry’s Mod. I can understand when/why people are unable to wait for #45 (its over one year ago I did a major stargate-release). But all other topics (University and side-projects) eat up all my time so far. I hope I can work out #45 this year and before April.

My sister has latelty destroyed our microwave-cap, which is supposed to be put over the dishes in order to keep the microwave clean.

Well, she was lazy and put the dishes onto the cap, which was upside down. This resulted to the plated heating up and melting the plastic of the microwave cap. Well, this was the result.

How you can see, I have updated the whole website’s design to this cool one. It took me half the day because this wasn’t the only thing to do. I had first to update all my wordpress addons and wordpress itself and then I needed to modify this design and fix nasty bugs.

Anyway, it is done now. I’d also like to announce, that our Teamspeak 3 server is available now.