Website and new blog!

I decided it was time to get a website a few weeks ago - I have finally finished setting it up, and I invite everyone to come check it out, it uses Wordpress and a basic theme for the moment, hoping to have it all customised a little more soon.

Projects are updated, as is the About Me page and the Home page forms my blog. I have imported all the interesting articles from here to my new website, but this blog will stay here as archived.

See you all at http://www.rooster212.com!

Summer So Far

Haven't posted for a while, so thought I would update everyone on what i've been up to.

• Had my Dad's wedding on the 3rd of June - it was a lovely day, and I think I performed my duties as best man well!

• My birthday on the 16th of June was nice, went for lunch at Brown's in Cambridge, then in the evening I went to my girlfriend's friend's 21st birthday party. I'm 19 now!
• I got some nice presents, a great 7.1 surround sound headset, a set of knives for the house in Hull next year (as I like having knives to cook with), a sandwich toaster from my girlfriend's parents, a set of shot glasses and some Aston Martin cufflinks from my girlfriend and loads of other stuff from very generous family.
• Other than that, i got Photoshop CS6, so tempted to do some more Photoshop tutorials sometime, along with some other one's I have lined up.

Hope all the other Comp Sci people are having a great time on their summer holidays. I'll get my Raspberry Pi out soon and get some tutorials out and experimenting with XBMC a bit I think.

Raspberry Pi: It arrived!

A mysterious package arrives...

Oh its beautiful! And tiny!

Flash is awesome on the iPhone 4S right?

When they said it was credit card sized they weren't lying!

All connected up:

All plugged in and ready to go.

The setup:

Sorry about the mess...

I'm a little afraid to plug my Razor peripherals into the Pi as they are high powered and backlit (my keyboard requires 2 USB ports but has a USB port on it) so I think i'll try it out tomorrow when I have some more time (as breaks in revision). It is a lovely little thing! 

I got the model B (so 2 USB ports and ethernet, with 256MB of RAM). Can't wait to get some real stuff done with it! I might try XBMC on it (for a media center) and some other distributions of Linux soon. I put Debian on the SD card for the moment as it was the recommended one from the Raspberry Pi foundation. I got a 16GB Sandisk SDHC card to put it on, and it works great from the looks of things!

I'll be doing more blog posts soon about the Pi and hopefully be showing some programming stuff soon!

Using C# in the Real World - LCD Studio

As I've been learning C#, I've been thinking "What could I possibly use C# for apart from coursework at this very moment?". Well last night, I came across a solution!

LCD Studio - a program that I have been using for nearly a year now for my Matrix Orbital GX Typhoon display - uses C# as its primary language! Granted you can also use VB and other .NET languages but the code samples were in C# by default.

So, wanting a couple more things on my display, I turned to the LCD Studio forums which are not used much any more but contain some great starting points. The program is a little old, so you have to do all kinds of things when starting a new project. What I wanted was a display of my CPU speed and also the current day of the week. Simple enough in C#, but getting it to display it is more complex, especially with legacy software (for example, the 16 GB you can see on the display above is just text, as the program is 32bit and could only see 4GB of my RAM).

Firstly, I looked at this post which gave me a good starting point. As the program is quite old, I had to change some things around in the program. When you create the project, it is easiest to create it with what you want to call the plugin for LCD Studio, otherwise you have to go around and change all of the properties of the project. Not that it is that big a deal.

Copied and pasted the default code from that post, and put it in a project (which was just called MyPlugin at the start), and then you need to add a reference to the LCD Studio CoreInterfaces.dll which is stored in the LCDStudio folder where it is installed (so for me, C:\Program Files(x86)\LCDStudio\CoreInterfaces.dll).

For my project I also had to add System.Management, which is in the default list of .dlls, as I wanted to get the CPU speed using it.

Then, right clicking on the solution and selecting Properties, I get to a screen where you need to change the target framework to .NET Framework 2.0. You have to do this as this was the latest framework that LCD Studio supported.

You can debug the program using LCD Studio too, if you go to Tools > Attach To Process... while LCD Studio is running, you can get warnings and errors for incorrect code and redundant parts of code. As I did that last night I don't have any screen shots but to be honest, its quite simple. Here is a screenshot of the Attach window and that is all you have to do.

And from there, I implemented the code in the Class1.cs file, put the Build Mode to Release, and pressed F6 to build the project. This creates the compiled .dll file for you to use and copy across to your LCD studio folder.

I have put up all my work for download here if you want to see it. I just worked out the code from the code sample that was there. To make it work, you also need to add a .plugin file to the LCD Studio folder which is a simple XML file, where the code is available at the same blog post as before. I have also put my entire Visual Studio project available for download here along with the plugin file and the .dll.

After I moved the .dll file and the .plugin file to the LCD studio folder, I had to restart it a couple of times before it would appear in the Options window in LCD Studio but it eventually came up, and to my delight it worked very well! (It says My Plugin due to my .plugin file I think but it doesn't seem to change - not really an issue for the moment!)

So that's my little intro to my experiences with C# in LCD studio. May end up releasing a more full featured plugin for BF3 or something in the near future, possibly over the summer when I have lots of time on my hands.

Download my work here.

My LCD display file if you want it.

Upgrades to my PC!

Been upgrading and changing around my computer over the Easter break - I decided to take the plunge to 16GB of RAM most importantly, which is great as it allows me to have visual studio open whilst having some mega huge Photoshop files and whatever else I am doing (I swear Chrome could use 16GB of RAM if it tried...) and DDR3 RAM is so cheap anyway... I also got some new LED lights (cathodes have seen better days) and some black vinyl to cover up labels without removing them (which in some cases would remove warranty).

I also put my old 1TB backup drive back into the case - I'd been using my dock on top of my case (a Corsair 650D) and put new thermal paste down on the CPU water block. I also removed the push fan from the water cooling radiator, so now just the blue lit fan is on the radiator. I have put a dust filter on the back of it too.

This is how it looks now (iPhone 4S camera in low light is still as terrible as any other point and shoot...) compared to how it was (old on left, new on right)




Have to say that the power supply looks great - here it was before I put it back in the case (if you can see it...)

Sorry about the picture quality, my sister is borrowing my DSLR. Must get some decent pics at some point!

Very impressed! If you want to see how it is different to how it was, there are details in my old post here.

And an updated spec sheet:

Corsair 650D case
Corsair H70 Water Cooler
OCZ 1000W ZX-Series Power Supply
OCZ Agility 3 SSD
2TB Samsung Hard Drive (for Media)
500GB Western Digital Blue (for Programs and Games)
1TB Western Digital Green (for backups)
16GB Corsair Vengence RAM @ 1866MHz
Core i5 2500K Processor @ 4.4GHz 24/7 (100Mhz Base Clock, 44x Multi)
MSI Twin Frozr III Radeon 6950 Overclocked - Core @ 900MHz, Memory @ 1325MHz 24/7.
Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3
Samsung Blu-Ray drive
DVD Writer/Reader
Matrix Orbital GX Typhoon Display (displaying this)

Anyone remember him?

Anyone remember this guy? Came up on Facebook here and I thought, why didn't he come back in 2007/2010?

Maybe because he was the single most annoying thing in Office. Apart from Access of course. But still, days struggling with Excel formulae at GCSE level IT included Clippy most of the time, even if he was less help than the IT teachers, which is saying something.

Customising Visual Studio 2010

There is no denying - Visual Studio 2010 is a world class development environment. However, everyone has the little things they like, keyboard shortcuts and the like. Changing keyboard shortcuts is easy enough (Tools
> Options > General > Keyboard) but I've recently looked into extensions. Some of them are great - here is a showcase of the ones I've just installed.

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Productivity Power Kit - Published by Microsoft
This kit has lots of useful parts to it - what I mainly wanted it for was the auto close bracket functionality, but it has other useful parts to it that I think I will make use of - custom scrollbars, middle click scrolling, Solution Navigator, Tab Well UI and lots of little options and tools that make Visual Studio nicer to use! Recommend this for any user of Visual Studio.

Color Printing - Published by Microsoft
Kind of self explanatory, allows you to print code out in syntax highlighted colours. Great little tweak that should probably be a tickbox for default printing.

Spell Checker - Published by Noah Richards
Checks the spelling in comments, strings in source code and HTML. Makes the little squiggly line similar to Word. Again, should be a default setting really but glad someone has fixed it! Noah Richards also makes some other nice little tweak like extensions which could be useful!

Indent Guides - Published by Zooba (Steve Dower)
This was one of the little gripes I had with Visual Studio when I started using it - I was used to Notepad++ where the indent lines were used by default when I used to do Python - I find them incredibly useful and makes the code, for me, far easier to read! If you don't get what I mean, here is a screenshot of it in action.

Hide Main Menu - Published by Matthew Johnson [MSFT]
A nice little tweak - simply hides the main menu from view when you don't need it. You can access it by simply pressing the Alt key, or by using other shortcuts to access the menus (such as Alt + F to bring up the File menu). Just personally, I like this very much - I like all the screen estate I can get!

Visual Studio Achievements - Published by Microsoft/Channel 9
As it says on the tin again - Microsoft in all its wisdom have decided to add achievements to programming. I think this is a great idea to get new programmers more into it, and exploring more complex aspects of coding. However, I do think that getting current or veteran programmers into it will be more difficult. I installed it for fun, and maybe I'll publish that i've done a hard one from time to time!

So that's my rundown for now. If you have any you like using, comment away!

Computer Build: Part 2 - Recieving The Parts and Building

This post is massively behind and I do realise that... haven't had time to update the blog! So the parts arrived after a driving lesson and sat in the huge box they came in. I put them on the bed and laid them out - here they are.

I couldn't build it until the 27th of June - I had exams to concentrate on and I knew that once I had finished exams I would have plenty of time to spend as much time as i wanted building and tweaking it!

So I had the exam (a 2 and a half hour computing exam if i remember correctly) and then proceeded to build it when i got back - with the help of a friend, we had it built within 2 hours, installed Windows 7 within 10 mins (SSD installs are fast!) and like that, it was working perfectly! Have to say, it was quite surreal seeing it up and running and realising that it all worked and that it was done!

Since I have built it, I have made a few modifications

• I tweak the Matrix Orbital GX Typhoon display often, my main display looks like this most of the time, but I also have iTunes data on there from time to time too.
• I now make use of the internal USB 3.0 headers instead of having the cables going out of the back and plugging into the back - looks less neat but it frees up 2 USB ports on the back. 
• I also have a wireless card installed in the PCIe 4x port
• I have a top 200mm fan which moves a lot more air than the original fan and has blue LED's in it to match the rest of the lighting. 
• The SSD is kinda faulty, needs RMA'ing. 

I will upload some more pictures of it soon, it is under my desk at uni with me and is running great! With the water cooler I get temps as low as 25 degrees idle and 36 degrees under load!