I haven't had that much time on my hands lately to do any proper writing (what with a full-time job, four martial arts classes a week, making arrangements for a trip abroad and a LAN party, looking for an apartment and car and being to several family occassions), which is why content has been a little drab lately. So I'll start today's tidbits with a request: if you have an interesting programming dilemma, issue, question etc. don't hesitate to
contact me - I'm most prolific when challenged with an uncommon problem.
That said, lets get to the goods:
- I was researching an issue we had in the current project (specifically, finding out which physical monitor was connected to which video controller), and at first turned to WMI which is usually good enough to give you such answers. Although I have some WMI experience under my belt I was looking for a tool to aid me in developing WMI applications - a WMI "explorer" if you will - and after a little Googling about stumbled onto a very useful tool written by French programmer Coq. The tool, aptly named "WMI explorer", is an open source Windows Forms application which allows you to query the WMI schema as well as object instances, and also generate C# classes for WMI classes. I've found it immensely valuable; go ahead and download it, just be warned - it's currently in French. I'm contacting the author to ask his permission to translate and distribute this thing (I'm not sure under which license it is distributed because, well, I can't read French!)
- I'm really very excited about HDR (High Dynamic Range rendering/imaging), and my excitement only grew after seeing the screenshots from Half Life 2: Lost Coast. Check out the screenshots in the article - they're simply staggering! The overexposed building on the third page is precisely the kind of thing you simply cannot do faithfully with bloom and which changes the entire gameplay; this means that when attempting to attack the castle from below you are partially blinded and at a massive disadvantage. And it looks absolutely stunning to boot - check out the curch on the fourth page!
- Amiga demo afictionados should check out the video for Control by Oxygene - extremely impressive visuals on a (in my understanding) vanilla A4000, along with a superb soundtrack by Clawz.
- Microsoft's specs for C# 3.0 are out, and it looks like the C# guys went haywire. I'll be digging more into that for comments. In the meantime you can check out this discussion (via Aynde Rahein)
- Go check out Indigo Prophecy. I'm very, very, very much looking forward to it (and Tycho at Penny Arcade seems to concur).
I'm hosting a LAN party this weekend, so hopefully I'll have some interesting experiences and/or pictures to share by Sunday. On Sunday itself I'm going for my first trip out of Israel in 8 years (the last, and technically first, one was to London for a week when I was 14). I'm going to Turkey for a week of treks, jeeps, rafting and of course some classic R&R (the trip's programme for Hebrew speakers can be
found here). Hopefully it'll be a great trip - pictures and experiences when I get back.