Oct 7, 2008

BlizzCon 2008!!!

This Friday & Saturday, geeks from around the world will gather in Anaheim, California to see what Blizzard, Inc. has to offer. Blizzard is responsible for franchises such as StarCraft, WarCraft & Diablo. They also infected the world with World of WarCrack, which has been present in my life for the better part of 4 years.

So, a friend of mine and I are headed out to Cali to ROCK BLIZZCON!!!

Aug 15, 2008

How to Make Ice Cream at Home with Basic Materials

Ever wanted to make ice cream "quickly" at home? I found this cool (no pun intended) article on wikihow.com.

How to Make Ice Cream

Ingredients

Makes one serving:

Steps

Plastic Bag Method
This is good for making individual servings of ice cream to be eaten promptly after making. The video below shows a slightly different recipe but still instructs on how to make ice cream with a sandwich bag.
  1. Mix sugar, milk or half & half, and flavoring in a bowl, then seal it in a quart-sized plastic bag.
  2. Take roughly two quarts of ice (crushed if possible) and place it into the gallon-sized bag with rock salt. Ideally, the gallon bag will be roughly half full with the ice and salt mixture.
  3. Place the sealed quart-sized bag with the ingredients into the gallon-sized bag. Make sure the bags stay sealed! Do not allow the contents to mix at any time. If the bags don't seal sufficiently, use duct tape to seal the top of both bags to ensure they don't open during shaking.
  4. Gently agitate, massage, and shake the bags for about ten to fifteen minutes. In this amount of time the contents of the quart (smaller) bag should start to turn into solid ice cream.As you agitate the two bags, it is important that you are mixing the contents of the inner bag, but you don’t want to be so aggressive that you burst the inner bag or cut it on the ice (double-bagging should prevent this).If your hands get uncomfortably cold, use a towel or an old t-shirt to hold the bags as you massage them; they will be quite cold and might become slippery with accumulated condensation. Consider using gloves or massaging while holding onto the top seal if a towel or similar cloth is not available.
  5. Remove the small bag from the large bag. Scoop the ice cream from the small bag and enjoy!

Things You'll Need

  • spatula, whisk, or hand-held mixer
  • one gallon-size zip one quart-size zip bag

Parts of article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Make Ice Cream. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Jul 31, 2008

No Dynamic Ports for Visual Studio 2005 Web Server

Ocassionally, having VS2005 create localhost using a random number can be a pain. To get around this, click the website "root" in Solution Explorer & then bring up the properties. In the properties pane, set "Use dynamic ports" to False & then set "Port number" to whatever value you want between 1024 and 5000.

Jul 21, 2008

Disable SuperFetch in Vista

In a comment on his Blog (Coding Horror), Jeff Atwood pointed out the command to temporarily turn off SuperFetch, Vista's new memory caching program. Some people have hinted that SuperFetch may cause slow-down or other issues. YMMV

Command:
net stop superfetch

*Note: This will come back after a restart, so if you want to kill it, disable the service.

Jul 10, 2008

Display all the properties in an Object

I've come across this problem before, sometimes when working with classes designed by different groups, other times when I'm being lazy & don't want to look through my code. Either way, it's sometimes handy to be able to iterate through the properties of an object. So, here's a "quickie" to dump the property names/values to an exception.

Definition:
public void showObjProperties( object myObject ) {
System.ComponentModel.PropertyDescriptorCollection objProperties = System.ComponentModel.TypeDescriptor.GetProperties( myObject );
string strTmp = "";
string strType = myObject.GetType( ).ToString( );
for ( int i = 0; i < objProperties.Count; i++ ) {
strTmp += strType + "." + objProperties[i].Name + Environment.NewLine;
//strTmp += strType + "." + objProperties[i].Name + ": " + objProperties[i].GetValue( myObject ).ToString( ) + Environment.NewLine;
}
throw new Exception( "Props: " + Environment.NewLine + strTmp );
}


Calling code:
String[] aryString = new String[] { "test1", "test2", "test3" };
showObjProperties( aryString );


Results:
Props: 
System.String[].Length
System.String[].SyncRoot
System.String[].Rank
System.String[].IsReadOnly
System.String[].IsFixedSize
System.String[].IsSynchronized
System.String[].LongLength

Jul 2, 2008

Comparing Custom Objects in C#

Once again I found myself trying to remember the specifics of how to compare specific attributes of a custom object when doing an Array Sort. The linked MS kb article has the specifics, but I'll copy some of that here, for longevity. ;)
private class sortYearAscendingHelper : IComparer
{
int IComparer.Compare(object a, object b)
{
car c1=(car)a;
car c2=(car)b;
if (c1.year > c2.year)
return 1;
if (c1.year < c2.year)
return -1;
else
return 0;
}
}

The key is you have to return one of three values:
  • -1 if the first object is less than the second
  • 1 if the first object is greater than the second
  • 0 if the values of the two objects are equal
Hope this helps someone,
Ian

Jun 26, 2008

Patches?

It appears that in v2.4.3 Blizzard has made the decision to allow mounts at level 30. Man this really chaps my ass, since I just hit 43 on my priest. Ah well, on the bright side, it gives me a reason to level my hunter and warlock (25/21) again. ;)

Jun 18, 2008

Let's get the ball rolling...

My hopes with this blog are to add little tid-bits of information that I constantly need & that others might be able to use as well. I'll try to avoid dumping more of the same out there, but it happens.

So, with that said, I hope you find something useful here. If you don't, "don't go away mad, just go away". ;)

Ian