Life Outside PLT1

Planning for PTQ Berlin (with Shadowmoor)

This was the initial planning thread for PLT1’s preparation for PTQ: Berlin, with Shadowmoor. Since it is now semi-obsolette we’re opening it to show our planning process.
The decks here are not final, nor are they necessarily good/viable/playable.
In hindsight some comments may appear uninformed/erroneous. Live with this.
If you want to discuss anything, sign up, post a common.
you can reach me on Gmail, name = darksentinel (if that’s insufficient information, then you’re a bot )

Continue reading Planning for PTQ Berlin (with Shadowmoor)…

Regionals 2008

Two decks were made for this regionals Continue reading Regionals 2008…

Epoch Fail

I’m really unimpressed with .NET

The webservices handler is a disgusting clusterfuck. not only does it not handle chunked encoding for incoming soap envelopes (good god, its an HTTP1.1 standard: you freaks.) but due to the oddity of .NET “value” types, you cant make dates optional: System.DateTime is not nullable, so when it deserialises from the soap XML, it NEEDS a value: automatically assigned minOccurs=”1″ in the WSDL. this is silly because you dont actually have a way to check if date data is unassigned. same with numeric types. it also makes SQL mappings horribly dangerous: if you load an INT field from SQL thats null, how do you handle that? make it 0 - but that leads to some serious issues, 0 is different to “not there”. With dates one can conceivably use the beginning of the epoch, but thats a dangerous game too… you check that in a different system, and it has a different epoch: you end up interpreting a date wrong, imagine, invoices dated to 01/01/0001 when you dont actually have a date…

on that note, microsoft are freaking weird and cant pick a single epoch…

1. December 31, 1899 - Microsoft Excel
2. January 1, 1601 - Windows’ Win32 file time-stamp
3. January 1, 1980 - MS DOS
4. January 1, 1 - Microsoft .NET’s DateTime

so that looks really weird to the unix/Mac OS X/Java epoch which is the good old 1/1/1970.


one neat exception is the Mac OS 9 epoch

January 1, 1904, was chosen as the base for the Macintosh clock because it was the first leap year of the twentieth century. [...] This means that by starting with 1904, Macintosh system programmers could save a half dozen instructions in their leap-year checking code.

cute huh?

as for microsoft: cunts, do some proper design work for once… seriously, 4 epochs? you dumb fucks, one of them thinks that feb 29 1900 is a real date! whats next in this trend of assigning fantasies to variables?

int i = SPELLS_AND_FAIRIES_AND_JUSTICE

Predictions on Microsoft

Sometimes, I hear a piece of information that in a single sentence changes my world view.

The XNA Community Games Platform team has announced the first feature of the coming XNA Game Studio 3.0, the ability to build games for the Zune platform.

It took a while for this to sink and then I realized the enormity of this statement. I’d be willing to bet money that Microsoft is going to enter the handheld gaming platform market and take a massive chunk out of Nintendo’s “gameboy” pie. I really want a Zune now. I care about it, if Microsoft make this I’m thinking it’s going to be as successful as the Xbox360 rather than the GP32.

And to be honest, it’s the most successful out of any of the consoles, they won this time. Sure Nintendo managed to sell marginally more Wiis but you forget Xbox Live. Which has more active subscribers than WoW. Combined with them owning the IP in their chips, thus when Opus and Valhalla come out we’ll see both system stability (no more red rings of death) and higher profit margins. Microsoft is simply raking in the money.

How did this happen though? Well simply put, it’s the best platform to develop for. Microsoft is a platform company, it’s simply a lot easier to hit F5 and it “just work” in Visual Studio than it is anywhere else. And this is where XNA comes in. It’s a development framework that lets us write code and it “just work” by hitting F5 on BOTH the Xbox360 and the windows platforms. Users don’t care about this, developers do. The thing is though, only developers count. I can’t write easily to do what I want on the PS3, if I want to write for the Xbox360 it’s a breeze, so given a choice I’d choose the Xbox.

Now what Microsoft is trying to do is harness these developers so that they WANT to write code for the “Zune” platform. I want to write code for it now, so it passes the litmus test.

All they need to do now is rebrand the platform and they’ve won the handheld war as well. Whoever has more developers wins. So go download XNA
and have fun.

I’m also guessing we’ll see support for Windows Mobile possibly in version 4.

WHO IS THIS?

Quick photo-trace.

For the love of shit, look at this. For the love of shit actually comment Jesus shit.

Alright, time to be brutally honest now; I suck at drawing.
Yeah sure, some of my stuff may look ok, but deep down inside I am embarrassed with the wooden composure of every single thing I depict; nothing at all like that which exists in imagination. Let me repeat the point i’m trying to get across; I suck at drawing.

Nonetheless, I still try and you know what? I’m gonna try something slightly different:

Yeah, fuck you.

Custard and Raisin Fudge

Add the following to a microwave safe bowl. I’m doing this in the microwave because there’s no reason to make fudge on the stove top. You don’t want it to burn, which it may do on the stove, and it’s simple enough in the microwave. The entire point is just to get the sugar to recrystallize correctly, the microwave method is significantly more repeatable and will turn out better results.

100g of Butter
1 cup of Sugar
1/4 cup of Golden Syrup
1 can of condensed milk (remove from can…)
1/4 cup of custard powder

Microwave for two minute intervals, stirring on the breaks and checking if it’s reached soft boil stage. This should be roughly at the 10 to 12 minute mark. Once it’s reached soft boil leave it for 2 minutes.

Then add

1tsp of Vanilla Essence
1/3 cup of raisins

And proceed to stir until the mixture stops looking glossy. Pour into a baking paper lined tin of some sort. Lamington tins are slightly too big, you need something slightly smaller.

If you want to make Bailey’s fudge.
Don’t add the custard powder or the golden syrup.
Use half of the amount of condensed milk. (Neenish tarts will use up the leftovers)
Add 1 cup of Bailey’s.
You probably don’t want to add the raisins at the end either, but it’s upto you, I haven’t tried it.

Some Shadowmoor Standard decks

Some ideas now that Shadowmoor has hit Standard:

Continue reading Some Shadowmoor Standard decks…

Regionals 2008, Team Whangarei

Team whangarei has two decks in contension

Continue reading Regionals 2008, Team Whangarei…

party, work.

Camille, Josh and Hamish are all having birthdays, we thought to chuck this in with flatwarmingness. Halfway down domnion road… all welcome to come and get boozed up.

also, if anyone wants some meta-data analysis contract work, i know of a job going.