Zero Credibility

Well, I felt like dropping a line here. I’m so lazy to prepare new photos for the site I hate myself. From the other side I don’t like them much, so I’d rather keep em on my hard drive till I get the new better ones.

From the other news I was lucky enough (orly?) to get original Windows Vista Ultimate straight off MS and decided to play with it. Well, since I have 64-bit Athlon I decided to install 64-bit version first and see what it is like. The interface is cute, though it looks like desperate attempt to catch Mac design. The GUI devours memory like hell. In idle state Vista ate 800Mb of RAM. Good thing I’ve upgraded my memory to 2Gb recently, so my computer didn’t choke. As for the gaming, well it was very bad. WoW was like 10-20FPS all the time comparing to 30-60FPS in the old WinXP. WTF? I tolerated this shit for like a week then decided to try 32-bit version. The performance is still poor but alot better. WoW fps is now 20-30 which is kinda acceptable but still not enough. What’s the point of releasing such slow OS? So much years of developing and instead of progress we’re getting regress? Or should I go and upgrade my computer installing quadro CPU with SLI gfx cards? Was that the intention of MS to pull the last moneys off us with their new pretty OS? And I don’t see any rumours about improving its performance in the games in near future… At least latest NVidia drivers helped a bit but that’s not sufficient…

As for the interface, well, it looks good and all, but… You probably seen that side panel screenshots with cute clock and all that shit? Now imagine my surprise when playing WoW I’ve discovered it drops its framerate every second. Like everything is smooth, but there’s that little jerk every second… I thought that this is some kind of WoW problem or my videocard. But when I turned off the goddamn clock on the side panel the jerking have gone! WTF is that? Clock that significantly reduces the performance of the game! And MS claims this OS is for gaming! Go improve the performance of your bloatware, MS!

Watched this movie the other day. Rather nice fantasy. Well at least they call it fantasy and it lays in the fantasy department in the store. But there’s no tolkienist stuff at all. This movie reminded me of Alice in Wonderland story somehow. Maybe because of the english humor there or weird creatures that Helena meets on her path. It’s like a fairy tale where reality is mixed with a dream. The plot is rather simple, the girl gets into her dream and fights the evil queen to save the white queen. The core of the story is about the dark and light sides of the soul and how human’s nature can change depending on the circumstances. The visual part is good too, 90% of the decorations is pure CG which is done very nice, as well as the creature design. Recommended for the people who still sees weird dreams ;)

Software bit: Messing with PSP I decided to convert some movies to it and see how it works. A bit of google search and I fished out PSP Movie Creator. The program is very simple, takes you 2 clicks before starting to convert the movie straight from the DVD. The quality selection is just a slider, you move it and the program shows how much the movie will take space when compressed.

I’ve got Trainz Railroad Simulator out of curiousity. Since I’m mechanical engineer myself all this train stuff was always close to my heart. Well the game is hardcore sim and offers all those details when you drive trains. It isn’t that complex though, there are not much buttons and there’s nice feature to program your commands in time which helps you to operate your train. I liked diesel sound too, it’s pretty real and when you drive for like 15 minutes from station to station it starts getting into your brains destroying all thought ;) The downside of the game is graphics. It’s awfully lowres and blurry. Well I can understand developers here. Graphics isn’t for reall railroad men. The core gameplay, this is what matters here. And it does its job indeed. Once you learn how to operate the diesel, the feeling is nearly orgasmic if you’re in the theme ;)

Software part: This weekend I decided to organize my mp3 collection. Yes, I have some mp3s, even if I don’t like em. I keep ones of the long deleted CDs which is impossible to buy anymore and ripped mp3s from my CDs for my player. And there are alot of them. So, since I’m going to buy iPod this spring I’ve decided to use iTunes to organize all the mess. iTunes does its job good, but there’re some things missing like sorting mp3s by path. This is really needed if you want to make tags for the nameless mp3s. And here goes little and useful program – mp3tag. czg recomended it to me while ago and i’m happy with it. You can edit your tags quickly and painlessly with it.

So, since I have nothing to write about, and Gom constantly persuades me to update my site, here it is, the update. This time I’ll talk about the program I use quite extensively several last months when I designed sites for myself and friends. This is Color Schemer Studio. I won’t describe it fully because all the info is on its site in the Features section. I’d point some major features. 1. The possibility to grab random colors off picture. This is needed when you what to make site’s color scheme to match palette of certain image. You just load this image and grab as much random colors off it as you wish. 2. The possibility to remember colors you work with. This is useful when you work with some scheme alot and its main colors shift somewhere as you work. But you don’t wanna abandon the color you found, so you just remember it for the later use. 3. The color wheel. This is very useful thing as it helps you to create harmonic color schemes and not only in webdesign but also in game development where I use it as well. For more information refer to the program’s site.

The time has come to clean up my site disk and upgrade WordPress. I’m now using WP 2.0 and pretty happy with it, I’m enjoying Admin panel so far, didn’t notice anything drastically new in the mechanics but I will soon I’m sure. Also I’ve done what I wanted to do long ago: to clean my Photo Gallery. I’ve removed entire Tank Museum album due to its vainness, removed old albums that had bad image quality because they were compressed badly and albums that were generally boring and really dusty. I’m sure noone will be dissapointed because of that. If they will, well, you have to have strength to get rid of the old shit ;) Anyway, I managed to delete about 80 megs of dust and I’m happy with that.

Software bit: messing with WordPress 2 and making new theme for MPQ required webserver and database and php installed on my machine. But since I’m total noob in all these complex matters I used my trustworthy XAMPP distribution. This is the package of all necessary things to build your own fully functional server in a matter of minutes. Using it, you can tune your future site, theme, whatever you want to the state of perfection on your local machine saving time on filetransfer. Highly recommended for those who have their sites hosted remotely.

New music has arrived quite suddenly and there are five cds: Bighter Death Now – “May All Be Dead”. I consider this CD is one of the best of the project. Proper BDN’s grinding loops and atmosphere of perversion and abuse. One of my fave of their CDs now.
Second CD is the new Der Blutharsch’s album – “When did wonderland end?” This is CD/DVD release. Der Blutharsch sounds as usual interesting here. Keeping their proper neo-folk style and bringing new sounds and band members. I’ve seen their bass player on Allerseelen show here in Moscow. He rocks, his play is very varied, psychedelic and immersive.
Third CD is a norwegian dark ambient project Svartsinn with its new CD “Traces of Nothingness”. Well, this one has typical Cyclic Law sound. Good volumetric dark ambient in all its glory.
Fourth CD is the danish neofolk project Of the Wand & the Moon with the CD – “Lucifer”. Well this is very much like Death in June by the sound, but even calmer and simpler. Quiet songs with the guitar plus some ambientish soundscapes to flavour the atmosphere.
And the last CD is from the local label I recently made the site for. This is compilation of the several russian ambient projects which is very interesting. Some projects exists for like 10 years now. Being in the deep underground they polished their skills and this CD shows what they have achieved during this long time. Good release.

About software now: I’ve installed nice monitoring thingy on my site – slimstat. I was missing extremetracker which i ditched due to it’s sinister looking code. I didn’t want it to be in the .php files of my wordpress. So here it is, new and shiny stats for my modest site.
The second thing I’d like to mention is the RSS reader I’ve discovered recently: RSSOwl. This one is quite nice alternative of the Feeddemon which I used but ditched because it’s not free. RSSOwl has everything you need for proper RSS browsing plus it’s free and cute looking. Recommended.