May 08

Video scaling is finally fixed

By KurisuNo Comments

So, you all know the problems I have had the past few months with video scaling, right?

Well, with me having to restore windows on this machine, I naturally had to reinstall the video card drivers, and what would you know, scaling actually works again via GPU.

All I can say is that something is horribly wrong with the routines used when nvidia driver sets upgrade, as it seems a good portion of users simply lose the ability to activate display scaling after any kind of upgrade.  Clean installs, or even nuking all drivers on the system and installing afterwards didn’t work…

This also means that, for the remaining life of this computer, I am probably not going to bother upgrading video card drivers. It’s nice to be able to play any game I want without having to adjust 18 different scaling options on my monitor. Nothing I play is that new anyway, and since most driver updates tend to optimize things for newer games, and new chip sets, there is no real need for me to update such on a 2 year old system.

So, there ya go. As typical, this was one of those cases where, if you upgrade once, it’s game over for a rather critical feature.  I just wish there was a fix for that flaw… Oh well.

Computers
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May 06

A reason to re-install Windows….

By KurisuNo Comments

So, I am going to have to reinstall Window to my main desktop.

The reason? Security center was basically destroyed by a flash based exploit.

I noticed a few days ago that, for some reason, the action center icon on the taskbar was just plain gone. Nowhere to be found.  I went to the action center itself and discovered that many security elements were just broken. Windows Firewall, Windows Update, and a few other services, just to name what I remember.

I scanned the system with MSE and checked that it was clean.  I recalled a few days ago that I managed to snag an alert with one file, but it was quickly cleaned, and nothing major had actually come of it.. or at least, that’s what I thought.

Turns out, that was the sign of a flash based system exploit disabling virtually all of my security settings, hoping that a trojan could be thrown into the system, undetected due to the system having crippled security measures and software detection methods; at least, under normal situations. Thankfully MSE detected and deleted it. This, sadly, was after the damage had been done.

I quickly began to look up the symptoms, and thus, learned of the attack and its results.  Then, I began to look up just what needed to be done to fix this problem. It seemed simple enough: enable various now-disabled services, sometimes having to hack into the registry to restore deleted service entries, and everything should have been back to normal.

Sadly, this was not the case. Windows firewall simply refuses to work. I have checked all group policy permissions,  services, and any other special setting you can think of, and all check out proper: it simply refuses to work.

So, the only option for me to have secure system is to reinstall windows. Again.

No, this isn’t the first time I have had to on this machine: back in April 2011, I had to reinstall due to a backup software solution updating, and  causing the system to lock up on boot.  I still don’t know what exactly was going on with that whole event, but whatever, the point is, it was annoying, and pretty pointless, in the end, for me to have had to do.

Oh well. Hopefully this will be a painless situation, but things like this severely tempt me to switch to Linux. Permanently…

Also, obligatory pictures!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Random
May 04

Terraria: The Tower Project [Part 1]

By KurisuNo Comments

So, as is easy to tell due to my steam play total being displayed on the side of this website, I am a big fan of the indie game “Terraria”. One part 2d platform game, one part RPG, and another part MineCraft, the game was gifted to me by a friend back when it was released. I played it a while, then just, got bored… yeah, it was cool to mess around with, but I didn’t have much fun. I waited a month, then came back to the game, I got to enjoy it, and make more progress, but eventually I got bored again.

Then, a few months ago, I got back into it, hard. I don’t know what happened, but I started to play it every day. Seeing my friend play minecraft was probably part of the reason I came back, but I am sure there were other issues, because I became fixed on progressing further in the game, rather than building stuff.  Eventually, though, I would begin to construct an elaborate “home” in my main world, and thought about what would happen if I were to expand the basic idea of building in the games universe.

Then it hit me: make a large world, and simply, build. Enemies would be so weak there would be no issue with me being killed by them while building, so basically, I was free to do what I wanted.  And what I wanted to do, was a tower. As tall as it could go. I love tall things, and what would be better than a massive tower complex?  Being a fan of the original World Trade Center complex, it was inevitable that the building I would come up with would be basically a giant squared tower, just slightly smaller scale than one of the original towers.

Tonight, I finally started on the project, to build the largest building complex in Terraria.  Of course, to start, I would go on and build as high as I could, from a decent flat ground level.. and just see what would happen from there.

This is the result of the first nights work.

Terraria Tower, day 1

After the first nights work.

I call it, for now, Terraria Tower.  It will expand underground, and eventually out into a complete complex of buildings of varying heights and styles.

It might take me a very long time to actually BUILD this building, let alone anything else connected to it, but well, at least it’s a start, right?

Games
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May 03

5 Years of Xadara: Part 3

By KurisuNo Comments

[Yes, I know this post is long overdue. Sorry about that: as usual life has it's way of taking up time. That, and Terraria]

So, by this time, it was coming up on 2010. Xadara was several years old, but had also grown stagnant. Very little conversation was happening on the forums, and while the “World Revolution” blog had its occasional updates, the site was basically rotting away.

It was time for a change. The site needed an overhaul, and actual content. A page where you selected either a blog or forums just wasn’t enticing. It needed an actual structure. Enter Joomla, and CMS Made Simple.

Joomla was the original CMS choice. However, it was, as a web developer friend put it, a “Clusterfuck” to work with. It simply did TOO much, and in the end, that overbearing flexibility made it not worth the time to work with.

Silverlight was tried, but it did not want to behave right due to ram limitations on the hosting account for Xadara. It was good software, when it worked, but since the control panel was virtually inaccessable, it simply was not usable.

So, a final option, CMS Made Simple, was tried: This one worked out well, with a theme that at least provided a proper design for what I wanted.

So, just before New Years Day, 2010, with the release of KMX4, Xadara was overhauled with a new design. The forums and blog stayed, but now the site had core content.

There were grand plans with this new layout… plans that never came to fruition. Reviews, in depth game data… so much was planned, but I simply never had time to work on such. Instead, after a few updates to the KMX4 release page, the site began to stagnate again. It would go on like this into 2011… and I would eventually decide on another change, one that I felt was inevitable.

The blog, World Revolution, was still being used. Posts were rare, but I did make them on occasion. I realized that, maybe, being a blogger would be the best thing, as by this time I had already tried to diversify the site beyond just KMX, or music games in general. I am a technology fan, after all, and I do have many varied interests. Why not make the site, at its core, about what I like? Why not talk about whatever I want to? It would have to work out, since it was purely me: nothing forced about it. If I wanted to do or say something, I could, and should!

So, in late 2011, I did it: I nuked the CMS Made Simple install, and the old forums, and migrated the majority of posts from the old blog into a fresh wordpress install.

What you see now is the result of that change. A new theme, some tweaks here and there, and boom: Xadara.com has turned from a simple music game discussion site, into something, well, so very typical, but so very unique.  No one on Earth is quite like me, and no site on Earth is quite like mine. Sure, it is just a blog, but it’s MY blog. My presence online.

As time goes on, I intend to expand the site in whatever way I feel is right.  New forums are in the works, as are a few other, currently secret projects. Nothing special, but well, they still are more content.

Xadara has been a labor of love, really. Through good, and bad, I have continued with the site, off and on, for over 5 years now. I have no plans of stopping it, and hope only for it to expand as years go by.

Xadara
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May 03

Experimenting with ReadyBoost: A quirky tale of caching.

By KurisuNo Comments

So, sometime last year, I decided to see just what the Windows ReadyBoost feature would do on my desktop machine.

Yes, I know the feature is designed with laptops in mind, but at the time I did not yet own a Windows 7 based laptop, so there really wasn’t much I could do, save for test the feature on my desktop.  I had good enough reason though: My desktop only has 3GB of Ram; while that gets most things done that I wanted to, if I were to do some heavy image or code editing along with web browsing, things would get a little congested. I figured a ReadyBoost setup might allow me to multitask without the slowness of HDD based swap file access.

So, I purchased a 16GB usb flash drive and set everything up.   I loaded up some game source code, several large graphic files, and did some random web browsing, slowly letting the flash drive build up a cache of common programs and associate data. Things went smoothly for the first few days, and I was happy.  Then, I decided to go to Archive.org and watch some old episodes of “The Computer Chronicles”. That’s when things went south.

Things behaved rather oddly. The videos would not load properly, or would play in odd ways. As far as I could tell, something was wrong with my computer itself. I actually for a time thought the video card was failing on me.  It would turn out that ReadyBoost was actually caching the ENTIRE video as it would download! I don’t know why it was doing this, but it was effectively causing the whole computer to act oddly, probably due to all the read/write activity going on.

ReadyBoost simply failed at this level of usage: Any kind of video file downloaded would result in this same situation, regardless of the site. YouTube garnered the exact same result; slow system response with a virtual inability to view the videos.

Once I finally realized this was going on, I said goodbye to ReadyBoost and just decided to stick it out with the 3GB of Ram in the system. The slight slowdown caused by some file paging was nothing compared to the disaster of having everything in the Ram be dumped to that flash drive.

Computers
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Apr 16

Is the Mac Pro dead?

By KurisuNo Comments

So, for yet another year, rumor around the internet is that Apple is finally going to kill off the Mac Pro computer line.

It’s the same story as previous years: Apple has not said anything major about any changes to the Pro line, when compared to the typical overhauls done every season to the other computer lines.

Of course, each year that this rumor pops up, the Mac Pro never leaves the Apple website. However, the system hasn’t recieved any real configuration changes in at least two years, while the technology in their other machines has constantly received tweaks and updates to match with cutting edge hardware designs. Lets just say the Nehalem processors and Radeon 5770′s are starting to show their age compared to the guts of their other machines; including even the new iPad.

Now, granted, I don’t own anything Apple beyond my iPod Classic, and I have no real interest in owning any system, but I do have a soft spot for the Mac Pro line, for one reason: It’s the only thing Apple offers that resembles a standard computer; a Desktop PC.

The system is very easy to upgrade, has an amazing amount of space for expansion, and is generally just a powerhouse machine that can easily grow in comparison to the iMac or Macbook Pro lines. Add in that I just honestly like the way the machine looks, and well, while that shouldn’t affect my opinions, it does: who doesn’t want their computer to look awesome, right?

I would hope that Apple is just waiting around, and planning a major upgrade to the machines in the near future. Not that the current system design is anything bad, but as I said earlier, it is just slightly dated compared to everything else.

Computers
Apr 12

Instagram: So simple, yet so enjoyable

By KurisuNo Comments

So, right, with all this talk about Instagram on Android, and me being a guy who likes to take random photographs, I decided to check it out.

Oh, those on my Facebook can see the chaos that has come. I have been snapping pictures of virtually any possibly interesting scene just to try out the effects, and see just what kind of emotions can be brought out in the image.

This comes a few days after the app was made available for android, and the day after the $1,000,000,000 purchase of Instagram by Facebook.  An amazing event that is, when you think about it: a simple photo sharing app with quirky filters was worth an effective one billion dollars to someone…. that’s just crazy when you think about it.

Anyway, I have quite a few pictures available to view, for those interested.  If you would like to follow me on instagram, simply look up the username: kurisuyamato

Android, Computers, Internet
Apr 10

Wait, what?

By KurisuNo Comments

So, in my typical forgetful fashion, I forgot to ever finish the Xadara history retrospective. It’s been a busy time at work, then some other, well, incidents, occurred, that have distracted me from the site.

However, I guess tomorrow I will try to get more work done on that history, and finish it up. Sure, it may be almost a month late, but still, better late than never, eh?

Oh, and I am going to try my hand at Android App development. Fun fun, maybe.

Life, Xadara
Mar 17

Happy 5th Birthday to Xadara

By KurisuNo Comments

Eeyup… 5 years is a long time on the internet… especially for a site that has been funded as a labor of love.

I am already writing a small history of the site… one entry in which I just posted before this one, so I will leave you all with just the cake… :)

Cake

Not a lie...

 

Internet, Xadara
Mar 17

5 Years of Xadara: Part 2

By KurisuNo Comments

It was Thanksgiving, 2007. KuriMix 1st and 2nd gen had been released for a short while now, and Xadara was gaining popularity as a community. Small, but vibrant forums, with new members every few days. It was pretty cool, really…

Until I woke up that cold November morning. I awake to find my hosting service canceled.

Now, let me back up a bit here: the hosting that I used back then was NOT Hostgator, my current hosting solution: It was a site called “Prolink” which, as far as anyone can tell, is actually a reseller of, of all things, Hostgator shared hosting services. One guy, running it like a business, for the ultra attractive “$10 a year” price.

Well, like all things, it proved too good to be true: that morning, he nuked the site for what was officially no reason, except a general TOS violation. Nope, nothing was specified.

Up until January 2008, the xadara domain went to virtually nothing.. a few test sites on free hosts were done, but nothing was as usable as an actual, proper host. So, with the help from a now-former friend, we purchased a hosting plan on Hostgator.

Xadara continued on for several more years as simply forums. I would go through 2008, with the site entering its 2nd year of life, without doing any major tweaks. I simply enjoyed the storage, and continued to work on my KuriMix game series. I had no idea what I wanted to do with the site, to branch it out, but I knew I DID want to do something major. It would just be a matter of time.

Random
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