Writing

An occasional pop in the midst of silence, a little crackle while watching a movie — these are features that I did not order with my X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion sound card back in 2008. Creative drivers are appalling and the company is starting to gain notoriety on the internet as just another large company who does not care about its customers. They consistently ignore plees to improve their drivers and blocks enthusiasts from creating improved versions. The driver is broken, please fix it.

Daniel_K, a user on the Creative Forum, is a lone philanthropist who edits the drivers to enable hardware features that Creative Labs that have intentionally crippled. I am about to install Daniel’s support pack and his updated driver from August (after observing the multitude of positive reviews):

1. SB X-Fi Series Support Pack 2.0 (2009-05-15)
2. SB X-Fi Series driver 2.20.0001 - Forte v1.1 (2009-08-06)

Creative do not like Daniel providing its customers with working drivers. Wired investigated and questioned Creative directly:

O’Shaughnessy admits that Creative Labs intentionally crippled its Vista drivers as a business strategy.

My next sound card will not be Creative. The Asus Xonar D2 Sound Card is a viable alternative at a much lower price (half of my Champion Edition) with brilliant reviews all over the internet. Next time I purchase hardware I will ensure customers are satisfied.

The .NET Framework can be unintuitive but when tethered to Sitecore it becomes a strange and unpredictable beast (as I am sure you know if you work with it). One issue I have had is stopping the XSL renderings from creating invalid short tags when the output form is set to XML.

My previous solution to this was to use <![CDATA[]]> at these points to imply that the field has a value, even though it is an empty value. However after upgrading the .NET framework this no longer works. Instead we have to insert content to ensure the XML Writer does not use short tags.

The snippet <xsl:comment>*</xsl:comment> works reasonably well and can be used to insert <!--*--> at these sections. Although it is not ideal, it is very useful for clearing div tags that should not have any renderable content.

Just found an application called ImgBurn after trying for literally an hour to find an Open Source or Freeware application to burn Cue/Bin images. It is a saving grace, and the slightly delapidated website put a huge smile on my face. What a kind guy for doing all this development.

It is brilliant application:

ImgBurn supports a wide range of image file formats - including BIN, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI.

It can burn Audio CD’s from any file type supported via DirectShow / ACM - including AAC, APE, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, PCM, WAV, WMA and WV.

The burn just finished successfully however the application just played some kind of ridiculous Glockenspiel tune, a characteristic requirement of freeware software. It has performed so far above expectations that I will ignore this minor grievance and rate it triple-A.

When I finally earn back my overdraft this summer I will donate to keep this project going, he only asks for $2.00 after all! I can now finally get on with the finer points of the Computational Mathematics coursework.

For the past few hours I have been trying to integrate a feed generation library into my new blog system. After a couple of minutes searching on Google I came across Anis uddin Ahmad’s PHP Universal Feed Generator. This feed generator can create Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds.

There were a few mistakes in his program: to begin with, escaping data in the XML output using the PHP function htmlentities is incorrect because it will generate entities that are not part of the XML standard. Instead you should allow native UTF-8 characters to remain in the XML document and only escape the small subset of characters that XML uses. I fixed other niggles, including making a method of FeedWriter public static.

I want to write my own feed generator and release it to the world. I wrote the feed generator for Mind & Soul when I was working for Premier Media Group. With some of the knowledge gained from my first year computer science course I could do a far better job. I will now take any excuse to try out my new skills!

A total homepage refresh has taken place. Instead of using third-party software I have written an article system from scratch. It is designed to take plain HTML files and deliver them through an interactive categorised journal.

Most striking is the vivid new design, a massive contrast to previous efforts. Instead of a combination of white and one other colour, this design is based around a maroon shade. It was tough getting this to look good but I think it is an improvement over the old design.

Another departure is removing a lot of the user generated content. Instead of allowing people to comment directly and leave guestbook entries, they can simply e-mail me. It is my site after all.

Quick warning before you read on: this article becomes CompSci!