IBBoard

Two months on from my original Death of a Blog post, I think I really am going to kill the thing off. I've not posted anything for ages, I keep getting more and more spam (although most of it is still being successfully blocked) and it's not really being very useful.

Now to work out the easiest way of archiving all of the pages in to static pages, because all I've found on a quick skim round is a "generate main page" option (which, incidentally, fails!)

Once everything is archived, I'll be keeping the site for static additions and hosting things like the DevIL partial-port that I plan to release at some point.

Well, not so much MDX but the fact that it's an entirely separate download, even for people who have the latest DirectX installed?

I'm trying to update the Dawn of War Texture Tool to be able to convert TGA images to DDS images. The application is written in C#, so I downloaded the DirectX SDK for .Net. After a bit of fighting to get it to flip a loaded texture, not only do I find out that DirectX doesn't have a direct way of doing it (manual byte swapping is the easiest way) but I also find that the documentation has less substance than a political manifesto and that the Managed DirectX isn't a normal part of most people's DirectX installs. That means my 75KB application has to come with a 4MB+ DirectX installer to add in Managed DirectX support!

You'd have thought that for something like DirectX, Microsoft would have done a better job of making C#/.Net applications that use more accessible, but apparently not. Now I'm trying to work out how to include unmanaged DirectX in my application, and not getting very far.

Normally I like C# for its cleaness, power and ease of use, but at the moment I'm beginning to realise why some people don't like it! Oh well, time to blame it on Microsoft for not making things as easy as they could do again.

I've been tagged by Ben for a meme. There's a first time for everything, and it'll fail miserably at the end when I'm supposed to tag others, but never mind!

In keeping with Ben's final comments on haircuts in Secondary school, I'll track my haircut developments.

One year ago...

Just like Ben, I was at Fujitsu Siemens Computers in Bracknell, Berkshire. Around this time I was probably still being the lone maintainer of the WCMS, with a small possibility of being an advisor on the Service Pack v2 system, although that may have been later. Teaching Stefan the joys of WCMS was undoubtably later, somewhere more in June.

By this time last year, I'd probably also got used to the fact that Bracknell somehow seems to have more Scallies than Salford - home of the Scally!

One thing that I learned that year - try to avoid jobs where your software development is dictated by Sales/Marketting!

Hair: As it is now. Short and spiked at the front, only a more controlled spiking than I tend to do now.

Five years ago...

Again, like Ben, I was in my AS-Level year at College (yep, it's going to get boringly similar!) I was at Pendleton College, Salford experiencing real Scallies, while having no idea that the Ben Kingsley theatre was so-named because of a certain Sir Ben Kingsley!

By this time I'd probably have been studying for the AS-Level exams, with the line-up including Maths, Physics, Computing and History, plus the obligatory (and rather pointless) General Studies. I have yet to find one University that wanted higher than D grades that would accept General Studies as an A Level. Even worse was Key Skills. Don't even bother asking about that!

Hair: center parting, the same as I had until the first year or two of University.

Ten years ago...

It's strange to think that it was so long, but I would have been eleven (my birthday isn't until July, so I always did exams when I was a year younger than everyone else) and in the third term of the first year.

I can't think what we did in the first year, but I was at George Tomlinson School, Kearsley, named after the Minister for Education from 1947 to 1951 (probably around the time the school was built).

Hair: side parting, carried on from Primary School. I don't know why, but it lasted a fair few years!

Passing on the Meme

This is where it falls apart. I know absolutely no-one beyond Ben and Stevie who have blogs. My Fiancee has an LJ, but that won't pick up pingbacks as far as I know.

Oh well, let's try it anyway. I'll tag:

• Stevie on the off-chance that he reads this
• Asli, my Fiancee (it's her writing name) on the off-chance that she hasn't had one of these via her LJ friends recently.