Miners' Guild Site

As some of you may know, I’m a huge believer in OSS and doing awesome stuff for free. Of course, I have to make a living, but outside of 9-5, I do a bunch of free stuff. And when I started playing Minecraft, a friend of mine invited me to his server. He had a pretty bland website with no domain (you’d get to it by IP). To express my gratitude at his hosting of a great Minecraft server, I offered to clean it up. He gave me root access to his machines as I...

Umbraco Certification

I’m officially an Umbraco Certified Developer, with level 2 certification (the highest). Hooray! This means I’m now officially an expert on using the great open-source ASP.NET Content Management System Umbraco. Thanks to my employer, DSoft Technology, for paying for the certification. This explains the fancy new badge on the right side of my blog.

Short story short: if you are working with Umbraco and need help, I’m your guy.

Progressive playback: An atom story

I have been doing a lot of work with video containers recently, especially figuring out interoperability between iOS/Android and optimizing progressive playback. In particular it seems Android devices fail to perform progressive playback on certain files while iOS and VLC succeed:
Why ?
As usual understanding things to the deep down proved extremely worthy.
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Another World Code Review

I spent two weeks reading and reverse engineering further the source code of Another World (Out Of This World in North America). I based my work on Gregory Montoir's binary to C++ initial reverse engineering from the DOS executable.
I was amazed to discover an elegant system based on a virtual machine interpreting bytecode in realtime and generating fullscreen vectorial cinematic in order to produce one of the best game of all time.
All this shipping on a 1.44MB floppy disk and running within 600KB of RAM: Not bad for 1991 ! As usual I cleaned up my notes, it may...

How to build Doom3 on Mac OS X with XCode

The source code of Doom3 has been released three days ago :) ! I have started to read it and I will probably write a code review if enough people are interested.
According to the README.txt the source code is building well with Visual Studio 2010 but it is not building at all on Mac OS X with XCode 4.0 ( it is actually very broken :( !).
Here are the instructions to get it to run...but if you just want to download Doom3 source code for Xcode 4:
I uploaded it on github. ...

Quake 2 Source Code Review

I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language doesn't feature polymorphism was especially interesting.
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Solving Ghost in The Wire codes

100% completed: All codes from kevin mitnick book ("Ghost in The Wires") have been broken.
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Solving Ghost in The Wire codes

I received today my copy of Kevin Mitnick's book: Ghost in The Wires. It is a great read so far. But even more interesting are the cyphered sentences at the beginning of each chapters. I am trying to solve all of them but if you can contribute, comment or send me an email !
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Free Software Abounds

One thousand thanks to all the people that have given me free software! It’s always nice to be able to develop on the cheap. Let’s see who I can thank - first of all, Microsoft Student Insiders hooked me up with a free MSDN account, which is no small feat. MSDN gives me virtually all Microsoft software ever, for the lovely price of $11,899. Thanks to the Student Insiders, I got it for $0. I highly recommend getting it - perhaps a cheaper package, though - you get support from Microsoft, a ton of software,...

The Cheap Way To Fix a GameBoy Game

So I recently picked up Pokemon Gold on eBay for super cheap because the saving feature was broken. For those of you who don’t know, Pokemon Gold and games like it store their saved data in a special kind of RAM called SRAM. Since RAM requires a battery to keep the data intact, these cartridges have a small battery inside. Usually, when your game stops being able to save, it’s because this battery died. Unfortunately, the kind of battery they use can be difficult to find. I decided to use an alternate battery in its...