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At the MacWorld conference yesterday there was a very significant announcement regarding iTunes and DRM. Soon you will be able to copy your iTunes downloads to any device you want. No annoucement so far on what happens to the music you’ve already bought however.

No Comments »Tags: drm, itunes, mac
Posted in Uncategorized |

One of our many server providers, saidhost has gone under without any prior warning. We quite literally got a message the server was down from our server monitoring people so we attempted to login to the server but it was inaccessible. We then tried to file a ticket and contact the company but their website had disappeared. Their phone had also been disconnected. A quick google search revealed the true story.

The company had gone bankrupt, but instead of warning its customers and allowing them time to move data and handle migrations, they had simply gone under, even taking our payment for December’s services.

Fortunately because we take daily backups, we were able to restore all of our clients data and migrate them to another server. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

For a more conversation and discussion, and incidentally where I found out about this initially check this thread out http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=732244

No Comments »Tags: credit cruch, saidhost
Posted in News |

Gosh its October already! A couple of little things that have caught my eye recently.

One is these is the great Girls Aloud – The Promice . It makes you wonder if we forgot about truly sexy clothes and fashion in the naughties, then again i doubt alot of people would fit into 60s style clothes nowadays…

On this retro note, if anyone from the 80s doesn’t remember this song they were never there!

No Comments »Tags: 60s, 80s, girls aloud
Posted in Random |

Ninja cat is sneaky. What more needs to be said.

No Comments »Tags: ninja cat, sneaky
Posted in Random |

One of the major side projects we are working on requires the use of the real-time 3D graphics using OpenGL technology. Normally this type of project would be the preserve of the C++ developer. However C++ is renowned for its difficult and lengthy development time which was something we wished to avoid.

By using C# we hoped to be able to rapidly develop our 3D app whilst also giving us easy portability between Windows and Linux systems though the mono project.

The established major OpenGL binding for C# is the Tao Framework. This framework has been around for a number of years and includes a number of additional bindings. However it has several major problems; the first of which is the design of libraries API is non-intuitive and adds lot of unnecessary typing. The second and most important factor for me is its missing the ability to easily write text to the screen, something you think should be remarkably simple.

Of cource the arguement is that Tao is just a direct binding to the C libraries, this is where OpenTK steps in. It provides the low level OpenGL access you need as well as higher level helper functions for faster and easier development.

So how does OpenTK compare to the Tao Framework? Interestingly OpenTK is acctually based on the Tao Framework, so you get the same underlying code. The biggest difference to me has been the ease of writing code. OpenTK has much better type safety compared to Tao and the API is by far more logical. This makes writing the code a pleasure compare to Tao. The most useful aspect by far of OpenTk is its helper libraries, these save you from having to reinvent the wheel and include Vectors, Matrix and Quaternions as well as the all important printing text to the screen!

If you are considering working with OpenGL and C# I would highly recommend investigating OpenTK as one of your options.

Above is a little teaser from the project we are working on. If you do a little bit of research you should be able to track it down…

No Comments »Tags: csharp, opentk
Posted in Development |