Bird Family Tree

Batman - The Dark Knight

nukefusion nuclear.fusion.reaction@googlemail.com — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:34:47 +0200

This film is cool. Seriously, you should see it. Heath Ledgers portrayal of the Joker is awesome
However, there is just one really annoying element. Christian Bales piss poor attempt at the Batman voice. It is soooo gay you would just not believe it.
He sounds like he’s having an asthma attack after chain smoking 60 marlboro’s. Real spasticated. Sure, chasing down those crazy Joker types can certainly leave you out of breath, but this was more than that. I think it was supposed to be intimidating but trust me, no criminal would take you seriously talking like a total dick-wod as per Bale. Not scary, not intimidating, just queer.

“Pass me…. the… ventolin….. Lucius….”.

Transparent Trackbar - C# .NET

nukefusion nuclear.fusion.reaction@googlemail.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:39:46 +0200

OH… MY…. GOD.
Just one more example of something in .NET that seems to have been designed purposefully to make you cry. The track bar control…..

Question: How easy should it be to have a trackbar control with a transparent background?
Answer: Easy as setting a property.
Reality: It’s practically fucking impossible.

Seems the TrackBar doesn’t support transparent backgrounds. Why is this? Nobody wants a UI that looks like absolute shit, do they?
Oh well, no big deal you’d think, I’ll just use SetStyle(ControlStyles.SupportsTransparentBackground, true).

Nope. Won’t work.

Allright, what about some other style combination of UserPaint/Overriding paint background blah blah.

Nope, nice try.

Ok, I’ll override CreateParams and add WS_EX_TRANSPARENT to the style.

No you won’t. Doesn’t work.

Ok, I’m getting pretty desperate now. I’ll override the crap out of WndProc and try to capture some WM_ERASEBKGND message or WM_CUSTOMDRAW and JUST paint the background.

Wrong again dumbass! Aren’t you getting it???!??!!!

YOU WON’T DO ANY OF THESE BECAUSE MICROSOFT HAS DECIDED THAT TRANSPARENCY IN A TRACK BAR IS NOT ALLOWED!

Unless of course you use Vista. Woo hoo! Then you can use the awesome power of the TBS_TRANSPARENTBKGND style!

Unfortunately, I can’t wait until the whole world has Vista, soooo, that brings us to the last option. A complete owner-drawn trackbar, that also supports Visual Styles.

Here it is, just incase anybody else has been pushed close to the edge of desperation by such a tiny little thing that should be so easy to do…. yada yada.

Transparent TrackBar Source

Notes: Code is provided as-is - in C# only. I dare say you will need to tweak this a bit for your own purposes. :)

Visual Studio Fonts and Colours

nukefusion nuclear.fusion.reaction@googlemail.com — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:39:03 +0200

Problem: 8 weeks of constantly staring at Visual Studio has burnt massives holes into the back of my retinas.
Plus I’m starting to get sick of looking at it.

Answer: I’ve tweaked the font and colour settings to something a little more acceptable.

That’s much better.

Feel free to download these settings and use them for yourself. There’s two copies, one for VS2005 and one for VS2008, to account for minor differences between the two. Now back to coding. ;)

VS2005 Settings
VS2008 Settings

Cowboy coding

nukefusion nuclear.fusion.reaction@googlemail.com — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:58:18 +0200

Cowboy coding is a term normally applied where there is no real plan for software development. Things just get coded, and I guess that’s kind of what I do. The thing is, that even with the best plan in the world, things change. I just like to get on and code. Source control? Nah, I just change things. :)
I’ve always been a bit like that and although it may not be the most efficient way of coding, it’s fun to see things evolve. I’ll often write something, then think “shit, that doesn’t quite meet requirements” and then re-write it. Each iteration the object becomes more what I want it to be and I actually end up getting quite attached to my projects. I like watching a project develop like that.

New software project coming along well. Garbage collection and GDI+ getting slightly on my nerves but it’s all happening……

Programming projects

nukefusion nuclear.fusion.reaction@googlemail.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:38:38 +0200

No time recently to update this site. Work is still ongoing but has been put on the back burner for a while to make way for a massive new commercial software project I’m working on. I’m not releasing any details yet, other than the fact that coding has been ongoing for coming up to a month. It’s early days so details on what the software is, etc, etc, won’t be about for sometime as yet. The development timeframe for version 1 is expected to be about 12-24 months - the rest, I’ll leave to speculation.

So as you can see, a rather large project, although that doesn’t mean I’ve totally forgotten about this site. I’m still here. ;-)