Work Update

Warning: Non-techy people turn away now. I did not just post this.

Ah yes... I do have a job. Lately, we've all been working hard trying for a public preview of Boxely. You heard it here first, folks! I've been working on... documentation! I just went through much of the Boxely toolkit, updating the comments as we now are now testing an automated documentation generator (a la Doxygen). Hopefully when you download the SDK, you'll marvel at how clear the comments are!

Other than that, there's been some bug fixes. One of the recent changes made in Boxely is that it no longer loads the default toolkit (gadgets.box) when the renderer is instantiated. This is the first step to making Boxely's UI toolkit completely separate from the renderer. While the hope initially was that we'd maintain a global toolkit, and every app would just use/extend that toolkit, everyone seems to want different things, and the global toolkit was packin' on a few pounds. So now, we can leave it up to you: if you want the toolkit, go right ahead and explicitly import it, or you're free to make up a toolkit entirely yourself.

I've been playing around with Vista Build 5472, and I feel like it's time for a little toolkit upgrade ;)

Net Neutrality

You've obviously heard that some companies are pushing for the development of a "premium" tier of the Internet, whose traffic is given higher priority than normal traffic. To me, this is completely absurd, as the it goes against the whole principle of the Internet. I'll let Jon Stewart explain this to you:



More on this issue:



Update: Here's a link to a more serious video on the issue.

Getting your Sound Blaster Live! card to work with Vista Beta 2

So, I'm compelled to explain how i got my sound card to work in Vista Beta 2, mainly because I scoured the reaches of "teh InterWeb" and couldn't find a fail-safe solution. Here it is:

1. Just got to Creative's site and download the latest drivers for XP. The file you download should be LiveDrvUni-Pack(ENG).exe.
2. Running this installer doesn't work, so you have to right-click the exe, go to Properties > Compatibility tab, and check "Compatibility Mode" for Windows XP Service Pack 2.
3. Now run the installer, it should be able to "detect" you sound card right and get basic sound working.

Ok, altruistic moment over.