Nice jQuery tutorial

I have been doing mainly Silverlight recently, but here is a nice jQuery one (better than doing ajax myself).

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/ajax/Using-jQuery-with-ASP-NET.aspx

Beat "All In" in Brutal

I finally beat the last level in Starcraft II "All In" in brutal. I was having trouble despite watching youtube on how others did that, but theirs seems easier because the waves seems to contain less numbers.

So basically I used the mind control device (but I did make a big mistake, I put the devices in front of the island where the artifact is instead of put it at the rear, puting them more at risk), and at the last moments I moved all my units to the center. After that, I kind of just waited and win because there are so much going on I can't do much.

Jaedon!

vs light, this is very interesting!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRqS68D2TH0&feature=sub

Got Starcraft II (Update)

Install Starcraft II at places where you can't control firewall is not a good idea, but at my home it went very well. I got windows 7 64bit, and because I have to AFK from time to time, I didn't even notice the patch download. When I came back to the computer, Starcraft II was already playable.

This is my first impressions. First, the graphics is very good. Sound quality is very good as well, love the music (will be better if they mix in the original sound tracks from Starcraft I). I only played a short time, and the cut senses are pretty good in general (but some are not movies, look like real time 3D generation and needs some anti-aliasing, it could be my graphics card, which is ATI5770, with everything on ultra).

Another thing is, it looks like every time I start the game, I have to logon to battle.net. What if my internet provider went down (which happened several times)? Have not tried to play without internet yet.

Got Starcraft II

Yep, I went to my local GameStop and bought Starcraft II. Went and installed at work to avoid wife (it is already 7pm so it should be OK). After all 12GB, I click on it, it keep saying "StarCraft II requires a patch, would you like to download it?". If I click yes, the same message will come back after a short black screen. If I click cancel, the game exits.

I guess it must because the company firewall. Blizzard should give some consideration to us who might not have internet access. Maybe a static download?

Will try out at home, after 12pm when wife sleeps :-(

Starcraft II beta (update)

Finally got beta working on my laptop, it was very slow though (about 3 year old low end dual core XP machine).

So I got a chance to go home today to try it on my desktop. Strange thing happened.

On my laptop (windows XP), once it installs, when I run, it will download 2 more patches.

On my desktop (windows 7), once it installs and run, it went to login screen directly, and if I try to login, it fails with "invalid version".

Googled and there are several discussions, but no solution.

Starcraft II beta

Yes, finally I got a beta invitation!! It is kind of late and I was in a personal emergency when I read that message, and have to leave immediately.

It is kind of late but I am so happy now. I was so bored that I wanted to play Diablo II, and found I can't find my copy (We bought 2 Diablo II so both me and my wife could play, but that is over 10 years ago and it is lost somewhere), so I have to buy online from Blizzard. Now thank you Blizzard!! I am going to download it (slow over the hospital wifi) and enjoy it later!

Microsoft meeting

My co-worker has finally pushed me to our local Microsoft meeting, and I have to admit it is a good experience. Relaxed and fun, free food and items. I win a MS T-shirt (which I always want to have one). The presenter showed some cool lambada moves and some general coding styles. Best of all, I saw a few former co-workers :-)

So if there are MS group meetings at your locale, I strongly encourage you to attend.

Unreal Tournament

I had the game back in 2000, and love the game play (especially the one where you can snip on top of a tower and the last one).

Recently during a conversion with a friend, we talked about unreal and he wanted to play. So I promised that I will give him the CD. Well, turned out that CD is lost forever and somehow I wanted to play again as well.

So I went to GameStop near my home and bought unreal tournament 3. The graphics is better than the original, and I am going through the levels right now hopping the great levels in the original is still present in this new version.

It is great to play old games for cheap, my copy is only $10 :-)

Still Waiting for Starcraft II

I always thought I am a very responsible adult, have the ability to not over spend, save for the future and when spending, spend rationally.

And Starcraft II kind of affected my mind. It is like a drug. I just bought a quad core cpu to replace my aging Athlon X2 (even though it should be able to handle Starcraft II just fine), and I will buy Starcraft II at the release (instead of wait for a used copy for half the price).

And the waiting is burning me from the inside. I feel like a drug addict.

Net Orbiter, cross dll obfuscating added

I took some time to add cross dll obfuscating. It was pretty easy (but I thought it will be easier). One core change is needed, and all others are just configuration changes. Much easier than when I use native TypeBuilder.

Now I need to make the interface a bit better, the current one is really hard to use even for me.

New obfuscator almost working now

Yep, after I developed my last obfuscator, which uses .Net's emit functionality, I decided to create a new one, parsing and constructing the .net assemblies myself.

The reason is simple. The emit functions has 2 drawbacks. First, there is no way to specify a catch or finally block is tiny or fat, and no way to let them not generate a leave command automatically. That increase the code size dramatically. Second, it automatically adds the framework reference in the assembly, so if it is a silverlight assembly, it will became a .net assembly, and requires a extra ildasm/ilasm to fix it.

The parsing was easy, obfuscating is much easier too, the reconstructing of the .net assembly is HARD!! I have to spend all my free time (which is tinny, often less than an hour a day) on it, and two days early I thought I got it, till I encounter a big file and the obfucsator was able to shrink it a lot. It just won't load. Turned out there are many small places where ECMA335 didn't specify, and I had to try it out.

Now all that is left is polish.... Which will be slow and boring.

Finally reconstructed a .net assembly

Yep, I was toying with ECMA335 recently and parse a .net assembly was easy. The re-construct of a .net assembly from the parts was hard, as you have to keep coming back to update the different RVAs. After that, I keep running to "Invalid IL format" problems, and turned out they are the alignments.

Last night I got it working, I was able to reconstruct my reconstruct program and use the reconstructed program again. That was with 3.5 framework. When I use the 4.0 framework, I got a strange "Divided by 0" exception, even though I can de-assembly using ildasm, so it is not a total success.