I used up nearly every yellow Lego brick in my growing collection, and succeeded in creating a four-sided question-mark cube.
A friend at work noted that this could make an excellent Kleenex holder or candy bowl, er box. It’s hollow, and the mushroom is actually sitting in a little hole.
Click for larger view.
I decided to create something very simple, but very cool, with Lego bricks. One pixel is one Lego brick wide.
Mario would look more authentic if I used brown instead of blue, but I don’t have enough brown bricks.
Over the past couple weeks, the world has been shattered by the loss of several notable individuals. Continuing the Grim Reaper’s soul spree, I had a personal loss today. In fact, this is the third personal death in such a short amount of time. It is very, very sad.
XBOX 360 #3: March 9, 2008 – July 5, 2009 (16 months) – No Video Output
XBOX 360 #2: June 30, 2007 – March 9, 2008 (9 months) – Red Ring of Death
XBOX 360 #1: May 23, 2006 – June 30, 2007 (13 months) – Red Ring of Death
They will be missed.
Even though I don’t care for the Playstation 3 all that much, Sony did do one thing right: you can plug in a wide-variety of 3.5″ hard disks.
Microsoft, in their endless, dirty pursuit of money by introducing hoops for consumers to crawl through, decided to create a proprietary interface for the Xbox 360 hard drive. The result? The Xbox 360 120GB hard drive retails for $159.99 (though you can find it for $119.99 and less elsewhere), whereas the same 2.5″ hard drive is $49.99 on Newegg.
Even if you open up the Xbox 360 hard drive enclosure, the Xbox 360 will only communicate with a hard drive with specific firmware.
Thankfully, intelligent hackers have created tools to update said firmware on several Western Digital hard drives. We’re still stuck with 120 GB (Microsoft doesn’t support larger hard drives), but at least we can get it cheaper.
Everything you need to perform this upgrade is written about amongst the internets, but (not surprisingly), the information is often scattered and incomplete. Here are the complete steps I took to update my hard drive.
If you have a memory card, copy your profile and any save games to it (you can always download things again later). I forgot to do this, and I’ll have to swap the 20 GB drive back in later.
Re-assemble the hard drive enclosure. This is pretty simple, just plug the new drive in, screw things together, re-assemble the latch mechanism, and you should be all set.
Startup your 360 with the new hard drive. Once you’re booted up, go to System Settings, and your hard drive should be listed as ‘Unformatted’. Select it, and select Format.
Tada!
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Darn. And here I was, genuinely curious about the ‘bra that lights upp’… such as, how? Green, light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark fabric? LEDs? Incandescent bulbs?
Of late, I’ve been tempted by F#. In reading articles and familiarizing myself with the language, there seems to be something truly interesting there, but I just don’t grok functional programming yet.
One item in particular that I’ve seen is the Record data expression. This allows you to create an immutable data structure, like so:
type Data = { Count : int; Name : string }
let data1 = { Count = 3; Name = "Hello"; }
Then, if at a later time you wish to change Count but keep Name the same, that’s absurdly simple.
let newData = data1 with Count = 4;
C#… does not have anything like this. To create a similar immutable data structure (including equality checking), you’d have to do something like this:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
public class Data : IEquatable<Data>
{
private readonly int mCount;
public int Count
{
get { return mCount; }
}
private readonly string mName;
public string Name
{
get { return mName; }
}
public Data( int aCount, string aName )
{
mCount = aCount;
mName = aName;
return;
}
public Data ChangeCount( int aCount )
{
return new Data( aCount, mName );
}
public Data ChangeName( string aName )
{
return new Data( mCount, aName );
}
public bool Equals( Data aOther )
{
bool lResult = false;
if ( aOther != null )
{
lResult = ( this.Count == aOther.Count &&
this.Name == aOther.Name );
}
return lResult;
}
public override bool Equals( object aOther )
{
bool lResult = false;
if ( aOther is Data )
{
lResult = Equals( aOther as Data );
}
return lResult;
}
public override int GetHashCode()
{
return Name.GetHashCode();
}
public static bool operator ==( Data aLeft, Data aRight )
{
return EqualityComparer<Data>.Default.Equals( aLeft, aRight );
}
public static bool operator !=( Data aLeft, Data aRight )
{
return !EqualityComparer<Data>.Default.Equals( aLeft, aRight );
}
}
That’s a lot of work! In F#, what takes a single line takes 70 in C#. And a lot of that is nasty, crufty copy-paste code. And its easy to forget to change some things, like the Equals method.
Well, let me correct myself. That would be a lot of work… if I wrote that. But I didn’t. I just wrote this:
<#
this.Namespace = "Example";
this.ClassName = "Data";
this.ClassScope = "public";
this.ImplementINotifyProperty = false;
this.HashCodeVariable = "Name";
this.Variables = new List<Variable>()
{
new Variable( "Count", "int", Options.Immutable | Options.ChangeMethod ),
new Variable( "Name", "string", Options.Immutable | Options.ChangeMethod ),
};
#>
<#@ include file="DataClass.tt" #>
What is this mysterious mumbo-jumbo? That, sir (or madam), is T4: Microsoft’s Text Template Transformation Toolkit (aka a code generator). It is included in Visual Studio 2008, but it isn’t widely advertised.
My DataClass.tt file is a horribly messy template that takes in the values I listed above, and translates them into the real source code example I pasted above. Besides immutable data structures, it also supports mutable members, including support for INotifyPropertyChanged and [Member]Changed events.
I’m rather liking this so far. If it turns out that this code generation is a horrible idea, I can simply delete my .tt files and use my auto-generated .cs files from then-on with little loss.
Note that the following source code is not well documented, and is not very error tolerant. If you do something silly, chances are you’ll get an obtuse compilation error. I recommend modifying it to suit your own needs.
Data Class Code Generator Source Code (11 KB, requires Visual Studio 2008)
The Lone Wanderer killed everything in the Satellite Facility. They deserved it, after all. With Liberty Prime… well, let’s just say Broken Steel, the Enclave deserved every laser and plasma blast.
In fact, he was in such a zeal for death and destruction that many of the crates and shelves were simply skipped past. Upon downloading the encrypted transmission, the Lone Wanderer back-tracked and hunted for any spare ammo and other goodies.
However, fate had something different in mind.
Lo! As the Lone Wanderer imagined himself falling down the stairwell to his death (it felt like deja vu), the Enclave had him surrounded! He turned on V.A.T.S. and noticed… they weren’t wearing… clothes. Well, sure, t-shirts and shorts, but their armor was missing.
Now, in addition to killing just about every good person in sight, the Enclave had now declared a war on Decency. This could not stand.
The following pictures document what I found in my sink’s garbage disposal just minutes ago. I am not kidding.
As near as I can tell, this is what you get when you throw cantalope seeds down the drain, but you forget to turn the garbage disposal on.
