I completely forgot to mention this as I was writing the previous post. If you’re Australian you might know that The Tomorrow Series has been greenlighted for a couple of feature films! This is the moment I have been waiting for since I thought how great the books would be as movies, and hopefully us Tomorrow fans will not be disappointed. I’ve been using this site for all the info on the upcoming movies, so go take a look, even if you’re not a fan

I have here some news: I’ve been working on some Messenger Plus! Scripts, in particular a brand new one called Message Narrator, which reads out a chat window’s sent and received messages. It’s more or less done now, so I should really get to work uploading the scripts page. The second one is just something I’m developing to help me with scripting. There are only three commands at the moment: toggle the debugging window, run the scripting documentation, and run an internal Interface Tester, which is pretty much a copy of the “official” UI tester, except written entirely in JScript and with no schema validation feature. It’s still got a fair way to go though, so don’t expect much on that topic.

On another note, Sanctuary Season 2 has started, and I haven’t seen it yet I will eventually get around to watching it after my school holidays are over, though, so it doesn’t matter that much. Meanwhile, Doctor Who has gone and gotten itself a new logo, which I think is much, much better than the old surfboard logo that’s been in use, and in fact still is, at least until the new season starts. I’m looking forward to it immensely now

I have also got Tiesto’s new album, Kaleidoscope, and while it’s not as good as his stuff in the past, it’s alright save a couple of tracks. A lot of people have been saying that it was “horrible” because he’s becoming too commercial; in fact I was half-complaining about that too before I heard the album. I had expected something a lot worse, so for now I’m happy, I guess.

ryxdp

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted (yet again), and with good reason; it was a very busy quite a while, and still is. First of all, our house is being renovated, so about a third of the house is out of action and a quarted or so of what’s left is crammed full of stuff, and that’s not counting the garage, where our new and largely untested* barbeque resides for now (it will then be transferred to our spiffy new deck). The extended living room is almost done now, with insulation and cabling in place, windows in, and my parents’ new ensuite is pretty much finished except for powerpoints and switches and whatnot. All in all, it’s really interesting watching the progress slowly unfold, day by day.

I’ve started watching Battlestar Galactica and am almost finished the fourth and final season. It’s pretty interesting and surpasses RTD’s vision of Doctor Who (obviously; pretty much everything does. I can’t wait to see if Steven Moffatt and Matt Smith turn that all on its head — they probably will) I just don’t get why the twelve Cylon models are apparently exactly like us except that something in their blood that is somehow really hard to detect makes them a Cylon.

On another note, I got me some VirtualBox upon hearing that it now supports 3D acceleration**, so I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and tried to make Compiz Fusion work, with great difficulty. Apparently it’s supposed to work out of the box, and looking back I think it does; it’s just that I wanted the settings manager so I could muck around being advanced and so on. I also tried to get it running on my laptop, but found that the northbridge wasn’t supported.

I have discovered the awesome power of Photoshop after using Fireworks at school to “create a logo”, which for everybody else was just a square in a circle or something with their initials over it. Me being me, I decided to go a different way, and so here is the end result of the initial concept:

Image removed.

I’m very happy with how it came out, and rather saddened that Paint.NET can’t do things like this, but at least I’ve got Photoshop to use in its stead when things like this are needed.

And lastly, I got a new set of speakers the other day, Logitech X-240, and the initial test blew me away. They were much better than my old almost-no-brand speakers where the bass drowned out everything else. I was pleasantly surprised to find a Bass Volume knob on the back of the subwoofer, which instantly sold me even before I’d tried them out.

*it was very depressing that we were defeated by a flaw in the design that prevented us from changing the faulty regulator. We had to unscrew the entire right side of the thing before we could even get a spanner in there.
**for non-geeks, fancy 3D effects.

ryxdp

As you may have noticed, CmYK has been a bit temperamental these past few weeks.

It seems that the server I am currently being hosted on hasn’t been well, which means that I’ve been getting a lot of downtime. Hopefully this issue will be fixed very soon or I will have to make a new account on 000webhost.

Sorry for any inconveniences caused

ryxdp

I’ve finally attempted to upgrade WordPress to 2.7.1 today, and I have to say, it was both very easy and very hard at the same time; easy in that the upgrade was very simple and straightforward…once I’d got everything uploaded (this was the hard part, but I’m not blaming it on WordPress :P). The new Dashboard really is quite cool, although I would probably prefer the old 2.6.2 Dashboard over this one, simply because I’ve used it longer, but I’m sure I’ll get used to 2.7 in time. I only had to change a few small things in wp-includes to get my theme to work properly again (it did already, though I had to add the WLM status and Random Engrish functions again, as well as change some “hard-coded” tags.

ryxdp

My first official skin for the new Messenger version has now been released! You can check it out here, but first, you might want to know a few things:

- Some images and colours cannot be edited (these colours appear to be hardcoded, and the images have a variable size so cannot be replaced easily)
- When Scenes are removed, colourising close to or on greyscale (black, white, etc) may result in red portions of some images (mostly just the “Scene” image, though). This is an issue with Messenger’s colourisation engine, and should be fixed with in a coming version of Messenger Plus! Live.
- Advertisements have been completely removed. This, to me, also means the Dynamic Content in the Emoticons, Winks etc. popup menus.
- The Min/Max/Close buttons on Vista have been replaced with the default XP buttons.

Enjoy!

ryxdp

Yep, a new version of WLMod (WLMod Wave3, codenamed Ceduna) is in the works, coming along very well. This update for WLM9 will sport all the usual simplifying elements — but now with some extra bits and pieces for the new Messenger.

WLMod was originally an attempt at a proof of concept to show that Messenger’s layout could be changed to a moderate extent without replacing or adding images. In Messenger 2009 however, it has become pretty much impossible to do this, so I’ve decided to use images in Ceduna anyway.

Ceduna should be released around the end of June, perhaps earlier if I get the time.

ryxdp

As you may have noticed, CmYK has changed its visual design, this time only moderately. I’ll provide a list of all the stuff I’ve done, both on and offsite (backstage on stuff I’ve written, yay!):

- I’ve changed the header, footer and post separators because they didn’t go too well with the site. Hopefully this design is much better looking
- I’ve added a super-duper zoom function to my Messenger display picture (just hover over it and wait a bit). I was originally going to have the zoom-out part delayed by a couple of seconds, but I decided against it. Also a note about Internet Explorer: It doesn’t seem to like the zoom very much and will push the entire blog to the left until it is restored. I can’t be bothered to try and fix this, as of course I have a distinct dislike for IE much like many webdevs.
- The orange headers have gone! Yep, I figured it was time to let them go, as much as I’ve developed a liking for orange over the time I’d used it. Still, I rather like the new light blue that succeeds it though.
- I’ve switched my Messenger status display method from the XML DOM to PHP’s SimpleXML, which is much better, and fixed a bug that invalidated the page by not returning the string with the proper HTML entities. This fix will also be incorporated into Helios once I get the chance to release the PLSC and PHP together.
- I’ve not been able to do anything with VistAero for now, but I have released a new version of CADLive, which now looks more like the new version of WLM2009! Check it out here. Also updated is 724 for CAD, just a few minor changes there though.
- I’ve had a quick look into the resources of the new Messenger version, and while I probably won’t be making any fully-fledged skins anymore, a WLMod version for 2009 could possibly be in the works soon. My school holidays are coming up as well, so I might have some extra time then to work on a lot of different things, WLMod perhaps included :D.

I’ll be back again soon with more stuff I’m working on, mostly Plus! scripts I’ve developed (they’re kind of useless, but I like them). I’ve also been thinking about making a new CAD skin with a totally new design; I’ll have to play around with Paint.NET for that!

ryxdp

That’s right, I’ve again been very busy as usual!

I’ve more or less finished the CmYKv2 Site theme, just a few tweaks here and there and some more additions to the Internet Explorer CSS and I’ll be done. I still have not got around to the CAD skin yet, I haven’t been using it very much recently, but I’ll one day get it done, sorry if you were looking forward to that (which I doubt). I’m still moving on to other projects, leaving a trail of half-finished things behind that I really want to clean up soon… but I’m in a bit of disorganisation at the moment, I’ve finally got my new CPU (A Pentium Dual Core, not that flash, but it’s brilliant for now, better than the old Athlon), and I’m piecing together all my stuff into the familiar formats and locations and all that. A secondary 500GB drive is also coming, so I can finally get everything started again.

I’ve also made two VB.NET apps mainly for my own use, HexConv and HexaDecimal, which convert hexadecimal codes into text and decimal numbers respectively, and vice versa. HexaDecimal may prove to be very useful indeed, as some colours are represented by decimal numbers. This way, I’ll be able to convert them into recognisable hex (HTML) colour codes eg. #FFFFFF. The other program simply turns hex code into readable ASCII.

Another project of mine you may have noticed is Helios (listed under Pages). This, also, is not done yet (surprise, surprise); I still need to make some adjustments to the script and ask for permission to release it or at least get the author to release it himself. This is probably one of my favourite things to work on, it’s simple and user-friendly (at least I hope so) and very lightweight. Thanks go to MeEtc for the PHP SimpleXML method of getting data from XML files, and Eljay for the Messenger Plus! Live script that started me off here.

ryxdp

I have a lot to do around the place and not much time left to do it… but here they are, in no particular order that I can consciously recall. None of these projects are finished yet, but some are coming close.

Two New Apps That Will Help You Skin Messenger
UIBENC and R2PGUI are two programs I have been developing in Visual Basic .NET. They are essentially frontends for console applications that I have found hard to use from a beginner’s point of view. I have made it easier to use these tools by introducing a lightweight pseudo-addon for them. The first of these, UIBENC, assists conversion to and from the new UIB format used in Messenger 9. The second, while not being able to convert to for certain legal reasons, can convert the rather longer-running propietary MSRLE format also used in Messenger (from 8.0 onwards), to normal 32-bit PNGs.

That CAD Skin I Told You About
Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to work on this too much. Rest assured I will get it up and running soon! I don’t think the multiple backgrounds idea will go ahead, so all I have to do is copy the substyles for different resolutions. For now, not much news to report.

And last but not least…

CmYK Is Getting A New Look
I’d had enough of the bright white and blue (OK I didn’t, I just wanted to get rid of the Wave 3 header cause it isn’t actually mine), so now I’m plonking on a nice Web 2.0-ish look, using light and dark blue, white and  orange. I think it looks quite good, and I’ve made a DP border, signature, and wallpaper out of the general design. The wallpaper I’ve not released, but I hope to sometime. It looks kind of realistic, as though it was a photo with a fair amount of noise, or stripy carpet. It’s a variation on the 724|3 screenshot background.

There may be odd things happening around the site as I can’t test php locally. It’s not a complete interface overhaul though, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

ryxdp