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 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

I am still alive! I have been very busy (not exactly) during these past weeks: I’ve had the graphics artist’s equivalent of writer’s block. So far, with my shiny new Toshiba laptop I got for Christmas with Vista, I’ve uncovered some pretty useful image resources I can use. This is the first of many more creations to come thanks to those resources.

Soon to be on CmYK is VistAero, a pretty self-explanatory skin for CD Art Display. It is a fullscreen skin for the latest 2.0 beta that, at the time of writing, only comes in 1440×900 and 1280×800 resolutions, as they are the resolutions of my PC and laptop, respectively. I will add more resolutions and I may also add different backgrounds, too!

I’m considering changing the site design, as I can almost smell some sort of legal action. I might just make a new header that’s “the same, but different”. You can’t copyright a colour scheme

ryxdp

Yep, STF3 has been released! This new version, as has been shown in the preview, incorporates major layout changes, a new options panel thanks to Basilis, and more. You can check it out here.

The site has gotten a bit of an update as well, with a brand new logo, my Messenger status in the top right, and some minor design changes here and there. I’m still not finished with the status area, particularly the text formatting when I’m listening to music (it should be blue and underlined, like links on the site, just to complete the whole “Windows Live” feel to it).

Windows Live Messenger 2009 is entering RC (Release Candidate) stage soon, and I have to say, from what I’ve seen of it so far, it is, for the most part, pretty cool. It has its ups and downs, as any piece of software, of course, and with it still (at the time of writing) being in Beta, that is to be expected. I may not do much skinning for 9 when the final is released, as there is just so much more to do, but I’ll have a play around with the UIFiles and see what it can do. In the meantime, I’ll try and see if I can get started on that Windows Classic skin I mentioned earlier… It’s promising!

ryxdp

Finally I am rid of Freewebs for good…WordPress is much more powerful and flexible (but the theming part was a slight nightmare, and IE doesn’t like the sidebar for some reason. Get Firefox).

I’ve really got nothing to say at the moment, but I will be announcing and updating all my skins here on CmYK from now on. I’ll be putting up a redirect page on Freewebs for a short while (maybe a month and a half) and then I’ll shut it down.

Adios amigos!

ryxdp