While working on an ASP.Net project at work, I found a strange “feature” (I’m more inclined to call it an annoyance) that is built into certain browsers. It seems that Firefox and WebKit have automatic port blocking built into them for specific ports. I was specifically trying to use port 6000 (a seemingly random, easy to remember port) but couldn’t access the web server. After a little searching, I managed to find some information and thought I’d share it.

Our artist has been working hard drawing all the graphics for our new game (more info to come on that front). She’s been working on the main character’s animations recently. These are complex animations with many frames and, to ensure they line up properly, she draws all the frames within a canvas the size of a single frame and separates the layers into layer sets. This is to ensure that the image for each frame of the animation aligns correctly with the frame before it.

However, our animation system in the game requires that each frame is drawn separately from left to right. Even with the layer sets, it’s still a lot of annoying manual work to move and align each frame while ensuring they’ll draw the same as they did in the single-frame-sized canvas. I recently found out that you can script for PS and so this set me thinking: there must be a way to write a script that can do this!

If you’re interested in the script click on.

I recently started playing around with Ruby and Rails. I haven’t done much with it yet short of these CodeSchool courses, but it seems really powerful. I did run into a bit of a hiccup when installing it, though, so I thought I’d write a quick post on how to get it installed in windows.

In web development, sending data back and forth between the server is a common occurrence. When using jQuery, sending the data is pretty straightforward, however receiving information back from the server is not so simple. You could receive data in different formats (ie. JOSN or HTML), the user may have lost authentication and are no longer permitted to access the page or you may want to send back different information depending on whether or not the task was successful. Over the years, I’ve developed a system for handling these situations that utilizes jQuery and JSON. It’s something that I roll out enough that even if noone finds this post, it’ll help me to have the basic code posted where I can easily access it. So, I’ve decided to document it here.

You can find the code after the break:

After several years, I’ve updated SystemRoot’s theme! Believe it or not, the old theme was from WordPress version 1.6. I picked this design from the WordPress theme search utility. It’s called “SnC Mono” and it was designed by Three Circles.

Naturally, I wanted to update the settings of it a bit more than it allowed by default so I did a little searching about an easy way to edit themes without necessarily breaking them. It turns out that WordPress supports this great feature call “Child Themes” (linked to WordPress docs). It allows you to create a separate set of files from your theme that you can use to override certain parts of it. You can override whole pages/files or just some CSS styles.

So, here’s the basic idea for setting up your own child theme…

I use Mantis at work (and at play) to manage bug and issue tracking. If you’re not familiar with it, I highly recommend checking it out.

So recently, I wanted to attach a large file (10MB wowzers!) to one of my bugs and received an error.

Naturally, a lot of my search engine traffic comes here from searching for terms like “system root in &ltinsert language here>” or “%systemroot%”. So, to live up to my domain, and you Googler’s expectations, I’ve decided to write a post about how to get the path to the system root in a few languages. If you know more, drop a comment and I’ll add it here.

While working on Fondusi’s I came up with a great way to store the map data (or any binary data, really) in such a way that previous files could be loaded using new versions of the software. It has some great capabilities and, after answering a question about it on gamedev.StackExchange, I thought it might be helpful to write a post about it here.

I was reviewing some of the search terms that brought people to my website. It seems like a lot of them are related to using the mouse in XNA, so I figured I’d write a quick post about determining the mouse or keyboard state in XNA, though this applies to most anything that polls input and has a main loop.

Every time I reinstall Word, I always forget where in the settings I can turn on the display of table gridlines. I find it really frustrating that it’s not on by default since, when you can’t see the invisible borders of cells, you can’t tell how many cells make up a section of white space. So, for my future reference and your benefit (hopefully) , here’s how you turn on gridlines (table borders) in Office 2007.