Excellent Silverlight Deep Zoom Example

http://www.silverlightbuzz.com/2009/08/03/obama-to-jfk-deep-zoom/

This example of silverlight's deep zoom capability is really really good. The easiest way to zoom in is by double clicking the photo of the previous presidents in the background as they appear, while single click panning to adjust your focus.

The smoothness is just awesome, and even on my slow connection it took hardly any time to load.

Where is MSN Live Messenger's display picture ?

I took a picture the other day when I was using Windows XP to play Red Alert. A few months on I wanted that picture, trouble is it was hard to find. Here is where I found it:

C:\Documents and Settings/_username_/Local Settings/Application Data/Microsoft/Messenger/_username_@live.com/ObjectStore/UserTile/Z0Y25sNrHkA+q2FhJaWh3eJLpntc=.dt2

where _username_ is your windows user account. The cryptic file at the end is the actual picture. I'm not sure what format it is in but renaming it to .jpg seems to work (atleast twitter accepted it and Finder recognizes it).

Ohh, and incase you're on a mac like me and want to get at your picture stored on the windows side of things, here is the path:

where WINXP is the name of my Fat 32 partitioned windows drive.

Die Macbook die

I was looking forward to installing Windows 7 via bootcamp to give the Aero version of the operating system a go, but ofcourse fate had other plans. After checking my partition table in rEFIt, I realized that I had no hope of getting windows on as previous GNU/Linux installs had completely messed up my settings, thank you grub.

Okay but I really wanted to try it, VMWare wasn't cutting it. So I decided to do a clean install, formatted my 320GB Scorpio, restored OS X from time machine, time for bootcamp. Aha, but wait, the super-drive is not working. It wont burn the Windows 7 iso. Awesome.

I must point out that I have already had the drive replaced once, oh well. I used a friends machine to burn the DVD eventually. The superdrive won't read DVDs now, grrrr. After a bit I figured out the superdrive isn't completely borked and does read factory imaged discs. I wasn't giving up yet however. Time for USB bootable images.

I borrowed a 40GB external disk from the same friend (my data is too precious to get rid off, and I don't have a pen drive thats big enough, actually all I have is 500Gb bricks so...), formatted it. A 40Gb disc with a Fat32 active partition, aha try it *evulll grin*. Actually its not that bad trouble is you need to use Windows to make it, for some reason Disk Utility on OS X messes it up, and I didn't try gparted. Okay Fat32 not happening, NTFS bootable disc (usb hdd) is what I got finally. Making one is basically copying the iso files content to a newly formatted NTFS disk. To make it bootable, you need to change the boot sector, there is a tool on the Windows 7 iso to do this.

The Mac EFI system doesn't boot legacy operating systems too well from external disks. Epic fail after hours of tweaking. There was some talk of a middle-man boot on a couple of forums, using Grub to boot and then making it switch to the external usb drive, but I had had enough at this point.

Installed Windows XP Home, time for Command and Conquer Red Alert 95, finally. Ohh and if you want a common data partition between OS X and Windows (say for music etc.) then make it after installing windows using Disk utility and then changing your boot.ini file to reflect the actual partition windows xp now resides on.

I don't like Aero anyway, compiz wallops it any how o_0.

Safari 4 Beta

I installed the Safari 4 beta on my macbook last night, I HATE it. On Safari 3 I have around 600 tabs open, these hover at around 750 MB RAM usage, and around 5 - 7 % CPU usage depending on what tabs are in focus (idle state i.e.). Yup, Safari 3 really does a good job of not wasting processor cycles on tabs in the background. Safari 4 comes along and destroys everything. The CPU usage is 97 - 120 % average and the memory usage is through the roof. This was despite the fact that I told it not to make a snapshot cache of my bookmarks. I gave it about 3 hours to settle down (indexing et. al), and then even a couple of restarts but the high CPU usage remains. 

Verdict: unusable for me at the moment. Safari 3 it is.

Randomness

go see coolness.