Category Archives: gaming

Flood It .NET

I’ve been playing a bit with Silverlight this weekend, and I made a little app based on little game called Flood-It! Unfortunately, at the time I started I couldn’t remember the name of the app, so it’s a bit of an interpretation…

Anyhow, the goal of the game is to ‘flood’ the screen with all one color. It’s a bit difficult to explain, so just click around a bit and it will start making sense.

So far I’ve really liked working in Silverlight, it’s very similar to Flex except that C# blows ActionScript out of the water. I’ve got a few more little projects I’d like to try before I give my final verdict, so don’t touch that dial!

Finding and Fixing Broken Images with Ruby

A family members was having a problem with some mixed up image names on a static html site. I could have fixed it manually in a few shakes, but that’s no fun. Instead I used hpricot to scrape, open-uri to test for broken-ness, Find to search and some good old fashion regex to correct.

This was my first time messing around with hpricot and I found it to be powerful and easy to use, two thumbs up. I foresee some scraping and spidering posts in the near future.

On to the code:

My final script was a bit hairy so I broke out the bit I used to find the broken images.

If you run the script it’ll print the offending paths to screen:

ruby image_scanner.rb http://site.com/busted.html

Or you can call the get_broken_images method to get an array back:

require 'image_scanner'
scanner = Image_Scanner.new
broken_images = scanner.get_broken_images "http://site.com/busted.html"

In case you’re interested, I’ve also uploaded the full code that I used to search for and correct the images although it’s implementation specific, riddled with lazy and is poorly tested. Read the disclaimer!

Just run it and be amazed!

ruby image_scanner.rb http://site.com/busted.html /media_folder /busted.html /fixed.html

Download only the broken image scanner
Download the full script

Ps3 Bad Company Update Problem

I’d tried a few times over the last week to update Battlefield: Bad Company on the PlayStation 3. Every time I tried I would get hung up on the “Downloading update data…” screen. It would stay at 0% for a few minutes and then briefly flash me an error code in the top right corner (8002AD23) and a few minutes after that it’d bounce me to another screen: “An error occurred during the download operation (80710723)”

I googled around for a while. Opened some ports on the router, plugged directly into the wall, restarted. I finally found somewhere that recommended I disable my media server via the network settings and BAM! “fixed”

My “source” for the “fix”: http://www.fixya.com/support/t291065-ps3_system_update_error