Monthly Archive for June, 2006

A simple polarity inverter for FooBar2000 v0.9.x

Published 17 years, 5 months ago in Devel/Software. 2 Comments

I wanted to find one but all my searches returned nothing, then I was brought to the Foobar2000 forums at Hydrogenaudio and it seems it is not very hard to develop one.

I created one after a couple of hours (mostly for downloading Visual Studio 2005 Express, Platform SDK and messing around with foobar2000 9 SDK and some sample DSP codes), documentation is lacking for sure, but simple stuffs like this one is really rather simple.

It works only on stereo sources and there is no option/setting to mess with, include it in DSP Manager and you have your polarity inverted and that’s all about it. 🙂

Simple Polarity Inverter 1.00 for foobar2000 v0.9.x (file size 45 KB)

BTW, this is my first written foobar2000 plugin and I have only tried it on my foobar2000 9.2, I don’t guarantee it to work in any situation but I think such a simple plugin will work fine in most situations.

edit: re-named it from “Phase” to “Polarity” to be more exact

Firebird – a great and free RDBMS

Published 17 years, 5 months ago in Devel/Software. Closed

Currently in 2.0 Release Candidate 2, it is a rather good RDBMS developed from Borland’s InterBase Open Source Edition.

It has both a full RDBMS server and an embedded server (for embedded applications), it is one of my most used RDBMS other than MySQL (which is considered free to an extent), the other embedded SQL compliant RDBMS that I use is VistaDB VCL edition, but it is not as fast as the embedded Firebird in my own tests (simple inserts and delete), and it’s documentation is just average.

The tool that I use with MySQL is MicroOLAP’s DAC for MySQL, but the insert performance (through Append … FieldByName … Post … cycle) is awfully slow, you’d rather roll your own batch SQL transactions than using it’s VCL components for insertion.

And most of the time those tools/components that claim to be compliant to Delphi/C++Builder has little to no code sample on C++Builder. It seems like the C++Builder versions are just step children of the tools/components for the money.

And BTW, if you didn’t realize it already, I use Borland C++Builder 6.0 as my main development tool on Windows Platform.

Z-O-G Stats : Top 5 Browsers and Operating Systems

Published 17 years, 5 months ago in General. Closed

Stats out of the 540K+ visitors.

Top 5 Browsers (Mozilla includes FireFox)

Top 5 Operating Systems

My PC Desktop Wallpaper

Published 17 years, 5 months ago in General. Closed

I hadn’t change my wallpaper for a while, it is a scanned image of the “Love Letter” DVD inner sleeve. The pose is so good that I don’t want to change it.

Those were the days

Published 17 years, 5 months ago in Movies/Shows and Music. Closed

There are times that you’ll tell yourself, ‘Those were the days !’.

The sentense flashed in my mind while I’m listening to Masatoshi Nakamura’s (中村雅俊) songs, ‘タダお前がいい’, and ‘俺たちの旅’, the songs in the soundtracks of ‘俺たちの旅’ (an old Japanese TV drama). I watched the TV drama when I was very young, the story and the characters are still on my mind.

夢の坂道は木の葉模様の石畳
まばゆく白い長い壁…

Still miss the days when I was young. “Those were the days !”

Don’t think I’ll ever get tired of listening to the soundtracks of Silent Hill series

Published 17 years, 5 months ago in Games and Music. Closed

They are simply marvelous, Akira Yamaoka is really that great (I’m repeating myself too much), I’m listening to ‘Theme of Laura’ right now and the scenes of Silent Hill 2 are all over my mind. Especially the prison cell scene, “It doesn’t matter who I am. I’m here for you James. See, I’m real.”.

My Silent Hill Collection (PAL) should be in transit by now, hopefully my Silent Hill Experience and US DDR Extreme will also come, too. edit: outpost.com doesn’t deliver them overseas, damn ! Have to try ebay.com.

I should also credit Mary Elizabeth McGlynn (her name is Melissa Williamson in SH3 EU OST) for her beautiful voice in SH3 and SH4 OST.

BTW, somebody put a video of Akira Yamaoka playing ‘Theme of Laura’ live with a symphonic orchestra on Youtube.com. In case you don’t know, click here to go to the video. I wish I was in Chicago and had attended the concert.

Played a game ? Read a story ? Watched a movie ?

Published 17 years, 6 months ago in General. Closed

Do you need someone to explain the story to you if the script/story was intentionally presented in a vague way ?

Some writers like to leave the story open to interpretations, as it stimulates discussions and the very interesting thing is that different people will see different things from the same story/game/movie and the story/game/movie will live on in their mind/heart for a much long while.

But many people won’t be satisfied with that and they always ask for an explanation from the creators. I guess that’s a good thing for them but an explanation is not necessarily a good thing for others.

I’d say they should leave it as it is, and in term of games I think Team ICO has done a very good job on both ICO and SOTC/WATC for not spilling the beans. And for sure not making a direct sequel to ICO (which usually selects a fixed path to the old game) is also considered a good thing to me.