Mysterious Updater5 folder

There is a very annoying file folder which keep on appears in My Documents. No matter how I delete it, it still reappears. Hence I do a quick google, and I found out that actually it is done by the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader 8, which the auto update functions is the culprit of this mysterious Updater5 folder.

Naturally, we would open up the acrobat reader and check its settings inside. So I go through the normal preference setting, click on Edit > Preference, and ironically didn't found any things related with the updater.


Then I did another quick search again, then only found out that in order to let the folder dissapear, you need to change the updater folder from My Documents to "Your Desired Location". In Acrobat Reader 8, click on Help > Check Updates.


Then it would check for updates and prompt out a windows like this.


Click on the Preference and it would bring you to this windows.


Click on browse and select some folder which dumps all the temps files. In my case, I choose UserData folder to dump the updater folder. Once you had choosen the folder, just click OK and let the update runs.

Go to My Document and just deletes off the folder there and now it would never reappear again. :)

Final Year Project

After so many weeks of works on this Project, finally tested by our supervisor already. Now we can proceed to the documentation stage although final exam would be started just on this friday. Cool isn't it?

I have really forgotten since when this Ancient War project started. Well, this Ancient War is a Real Time Strategy Game which runs at the Pocket PC, Windows Mobile 5.0 platform. It wont be as great and cool as the Mobile Age of Empire that runs in the same platform.

We are stuck for months on how to implementing the Game API into the projects and our code platform changed from C# to C++. We also take many project as our reference such as the RTS tutorial make by some forumer in a game forum, which I don't really remember now, and also the Tank Battle game.

People might think play game is fun, but actually the process is not fun at all. We have been cracking heads on how to make even a simple things such as walking to be possible. Even possible, there is many things such as the location translation, and where is should stops, which objects would not collide with the unit and so on.

Testing and the coding progress is really extremely frustrating as everytime the emulator runs, my computer resources would be sucked up dry. CPU would be load at constant 100%. Doing other things while emulator are running seems to be nearly impossible. Honestly I really hates to run the emulators.

This is the processing load while Ancient War running in the emulator with my 4 years old computer.

At last, everything is end and we now can proceed to the Documentation for this Ancient War which our supervisor request us to came out with at least 100pages each. Easy? Nah... I bet I need to squeeze everything out from my brain just to write 1 page.

Screenies....

My messy sprites...

Prepare for war...!

From this...

into this...

VISTA Aero Theme

I have problem to logon to the blogger past few days, so that makes me lazy to update my post. :P Recently I change my Mac OSX Theme into VISTA Aero Theme. This is how my latest theme look like.



Nice? :P

How good is AJAX?

Short talk,
The post below are just written based on my understanding on AJAX. There might have some information accuracy problem. You are welcome to justify it and discuss it at the comment pane at this entry.

AJAX might be quite fresh and new for some of you, but to those who are familar with web application development, I'm sure you had been heard about this upteem times.

Well, AJAX is a quite new technology which now getting more and more popular as many famous websites are turning into the implementations of AJAX. For example, Google earth is one of the best examples of AJAX implementations. Live Mail (Microsoft Hotmail), Yahoo Mail were using this AJAX technology too.

What is AJAX?
Take a short browse to Google search engine, it gives you definition of combination of Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Basically AJAX enabled website gives you a fast response to user request compared to the old browsing experience. This is because, AJAX does not refresh the whole page each time user send a request to the server. It only refresh the a portion of the websites only. Thus, you would feel that the feedback was quick.

I would take Yahoo Mail as an example. You can see that Yahoo Mail actually divided into several segments or portion. I highlighted it into different color so that you can spot the segments border.


As you can see from the picture, the one highlighted in blue would be the menu pane, which is always there and only will be refreshed when new mails arrived. (The other pane would not be refreshed and none of the data would be send back to the server). This is one of the way AJAX improves speeds compared to the traditional style.

Besides that, each time you navigate through the tabbed menu (The one highlighted in red), the segment which highlighted in green only would be refreshed instead of whole pages. When its exchanging message and fetching data from server, you would see there is a Loading message with an animated icon inside the green area only. Thus most of the time, user thought that it was part of the animation.

Is AJAX really that good?
Well.. most of the people would amazed with the speed that AJAX provides, however most of us don't see if there is any problem at most of the time. After the taiwan quake, and internet connection distrupted, now you noticed that AJAX is not as smart as you think. Why would I say so? Ok.. the traditional server side pages exchange in page by page but AJAX only exchange part of the page (Segments or Division). Hence when the browser tries to fetch the data, most of the time the normal web browsing ables to tell when is your page going to be completed. (Progress usually shown at the browser's progress bar).

For AJAX, all you can see is "Loading"... You won't know when would it be done, and of course clicking on refresh it not a good way. Refresh button would refresh the whole page instead of that particular portion. Of course maybe programmer can put the loading progress information into the portion instead of putting the words "Loading".. but would it be confusing if there are too many figures in % in the page?

The second issue would the the "BACK" button of your browser. Ok, imaging you are happily composing the email and then click on the send button happily. Then out of sudden, you recalled that you had missed something out. On the natural instinct you would sure click on the back button and hopefully everything is there. Of course most of the web programmers would cater this problem by remains what you have typed when you click on the back button.If the page is an AJAX'ed, surely there is no BACK option for you to choose. Why? because every operation done only would refresh the portion, not the whole page. Hence browser doesn't know that the information in the page are being refreshed.

Of course actually a good AJAX programmer able to handle both of these issue well, but at this stage, how many AJAX websites do realize of these problem?

Discipline yourself ya, Corporate Internet users!

If you have read today's STAR newspapers, you would be "entertained" by this news article voiced out my the MCMC (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission).

PETALING JAYA: Corporate Internet users have been advised by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to exercise discipline when using the Internet in view of the limited bandwidth available, as Malaysians get back to work Wednesday after a long weekend.

Hmm... exercise discipline... The first thought that crossed my mind is about P2P sharing activity which they always use as low bandwidth excuses. Yet when I further read the article, it was not about P2P sharing.

In the meantime, MCMC said that non-vital communications should be limited or not allowed at all.

"Check only office mail and do not open a browser to surf the Internet unless you have to," said MCMC head of communications Adelina Iskandar.

I understand that the fibre optic disaster had greatly affect the Internet bandwidth, but imaging the morning you get into office, turn on your computer and lay your fingers on the keyboard and mouse as usual. Then suddenly your manager tells us about MCMC asking corporate user to be discipline. No browser allowed until cable at Taiwan restores its operation. Okok.. I know some of you can live few weeks without browser, no reading online newspapers, no surfing forums, no knowledge sharing for office portal, no google in office.

Then continue to read the news,

Users might also want to consider cutting back on using Skype and other Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) applications. VoIP is a popular and inexpensive Internet-based substitute to traditional telephone calls. The use of chat and instant messaging applications should also be disallowed or restricted at the office, she said.

Now, first no browser allowed. Now no Voip, no MSN, no Yahoo~!. Hell.. some company takes IM as their main communication tools. With IM, maybe manager just need to double click a contact in the dept to call for meeting. Imagine without IM, use shout? phone calls? or email? What for subcribing corporate line.. Might as well downgrade to home line. I mean those company which don't rely internet on doing business one la.

Source:
Interesting link

Happy New Year~!!

Hmm... another year again~! Hmmm... everything happens so fast and now is another brand new year for everyone of us here. Last year of today, I am still worrying about my industrial training placement, and today, now.. I had even completed my training already. What happens in my life this year?

- Gone for industrial training for half year at Kelana Jaya
- Change HP
- Presented my seminar
- Working on Final Year Project
- Having my final semester in here
- Changed blog template for more than 3 times
- Did ActiveScene XD
- Learned PHP, Coldfusion and JSP programming languages.


Hmm.. thats very few things happens but better than fill the list with all the bad things la. Anymore that I've missed out or not huh? Should be no already... Anyway
hope that more good things would happen on 2007... All the best to you too... :D