Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I was released today and I watched it.  My rating would be 8.8 for the movie out of 10.

Graphics, sound etc are the taken in the movie, the story is also good and the twists and curves of story line are new and not commonly seen in any story or science fiction movie.

The first half is damn good, the second half is good yet it could have been more detailed rather then speeding the movie up.  In some areas of the second half the logic element for some scenes are lost like Prime is stuck in steel ropes when flying and could not come out on his own, the count of ropes is also low and that too they are from a semi fallen building.

Overall, a great movie and a definite must watch.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Steam and its Team Fortress 2

Two full days time for downloading only a 9.8 GB game with 1Mbps connection, which is indeed, the download did not take the full speed of the internet,  tried to play the game, the game worked, however, not able to play much, I HATE STEAM for the first time, the game is Team Fortress 2.

The problem is that I am not even able start a game immediately, after connecting to the server, when ever I try to play a game, initially the maps and other resources get downloaded, it takes a lot of time, even for downloading these small files it takes a lot of time, I played for somewhat 20 mins, lost complete interest.

The issues is that steam need to update its UI properly, not the graphics, but on how the game is being presented, the starting and the ending parts, like showing the status of downloads clearly, downloading regular multiplayer maps initially only, giving a offline installer so that download speed can be enhanced with the help of p2p clients etc.

My final verdict as on 28/6/2011 for the game is, the game is now free to play, however waiting for a month would reduce the load on the servers of steam and also we can get the offline content up and running, STEAM is sick. Sad smile  But thanks for making the game free, although its age is above to end I suppose.

Monday, June 13, 2011

My experiments with SQL and Access

I have programmed a disk catalog software in 2007 and had been using since then, this software records and stores all the disks file structure information.  The software works with 3 table and only one table among them is of talk able size.  this table contains the information on all the files and folder, it indexed about 50-60 DVDs, that’s nearly 66k+ rows of data, each row of data contains 8 fields of text, 1 field of bool and 2 fields of date and time.  The entire file size has reached 143MB, don’t you think it is too much for a save file?.

Hence, I started to work on MS SQL database, this time for a slight advancement, I worked with Silverlight.  I copied all the records from the MS Access DB to the new MS SQL DB, the functionality is mostly common, Silverlight gave a good boost to the visual aids. the new MS SQL DB, in addition, it also indexed my 2TB HDD, that’s nearly double the records, i.e. the new MS SQL Database contains nearly double, i.e. 132K+ rows.  The best part is the file size, the ACCESS with half the content takes 143MB where as SQL took only 29MB with huge data.

Hence forth, I would suggest that SQL takes less space than the Access and SQL is faster than the ACCESS at providing data for more than one user.  However, later I tried the compact and repair option available in Access, the size of the shrined to 30MB, sql can support many users at once and is better for mass usage unlike access, access is suited when the DB is limited to small/less use.

Those who want to use my software, please find the link here:

Disk Catalog V2

A small pic of it reading my 2TB HDD is here:

DiskCatalogV2-Recording 66k Rows

Please feel free to use the software and only request is to let me know if there are any issues/bugs with it.