Wide Fit Soccer Cleats (Boots) - Nike CTR360

I have wide, flattish, feet and love to play soccer - and this can be a problem when you're feet are size 12 1/2 to 13.

I've taken to wearing turf shoes the past two seasons because they're so much more comfortable than regular cleats - even Copas (which stretch well, but have a really narrow plate) are a problem as they are fine during the game but the next day my feet really hurt...

Luckily I was browsing Nike's website to see if they had any wide-fit boots now (almost nobody does) and lo and behold - they have a customizeable boot called the Trequartista III that comes in a wide fit.

Nike CTR360 Trequartista III FG iD (Wide) Men's Firm-Ground Soccer Cleat

You have to order direct from Nike's online store, and they're not cheap at $135, but you get to customize the studs, plate, upper, tongue, laces, et cetera - but most importantly they have 12 1/2 WIDE fit.

Thank God...  Sadly you have to wait 25 days while they make them and ship them to you though...

Mine will look like this:

Let's hope they fit well :).

BTW, the link to order is:

Nike Store - Nike CTR360 Trequartista III iD

SkyDrive is a pretty cool free app with a fair amount of free storage, but I really don't want to sync files by dumping them in the SkyDrive folder - so...

I tried simply making a soft link to the folders I wanted sync'd on my drives and it turns out that it works just fine.

mklink /D "C:\SkyDrive\MyFolder" "C:\SomeLocation\MyFolder"

You need to be running a command shell with Administrative privileges before you execute that.

The example above presumes that your SkyDrive folder doesn't already have a "MyFolder" link or folder in it, and when it runs, a soft symbolic link will be created in the SkyDrive folder that resolves to the actual folder location outside of the SkyDrive.

I currently share files between two PCs and an OSX box (yes, SkyDrive is on OSX too) this way before they qualify to be put into source control...

English subtitles in English soundtrack for foreign dialogue using Handbrake

I have backed up most of my video collection to a central server in my house, and I usually use AnyDVD HD and CloneDVDMobile together to do my rips; however, CloneDVDMobile has very limited support for subtitles (which I only noticed after going through dozens of my DVDs and doesn't support BluRay at all.

To get around these two issues I use Handbrake.  Using Handbrake to rip from BluRay is another topic; however, using it to effectively pull subtitles that are supposed to be shown in the English only soundtrack can be a pain, so since I've just re-figured this out again for probably the 3rd time - I'm posting it here so I can find it myself later...

Under subtitles, choose to Add and usually select the first English audio track (you may have to try others), then check 'forced only' and 'burn in' and usually you'll get the results you would get from simply playing the movie in your bluray/dvd player.

Unity3D 2D UI Click-Through Issues

I have message box and dialog box classes for use in Unity3D that need to act 'modally' (but not truly modal) at times, and one of the problems I've had was preventing the mouse-clicks/touches from hitting controls under the controls in the message/dialog boxes.

You'd think that the Unity3D system would already take care of this, but apparently there is some behind the scenes issue that is non-trivial to resolve (otherwise the Unity3D devs would have knocked this out a looooong time ago.)

Anyhow, I found a simple solution today that works for me (until I find it fails on iOS - fingers crossed that it doesn't!)

When my OnGUI call gets to my message/dialog box, the message/dialog box simple creates TWO full screen transparent GUI.Window objects.  The first one calls an empty method, the second one calls the method that draws the controls of the message/dialog box.

I'd tried this previously, but only created one GUI.Window - hoping (vainly) that having the window under the message/dialog box would prevent clicks from making it through.  Oddly enough, it sort of worked, it prevented clicks that were on the message/dialog box controls from going through, but you could still click anywhere on the rest of the screen and cause havoc...

Anywho - I'll have to test have badly this affects performance (it shouldn't really as the both windows entire areas have an alpha of 0.0.)

Sharing C# Source Code With A Unity3D Project

I ran into some issues recently trying to share some common networking and data classes between a client application, a middleware ASP.NET server, and a configuration/server management tool.  All three of them needed to be able to serialize/de-serialize the same XML data; however, Unity3D does not currently support (natively) the ability to reference source code files outside of its project directory structure.

The easy solution to this on Windows is to create a symbolic link, and it works nicely.

I'll be revisiting this problem when I go to build on OSX (I presume that I'll be messing with my samba conf) and there are ways you can trick your source control system into accomplishing this (but it's really hacky) - so this isn't a panacea for the issue.

Hopefully the Unity team will introduce its own linking system that handles this (if Mono doesn't already have it...)

Worst case I'll be writing some file synchronization scripts that trigger the Unity editor to copy from the common direct (which is problematic if I make changes in Unity - but hopefully I can avoid that.)

Sigh...

Recently converted an ASP.NET Web Site project to a Web Application project...

...because I really need to use shared/common sources for 3 inter-related projects and you need a Web Application to do it (because Web Site projects do not let you link to source files, just copy.)

Anywho - I converted, built, tested, deployed, crashed.  Turned on detailed errors, zilch.  Enabled .NET error page information.  Bingo, "Default.aspx.cs could not be found."  What?

I FTP in, look at the directory structure and see that the bin folder does contain the DLL it should.  Spend a half hour wondering what exotic setting I'd forgotten to configure.  Cursed Microsoft for a little bit.

Suddenly I remembered something rather important.  When you're using a pre-compiled version of your project (as a Web Application generally is), you don't use the CodeFile attribute in your Default.aspx html code.  You use CodeBehind.

CodeFile instructs the webserver serving the page to use the JIT compiler.  CodeBehind instructs the compiler on your dev box where to find the class it needs to shove into the DLL.

So, yet again, it was all my #F$()ing fault.  Sigh...

Flickering running Rise of Nations on Windows 7 - Intel HD 4000 Graphics

I played with the old (circa 2003 iirc) game Rise of Nations this weekend while waiting for someone to reply to e-mail inquiries and I ran into a strange flickering problem that nobody seems to have reported on the interwebs, so I thought I would post the solution I found.

Editing the ron2.ini file and setting ForceAGPVBs=1 resolved the issue for me.  Previously the graphics had flickered heavily - especially relating to text boxes.  None of the older solutions (expading resource windows or disabling vsync) worked for me, but this did.  BTW, this was on a 2012 Mac Mini running Windows 7.