mon⋅u⋅men⋅tal [mon-yuh-men-tl] - exceptionally great, as in quantity, quality, extent, or degree: a monumental work.

Sad how truthful this is. :) Guru meditation error blowed my mind. The only thing missing is someone dying from heart attack.

On last project we are working on, we decided to go heavy with browser cookie usage for saving user personalization settings locally instead of centralized (to database). Yes I know it slows down the page rendering, but please humor me in this exercise. Answer following questions truthfully:

1. How often do you delete your browser cookies?
2. Do you delete them at all (on purpose or automatically by an antivirus)?
3. Are you afraid of browser cookies?
4. Would you even consider using website which saves user personalization settings locally to your computer (and available only from that computer) vs. site that requires registration and login and then saves user personalization settings centralized?

The initial fear of cookies (or at least a "hype") should have disappear over the past years, and people should have realized that much greater harm can happen to them via internet browser than a mere 4kb of random data stored in cookie.

So, the only real question here is - are cookies convenient enough method of saving personalized settings in modern web age? Are people so used to "click here to register" signs (let's not forget fighting with captcha, leaving personal data, waiting for an email and activating account via email links hassle...) even only real benefit is ability to save personalized settings of that website???

This is rather note to my self then a post. If you are using modded inf to install new workstation (180.x) GeForce drivers to a notebook (from for example here), brightness control via function keys will behave strange. Strange as in - it won't fade at all or will fade, but in strange steps. You can notice hard screen flickering when dimmed.

Solution is to add this to nv_disp.inf:

[nv_SoftwareDeviceSettings_G8x]
...
;Smart Dimmer Controls
HKR,, EnableBrightnessControl, %REG_DWORD%, 1
HKR,, PanelPWMFrequency, %REG_DWORD%, 210
HKR,, PanelPWMDutyRange, %REG_DWORD%, 0x03E80096...

New modded drivers didn't contain above three laptop manufacturer specific settings and that caused all the problems. It's also interesting to note that brightness control in Vista's original VGA driver works flawlessly. So to completely rule out hardware failure, test your screen with those drivers.

Each time I update drivers in such a manner, I am happy that my hardware doesn't melt. And yes, I've tested above settings on Samsung and Asus laptop and brightness control worked as with original driver set. Hooray! )

I was looking forward to play new GTA 4 over Xmas. Brutal Balkan (Niko Belić) in New York. Sounds like an interesting plot. :) And as it happens I have new reasonably priced laptop at home with Nvidia 8400M GS and dual core 2.4 GHz cpu on which I just successfully finished playing awesome Fallout 3.

To make long story short - GTA 4 PC port is BIG FAIL! I don't care about Social Club or MS Live addons or SecuROM DRM which forces you to keep DVD in drive all the time... I care about not being able to play it at all. When game producers start producing games for future generations of PCs and they don't implement any optimizations - you know that things in PC gaming world have gone horrible wrong. Initial GTA 4 minimum system requirements were looking good. But then, somewhere in between... R* decided to change requirements on the fly.

"Most users using current PC hardware as of December 2008 are advised to use medium graphics settings. Higher settings are provided for future generations of PCs with higher specifications than are currently widely available." - from Rockstars GTA 4 gfx setting guide

I spent whole weekend trying to get the game running on my reasonably priced laptop and after I heard that my colleague with high end gaming rig had similar problems I decided to post something and maybe help somebody else (w/ Nvidia and Vista).

GTA 4 Missing textures bug:

• Download and install latest .NET Framework 3.5 SP 1 from MS
• Get new GTA 4 Nvidia 180.84 drivers. If you are updating drivers, just be sure to uninstall old ones and clean remaining files with Driver Sweeper. If you want to install new driver to laptop, you will need Mobility Modder. If you don't want to update to new driver, you can try resetting video card setting with Riva Tuner.
• If your gfx cards has less than 256 mb ram forget the game. Nevermind laptop gfx can share memory GTA4 needs 256 real memory. I managed to fake it but when you drive around the town and new textures kick in, the game is just too slow to play.
• I managed to get game running and fix missing textures on my 128 mb gfx appending this parameters to LaunchGTAIV.exe shortcut (just be sure to start the game by clicking on that shortcut):

  "C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\Grand Theft Auto IV\LaunchGTAIV.exe" -novblank -norestrictions -nomemrestrict -renderquality=0 -shadowdensity=0 -texturequality=0 -viewdistance=1 -width=800 -height=600 -availablevidmem=256 -percentvidmem=100 -DX9 /high

Slow performance on high end configurations, cannot change gfx setting:

• current version of GTA 4 doesn't support Nvidia SLI.
• In in-game options - turn off clip capture option so game stops recording whatever you do in background.
• Appending this parameters to LaunchGTAIV.exe shortcut do disable restrictions in ingame gfx setting and disable vsync:
  "C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\Grand Theft Auto IV\LaunchGTAIV.exe" -novblank -norestrictions -nomemrestrict -percentvidmem=100 -DX9 /high

That's it. Have to find something else to do over the holidays. :)

I am writing this more as a reminder to myself, and also to have a link which I can easily send to people who ask us to build them replica of Facebook.

We, here in Nivas, at least twice a month get a client requesting us to to build a website which replicates (and improves) an existing high-end successful website. Lately social networks are a big hype, so we get quite a few Facebook-wannabe requests, and not to limit requests to social networks - we get requests for eBay clones, Amazon clones, Plaxo clones, Twitter clones ...

What most of the clients do not understand is the fact that all of the high-end websites evolved over the period of time. Two keywords here: EVOLUTION, and TIME.

I will take Facebook as an example, since most of the people are familiar with it.

Facebook opened at 2004. That is four years ago, almost five now. Facebook started as a closed project of Mark Zuckerberg and only Harvard students could join. The initial pool of people was very limited and very controlled, and marketing was easily done - Mark could just tell to all the people "Come join", and he got his first 50 users. As time passed, more people and friends wanted to join, so Mark opened registration to other colleges, then to any university student, then to high-school pupils, and then to everyone old enough to hold the mouse and type on the keyboard. Even after Facebook opened to everyone, it still went through a couple of evolution steps, adding functionality, changing and improving design based on experience and user input, and will keep evolving until the day it somehow dies.

All websites that are hard hitters on the net now passed some sort of evolution.

Attempting to create a website that will be an exact duplicate of Facebook in it's current state (or any other hard hitter) and making that a starting point of a project is just doomed to failure.
Well mister Daemon, tell us why is that so? Alright, listen:

1. You have no users and no content to start with.
Easy one to understand. You have nice site, but no content on it. If you made eBay replica, you will need at least 10.000 items there to attract anyone. If you made Facebook replica, you will need 10.000 users so that the site appears alive and fluid.

2. People will be blocked by the complexity of your project.
Releasing a complex huge site online is pretty big fail. Even if you invest in marketing of your site, new people that come to it will just be stunned and knocked-out by all the tools that you invented for them. You will now ask me "Well how come that even tho Facebook is so complex, new people come to it constantly?". Answer is easy; they were introduced to it by someone who is already feeling comfortable with complex functionality, and even if people get stuck, they can always ask someone how to do certain things. As Facebook's functionality grew, from most primitive to what we have today, people were learning how to use it gradually. Then those people who have the knowledge can easily help newcomers. Your project does not have "old" folks that know everything.

3. You are competing with existing monsters, and you cannot win fast.
You can win. In 4 years from the release date of your site. And only if you plan your evolution and plan your growth.

Then we have a question of location. If you are building regional site, or site targeted for specific country, the problems become increased tenfold. What works on global scale does not necessary mean it will work in your target country/region. This is a whole another set of issues you have to analyze before doing a major investment in big website. But this is a topic for another post.