Microsofts XNA and the XNA Creators Club

If your anything like me you would have been sitting at the XBOX 360 playing Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and thinking how the heck do they do all of this. So it got me wanting to try and make my own game.

I checked out the creators club for XNA and discovered some really cool tutorials. It allows the user to construct their own 2D and 3D game in XNA / C# programming.

Why not check them out today, Im glad I did, I was able to make a fully functioning game within one week.

http://creators.xna.com/en-GB/education/gettingstarted

ikee Never gonna give you up! - iPhone Worm

The ikee worm reported on the 9th November where the iPhone wallpaper is changed to an angelic picture of 80s music legend Rick Astley. A 21year old from Austrialia thought it would be a joke to infect vunerable phones with the worm. It has since spread global.

It seems that only phones that have been Jailbroken are infected and those that have the SSH software installed. This allows them to install 3rd party apps not approved by Apple.

I do not think Mr Towns who wrote the virus should be penalised in any way, afterall, he did in fact shed some light on the fact that Apple has actually shown a lack of security knowledge for their product. If backstreet programming was unable to take place then the security threat would be much less. It is impossible to have solutions to all security threats and viruses though it is good for other vunerabilites to come to light which perhaps the origional designer may not have thought about.

Security in computing is very big business and its helpful to be made aware of potential threats so they can be dealt with accordingly. Apple have since employed someone to oversee a team of software engineers dedicated to the iPhone OS security.

Trixbox Virtual Telephony System VOIP

Owning a business is just the easy part. Paying for an expensive and highly configurable telephone system isnt.

Example of this system use:

• An office internal telephone system with 40 extensions (can be a PC or Analogue telephone)


• Integrated with the existing BT telephone line for making and diverting external customers


• Software runs on a dedicated old computer


• PCI Networking cards (FXO) used for connection of analogue extensions


• Virtual PBX software to use the laptop/PC as a telephone

The list is endless. Just check out http://www.trixbox.org/

Microsoft Windows 7 Installation Problem Wont start

Came across this problem today when installing windows 7 64-bit via clean install using boot from cd. At first it seemed to install correctly and when windows decided to restart the computer to finish the installation it would not boot from the hard drive to complete as it should.

It just froze in the same state, so after working about with the computer to troubleshoot the problem I discovered that the problem was the following: I had a slave hard drive installed and this seemed to cause problems. So I removed the other storage drive and kept the main C:/ drive and off she went (as they say) so I treated myself to a good old cup of tea :)

One other small problem was that at the beginning windows 7 would not install due to needing the drivers for certain media. It insisted on the drivers before the install would contuinue. It appeared to want RAID drivers however the problem appears if you are using the wrong version of the operating system. Ie (x86)