Browser Swap
After many years of using Firefox I’ve recently found myself leaning towards the Google Chrome browser more and more, the “once alternative browser champion” has become rather slow and tiresome to use.
Yes I know you can tweak some settings in the config and download a extension that delivers 25% faster browsing but I really can’t be arsed if I’m honest.
I like that the Chrome browser just works quickly from the start just like the old versions of Firefox when it first appeared on the scene. Opening the browser and waiting for 2 minutes isn’t ideal and time is more of a managed resource in my day-to-day live now.
I’m not saying that Chrome is perfect but in my opinion the pros certainly outnumber the cons when I compare it to Firefox. For now I’m enjoying the change of scenery.
Perhaps I just need to wipe my Firefox install and give it another chance I know there are most likely files in my profile that date back to when it was branded Phoenix, I’ll keep notes on how it goes.
PC Upgrade
We’ll I’ve finally got my new hard drives installed with a fresh version of XP too.
My old SATA discs were a little old and both had snapped the plastic support for the data cable off. This meant they were a little flaky at times and the one drive hadn’t work for the last 3 months.
I planned on cloning the OS and migrating the whole lot over to the new discs this would have been fine, only due too my partitions things weren’t going to be so easy.
Happily I have discovered that there are 2 great benefits to how I game.
MMOs – all my mmo games that I moved over worked off the bat, which is rather good considering their size and the potential downloading that could have been required to re-install them. (LoTRo was a game that didn’t like this last upgrade but It wasn’t installed this time around)
Steam – Horrah for Steam, well nearly. You see my steam installation wasn’t exactly the same as the one described in the Steam Knowledge base. They assumed my steamapps folder was under the main steam folder (steam\steamapps) when in fact it was located at steam\config\steamapps.
This resulted in a bit of a headache because moving the apps folder to that new location resulted in Steam not loading up. But after some trial and error I found that I needed to boot Steam up without the apps folder and it would be created, then keep the files that it generated as they held the correct path. A little awkward but worth it as downloading 43GB of game data wasn’t as appealing as you’d think.
So I’ve now got my shiny Christmas presents installed and a massive 500gb Free 
Gaming Charts
As you may be aware I enjoy looking at the stats that GamerDNA captures for XFire usage, it is a simple yet effective method of showing how much time was spent and what percentage was spent on each game. I’m truely suprised that XFire doesn’t capture such data already.
At the start of January I reviewed my XFire data for the month of December, I wanted to see how frequently I played certain games. I pumped the data into the handy Google Chart API which then displays an image based on the information provided.
When February came around I wanted to do a similar task but rather than having to trawl through the data and craft the url to generate the Chart I decided to automate the process. So in a frenzied weekend of wracking my brain into remembering PHP, I created a page that automatically reads the RSS feed of my gamerDNA experiences and uses the XFire data held within to generate the URL for the Google Chart.
After a few hours cursing at stupid errors I finally created a fully working tool that achieved the result I was aimming for. Once this had been tested a few dozen times it suddenly occurred to me that It would be easy enough to allow other GamerDNA members with XFire experiences to generate their own charts.
http://charts.welshtroll.co.uk/
It’s not all that pretty but providing the username entered has XFire experiences on GamerDNA in the last 30 days it will “hopefully” generate a nice little chart. I’m hoping to enhance the functionality to include the ammount of time played as well, but that can wait for now, small steps to start.
