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    I've been testing Windows 7 happily for a few months now, it's stable, fast and probably the best Windows is going to get. Last week, after installing updates on my RC install, I was shocked to see ffdshow no longer handled the decoding of H264 video. Since Microsoft's crappy software is too stupid to figure out how to render AAS subtitles when I'm watching .mkv anime rips, I've relied on ffdshow to do this for me (and it's done a WONDERFUL job at it).

    But alas, Microsoft has decided that I'm incapable of choosing what codecs I use, and instead they've made it near impossible to use 3rd party codecs when an equivalent MediaFoundation codec exists. I can get the reasoning behind MediaFoundation, it's all about DRM for CableCard really, but are you actually going to go so far as to preventing me from replacing these and simply losing the functionality to play encrypted TV shows? Really?

    Thankfully, the wonderful people at the doom9 forums have come up with a (albiet ugly) solution.

    For a certain code golf challenge I needed a way to abstract away the mess of dealing with stdin to make my code cleaner (and I can reuse this wherever, which is a big bonus). However, being accustomed to STDIN.each_line in ruby, I wanted an iterator instead of using a while loop in my SumApplication.run() method, so I spent an hour in the vala source figuring out how to write my own iterator that works with foreach(). Now I give this knowledge to you, so you don't have to spend the time yourself!

    So, today I opened up the community tab in steam to find something very odd, one of my friends had gotten achievements (somehow) for three games that were released before Valve had even thought of the Steam Community in the first place! Half-life 2: Episode One, Half-life 2, and Opposing force (though these are obviously placeholders). Is Valve dilligently working on adding achievements to these older games, and I was lucky enough to hit a glitch that allowed me to see them? Hopefully, we'll soon know (note, screenshot of the community page attached for those who may think I'm bullshitting)

    Oi, well today I relearned my lesson: don't neglect your backups, even for two weeks. Just booted windows to see it shows nothing on my screen, it refused to start, and the "Windows Startup Repair" kept trying to 'rollback' a corrupt registry (hooray for stupid design decisions that they STILL haven't fixed!) So, my latest backup is two weeks old (that's not so bad, except when you're missing 40-50GB of data...), and it's going to be a lot of fun getting it all back...

    So, my long awaited Wii SD update has finally arrived, introducing a shiny new SD menu clad in contrasting black and adding support for SDHC cards up to 16GB (officially, at least). The SD menu now allows you to 'run' Wii channels (including WiiWare and Virtual Console titles) 'directly' from an SD/SDHC card. But are all of these advances enough to solve the storage pitfalls of the Wii for hardcore gamers?