News & Updates in July 2011

Posted the character profiles of Hans (from Pumpkin Scissors). Posted the anime profile of Master of Martial Hearts.

Wow, another month gone and barely any updates! I really did have every intention of updating the site several times each week, but so much has happened recently that I just haven't had the time I needed. Most of my time has been spent working on a job building an interactive bilingual website for a client overseas, but I also spent close to a week in Vallejo visiting my sister and her boyfriend and helping to clean up my parents' house to get it ready for new carpet. And then when I returned home, my computer hard drive decided it had lived long enough and was time to move on to the great beyond!

It always sucks when a hard drive dies, but thankfully I store all my data on a secondary drive (and then have a backup of that) so I didn't lose any actual data. To get my PC up and running again, I looted the boot drive from a spare computer that I was going to give to my dad, so that upgraded me to Windows 7. I was happy with XP and had no desire to upgrade, but this situation kind of forced my hand. Overall I do tend to like it now, though I had to also loot a gig and a half of RAM from the spare computer to get the PC up to speed, which means now I'll need to get some RAM for that computer.

So that took up a lot of time, reinstalling all my programs, setting up all my preferences, and generally getting my system set back up into a usable state. On the plus side, I did discover a new text editor called RJ TextEd. I previously used UltraEdit, which was a fantastic programmer's editor, but it was an old version as you have to keep paying to get upgrades, so I decided to see if any new freeware alternatives popped up that could match it. I've done this search a few times before, but never came across one that offered all the features of UltraEdit, and this time around I again had a few misses before finding RJ TextEd. It has almost everything that UltraEdit had, minus a few minor things I do miss, but it also has some cool features that UltraEdit doesn't (at least the version I was using).

One of the cool things about UltraEdit which was lacking from RJ TextEd was it's UltraCompare program, that would give a detailed comparison between two files. So I went looking for a good comparison program that I could set up as a tool in RJ TextEd, and after one program that seemed decent but didn't have the ability to merge changes, I found WinMerge, which is supreme! It can compare files and/or directories and allows merging specific changes from either file, among other great features.

I am once again going to try to do more updating this coming month, but I also have a new project of creating an iPhone application, and I have no experience with that so I expect it will chew up a lot of my time. I'm hoping it really is as easy as people make it sound.

Posted the character profile of France (from Hetalia: Axis Powers).