Archive | November, 2008

Apple Bluetooth Keyboard under Vista

By on November 29, 2008 in Mac / OSX, Windows Vista

I enjoy gaming. I don’t enjoy having to use a full PC rig to play them. I prefer playing on my Macbook Pro. I recently got myself the new Unibody one and wanted to play Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 under Vista x64 (it has 4GB of RAM, x86 makes little sense).

After a painful install, I wanted to get my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to work. When I am at home, my MBP sits up on a Griffin stand and I use the Bluetooth keyboard. However, for love nor money, I could not make the thing work under Vista. It would just keep flashing it’s little green light for no apparent reason – until I finally figured it out!

At the step where you have to ‘enter’ the passkey. Enter it, then press ENTER repeatedly. Silly? Yes! The only thing that got it working for me? Yes! It seems that you have to keep persuading the keyboard to actually stop being discoverable and be useful. This appears, to me at least, the only way to achieve it.

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X-ray Gaming

By on November 10, 2008 in Portfolio

An anti-cheat solution that deals with Gigabytes of images every day, X-ray Gaming is a great example of how a pre-existing client/server setup done by people in their spare time can be turned into an enterprise class solution. I took over the reigns and migrated it’s client from something done by hobbyists into a professionally written C++ client. Work was also done to separate the databases that managed images away from the front end. This gave the end-user a much better experience. Technologies employed were PHP, vBulletin, MySQL, Python, RabbitMQ and Solaris.

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