Valve recently released the Steam UI beta which is due to come out of beta this Monday. It seems a lot of people are complaining that you can’t have icons next to your games in the games list like in the old UI.

This is false!

Just press the “+” symbol just to the right of Counter-Strike in this screenshot and you can enable game icons. Easy!

I finally got an Nvidia developer account a few days ago which gave me access to a very useful library to use with CUDA.

cuPrintf allows printf equivalent statements to be placed inside CUDA kernels without the need for -deviceemu.

The following example demonstrates a simple use for cuPrintf and displays the current thread ID.

cudaPrintfInit and cudaPrintfEnd only need be called once throughout your entire project.

Output is not automatically displayed on the screen, but stored in a buffer which is cleared and displayed when cudaPrintfDisplay is called. The size of the buffer can be specified with the optional argument cudaPrintfInit(size_t bufferLen).

cudaPrintfEnd simply frees the memory allocated by cudaPrintfInit.

When cudaPrintfDisplay is called, output stored in the buffer is displayed to the console. The second argument in this call either displays the current thread (true) or doesn’t (false). The first arguemnt, specified by stdout in this example, simply defines the descriptor where the cuPrintf log is sent.

On another note, I’ve found that using cuPrintf impacts on the performance of my kernels, presumably due to the data transfer performed every time cuPrintfDisplay() is called.

Dropbox is a great little app I found about a year ago for backing up all your important files and making them available anywhere in the world, as well as syncing them to any other computer you have linked to your account.

For example, if you’re working on a document on your computer, any changes you make to the document will instantly be reflected on your laptop or iPhone so you don’t have to bother with a flash drive or e-mail.

I’ve found it ridiculously useful for all my uni work as it saves up to 30 days of revisions to any file. So for example, you mess up some piece of source code and you want to get the version back from 3 days ago at 3 o’clock, then that’s possible via the Dropbox website (Obviously no replacement for SVN but handy anyway). You just select which version you want to restore, and then that version is pushed back to all your devices with Dropbox installed! You can even recover deleted files and it works on Windows, Linux, Mac and iPhone.

Sign up for free here and get an extra 250mb on top of the standard 2Gb that you’d usually get.

After buying the orange box over a year and a half ago, one of the included games that I never got around to completing was Portal (as I primarily bought it for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 like everyone else). What a mistake that was!

Portal is a first person action/puzzle game that puts you in the shoes of Chell; the seemingly silent protagonist.

It’s set almost entirely inside the “Enrichment Centre” for “Aperture Science”, a research corporation responsible for creating the “Aperture Science Hand Held Portal Device” (portal gun).

The game takes place through a series of test chambers that pit the player against increasingly difficult challenges. All of these challenges revolve around using the portal gun to overcome some particular obstacle and are all excellent fun.

Portal Momentum Puzzle

The plot has a few amusing twists in it and is told through the narrative of GLaDOS, an artificial intelligence that directs the player through the test chambers whilst providing some amusing dark humour. All the while promising the reward of cake upon the completion of all test chambers.

Portal really is a game that needs to be experienced as my description of it really doesn’t do justice. The combination of unique game play, challenging puzzles and a humorous but simple plot line make for several hours of excellent fun!

Usually food at uni is pretty good but last night I got served this thing (we’re catered). God knows what was going on in the kitchen but it was terrible. Who serves a chicken boob with no sauce or any kind of seasoning!? Whats more, the “vegetables” consisted of cauliflower and yet more cauliflower. There was nothing else on offer apart from some bread. WTF?

The Abomination

Here’s to hoping this remains the worst uni food I will ever receive!

My girlfriend bought me Assassin’s Creed II today for the 360 so I eagerly popped the disc in, installed it to the hard drive and began playing. Not 40 minutes of playing resulted in the game freezing and emitting some crazy beep through my speakers. I restarted my xbox and played some more and the same happened again after 5 minutes. Repeat this a few times and now every time I turn it on I get the aptly named “Red Ring of Death”. Yay for me.

This is my 3rd xbox to do this. Luckily, thanks to all the times it’s happened before it’s still under warranty so I can get it fixed for free but it really is a pain in the arse. Here’s to hoping I get a new console rather than a refurb.

My Most Recent RROD

On the other hand, my brief experience of Assassin’s Creed II was awesome. Starting the game as a baby is nothing new (see Fallout 3) but the novelty of having to press buttons to move your legs made it far more memorable.

So here I am writing my first post on a blog ever trying to decide what to write.

I guess most importantly, I’ll be using the blog to post random thoughts about games, music, films, work, programming tips and anything else that generally pops into my head (although we’ll see how much of this stuff I’ll actually write about).

If you want any information about me, the ‘about’ link at the top of the page is probably the best place to go for relevant up-to-date information!