Prashant Deva's blog

With the release of Windows Vista coming closer and closer, I was thinking about the debate between SWT and Swing.
Will you still use Swing in Windows Vista? I look at the current default UI produced by Swing on my xp machine and it looks like the 90s. SWT of course, on the other hand produces native fast GUIs which are exactly the look and feel of windows.

So with Vista coming up with nice 3d accelerated GUIs will you still continue using the back and beyond GUI that comes with Swing or will you switch to SWT?

Now I know as soon as you read the title of this post, you are probably wondering what do ultra geeks like me who deal with stuff like parsers, lexers and eclipse ides have to do with gaming.

Well it turns out that I love playing video games and of course for anyone who likes video games and first person shooters its a duty to play half life 2.

So well I went and got myself a copy of the game. I had heard that half life has this 'steam' thing which requires you to connect to the internet the first time to authenticate your game. So well, I install the game and then steam pops up saying it will take 4 hours to update!!! Well, in india you dont have the fast broadband connections of US. So anyway I leave my computer for a while and go to sleep.

When I wake up I see that the update has completed and now I need to enter my cd key to activate the game. So I type away the key, looking forward to shooting some aliens very soon.

But thats when the sh*t hits the fan! It says the cd key is already in use by some other steam account!! What the f***k!!! This is the original game and I have input the cd key that came with it and now it tells me that its invalid!!!
This is the worst f*cking form of authentication I have seen.

I even sent a mail to their support, but today after 3 days I still havent got a reply! I absolutely swear never to purchase any game which uses the f*cking 'steam' from now on!!!

As for the game, I eventually borrowed a steam account from a friend whose key somehow worked and managed to play the game.
But it still sucks on Steam's part that I cant play the game with the key provided with my original cd.

Oh btw, the game rocks! ;)

As you might have probably noticed, that the price of antlr studio had been increased a few days before.
Well, I had taking the advice of quite a few people who run their micro ISVs and they had all been suggesting me to do a price increase. Although I was a little skeptical about it, I did eventually thought to take their advice. But I guess I had overlooked one point, that none of them had really used antlr before.

So well, after I increased the price I noticed right away an extremely sharp decline in no of people registering for evaluations and I made no sale fo those days.

So the price is now back to 49$. And rest assured it will stay that way for a long time now :)

A cool part of making great software is the nice comments you get from time to time.
Every few days I get some or the other comment telling me how nice antlr studio is, and it really feels great to hear that.

Here is one comment I recently got for the web site -

"... that's probably the single BEST web site I've ever seen demonstrating a technical product. You are a god".

If only I had some female friends with the same opinions about me....

To better demonstrate the capabilities of the Flux Debugger, I have written an article on it.

You can find it in the articles section at placidsystems.com and also on antlr.org.

Here is a direct link -
http://placidsystems.com/articles/article-debugging/usingdebugger.htm

Oh and a Very Happy New Year to all the readers! :)