Fate Unlimited Codes (PS2)

Game Cover

Recently, I have watched Fate Stay Night and Fate Unlimited Blade Works for the fifth times. I also just found the game named Fate Unlimited Codes in PS2 (it is quite old game), and wanted to try it very much. It is a fighting game. In the game, you can select characters among masters and servants to play. There are some special secrets in this game such as Saber Lily costume, Zero Lancer, and Leysritt (Ilya's housekeeper).

Saber Lily

You can download this game here.

For how to play and secrets, take a look at here.

Mission mode information, go to this site.
Note that Ex attacks/specials can be used if the following conditions are passed:

1 - The Holy Grail Meter (the "chalice" under the timer) must be FULL
2 - Make sure you have 3 bars of Mana
3 - Deal damage to your opponent while the Holy Grail is full to get your life bar flashing
4 - Go into EX Mode/Overdrive/whatever you want to call it by pressing the three attack buttons together (and while you still have 3 bars full of Mana)
5 - Input the commands for the EX Attack.
6 - Make sure your attack actually HITS.
7 - Enjoy the EX Attack animation.

p.s. Go to practice mode to make you getting more ideas.

Special Box

Netbeans vs. Eclipse

Check out this link: http://caffeinbean.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/an-up-to-date-and-ongoing-list-of-netbeans-vs-eclipse/.

Install Linux on Your Mac

Read this article: http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/install_linux_your_mac.

How to speed up Visual Studio 2010

According to the current version of Visual Studio, that is 2010. We can't deny that this version of Visual Studio is running slower when compared to the previous version (2008). So, I found some blogs wrote about the solution to improve Visual Studio 2010 running performance. I followed his steps, I think it should work for everyone else. Enjoy coding time!

The solution is posted on http://lennybacon.com/2010/10/18/UltimateGuideToSpeedUpVisualStudio.aspx.

Later, it seems like the link I posted is not exist already. So, I would tell the steps from my memory 555.

1. Go to options and click at Environment then look at startup tab. Select show empty environment.

2. Go to main environment tab, in Visual experience, deselect automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance then select Use hardware graphics acceleration if available.

3. Go to IntelliTrace tab, deselect enable IntelliTrace.

4. Go to Buld and Run tab under Projects and Solutions, check at Only build startup projects and dependencies on Run

Finally, I hope that it can help your Visual Studio run faster a bit ^^".

Remapping the keyboard layout in Windows 7

For some reasons, you may want to change to keyboard layout, such as playing games, changing mac keyboard layout to be more comfortable when using Windows. Try this program Sharpkeys at: http://www.randyrants.com/2006/07/sharpkeys_211.html.
There are also other programs that do the same purpose at: http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/remap-keyboard.htm.

Useful Resources for developing Python GUI Applications with Tkinter

• Tkinter Classes
• Text Widget
• Frame Widget
• Button Widget
• Pack Geometry Manager
• Grid Geometry Manager
• Scrollbar
• tkFileDialog
• Grid Geometry Size Propagation (with sticky)
• How to handle the window close event (clicking the 'X' Button)

How to force a thread to stop when the main program has been closed in Python

Last week, I had done with Tkinter GUI programming, and that program requires a lot of processing power to crawl and parse web pages. So, when I was running the program, it was hang. The solution is using multi-threading, but I found a next problem that threads were not killed when the main program was closed. To stop threads, we need to set daemon thread letting the threads die when the program is terminated.

Thread.setDaemon()

Compile Python apps to .exe with py2exe

Normally, to run Python applications, we need to have a Python Interpreter. However, it's not always end in this way. If you are using Windows-based Operating Systems, you can compile your Python program to an executable file, and let other Windows-based users to use it without any of Python interpreter installation. You can download the py2exe from http://www.py2exe.org/ according to your Python version.

Examples:    A console application

print 'Hello World!'

 To compile console applications, create a setup.py file and then write the following code:  

from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe
setup(console=['hello.py'])

Then, terminal access is required for compiling process. Write it as the following code:

python setup.py py2exe

Next, py2exe will try to generate the executable file for running that Python program on Windows.   A GUI application

from Tkinter import *
app = Tk()
app.mainloop()

 GUI applications need to modify console application setup code a bit as the following commands:

from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe
setup(windows=['ui.py'])

Then, use the same command that I already mentioned above. In addition, py2exe tutorial can be looked for more information at: http://www.py2exe.org/index.cgi/Tutorial

How to print percent sign in Python

Hahaha! until now, I still don't know how to print percent sign in Python yet because I haven't needed to use it. The solution is in your printout string, you need to put '%%' (concatenate percent signs). Then, the output will show the percent sign.

print 'Your accuracy is 80%%.' # Your accuracy is 80%.