People that are close to me know how much of a complete Tron fanatic I am.  I’ve always loved the Tron movies, even today, watching Tron made in 1982 is still a great story.  Disney took a heck-of-risk as I mentioned in my previous post discussing some Tron history.  Unfortunately in 1982 I don’t believe the world was quite ready for a move quite that advanced and it wound up as a box office flop.  Though over the years the movie has gained a huge cult following.

Enter Tron: Legacy

With legacy I think Disney has met with success.  Skeptics would argue that it didn’t make enough money at the theater to warrant another Tron movie and to some extent that’s a reasonable argument but it’s flawed.   Disney reported a 54% earnings increase and pointed at Tron: Legacy as well as a few other titles.  According to this post on Feb 8th, 2011: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118031762  had this to say:

Clearly this movie is viewed as a success by Disney which hopefully means more of it!  I will say this much, I’ve been keeping a close eye on “Tron” in twitter and it’s almost CONSTANTLY being discussed.  Mashable posted about this here: http://mashable.com/2010/12/28/true-grit-fockers-tron-twitter/.  I’ve been keeping tabs for a while now and as proof I’ve taken several screen shots at various random intervals check out the traffic:

These three screen shots, from left to right.  On the left one the time frame was Sunday Jan1st @ 1:17am EST.  Someone would rather watch Tron and Inception than go to sleep.   The second screen shot was Monday Jan 16th at about 5:30pm. The third is from Today the 20th at about 4:30ish or so.  If you carefully examine the time stamps, there is not a great deal of time that passes between mentions, granted 100% of them are NOT Tron: Legacy but the point is that for the last twenty days I’ve been watching this pretty closely and the traffic is nearly constant.  Obviously people are talking about this even after over a year now the movie STILL has nearly a constant stream of twitter traffic discussing it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again in an annoyingly huge font:

Disney, we LOVE TRON!

I an anxious for the animated series to hit Disney XD and am very hopeful that we’ll see another movie!

Not that my web sites get enough traffic to warrant doing this, but it’s still the principal.  The primary codejockey.net web site as well as this blog site will go dark later this morning starting at 8am to protest SOPA/PIPA.

An annoying trend that I believe is making it more difficult for gamers is that everyone is now trying to build their own “Steam” system.  For EA Games, I now have to create an account and use their launcher.  This evening I got an email from UbiSoft whom is also introducing their own system.  The problem: Of course these vendors aren’t going to cannibalize their own products and use Steam which makes me, the consumer quite unhappy.  Rather than go to one place to play all my cloud hosted games, I have to go to many.  Not to mention adding even more user names and passwords to my already ridiculously long list.  Why can’t these guys also publish though Steam.  Steam is a proven platform that has been around for many many years and it serves as a great, single place, to house, play and store all my games.

Please can you game publishers stop trying to get into social networking and stick to your core competency: Creating good games?  Can we please stop the mass amounts of user names, passwords, and all the other extremely annoying authentication tactics?  Can’t everyone just interface with a platform that already has a huge subscription base?  Why try to re-create something that has this many gamers on-line nearly all the time:

It’s taken Steam a good number of years to get that number, good luck matching it!  Just use Steam to make my life easier, PLEASE!

Just in time for me to get RC1 completed before the end of the year!

After hearing a few reports from friends of mine, and also starting to experience the problem personally I noticed BingPaper started crashing.  This turned out to be an easy fix and tonight I finally got a chance to get it fixed, tested, checked in, and published to the CodePlex site.  If you have BingPaper and have had problems with it crashing lately, please grab the latest update to make that problem go away. More...

Mozy has been both a positive and a negative experience over the years.  I’ve run into issues where the restore was corrupted, and a request of a different restore in time fixed the issue, annoying, especially given how long it seemed to take for my restore to be available for download, then to have to wait for the download to finish.  The Mozy client is so poorly written that I didn’t bother to install it on my newest laptop as it loves to PEG the hard drive and I got very tired of that problem alone.More...

I was going to write up a bunch of steps with code, screen shots, config settings, etc for working with log4net, but it turns out someone, a while ago, has beat me to the punch.  The articles I found are fantastically done and I see no reason to re-write what someone has already done a superb job of doing.  So without further ado, here is a link to a “landing” page the author created with links to all his log4net articles.  This link should wind up in your favorites!

http://www.beefycode.com/post/Log4Net-Tutorials-and-Resources.aspx

The codejockey.net domain will be down from 5/26/2011 through 5/31/2001 for various upgrades, DNS entries, etc.  I would have warned about this downtime but I honestly don’t think the traffic level on my blog (especially given I rarely blog any more) likely didn’t warrant a long notice.

Thank you,

Eric

As you will notice, I’ve had the picture I’m posting below this text since 2009, but even to this day it’s funny to see.  At one point during the day (16:10 according to the date/time stamp on the photo) I needed to get some cash out of the ATM and I drove up to this screen: More...

Introduction

Two tools that should be in every developer’s arsenal are Fiddler and Beyond Compare.

More...

Introduction

Feel free to skip past this, If you’d rather cut to the chase and  want the summary of my thoughts and opinion about the movie feel free to skip to the Tron Legacy: My Opinion portion of this post.   Otherwise I’m going to ramble quite a bit talking about some Tron History and also provide some details on how and why the movie is and always will be #1 on my list of favorites.  My Disclaimer: As such, odds are that you might as well understand this is going to be a positive review as I am biased to begin with.