FUR COAT YALL
Hello everyone,
It’s been a while since I’ve written on this blog, and since I’ve updated Party Buffalo. A friend of mine was trying to use my cross-platform FATX explorer, and it didn’t work for him. I thought that it was odd, since the FATX libs should be 100% solid as far as reading and disk size calculations and all that crazy stuff goes.
Well, I was wrong. Here was the problem, which also applied to Party Buffalo: I was using the raw disk size, and not the actual size that the Xbox uses from the security sector. So, for some disks, the size of the file allocation table would be off by +- (around)0×3000, give or take, which would then make the data region of the Data partition off by that amount as well, therefore giving the user bad (just random) filenames and other weird stuff happening.
I said this before, but this is almost 100% guaranteed to be the last update for Party Buffalo, unless I really screw up this update. I’ve since moved on to other projects. I’m starting to get in to web development (Ruby on Rails to be precise), and this project has lost my interest. I was debating finishing Up, but then two friends of mine showed me the awesome work they’ve done on their cross-platform STFS package manager (also does a lot more than just that!) called Velocity. They made the excellent point that it’s useless on non-Windows platforms without a device explorer. So, I’ve started to start development on Up again, and hope to have it done this winter.
Some reflections on Party Buffalo, and CLKsFATXLib:
I would have designed them both a lot differently. Looking through the source, I realize how much I didn’t understand when I started off, and how much better I could have made both projects in terms of performance and source structure/readability. Things got messy. Things got ugly. I sort of started to do that with the Drive class in Up’s FATX library, but I plan on sorting that out before the project is done with (how about this weekend?). I also probably should have made the update system a lot nicer, and shouldn’t have done that bullshit with the ads/latest news stuff. No one cares about that. It was annoying. I did it because the person who was hosting my server before suggest I do it in order to gain ad revenue for both myself and him. So, sorry for subjecting you guys to that.
I also probably should have used some kind SVC. Seriously. I started coding Party Buffalo when I was 13 I believe. I didn’t know what SVC was, so I didn’t use it. It was only at the end of the project that I finally uploaded the source to Google Code, and in hindsight I probably should have just uploaded it to GitHub. Zipping up the source and uploading it to a dump site really wasn’t the best solution (and it’s what I’m doing for this release, since I’m too lazy to reconfigure Google Code stuff and set it up on my GitHub page).
Per usual though, you can find the sources at http://clkxu5.com/drivexplore/src/. I did not provide CLKsFATXLib with its own source in the subfolder. Just grab the latest DLL if you need it.
To all of you who still use Party Buffalo: thanks for sticking with me. When Up is released, it should be pretty good, and make up for the flaws in Party Buffalo. If you’d like to follow the project, you can find its GitHub page here: https://github.com/landr0id/Up. You can also follow me on Twitter (@landr0id) if you’d like. And yes, that picture is of me in a fur coat.
You can grab the latest version here: http://clkxu5.com/drivexplore/Party%20Buffalo.exe
This update is recommended.
