From technology to politics to video games; these are the random thoughts of a geek with too much time on his hands
Zoomba's Articles » Page 20
February 21, 2008 by Zoomba
Yesterday, I noticed a brand new wallpaper from Vlad, possibly one of the best wallpaper artists on WinCustomize (and maybe even the Internet as a whole).  Sadly, Vlad posts infrequently on WinCustomize, but when he does, the work is always top-notch.  I feel his work is some of the best in the Wallpaper gallery and would love to see more of it.  In case you weren't already aware of Vlad, or if you haven't kept tabs on him lately, here are a few of his most recent uploads. ...
February 20, 2008 by Zoomba
Ok, we have a nice new forum look, but we still have the same old, tired smiley faces we've had for years.  Well, it's time for some new ones!  Instead of just going out to Google and searching for free smiley sets, we're turning to the community for help.  With so many outstanding graphic artists here, I'm betting we'll end up with some outstanding smileys. Whoever submits the winning smiley set will receive a free ObjectDesktop subscription (or extension to their current sub)...
February 20, 2008 by Zoomba
I.R. Brainiac is known for his highly stylized skins, making use of textures instead of colors and gradients, and 3d pieces to give his work an uncommon amount of depth.  Skins like Slider XP , Plasmatron A.I and Knot Vista are perfect examples of his unique style. In my morning forum patrol, I stumbled upon this thread .  It looks like I. R. Brainiac is at it again with a brand new skin; Payload. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how the skin progresses!
February 19, 2008 by Zoomba
Since early on in the public beta test, users have been recording gameplay videos of Sins of a Solar Empire to show the game off to friends.  This works out great because Sins is a game that demos very very well and it was easier to get the point of the game across in video than in words on a forum.  And since the game became widely available earlier this month, we've been seeing more and more Sins gameplay videos cropping up every day. So, we thought to ourselves "Why don't we d...
February 19, 2008 by Zoomba
Have you ever wondered what exactly the most popular skin ever posted to WinCustomize is?  Well, turns out it's XP Professional III by adni18, last updated in July of 2007.  Right behind that is another adni18 skin, then a treetog skin from 2005, a gef DX theme from 2005 and so on.  It's actually very interesting to see what skins were the most popular and how they've stood the test of time. We actually have a page that shows you exactly that: Most Popular Skins of All Ti...
February 19, 2008 by Zoomba
Over the weekend we rolled out a pretty big upgrade to the infrastructure that powers our forums and articles system across the entire Stardock network.  To go along with this we put out some layout and code fixes for the forums to hopefully make them easier to use/read and faster to load. After ironing out the major kinks yesterday (speed issues, broken images, quote issues etc) we're starting down the road of restoring the list of temporarily lost features .  So we feel we're in...
February 18, 2008 by Zoomba
Welcome back to the work week ladies and gentlemen.  As you can see by the posts below, the weekend was a pretty busy one for the team behind WinCustomize but I'm sure everyone else had a nice few days off to relax, slept in, and generally put off all the things you should have been doing in favor of more enjoyable things such as napping, reading a book, or just being lazy.  But now it's Monday, and that means, among other things, time for me to do my weekend picks. ...
February 18, 2008 by Zoomba
Since the forum upgrade late late last night, there have been a number of people encountering bugs or inconsistencies in how the site is working.  We are trying to get all of these problems resolved as quickly as possible, but we need help from the community to track everything down. Now, when you find something, please don't go "images are broken!" or something equally vague.  Bugs like that do us no good.  They don't tell us what specifically is broken, where it is broken, a...
February 18, 2008 by Zoomba
Huzzah! We've completed our work for the night and the forums are back up and running.  You'll notice a number of visual changes, and you'll hopefully notice improved speed and general performance. Please post any issues you run into here.  We've done a lot of testing this past week and tonight, but if something slipped through we want to know so it can be fixed quickly. Items not functioning at this moment: Recent Posts List on the Sidebar Featured Articles Fixes are c...
February 18, 2008 by Zoomba
Huzzah! We've completed our work for the night and the forums are back up and running.  You'll notice a number of visual changes, and you'll hopefully notice improved speed and general performance. Please post any issues you run into here.  We've done a lot of testing this past week and tonight, but if something slipped through we want to know so it can be fixed quickly. Thank you all for your patience.
February 18, 2008 by Zoomba
Huzzah! We've completed our work for the night and the forums are back up and running.  You'll notice a number of visual changes, and you'll hopefully notice improved speed and general performance. Please post any issues you run into here.  We've done a lot of testing this past week and tonight, but if something slipped through we want to know so it can be fixed quickly. Thank you all for your patience.
February 17, 2008 by Zoomba
We're just about to lock the forums while we do our database upgrade.  During this time you will be able to read, but not post anything.  Private Messages will also be down.  If you try and post before the upgrade is done, you will get a rather ugly server error.  Don't worry, we know it's going to happen. This post will be replaced when the work is complete. Thank you for your patience.
February 16, 2008 by Zoomba
This is a reminder that we will be doing work on the Database behind the forums and articles system on Sunday, February 17th starting at 8pm EST.  During this time the forums will be locked, preventing new posts, comments or private messages. The maintenance window is scheduled to last until 7am EST on Monday to allow for testing and unexpected delays.  During this maintenance window, you may find yourself able to post to the forums.  However, any content that is posted before...
February 15, 2008 by Zoomba

I missed my Friday Fidget last week, but I blame that on simply being insanely busy.  You see, we launched Sins of a Solar Empire at the start of the week to retail and digital distribution.  This means there was a fairly constant flow of work related to Sins that needed to be taken care of, on top of everything I do on a daily basis already.  This week things were starting to calm down, then we decided this coming weekend was the perfect opportunity to do our massive database migration.  No rest for the weary.

Anyway, on with the Fidget...

February 15, 2008 by Zoomba
Today I present the final part of our Ask a Moderator series.  For the last four weeks, I've been putting questions, submitted by the community, to the folks who help keep this site humming along day-in and day-out so you could get a better picture of who these people actually are, and why they put so much time and effort into WinCustomize. With this being the final set, I'd like to thank all of the moderators who participated, and all the users who submitted questions.  I hope ev...