On 30 January 2010, BuffMePlz had released the latest AI version for DotA Allstars 6.66b AI 0.214.

Here is the story. A few weeks ago, my brother asked me to re-partition his new laptop’s hard disk. It is a Dell Studio laptop. At the beginning, I tried to use the popular EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition since it received a lot of positive reviews, but unfortunately the laptop is running on the 64 bit version Windows 7 Home Premium and EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition works only on 32 bit Windows. Then, I tried GParted Live USB, a Linux based partition editor. Again, it was not a success because GParted gives me error whenever I tried to re-partition the hard disk. I don’t exactly know what caused the problem but I can see there is a Dell Backup Utility partition and maybe it had caused the error.

After searching for the alternative, I found Partition Wizard Home Edition. Partition Wizard Home Edition is a free partition manager software for Windows. It is free for personal/home use and the best thing is, it supports the 64 bit version of Windows. Basically, Partition Wizard will let you perform partitioning actions such as create, format, convert, explore, resize, move and copy a partition, like any other partition managers. Partition Wizard is very simple and easy to use.

Because it is free, it is not as powerful as other paid partition manager such as Partition Magic. For example, Partition Wizard only supports FAT, FAT32 and NTFS partitions. This means you cannot use Partition Wizard to create, resize or move Linux EXT2 or EXT3 partitions. As you can see from the image below, the partition (1) is actually a EXT2 partition, and it is shown as other in Partition Wizard.

I was looking for a simple download manager that will let me to easily queue the download from multiple file hosting site such as Hotfile and Rapidshare. I found JDownloader, a one-click-host download manager written in Java. Unfortunately I don’t really like it especially the part where it uses too much of my precious CPU cycles and memory. As I was looking for the alternative, I stumbled upon MDownloader and it come with ‘Don't click - queue it’ tagline. Well.. another .NET application and the chance of it to use a lot of CPU and memory is high but I decided to give it a try.

Surprisingly, I found that MDownloader is quite good. The first version that I use was MDownloader 0.9. The interface is very simple and despite the moderate memory usage, MDownloader is quite tame when it came to CPU usage. You won’t notice MDownloader is running in the background.

To use MDownloader, copy the links that you want MDownloader to download, and hit ‘Quick Paste’ (1). It will take some time before the downloads popped up in MDownloader. Just as simple as that and MDownloader will automatically download from all the links. MDownloader has built in captchas recognition but sometimes the OCR (optical character recognition) engine fails to recognize the captchas and you need to manually enter them. If you are queuing a lot of files, make sure you check MDownloader every hour or two, or you ended stuck at the captchas without downloading anything!

Have you been wondering how to choose the web browser that you want to use to open links? Normally, you can open links from non-web browser application using your system’s default web browser, and Windows only let you set 1 default web browser. Browser Chooser is a program that allows you to choose what web browser to open a link that you’ve clicked. However, Browser Chooser can only be lunched if the links that you’ve clicked are not from a web browser.

Browser Chooser will present you with the list of web browsers installed on your system when you click a link from a non-web browser program such as Yahoo Messenger or mIRC. It also works when you are opening a web page shortcut that was created by software installers on your start menu. Browser Chooser is able to detect 6 web browsers installed on your system; Firefox, Flock, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, if they are installed in their default directories.

After you’ve installed Browser Chooser, you must first set Browser Chooser as the ‘default’ web browser. Click the small ‘Options’ (1) button and go to ‘Miscellaneous’ tab. Then click ‘Activate Browser Chooser (Make default browser)’ (2). You can also enable the ‘Show URL’ (3) option to make Browser Chooser display the URL that you tried to open. In the Options dialog, you can choose what web browser that will be displayed by Browser Chooser. Browser Chooser can display up to 5 web browser.

If you are looking for a powerful Task Manager alternative/replacement, or simply a tool to manage the processes and services that running on your system, then Process Hacker might be the right system utility application for you. I’ve been using Process Hacker since version 1.3.x, so far Process Hacker is indeed an ultimate task manager and I can see the developers have put great efforts to improve and make Process Hacker a powerful system tool.

Process Hacker functionality and interface quite similar to Process Explorer’s. However, Process Hacker offers you 2 additional functionalities that Process Explorer don’t have; the ability to manage services and network connections information.

On ‘Processes’ tab, you can do the basic Task Manager actions such as terminating process, changing process priority, etc.. You can also easily search the process file name on Google, upload a process file to VirusTotal, and if you know what you’re doing, Process Hacker offers you advanced features such as terminating process using different methods, inject DLL into a process, inspect process threads, protect a process, write directly to process memory and many more. The processes are highlighted according Own, System, Service, Debugged, Elevated, Job, .NET, POSIX, Packed/Dangerous, Suspended Threads, GUI Threads, Relocated DLLs, Protected Handles and Inherit Handles.

The latest DotA AI map, DotA Allstars 6.64 AI 0.213 had been released by BuffMePlz on 25th October 2009.

Release notes for DotA Allstars 6.64 AI 0.213:

Changelog:
-First update to 6.64
-Changed the default AI behaviour of creeps and towers to be the same as in the official map
-Fixed the fade on Circles of Protection belonging to other players
-Fixed some numerical errors on Bristleback's abilities
-Added some additional AI ability functionality (Black Hole, Fissure, Epicenter)

[Download: DotA Allstars 6.64 AI 0.213]

[BuffMePlz’s blog] [PlayDotA Forum] [DotA-Allstars Forum]

Release notes for DotA Allstars v6.63b AI 0.212:

6.63b (v0.212)
==============
-First update to 6.63b
-Fixed an issue that was causing AI bots to learn their abilities out of order
-Fixed another issue that was still causing the game to crash when a player leaves the game early
-Added some additional AI ability functionality (Crystal Nova, Storm Bolt, Mana Burn)

Original post:
First release, updated to 6.62 and 1.24b compliant.

For those who love to download videos from YouTube, xVideoServiceThief (or xVST) is a handy software to help you to easily steal, I mean download your favourite videos. xVideoServiceThief is simple, easy to use and just works. xVideoServiceThief has lots of features and it is not like any other YouTube downloader.

Other than YouTube, xVideoServiceThief also supports downloading from a lot of other video websites (currently 73 as this post is written) such as Bebo, Blip, CollegeHumor, Dailymotion, Google Video, LiveLeak, Metacafe, Video MySpace and many more, in fact, er.. well.. some adult websites too.

xVideoServiceThief can covert downloaded videos instantly after being downloaded to popular format such as 3GP, AVI, MP4, MPG, WMV and MP3. This will save you the time to convert the videos that you've downloaded without the need to launch any external application.

xVideoServiceThief also provides you with a video search ability.

Windows 7 was released to manufaturing by Microsoft on 22nd July 2009 and retail available by the end of October 2009. Microsoft introduced a new design for Windows 7 taskbar. If you do not plan to upgrade to Windows 7 and at the same time you want to have the nice Windows 7 taskbar on your Windows XP/Vista, you can use this small application to make Windows XP/Vista taskbar look like the Windows 7 taskbar.

ViGlance - Windows 7 SuperBar for XP is a small application that allows you to have a Windows 7 taskbar look on Windows XP and Vista. Using ViGlance enables you to get almost all of Windows 7 taskbar features such as pinning application shortcut to taskbar, reordering taskbar icons and window thumbnails. The start button will be replaced with Windows 7 Start Orb.

To install ViGlance, download ViGlance zip file and extract it to a new folder. Then, run 'ViGlance OneStep.exe'. ViGlance will run on your system tray.

Updated on 18th September 2009 for DotA Allstars 6.62b AI 0.211.

BuffMePlz had recently released the latest version of DotA AI map (DotA Allstars 6.62b AI 0.211). This latest version introduces bug fixes.

(not the actual loading screen)

Release notes for DotA Allstars 6.62b AI 0.211:

Mostly just addressing bugs, will try to address some AI issues for next release.

Changelog:

6.62b (v0.211)
==============
-Temporarily removed managed group system to remove critical error bugs until I get a chance to clean up group usage in the AI script
-Rewrote Liquid Fire to prevent conflict with the AI script
-Fixed a bug with Weave
-Fixed a bug with Spirit Bear losing items when the ability is levelled
-Fixed a bug with the game crashing when a human player leaves the game early
-Fixed a bug with Cold Snap not working after the first hit
-Fixed a bug with -ma

Release notes for DotA Allstars 6.62 AI 0.21:

First release, updated to 6.62 and 1.24 compliant. Note that this is v0.21, and there will be bugs.

Some abilities are not working for bots yet (they learn them but don't use them), and this is expected and will be addressed in future versions.

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