Older blog entries for TheCorruptor (starting at number 142)

Another busy weekend has disappeared...

Finished off the pygame logo and sent it to ShreadWheat. Hopefully he'll be using it sometime soon. In the meantime, you can get a glimpse of it.

Chakie and I spent a long aftrnoon bug-hunting yesterday. Except I was having problems with my win32 install, which meant we fixed a bug that we weren't even looking for. Funny how things like that happen! Anyway, we proved what we needed to with the PyGame events (Looks like SDL might be at fault) and tidied up the scenario handling under win32. Civil is now pretty painless to run on Windows! :) #PyGame saves the day...

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I casually joined Nupedia last week and offered my GFX services to them. I was pleasently surprised to receive a response so quickly thanking me and offering to get me in touch with some authors. Looks like I could be doing the odd thing for them over the next few months. That would be kinda nice exposure...

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I've been thinking long and hard about moving off of windows, and a friend is selling an I-Mac for 300UKP. I'm having serious thoughts about upgrading it and bunging MacOS X on there. Then I can get Photoshop running on Unix! Wahey! This also means I can consolidate my other machines into a sensible scheme of servers, firewalls, and Linux development boxes (running Debian?!) -- without wasting fast CPUs on stupid OSes purely because I need Adobe software...

Oh, I'm soooo tempted! All I need is someone to twist my arm... Do you think I should?!

Another interesting day...

Finished off the amendments for my XSLT/XSLFO stuff at work and had that satisfied feeling 'cos I'd made life simple for myself at the beginning: Modular XSLT rocks! ;-)

Carried on looking at the Scenarios for Civil, and how best to transform them. A quick discussion with Chakie on #PyGame stopped me from chunking the files into two (one for rebel, one for Union) as anyone could just view the opponents scenario anyway. I've also got to hide unit locations and objectives. No big deal...

I've pretty much decided how I want things to look, so I just need a clean bit of time to sit down and hack the XSLT to completion... With a bit of luck I'll get it out of the way on Sunday... (Dyork: I'll post the URL up here when I'm done so you can have a snifter... It's nothing complicated as far as XSLT goes, but it's a nice application for our project...)

I flashed about my unfinished logo for PyGame last night. Got a few comments back ("Change his mouth", "change his tongue", "Try and hide that SNES joypad!"), so I'll have to make a few amendments. I'm also going to add a few leaves draping over the top, and the odd patch of grass. Otherwise, it's pretty much there. Not bad for a couple of hours in Photoshop last night! :-) You can have a giggle at my work in progress...

Tonight I'm going to relax with Emily, and play a little SF2 on my GBA... :)

Ok, so my whorish antics on handheld Nintendos is drawing to a close for this week. Managed to rack up 1500 vs points on Street Fighter II Super X-Reunion, and rattled through the 50 and 100CC cups on Mario Advance. I now have a sore thumb, and a bit of difficulty focusing...

For my next trick...

I had a very serious play around with IBM's Schema Quality Checker today (http://www.alphaworks.i bm.com) and it's proved to be a very useful tool. It does report errors that XSV doesn't, the one confusing one I found being if an element 'foo' appears in multiple 'sequence' declarations within the same parent 'choice' declaration. SQC thinks this breaks the minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" construct -- XSV happily reports this as valid (which it is, AFAIK). Other than that, it pointed out a lot of errors in my 1000+ line schema, and helped me tidy it up considerably.

I've sketched out my plans for Civil's XSLT stuff, and done some quick tests with the HTML. I just need to check the stability of the scenarios before I go ahead and produce the XSL -- I've been thinking that it's probably worthwhile making an XSL:FO output for running through FOP, in case any one wants to print scenarios out. This isn't really difficult to do, I have all the page setup code lying around anyway. I'm not sure how it's going to cope with the map preview though...

It also dawns on me that it would be useful for the website to have Xalan/Xerces on it so we can provide some kind of web-service where people can produce this material from our collection of scenarios without needing to be XML savvy... I'm gonna have to look into how to go about doing that -- maybe that's a good excuse to play with PHP...

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I'm starting to get a lot more interest in my skills for consultancy work. This has made me realise that I have to sort out my website. It's funny, but now I have so many things to do, I really don't want to take the time out to sort it. I just need some public proof that I can write JSP/Servlets and the like, and for the time being, the only place that's gonna happen is on my site. I just don't want to take a week out to re-do all the graphics, although it really could do with being a little bit more standards friendly...

Street Fighter 2 and Mario Cart for the Game Boy Advance arrived today. Looks like I'm gonna get nothing done for the next few days whilst I hammer these into submission...

Luckily I've started the PyGame logo, unfortunately I promised a delivery this week and there are loads of things I should be doing instead of playing games, like work on Civil!

But the GBA is so cute, and I can't resist! (And besides, most of the world is currently caught up in Gran Turismo 3 fever! ;-)

Civil has seen a lot oof decisions and action made on it this week. It's been good hanging out on #PyGame, as Chakie and I have been able to dicuss things more easily.

This week saw the addition of sound, and more LOS improvements. I've also decided to produce an XSLT stylesheet for the previewing of scenario's on the web. I've thought of a nice little hack to produce previews of the maps, and Chakie has figured out how this can be integrated with the scenario manager to allow people to download their favourite scenarios. I'll no doubt bang out the XSLT one night next week. It'll probably take another night to integrate the colour information from the python source and produce the map previews. Just gotta see if Netscape can handle my ideas...

Off to London this weekend for some beers and a catch up with a mate. Gonna spend tonight at home now so I can play GT3. I also hear in the news that Crawfish (they of the Doom GBA demo) have secured the rights to all the old Bitmap Brothers games. Xenon2, Speedball 2, Gods, Cadaver, Magic Pockets and the Chaos Engine will all be appearing on the GameBoy Advance. To say I'm wetting myself is an understatement!

Speaking of which, I've just order SF2 and Mario cart advance for the GBA. They should be arriving early next week... My God I'm gonna have joypad thumb all next week!

I've finalised my design for the PyGame logo. Should be able to get that out of the way by the end of next weekend. I'm hoping everyone will like it... If not, well, at least I try! ;-)

Have a good weekend all!

Started hanging around in #PyGame. Making friends with all the locals that in turn keep an eye on what Civil is up to. It's fun... Also sent a new screenshot for the front page of the site. More publicity! :)

I've also offered some time to ShreadWheat for GFX. He'd like a new PyGame logo, so I've said I'd be happy to help. Should only be a couple of evenings work, and it's a nice way to say thanks for all his hard work...

Chakie and I also had a chat about sound related issues. Looks like we'll be adding that long awaited feature pretty soon. I think I'm gonna get in there and write one of the backing tracks. Just something ambient...

I finished off the last of the dialog buttons, after spending ages drawing a page turning in the opposite direction to the 'back' button, only to find out that it wouldn't actually fit on the button. Doh! Anyway, the final one is committed and I'm feeling good... I'll do a short squirt on the hexes tomorrow night, then I'm done for the week.

Dyork: You've just encouraged me to waste some time! ;-)

Committed some more buttons for Civil tonight. Feels kinda good!

Got another couple to do tomorrow then it's back to the hexes...

Might go and hang around on IRC for a while. See if I can bump into anyone...

Got sent some examples of the FOP java extensions through the developers list today. They didn't work first time, but they highlighted the problem that was happening. There was something in my CLASSPATH that was causing the issue. I'm not sure what, as I deleted everything and just tied what was needed immediately to it, in order to get things to run. Suffice to say, the weird problem has now been fixed, and as predicted, it was something stupid. I still don't understand how this affected FOP but not Xalan, but at this point I don't care. I've got to rush around and get things working with FOP after figuring out how to do it another way! Still, I'm relieved...

Things aren't rosey at home atm. Pap is on a bit of a downer, and it's difficult to get all our things done when he's running aroung trying to sort his life out. Tonight I'm just going to hide and work on the GFX for Civil. Emily will no doubt be bored, but I've had enough of the house atm...

Ok, weekend over with, and an excellent party's mess has been hovered/washed/cleaned away. Phew...

FOP has sapped my will to live today. It's hard to complain about an open-source project when you've not contributed, and I hate to make comment as I really like the output of FOP. But I've hit some problems over the last few days with Java Extension functions. I can get them to work in Xalan with no problems what-so-ever, yet the same code, XML and XSL, will not run through FOP. It just refuses to find the classfile. I've tried everything I can think of, have hit the developers mailing list for help and had a few pointers ("Have you compiled the class", "Is it on your classpath") but nothing that I hadn't already thought of or tried. This is a real downer, as it'll probably mean re-working some of the middle-ware in order to get the system to do the things I need. Arse...

This is the first hurdle in ages that I've not been able to get over and it's really bugged me. I've downloaded the source, and I'm determined to trace through and figure out what's going on, but as far as work is now concerned, we're moving on. And things with FOP were going so well! Using it as a solution to our printing needs was the perfect answer, and I know that the alternatives to doing what I wanted from the Extension functions will not be untidy, I just wanted it all to groove from FOP. I feel like a plumb as it's bound to be the most stupid reason ever. I just wish the FOP documentation was a bit more comprehensive. Oh well, no point complaining if you can't lend a hand...

Got some more Civil requirements; buttons for question dialogs. This reminds me that I've got to do the "next" and "Back" buttons for the Scenario Info screens as well. I'm gonna sit down tomorrow night and tick all the buttons of my list of things-to- do! :) Tonight I'm gonna sit down and do the accounts...

He he! Nearly the weekend. I'm not going to be doing much on Civil this weekend as I've got a lot planned. Tonight is a trip to the pub to watch Gary, the worlds greatest pub-sing-a- long act ever. Saturday is a house party at my place. We're expecting a lot of people to come and join the fun and I'll be DJing for 3 hours -- the best bit of the evening as far as I'm concerned! :) I wish I could stream it on the 'net. Maybe I'll look into setting up shoutcast and some real-time mp3 encoding. I'll need to get broad-band for that though... Oh well...

If I'm not too hung-over on Sunday I'll be sitting in Photoshop. Hopefully to finish off the san/grass fixes...