Older blog entries for TheCorruptor (starting at number 340)

Code

More code today. Got the Interference Plasma routine I'd done in C working in Pygame and did a basic Shade Bob routine. Well, to be exact I mangled the video feedback effect already in the PCR and got something similar for little coding. Shade bobs should really be additive, where as I'm just blurring the surface feedback. Still, it looks the same... :)

I submitted the Interference Plasma to the PCR, but I doubt it's worth a new addition. It's identical to the circles version previously featured bar the use of a calculated surface instead of a bitmap, although it does look mighty different. I should probably just include that as a comment to the existing routine instead...

Car

Ah, got my car back. Sounds as good as new although I've got to run it in for a hundred miles to let the cam-belt settle into the head. I did get shown the state of the old head and it wasn't pretty.

Anyway, 1200UKP dent in my wallet and I don't know if I should be happy or gutted. It was nice to drive again!

Spent some time today producing the Michelangelo t-shirt for Virus.org. Mort will hopefully make a variant of this available soon.

Code

I'm still having fun with video feedback effects. Got a fairly fast SDL version of it going, now I just need to do something funky on top of it. Or, I could remove the zoom and do a reasonable shade-bob. Hmmm, probably something for Pygame...

It's my birthday today, so I was sensible and did some work on Civil: added some forest clearings, added character level formatting to the QandA sets (in the docbook2HTML stylesheets) and some buttons for army status. Only then did I break out the whiskey and get tipsy! ;-)

Home Office

So, I've been trying to figure out exactly why Z'hadum, my backup server at home keeps crashing. I know, it's my fault for being lazy and leaving 2k on there but lately it's not stayed on it's feet more than a couple of days.

I've gone through and scandisked, hotfixed and defraged the beast in the hope some stability may result. From here it a question of "wait and see". If things get worse I'll have to put a monitor back on it and wait for another dump instead of relying on the lack of information Event Viewer provides.

Ho hum...

At least on the good side, I have been motivated enough to clean my office and do some cable tidying, something that's been long over due...

Reading

I've finally done some catching up on my reading. I've eaten XML's Blueberry candidate, finished off UML distilled and got about a third of the way through the OpenGL redbook. That's better than I've done in a while... There's still a rather large pile of design patterns to go through, especially the intriguing XML related ones. At first I thought this was highly amusing, but given how sensible some of the Java patterns I've seen recently are I'm hoping for something good on the XML front. Even better, some XSLT ones... I've already noticed several that I use on a regular basis...

Holiday

As I think I mentioned, I'm officially on holiday for a week to catch up on projects. Tomorrow is going to be for Civil GFX, Tuesday I think I'm going to setup the Radio G website (good excuse to play with Flash MX), Wednesday will be YaSS GFX, Thursday; stuff for Virusdot and Friday will be Seal Basher code.

Of course, it's bound not to turn out like that.

GPRS

I finally jumped off the fence and got Orange to start my GPRS account. 5MB over a month; 15UKP charge.

In their wisdom, Orange UK don't support any platform other than windows, so I had to go through several hoops in order to get the APN and user/pword details out of them. More bizzare: OS X doesn't supply modem scripts for the T68i despite the seamless support it offers for syncing and updates. Luckily Ross Barkman supplies some very tidy resources for the phone (not to mention most other models) on his homepage. This made my life much easier, and everything worked first time once these were dropped in /Library/ModemScripts.

The GPRS seems to work as advertised: 4.6-4.8k sec sustained while downloading, which is more than enough for what I intend to use it for (email and journal updates whilst on the move). The one thing I don't like is the habit the connection has of dropping out. I'm not sure if that's Orange being crap, or my setup, but it is slightly annoying to have to reconnect every 5 mins if the network stalls. I suspect there's probably some more tweaking of the settings to do, but without any official word from Orange it's hard to tell where to start...

Regardless, downloading my email at 70MPH on the motorway was very cool. ;-)

Life

I'm now officially on holiday for a week, hopefully to catch up with some of the work I've neglected to do over the last month or so on my various projects. I also want to do some more OGL hacking, as most of the developers I'm working with atm are moving over to OGL for their next projects. The more I know about this, the easier I can make everyone's life. :-)

Particularly hung over today due to the excesses of last nights leaving do for one of the engineers... A good time was had by all! ;-)

Just debating what to do with myself now. There's some out standing issues to deal with at work, but I'm not sure I'm in the right frame of mind (read: sober enough) to do anything.

Civil

chakie added some more features: army status. This looks pretty damn excellent, and it's great to get a clear over view of your troups during the game. I've got a few bits to add next week as well, so hopefully the next release can come reasonably soon...

T68i

As predicted, more fun with the phone. I've worked out that a 128x108 gif image can be uploaded to it, so I've exported various photos of friends from iPhoto and uploaded them. The photo appears when that contact calls me, which is fun if a little unexciting. The one thing I did do was create a small image that looks just like the blue screen you used to see when you first switched on a C64, "Ready" prompt and all, so I've uploaded this and set it as the phone's background. Given the general blue theme it's very apt and looks very cool. I know. I'm sad...

The phone has about 1MB of RAM available for images and sounds, probably to support the "MMS" style services being bandied about. I'm not particularly interested in this so I've deleted all the supplied media and templates. It would be nice if I could use this to store anything I wanted, so I'm going to try uploading random text files to see what happens. It might be nice to upload my PGP keyring to it for instance? (Update: this didn't work. Seems you can only upload certain things.)

In general, the range of the phone/bluetooth adaptor appears to be quite good. I can discover and pair from 8 or 9 meters away which is more than enough, but this seems to go down drastically if a partition or wall is in the way. To be expected I guess. Still can't find a bluetooth version of Netstumbler though! ;-)

I've also given Apple's software a fairly extensive kick of the tyres and everything seems solid and clean. Once the initial authentication has been made both devices recognise each other and will pair seamlessly and managing multiple devices is trivially easy. All in all, simple, but useful. I'd like to compare this to XP...

Ok, had some more time to play with this bluetooth stuff, and Apple's Address Book app is superb with Bluetooth enabled.

In addition, incoming SMS messages flash up on the laptop so I can read and reply to them without having to pickup the phone (this has already proven to be very handy at work. I can have the phone on silent, iTunes playing in my headphones and still deal with messages). Incoming calls come up with a photo, the number of times they've rung and the usual "Do you want to answer" prompt. I can redirect to the answering machine or accept the call from the laptop. I can also ring or SMS anyone in my contacts list via the address book. Very cool.

From a brief experiment it appears that the sound input on the laptop acts as a handsfree mic, but as I'm not getting the voice of the caller coming through the laptop I suspect the mic on the T68i is particularly sensitive. More experiments to come. One of my work-mates also has a T68i, so we may try and hook them directly to each other this afternoon and see what that lets us do. Then I'm going to stop running up my phone bill with test calls! ;-)

Wow, Apple store is quick! My D-Link bluetooth nipple arrived today and I only ordered it on Saturday.

I know several people were curious, so I took a couple of photos of the D-Link which you can view. It's not that exciting though! ;-)

iSync works like a charm. All my iCal entries made it to the phone, with alarm events intact, including notes and tasks. This is great, as I often don't have the laptop open when I set alarms, so the phone is going to be useful here. Full marks to Apple.

Phone numbers in my Address book were added to the phone under the correct names and vice versa. Again, full marks.

The initial sync, some 200+ entires across the two devices, came to about 30k, and the sync took a couple of minutes. Not the fastest thing ever, but subsequent changes seem to be much quicker.

The pairing of the devices is pretty easy, initiate from one device, type in a pass phrase, then accept on the other device and type the same passphrase. I did make the mistake of initiating from the laptop, typing in a word, and then discovering that the phone only accepted numbers. Doh... Anyway, once that mistake was made it was plain sailing... Range seems to be quite good. I can make a pairing from the other end of the lounge, which is more than enough.

I've not sorted out a GPRS bundle as I wasn't expecting the nipple to arrive so quickly, so I've not tried out the phone as a modem yet. I'll probably get something arranged over the weekend and report back... We've also got a load of devices in the office with Bluetooth, so I'm going to have a play with those tomorrow. I'm pretty sure one of those is already GPRS enabled.

All in all, does what it says on the tin. Pretty easy. Pretty cheap. Pretty useful. Nothing earth shattering, but I'm quite chuffed with it all.

Car of Woe -- Still waiting on the quote for my car. 14 of the 16 valves are screwed, so things aren't looking good. Gonna be *very* expensive. I'll be selling the beast as soon as it returns.

Retail therapy -- To console myself (and replace the missing phone) I bought a Sony Ericsson T68i, which is very nice. The Bluetooth adaptor has been ordered from Apple and should be here by the weekend. GPRS here I come...

I also got Super Mario Sunshine, which I have to confess is excellent. The return of skills from previous games, the self referential pisstakes and the sheer amount of polish that has been applied to that game make it stand out above anything I've played in a long time. My pikmin addiction has been cured. Unfortunately, Mario has taken its place. Sheer nintendo genius! Jak and Daxter is inferior on so many levels (not to mention far too easy) that it's difficult to describe.

Mario, at least, is keeping my spirits up while I try to ignore the hugh bill facing me for engine rebuilds. Luckily I have next week off, so I'm going to get back into my projects then. This week I've set aside for more disasters...

The tale of my weekend continues. To cap off yesterday, I lost my phone. And they say things come in threes... :)

Was most angry at myself for most of the day as I reliased I'm a bit crippled with regard to sorting out my car and ADSL connection if I didn't have a phone, but I've now come to the conclusion that as I was going to get the T68i with GPRS this month it's no big loss. Vodafone won't help me out so I'm going to change providers and I've stolen Emily's phone in the interim.

On a brighter note, my ADSL modem reported a sync with the exchange 20mins ago, so I'm now back online. Unfortunately, I still have to wait for the engineer to come over tomorrow, but hopefully he can run a decent check of the line from this end to ensure it doesn't happen again...

Things could be worse I guess!