Older blog entries for chakie (starting at number 126)

Gee, I checked out the site for the Ku Klux Klan as a few folks on IRC made jokes about how ugly it was. Sure it was ugly. Not only from a graphical point of view, but also from a moral point of view. Those people are some sick fucks. I think now that Afghanistan has been bombed to the Stone Age and tens of thousands of innocents killed, with more to die over the winter, those B52:s could be put to better use. How can a land that proclaims to stand for justice tolerate KKK to operate and spread its evil? Sure, freedom of speech my ass. There has to be limits to everything. The germans do a good jand fairly fair ob of trying to silence nazis, why can't the US do the same with all extremists?

As for some good news, my little applet for monitorin TV programs works just fine. Even uses the sexy notification system in KDE. Man, there is some nice stuff in there. Shame I'm too stupid to learn how to work on KDE itself, but I can try to do some apps at least.

Friday feeling. Zip energy to do anything useful. Have done a lot of work this week fixing stuff at work, so I don't even feel bad about it.

My KDE applet finally loads the two icons it's supposed to load. It all was a question of an instance of a class I should allocate to make my applet know where to find the icons. Thanks to the folks at #kde and the kde-devel list. Now the only remaining thing is polish, polish and more polish before the applet is truly useful. :)

Doing some more code on Civil today. It's actually progressing, and the AI client can connect again. It'll most certainly not yet work ok, but there can't be much missing anymore. There is still no actual AI code, it's more of a framework for the AI thing. Plauggin in the AI logic is just a matter of adding stuff to a function to do the actual calculations. It sounds simple, and it is. The actual AI logic will be horror, I think, but plugging it in is a piece of cake.

I should take the code and do a horror patch some day and merge it in to the main tree. I have my doubts about that thing working... :)

My KDE adventures are progressing. My little applet now almost works and is almost useful. What is amazing is that I haven't had a single crash yet, no seg faults or similar. I haven't coded C++ for almost 2 years now, and never really done any KDE stuff. I must applause the excellent docs, which are really good, as long as you remember to get them from developer.kde.org, and not some random site somewhere, where the docs are too old.

I do have a little problem though. I have no funny idea as to where a few icons should be installed. My app uses two custom icons (provided by TheCorruptor, as usual), and I want them installed along with my app so that I can use them in the applet. I still have to figure out where they shoul be installed, and how to load them. Installing in $kde_datadir$/myapp/pics/icon.png and loading with QPixmap icon = UserIcon("icon"); won't work. I have tried a lof of combinations and different paths, but it never finds any icons, it always returns the "unknown" icon. Weird. Anyone got any idea?

Trying my hands on KDE development. Fun, but so much to learn. My applet seems to work ok, at least so far according to my tests with appletproxy. The folks at #kde are really friendly and helpful, thanks them.

The amount of idiots on IRC still manages to amaze me. On #pygame there was a stupid guy that only wanted to show his own superiority by beating down on other people's projects. Nice to see that the first comment from him/her was "your app sucks rocks". It's normally a very nice channel with quite little people, a bit like a small family. I don't understand people like that. Anyway, it defnitiely killed the last fun parts of developing with pygame for some reason. Time to find new projects, I think.

Weekend over, work resumes. Ho, hum...

Been doing very little at Civil this weekend. I've been too tired. I should put up a new screenshot some day, but that's probably one of the smallest things I have to do. Hmm, I'm having one of those "I don't care shit about anything" weeks again. I wait for the weekend already. Then I'm allowed to do nothing, just sit alone at home and wait for better times. Oh, well...

On the bright sides, a script I made for fetching TV programs and store the data in a database works just fine. Quite simple stuff. I also have another script that checks the downloaded data against "patters" that the user has specified. The patters are just regular expressions. I don't really know how to notify the user that some show/movie will be on. I don't really like to run a Python app every 5 minutes (cron), nor have one as a daemon. Python apps do hog memory like crazy...

I've been toying with the idea of making a KDE Kicker applet that would somehow inform me of the upcoming stuff. It's kind of fun to be playing with KDE and KDevelop in particular. I just wish KDevelop could use something else instead of the built-in editor. For one that has coded 10 years with Emacs it just doesn't work. :) I keep doing the wrong stuff all the time, and I miss sane indenting, i.e. press TAB and it indents the line to where it should be. I also found a few bugs in the version of KDevelop 2 that I use. Report them? Sure, and make an ass of myself? If I wanted to report bugs meaningfully I should first search through the entire database to make sure nobody else has reported them before, and then probably register myself too somewhere. I don't like that, too much hassle. But I do like KDevelop, it's really nice. I'll have to look if I can make it to use an alternate --prefix so that I can test my applet without installing it as root. I also hope Kicker notices/uses the newly installed applet without me having to restart KDE. If I have to restart I'll abandon the whole applet idea faster than the speed of light. We'll see... :)

Got back the joy of coding and banged up some new stuff for Civil. The code basically reorganizes the panel a little bit, as the messages to the player (chat etc) that previously was displayed in the right part of the panel now has moved up in the main playfield. There they stay for a while and then scroll away. Looks rather nice, I think. The panel must now be redesigned, but that should be no problem, as TheCorruptor thinks it sucks and wants to redesign it. I think the old messages area could be used for a list of orders for the current unit. Yeah, that could be nice.

I also added a small framework for doing animation. Basically it's dead simple, as it's just a class that manages callbacks to other classes that want to be animated, and calls them on specified intervals. Just a few lines of code, and seems to work ok. If we're going to animate more stuff I need to make the playfield more intelligent, so that it can repaint only parts of itself. Right now repainting the playfield repaints te entire thing, even if the change would be only a few pixels. Clearly it's "slightly" inefficient. Should be fairly possible to come up with a scheme for having it repaint only dirty rectangles.

Been playing a lot of Combat Mission lately, as my dear wife is in Dallas on a bussiness trip. I might get addicted... Also playing my second run through Baldur's Gate, this time as a magician. Quite easy going so far.

Been banging my head against a really hard wall for a few days while trying to get view frustum culling in my little simple app. I got a lot of sample code that I just needed to plug in and use, so all should be well? Hmm, no, it just doesn't work. The code is ok, but for me it just culls wrong stuff. I've stripped my code down to just render a few lines, and when rotating the scene some lines vanish (get culled) whenthey should, and don't get culled when they should. Frustrating. And I don't want to bother the author either, as he's been so kind already. I need to figure this out for my own sanity!

Civil will soon start progressing again. I'll see what happens today on the list, and unless there's many objections we will go from a realtime engine to a turnbased engine. I already have some code for it, but it needs to be merged in into the "real" Civil tree. It's going to be good to get it rolling again. :)

Played through Baldur's Gate for the PS2 yesterday as the Arcane Archer. Was quite easy, after all. I immediately started a new game as the Magician. Will be fun to see which one is easier to complete. :)

Whee, the skybox for my tank game works nicely now. Looks ugly, as the image isn't suitable for wrapping. Well, that's a later problem.

Maybe it's time to start updating this diary more regularly again. Lots has happened this last month, but I don't assume anyone cares, so I won't bother.

Been working a little on a simple 3D tank game. It's supposed to be some kind of Scorched Earth, but with tanks that move and "interact" with a full 3D landscape. Multiplayer, of course, through a totally dumb server. No lag control, no scoring, no stats etc, just a few tanks that blast each other.

Baldur's Gate for PS2 rocks, as does SSX Tricky. Spent a lot of time with them since Christmas, and also this week. I'm basically laid off, so I have time. :)

Long time since my lats entry... Been a little bit busy at work and life, but I'll start posting more regular updates again.

Civil

Much has happended this last month. Not much in CVS at SF though. I will add some more code when I consider it ready. Speaking of CVS at SourceForge, I haven't gotten it to work properly for ages, and the support won't help me. I shouldn't bitch and whine, as I get a free service that otherwise works just fine, but as I can't go in and fix it myself I can do nothing but whine. This is also why I grabbed a nightly tar-ball and put the whole thing on my own CVS server at home. At least there I can fix problems without waiting weeks for a answer (that did nothing) from support. There really isn't anything on SF we really use for Civil apart from the mailing-list and www homepage. Now, quit whining...

I do hope my changes to Civil manage to make things better, as I don't like the way they are right now. I don't know what to about it, as nobody likes my proposed changes, and I don't want to live with the current structure. I assume we're dying a slow death... :(