Some more work on integrating the nice A* pathfinder that JohnE did. Seems to work pretty nicely, although it is hexbased, and the paths are a bit rough. Will do for now though, and as soon as it can do proper cost calculations for the various types of terrain I'll define it as ready.
Ugh, back at work again, and I don't like it. It's too hot in here, and we have no AC. Sucky.
Civil is progressing nicely. All kinds of nice code get written by most of our team. In fact I'm to only on that's been lazy. :) Hmm, not entirely lazy, today I finished a firts draft of an appendix to the manual that describes the scenario file format. It's actually not really needed, but it was fun to write. Sometimes I like documenting stuff. I must be weird.
I've also tried to get fatigue to work properly in Civil. All actions that units perform should make them fatigued, and when they don't do anything they should rest.
MediaQb
I've decided to get a VIA Mini-ITX board for the new media box. Priced over here at 159e it's not that bad, especially as an 800MHz C3 is included. I hope that this system will be able to grab video from a Hauppauge video card, and encode it too. Time will tell... At least the new box will be pretty silent, as the little processor fan can apparently be changed to a heat sink of good quality.
Ooo, first entry in almost a month! Been on vacation this month, so I've not done too much to mention. Visited Ireland and had so much fun. Fantastic country! So much to see, so friendly people. Pics are up at: our site. It's all in Swedish, but the actual jpeg images are multilingual... For a pic of me and TheCorruptor see this pic. I'm the moron on the left. :)
Also got to meet TheCorruptor in person! He came to Ireland with his girlfriend and we met up in Kilkenny. Lots of fun, and now I finally have a face for a person I've known for three years! Weird...
Work starts next week. Ugh... Will also start working some more on Civil. msa has done a lot of good stuff while I've been busy doing vacational thingies. Seems maps will now soon have proper heights, which is great stuff!
Our holiday in Ireland starts today. We fly in afew hours. Will be fun, and I'll finally get to meet TheCorruptor, whom I've only seen so far in old pictures. We'll meet up in Kilkenny later during the week. Will be away for little over a week.
Projects
Been doing a lot of stuff on making our image slideshows be easily uploadable to our website. We can now create the slideshows from our digipics using a little PyQt app, and just hit one single button to export it to HTML and upload to the web hotel which hosts our site. Quite easy to do, thanks to scp and ssh.
Political rant
Seems the Americans have bombed yet another wedding in Adghanistan, killing dozens of people and wounding over 100. A mistake, apparently, but that will probably never be admitted by the US military. I wonder wether the persons responsible will ever be put to trial in an international court for the crime. No, the US doesn't support international trials. Smart, so someone will write up a report about the "incident" and bury it deep in some vault. That's it...
I wonder what would happen if an afghanistani soldier (wait, wait, they were not called soldiers, but "illegal combatants") would by a mistake actually blow up a US barbeque grill or a US jeep, maybe even killing a US citizen. I assume that would mean that a few villages and a few thousand more afghans would taste napalm and other US nastyware. You have to see every incident like this reversed. What would the US do if it happened to them? The thought is scary...
Sigh.
Oh, if you feel like responding to me about this thing, I will probably not see it, as I'm away, so send feedback here instead.
I hope the TV-out works, as that's the most important part of the whole system. Seems I'll just have to get one and test it, fortunately they are not expensive.
Whee, we finally bought a car yesterday. A '98 Volkswagen Polo. It's small, but it's enough for us, as we'll mostly use it for short distances within the city, and the occasional trip to my parents. It wasn't too expensive either. Will be fun to be able to go places without having to worry about trains and busses.
sri: there are a lot of LCD:s that use a serial interface, and I'd say that all motherboards have a serial connector. I have one from CrystalFontz, and it's very good, although a bit expensive.
I checked out some more info yesterday about the new VIA Mini-ITX motherboard. It looks like a dream come true for those building small media boxes. I'd like one, but I don't dare go out and buy one just like that. I'd like to know wether it:
It has a microATX power supply connector, and that's good; I can find a power supply from some case somewhere. The size (17x17cm) is really small, and the C3 CPU should be able to play movies and grab video from a TV-in card. At least I think so.
Anyone know anything about the Mini-ITX? There was a nice case linked from /. a few days ago, but it didn't run Linux AFAIK. I'd like to know wether it won't work at all with Linux before I buy one.
Back at work after a few days of relaxing, beer, barbeque and lots of sleep. That's the way Midsummer is supposed to be spent in .fi. Preferably at a little lake in the middle of the woods.
Civil has been progressing a little bit slow, but that's mostly due to me being slightly sick for almost a week now. I did complete a more or less major rewrite of a few central classes, and I think it works better now. I can still think of a few things that can be done better, and will try to get some feedback on civil-devel.
MediaQube
Getting a motherboard with integrated TV out that works with Linux is essential. I think that the TV out for Matrox cards works ok, and at least for some ATI cards. But what about Nvidia cards? I've heard a lot of good about their 3D performance (never had one), but very little about wether TV out works.
chipx86: you said you had a GeForce 2 MX with working TV out. Was this perhaps under Linux? Does it work well?
Nice weekend. Got to see Rammstein and Slayer. Needless to say they both rocked pretty hard. I just love the amount of pyrotechnics that Rammstein uses in their shows, and their overall performance is just so much fun to watch.
Apart from that there's nothing new under the sun. Adding some minor pieces to Civil so that all terrain hexes and their features are described in a textual file. The data will also be editable from within the editor, thus making it really easy to define the properties for all the hexes. Btw, we have about 575 hexes right now, that must be some kind of record! TheCorruptor has worked so hard with all the icons for a long time!
Some more stuff done on Civil. I think I soon will have the troops get fatigued when they do stuff, and rest when they take it easy. Not too hard, but a bit boring to do.
MediaQb
Started planning the new media cube. I'll be a new thing for playing MP3:s and DivX movies, as well as capture video. The current box plays DivX and MP3 files ok, but it can't record TV shows. So it's basically a TiVo replacement. It does have quite much that needs to work:
I'll build the machine into a cube this time. The old one was made "stereo sized", ie. about 42cm wide, 25 deep and 9 high. This one would have a bottom area of slightly larger than the motherboard, and be maybe 15-20cm high. I'll also not paint it black as the old one, but instead some kind of dark blue, wine red, olive green or similar. I'll be made into a visible part of the furniture, so the finish needs to be quite good. It'll be built from 4-5mm plexi, as it's so easy to work with (the Dremel rules with plexi).
Not actually done any actual drawings or similar yet, nor has any hardware been decided on or bought.
Music
Tomorrow it's time for Provinssirock, a rock festival. We're going to see Rammstein and Slayer. Will be much fun.
Misc
Helping with a move tonight. Physical work. Hardcore...
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