[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Back from a wedding at the Å Islands. Much fun was had, and we got to see a lot of people that we haven't seen for years.
Done nothing for a week or so. Motivation getting close to 0. Don't know why. Maybe it's because there's only boring stuff left to do that I don't really want to do and have no idea how it should be done.
MediaQb
Ordered the motherboard and some other stuff. Sill waiting for it. Will call them today and be obnoxious with the company. Won't help a thing. :) I'm designing the actual case though, and it sure is going to be small. A bit like the Nintendo Gamecube (from where the box borrows part of its name). Will need to start writing the on-screen display software sooner or later. Lazy.
Politics
Seems one of the unnamed more powerful countries of the world still keeps blackmailing the rest of the world with respect to the ICC. Childish behaviour. Seems like that country even has created a law that would allow them to free any prisoners from that country that have been arrested byt he ICC for war crimes. They'd even use military force. I find this so immature. That country is constantly whining about terrorists, but it won't let terrorists that originate from that said country be convicted in an international court. Sad...
Ugh, really bored at work today. Had some excitement as one of the disks on our server's RAID had died, and I needed to go and check it so that it all worked ok. No problems, the spare disk was used just the way it should work.
MediaQb
Ordered a VIA Mini-ITX motherboard and a Hauppauge TV card a few days ago. Should arrive any day now. Have already started designing the case for the new system. Will be done in plexi, because I like the material as it's easy to work with (read: Dremel) and inexpensive. According to current plans the box will be about 18x18 cm (width/depth) and about 10cm high. The height depends on the size of the TV card.
Have also decided to do the interface fully TV-based. The old media box has a extensive menu system built using a 4x20 LCD, but I'll try to cut costs and leave out the LCD this time. Instead I'll do a Pygame based fullscreen system, a bit like a simplified TiVo interface. Should be pretty fun to do. If someone has ideas or comments about such a system please let me know. I will share the source if someone wants to look at it. :)
Life
We'll go look at a house tonight. We need to get used to what we should look for when inspecting houses, so this first one is just practice. Will be fun though, and not that far.
Some major rehacking of the keymap and menu handling in Civil. Keymaps associate key identifiers along with modifiers (shift, alt etc) with callbacks. Basic stuff. Menus have similar too, but with an added textual component that is displayed in the menu. This all was a bit messy, and I hope it's better now, at least I got to nuke a lot of code. Reducing code and retaining funtionality is always a good thing. Some bugs left to fix though.
I also added a new little popup menu button. It brings up a popup with "administrative" things, such as toggling features, showing/hiding windows etc. Basically stuff that is state independent and always available.
Oh well...
MediaQb
Been thinking a bit about the new media box. For this one I'll save some money and abandon the LCD display. I'll instead make the UI TV-based. Need to start reinventing an own framework for doing stuff that looks like the TiVo or the Nokia Mediamaster. Should be fairly simple. The old box has a *lot* of functionality built into the LCD-based menu system, so there will be quite a few displays that need to be coded up. Maybe I should create a little tool for making the displays? Hmm. Anyone in need of a project? :)
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.
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