Older blog entries for chakie (starting at number 193)

It's my 30th birthday today. I'm old now, and have begun to look back at my unachievements in life. Not a good day.

Civil has reached version 0.80. We now even har a tar.gz, deb:s, a Windows installer and RedHat rpm:s are coming this weekend. It's been a good day. :)
Civil

A lot of activity this weekend wrt to packaging. It seems that we will have working packages for RPM and DEB soon. Packages for Windows and OSX are in the works too, but not yet here.

We're aiming to tag 0.80 on Friday.I think we should throw up packages then too, so that people can test more easily. It also means that we could get comments like "you're bloody game doesent w0rk!!!!" (l337isms added on purpose), but that's life. It's not really fully playable yet, but we're getting there. :)

Mediacube

Put it up on SourceForge during the weekend. Have implemented a nice XML-based and quite dynamic menu system for the thing. As a first real thing I'll add a little state that shows current TV listings. I already have all listings as XML files, so it needs to parse the XML file and generate a little menu and some surfaces for the data. Fun stuff. So the software side is prograssing nicely, as I have a lot of old stuff to basically just copy.

When I get a little bit further un the software side I'll make an initial announcement and see if someone is interested in the whole thing.

The hardware side of the box is still not started. I have most of the stuff, but just need to start with the physical assembly. I just need to be bootstrapped into starting it. Will be fun. Still missing a harddrive, round IDE cable and the IrMan receiver.

Civil

Been doing some debugging on Civil. msa has been busy cranking out code and TheCorruptor has added nice new icons. We're actually in pretty good shape right now. We also got a weird Pygame error fixed, it turned out that there was something funny in Pygame that could roughly throw exceptions at random. getting Pygame from CVS fixed that, but it also means that we have to check for the Pygame version when starting, as some versions of 1.5.x are broken. Not nice, but nothing we can do.

Mediacube

Got the plexi glass last week. Final dimensions will be 22.5 x 22.5 x 13.7. Measurements are in a suitable international standard for lengths. :) The box is a bit bigger than I wanted, but still fairly cute. Not yet starting the assembly, maybe I'll start it during the weekend.

Also got the 8cm fan today. Will need to assemble a little speed controller so that I can turn down the speed a bit (and thus reduce noise too). Should be simple, and I already have a "electronic recipe" for that. Also got a rounded cable. It was supposed to be an IDE cable, but I got a floppy cable instead. WTF? Turned out I had actually ordered the wrong cable. My mistake... No big problem, I'll just order a new cable and try to sell the old one.

19 Aug 2002 (updated 19 Aug 2002 at 10:42 UTC) »

Bored and tired.

Did some Civil fixes for a few misc things. Nothing to get excited about.

15 Aug 2002 (updated 15 Aug 2002 at 12:46 UTC) »

It's so hot here at work. My brain melts. We have several fans that try to mix the air a bit and all windows are open, but we can't get any kind of "cross draft" (is that English?). What we would need is proper air conditioning, which we don't have, and probably won't get either. Sigh.

Civil

Some more code on Civil today. Tracked and fixed a (in the end) simple bug that appeared because Pygame 1.5.2 had changed some rectangle handling. It's probably better now, but we got a few (so far) weird rendering artifacts.

Planned on looking at making reinforcements work too, but it's just too damn hot in here, my brain doesn't work. Reinforcements are basically units that arrive at the battlefield at a later time, just like in real life. Those units will have a given position, and a time when they arrive, ie. become visible and selectable. That part needs a little addition to the XML scenario format, and some code to handle. Additionally a little dialog should pop up informing the player that the reinforcements have arrived. Should be easy too.

Media thingie

Got the plexi glass today. Now I only lack a harddrive, an IrMan receiver and a rounded IDE cable. The normal flat cables are too hard to handle in this little box (22.5 x 22.5 x 12.7cm). Tonight I can start with initial assembly of the box, although I'm not sure I've got time for it. This is a long term project, and I should save some fun for later. :)

rillian: I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Please enlighten me. I'm but a wannabe non-ignorant person on the other side of the Atlantic pond that reads newspapers and listens to news broadcasts. What do I not understand here?

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.

Civil

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.

Civil

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? :)

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