Older blog entries for chakie (starting at number 198)

gilbertt: yes, that works just fine. Why doesn't apt do it? As I understand it the server says that "the site is somewhere else, here's an URL, go get it". I think apt should be able to use that redirect, or at least print a sane message. I had no idea I should even be looking at HTTP response codes. :(

Mediacube

First shots of the not-yet-completed case are here. I still have a lot to do, but part of the grunt work is done. It's fun to do something real, and not just code. I'm not too good at the coding part, so it's nice to see at least something work out. Tonight I'll see if I get the TV tuner to fit in with the back panel too.

Unfortunately it does seem that the drivers for the Mini-ITX board for Linux are crap. It seems that VIA has created (or maybe just link to some contrib drivers) drivers for the Trident graphics chip, but the drivers are seriously out of date. Of course they can now say "hell, we've supported Linux, so shut the fuck up". Sure, you've "supported" and ancient version of XFree86 that would give me enormous amounts of problems to try to track down. For crying out loud, there is probably not much more to do for VIA than recompile the driver for newer versions (not plural) of XFree86 and run the normal tests to check that it works. Of course they provide drivers for every single version of Windows, with great support. I feel so betrayed by VIA, but I have only myself to blame. I shouldn't have trusted VIA's marketing and should have thoroughly checked and validated every single claim they made about Linux drivers.

Now I'm in a bad mood. So let's continue with the next rant.

Debian apt repositories

How damn hard is it really to creat a little custom repository with a few packages in it? I've spent a few hours now tweaking my repository, and it just won't work. I've followed the APT-HOWTO, and it has a nice step-by-step guide for how to create a repository, but it just won't work. apt-get update gives me a weird (undocumented, of course) error when I try to fetch the package listing. From the error it seems there is no error. I've tried all kinds of permutations on the directories in both the sources.list entry and in Packages.gz, but nothing works. I get:

Err http://civil.sf.net ./ Packages
  302 Found
Ign http://civil.sf.net ./ Release
Failed to fetch http://civil.sf.net/download/debian/./Packages  302 Found
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
W: Couldn't stat source package list http://civil.sf.net ./ Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/civil.sf.net_download_debian_._Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)

And other similar. Seems the error 302 Found means that there is no error, as it has found something? A slightly more verbose error message could maybe be nice? The other errors below that one are probably because apt-get couldn't find the package listing, and the local listing update fails?

I don't know, I'm just so disappointed. I wanted to make something that makes it easy for our Debian users to keep their game up to date, I don't even want to make something that would work for official Debian. I must be a moronic idiot when I can't get this to work.

Civil

See above. No repository yet. :)

Update! gilbertt: yes, that works just fine. Why doesn't apt do it? As I understand it the server says that "the site is somewhere else, here's an URL, go get it". I think apt should be able to use that redirect, or at least print a sane message. I had no idea I should even be looking at HTTP response codes. :(

Advogato

Seems that doing two entries on the same day just silently nukes the old entry without any warning? Evil. I normally don't go to the recent log page to read my own entry, but this time I did, and I noticed that my 3hrs older entry was obiliterated. Some Back clicks later I got to see the old text, so maybe I can salvage it. I put so much love into my rants, I don't want to lose them...

Civil

0.81 is out. This is a very little step feature wise, but a milestone stability wise. 0.80 didn't work well on Windows, not too easy on OSX, better on Linux, but all platforms had Civil come down in flames if you had the wrong version of Pygame. We now require 1.5.3, as it has a few fixes that are critical. msa and TheCorruptor have worked very hard with this release, and I'm quite proud of what we've achieved. Still lots of do before 1.00, but at least I am in no hurry.

Civil

Civil has been steamrolling ahead since last Friday when we put out 0.80. Huge amounts of bugs have been fixed and half-done features completed. We've also made it a lot easier to get running on Win32 and OSX (for which we'll even have packages soon!)

I think we'll put out 0.81 within a few days. I'm for a change very happy about the progress as we now get closer to 1.00 every day. I hope TheCorruptor does the merchandize he said he'd do when we reach that magical number. :)

Mediacube

Last night I did the first real hardware hacking on the case for the box. I glued a few walls together. Man, that glue is poison. It glues excellently, but the smell is really awful. For this thing I really take the poison warnings seriously, and won't stay in the room for any longer than strictly necessary. It's a great thing that our apartment house has a cellar where I can do things like this, and just leave it. I could never use such a glue in our apartment.

TheCorruptor found Freevo, which is a free TiVo system. Looks very nice! It also does/will do 90% similar stuff as my box, so it's a bit of a shame I didn't find it earlier. Could've saved me some work. Now that I've worked so hard on my software I'll use it anyway. We also have a lot of very specific stuff that couldn't really be integrated into Freevo. And I suffer from NIH too. :)

Other

movement: doesn't the class QSocketNotifier work as a replacement for select()? I've found it most excellent when dealing with Qt and I/O. Your other problems I have no idea about, have you tried the mailing-list? It used to be a very place, back when I did much Qt work.

Phew.

A lot of stuff has been done for Civil. Many bugs have been fixed, stuff simplified and new features added. All in all a very productive era. A bit of a shame that the packages we did for version 0.80 contained a bit buggy code, but we knew we'd not be able to get it all right the first time. So we're contemplating putting out a 0.81 with the most evident stuff fixed.

TheCorruptor hacked up an OSX package too, which is nice. We actually have a game that runs (more or less well) on Linux, OSX, Windows and probably any other platform that Pygame runs on (BSD, other versions Unix etc).

We've got some nice comments about Civil though, which is nice. Working on something for 2.5 years more or less secretly can make you a little bit bitter at times. We'll now put out packages more frequently on the final uphill battle towards 1.00. :)

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.

Bored and tired.

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