Older blog entries for chakie (starting at number 232)

Lirc

I managed to get Lirc going just fine by not trying to use the Debian packages. Sometimes going for direct source is so much easier, especially if the package somehow has to support a *lot* of different hardware. I had the exact same problem with ALSA. It was a mess to try to get to work from packages, installing from source as a piece of cake. So we can now control our VDR box using the remote. The only problem was/is finding a suitable remote that has enough buttons. VDR likes to have directional buttons, digits, play/pause/stop/etc, the red/greeN/blue/yellow as well as some other buttons. Not many remotes have all those. So I ended up using the remote for our old Sony analog VCR. It works quite nicely, but I have to do some button remapping, as some buttons also control the Sony TV that we have, and "interesting" stuff happens when some buttons are pressed. :)

I've so far been pretty happy with the box, and now that Lirc works ok I can remove the keyboard and integrate the IrMan receiver in the case itself. After that comes some surface finish work and it's done.

Civil

I don't know what to do about the new LOS code I did (and which msa bugfixed). It would be a shame to throw it away, as it's quite a lot of effort. It is bloated, but it is kinda nice too, and somehow I think it's a bit more correct than the old code. O, what to do, what to do?

War

So the US is again on a warpath to destroy another country for the second time. Sigh. They wouldn't need all that oil if they instead introduced a car culture which aims at smaller cars with smaller engines and thus smaller fuel consumption and less pollution. Not every american needs a huge pickup truck or a SUV... So, it would be a good thing towards all the people on this planet. Less pollution and much smaller oil consumption and thus less wars for securing the oil. What I really want to say is "I think Bush is a bit mad, or at least a moron.", but you can't write opinions like that in a forum like this. :)

Another week starts. I wish it was Friday.

Digi TV

The digi box works pretty nicely, although the driver has a few issues with tuning DVB-c channels. Will probably get fixed sooner or later. Will need to configure lirc today to handle the remote. I tried to figure out last night how to get Lirc to grok my IrMan receiver, but I found nothing. Sure, the docs keeps talking (absolutely all the time) about that you don't need to have some kind of custom thingie for IrMan, but not at all *what* should be used instead. :) The docs also talk all the time about all kinds of remotes and how to get them to work, but not really too much about how to get the infrared receivers to work... :)

But the Lirc folks have done a great job and I should quit whining. I doubt it'll be too hard after all, Google is my friend.

Civil

Major hacking on a new LOS system. It has proved to be too buggy, slow and bloated to be used. It was a nice idea, but just didn't work out, at least not with my limited Python and math skills. We'll probably silently forget this episode and try to fix the old LOS code. Well, *I* can't fix it, it's far beyond my grasp.

Safari

Interesting Apple news. Fun to see them do the right thing, ie. take something OS, modify and fix it to suit their needs and then release the changes. Of course it would have saved the KHTML developers a lot of time if they could have cooperated with the Apple develpers a lot earlier, but of course Apple wanted to keep Safari secret.

An interesting comment I picked up at The Dot said something like:

Interesting to see the news about KHTML get buried so deep on SlashDot and that most folks where just complaining that Gecko wasn't used. Apparently most folks there just want to replace on monopoly with another.

I must say I agree.

Digi TV

Ok, the box works ok and shows digi tv just fine. All seems to work as advertised. Channel switching, EPG data, timers, recording, etc. Very polished. I do however sometimes see the image break down into a mosaic (MPEG compression blocks) for up to maybe a second or so. Happens especially if recording. But I'm quite happy with it so far, worked far better then I thought it would, especially after I found the channels.

Now I need to familiarise myself with the plugin interface. At least it's C++ and not plain C, with a well documented interface and some samples. There are quite a few plugins to choose from already, but I have some specific needs.

Oh, and I need to make the IR-receiver work with VDR too. Should be no problem at all.

Digi TV

Oh, have I fiddled with digi TV these last few days... I installed the new Hauppauge DVB-c card in the media machine and have been fiddling to get it to work. The driver itself worked immediately, but I just couldn't get it to find any channels from our cable network. I tried a lot of scanning tools, but nothing helped; it just found nothing. After a few days I got two patches from another Finn, and with those the DVB-driver finds all Free-To-Air channel bouquets. It also finds all the commercial bouquets, although I can't watch them without a CIM-card (which costs €:s).

So, now I have a list of the channels along with all the parameters. To actually watch digital TV I'll use the excellent software VDR, which allows for all kinds of nice stuff to be done, a bit like TiVo. Will be fun to play with tonight. :) If all that works I'll start writing some plugins for VDR that do stuff that our old media machine did, such as show digital pics, weather info etc.

Civil

We seem to get closer to 0.82. Personally I want 0.82 as a milestone to show that we're still progressing and have not stalled. A lot of small stuff has been fixed since 0.81, and msa and Mikee have fixed a lot of the line of sight (LOS) bugs.

Btw, it anyone interested in maintaining the Windows port of Civil? I don't care one bit about Windows folks, if Civil doesn't run on Windows it's nothing I lose sleep over. So now is a good time for someone with Windows to help out and maintain the Windows installer. TheCorruptor has already made a NSIS installer, so it should be a matter of making sure the stuff runs on Windows and then doing the packaging. Ok, no more ads. :)

Ah, my last entry got posted after all. Nice. :) But Advogato sure is a lot slower nowadays, but I usually try to post my entries when I go for lunch or coffee, so it has either been posted/previewed or timed out by the time I get back.

Today I'll finally start assembling the box with the card for digi-tv. We'll see if it all goes well or if it ends up as expensive garbage. The new card was pretty big, so I may have to do some Dremel hacking in order to get it to fit. The old analog card was much smaller, about half as long, the new one is almost 20cm long. The card has the components pretty sparsely laid out, so I assume it's some kind of standardized layout that Hauppauge is using.

Did some coding for Civil and nuked some old cruft as well as added some new features. Feels good to be doing useful stuff again. Ok, not really useful per se, but at least fun. :)

Hmm, I can't post to Advogato anymore? I can read anything just fine, but my diary posts seem to time out all the time? Has the engine behinf Advogato reached its limit, is my browser broken or am I just not wanted here anymore? Let's try one more time. This was written a few days ago, and I've been trying to post it a few times, never succeeding...

I've been very lazy wrt to posting here. Will try to be a better boy next year, that's my New Year's resolution. :)

Civil

Development has started for real again. I've added some code related to validating scenarios in the scenario editor, so that the user can make sure that saved sceanrios are valid and can be played.

Also started some work on terrain cleanups. That just needs to be done before we can get on with the show. msa has also tackled LOS (line of sight) and I'll try to add a facility for easily debugging LOS between two points on the map.

Oh, and TheCorruptor has added artillery units too! He's of course not satisfied with them, but I think they look *really* good. Screenshots will be posted once I do a few.

After we've done some progress I think we'll release 0.82, just to show that we're still alive (after a few months of silence). Yeah, it's good to be back!

MediaCube

Finally got my Hauppauge WinTV DVB-c card today. Will try to integrate it into the box tonight and play with it. I hope it all works well... Wish me luck!

mascot: modules don't work at the moment. Nothing wrong with your config, you'll just have to wait a few versions.

pabos: I feel sorry for you. I had a bit of a similar experience when starting with automake. I knew the rest of the toolchain pretty well before that, but still getting automake to work was rough going. Maybe you should leave the auto* tools for a while and just get to know Makefile:s and the compiler related tools first?

Panzers

Will do a 0.40 release today. I've done a lot of structural changed, such as integrated osgSDL into my source tree so that one dependency is removed. I haven't run the game for two weeks or so, as I have no 3D acceleration anymore. If someone actually downloads, gets it to compile and has problems running it, I hope they report the problems. I'll keep on developing the game "blind" for a while, but soon I know I have to see it running again in order to continue.

Oh why, oh why does the 3D card manufacturers have to be so damn bad at producing easy to use Linux drivers? I restarted X one day and all my hard work at tweaking hw accelerated OpenGL seem to have vanished. Poff. Just like that. Damn Matrox.

Been a while. Have done nothing useful. Bitter. Still looking for a job.

Mediacube

Started working on the actual case again for the box. Needed to have something where the harddrive could be mounted in, so some gluing gave me a nice little corner in the case. After that I need a hole for the IR receiver, small rubber feet under the case and some paint. Will take a few weeks, as I'm in no hurry.

I also decided to scrap the idea of an analog TV card. I ordered a digital Hauppauge DVB-c card that should be able to decode digital TV from our cable. So the box will then be a *full* PVR with timeshifting and whatnot. I'll use the VDR package for most of the functionality. I also plan on adding a few modules to it that would let it do basically the same as my current software. Could be fun!

Panzers

I think I'll release 0.30 today. Have done a lot but can't really test it at all, as I lost all hw accelerated 3D. Damn Matrox crappy 3D drivers. Unfortunately ATI and NVidia cards are so damn expensive. Sure you can get a cheap NVidia card, but those cards are already obsolete. A bit like when we went to play with some OSX Mac:s and the best 3D thing the machines had were GForce2MX (or something like that). The sales guy got a bit offended when I told him that the cards are obsolete. :)

Not much.

Releases a version 0.10 of Panzers a few days ago. It was buggy and uncompilable. Released 0.20 a few days layer. Same problem. I should actually try to compile my tar.gz packages before I upload to SourceForge, but I'm too lazy and I don't really care that much. People should just face the fact that versions of 0.x are buggy and suck. So, finally did a 0.21 that was just a little fix that makes automake include all the needed files. This one seems to compile, although it doesn't really work too well. Multiplayer just isn't there yet, and won't be for a while. I'm contemplating switching to SDL_net for the low level socket handling, which would give me chance to experiment with UDP with a lot less hassle then doing it manually. I normally hate using UDP, it's just too sucky, error prone and it's just plain sucky to make the manual error handling ("ooh, did that important packet with the data for the new player actually reach everyone?"), but it could be worth to experiment.