Older blog entries for lloydwood (starting at number 16)

I was wrong about travelling a lot; it really shouldn't stop me from programming at all.

I spent a good couple of hours improving experimental SaVi texturemapping before my laptop battery was exhausted. I was on a flight, where movies just aren't what they used to be (but, then, as a moviegoer, I'm not what I used to be, either). Playing with SaVi was more fun; I think it's the first time I've gotten something done on a plane.

Douglas Adams once gave a talk on the lack of standardised laptop power in planes; it's printed in the posthumous Salmon of Doubt collection. That showed that he spent far too much time in the air; couldn't he have given a talk on something that, well, mattered? Last chance to see? Last chance to fly to, more like.

The trivial problem of seat power is slowly becoming a solved problem, but by the time laptop power sockets are common in economy I'll probably have enough frequent-flyer miles to be upgraded all the time; I'm spending far too much time in the air myself. Still, there's room to stretch out these days; a lot of empty seats.

I come from Cleveland, England. I'm writing this in Cleveland, Ohio; SaVi development is wherever I am.

Happy birthday, dad, wherever you are.

Haven't done any SaVi development in ages. Oh, the guilt - but I've been travelling a lot.

Haven't sold any T-shirts in ages. Perhaps I put too much stock in the idea, and we got too much of the idea in stock. I'm trying to think of a new design to put into production, because I'd hate to be a one-hit wonder.

Wonderful hits: I see that Royksopp's Remind me music video has been classified by the BBC as 'urban'. Excellent.

Dean weighed in with some useful suggestions to improve SaVi's dynamic texturemapping using Geomview. Alas, they all involve modifying Geomview, which I've been avoiding up until now; I suppose I could come up with a set of diffs, much as I did when I took over SaVi 1.0. Geomview's development is... quiet; no idea when its C++ streamhandling code will build with gcc 3.2, or whether a 1.8.2 release will turn up.

I've had some success with using mozilla's bugzilla, describing various mozilla bugs, and even seeing some resolved. It feels worthwhile.

Not so with gnome's bugzilla. Two years ago I filed a bug on a gnome component, and someone finally got around to doing something about it yesterday.

Apparently I should upgrade to gnome 2. Riiight. I'll do that straight after I upgrade to emacs 21, which is after hell freezes over.

September 2003 update: I see jwz has had exactly the same problem.

Generated a better-sized large pbm earthmap for the dynamic texture-mapping work in SaVi development, now I've found Gimp's threshold filter.

This is going to be tricky; I need 'Large coverage window' as a menu option (destroys small coverage window if it's open...) to make best use of this map, and ideally to have the dynamic texturemapping work off the same coverage map if the large coverage window is open (and we're default cylindrical), and use its own if not. Doing all the computing for multiple coverage maps at once is best avoided if possible. Generating a scalable earth bitmap from the vector set already used by Geomview would be ideal, but hard to do; the coverage plot is already scalable.

Zeldman pointed out the existence of Eric Meyer's colour blender. After getting colour picking and random colours working in SaVi over Christmas and into sourceforge cvs, this (try two intervals) was what I was aiming for, by blending colours 1/4 together to generate 2/3 diversity/intervals and random blends. I need to support this in the coverage window, along with a save-coverage-window-as-ppm option based on the write-scratchfile code I've already done for the texturemapping. zlib support for compression of that and of scratchfiles would be a bonus...

Those little things are easier to do and less time-consuming than the dynamic texturemapping stuff and getting that interacting well with Geomview; quick wins that will let me release 1.2.2 with a clear conscience.

Quickly experimented with dynamic texturemapping between SaVi development code and Geomview, so that dynamic satellite coverage appears on the Earth sphere in 3D and is updated in realtime.

Even given the hacky nature of this proof-of-concept work, I think the results are cool (there's a screenshot along with the tarball you can play with), doing it was easier than expected... but reading in texturemaps from a scratchfile that is written every second? Ugh. There has to be a better way.

I finally succeeded in talking Waider into trying out the SaVi development code. It was entirely worth it; a couple of problem observations and suggestions from him, a couple of fixes committed by me. Like, totally positive outcome.

I love it when a plan comes together

Did ridiculous amounts of SaVi development over Christmas and New Year; probably enough to justify releasing 1.2.2.

SaVi's new Earth Made of Glass feature allows Geomview's trippy spherical and hyperbolic spaces to be demonstrated, and, combined with the colour-changing coverage options I've just finished adding, it makes for something of a visual treat.

I'd have done far less development, but my family, having noticed my tendency to play SSX Tricky on my sister's Playstation 2 when I'm home, gave me a load of boarding games for her PS2. I didn't get to try them out on Christmas Day, since the television was being watched.

A few days later, as all the television schedules returned to normal programming, less watching was done. And, lo, my sister went out and spent her Christmas gift vouchers on The Weakest Link, the PS2 game, whereupon the family sat around the telly and played that instead.

Thus, I used my free time productively. Programming. Normally, I don't have much free time. I don't have a Playstation. I don't even have a television.

If the time that I did spend was any indication, I'm going to remain entirely rubbish at Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder and Surfing H3O for quite a few months.

Well, there's always Easter.

We also completely amazingly misjudged last-minute festive-season-of-goodwill joy-to-all demand for depressingly dystopian products of a totalitarian-society mindset, and have a whole load of ++ungood; left. It's a mistake that anyone could have made.

But at least I haven't lost my shirt.

Added a last-filename-used indicator to fill up remaining window space; it's in SaVi development code. I should have thought of this a long time ago, especially considering that I'd quickly select a constellation and then guess what I'd loaded by looking at the coverage panel, before checking the orbital parameters.

The filename should probably be in the window titles, but I couldn't make that work in Tk. (Tk/window manager interaction seems quite poor and non-standard, if my efforts to generate window icons from Tk (which work in fvwm2, but not in KDE or Gnome) are anything to go by. This is probably really a failing of the separation imposed by the X model, and everything that flows from that.)

I'm forever amazed by the low usability standards that unix software reaches. But I think I'd prefer to address it by gradually improving the software rather than writing documentation excusing the behaviour by describing it. At least, that's my excuse for SaVi not having much in the way of documentation, much less properly-*roffed-out man pages.

SaVi now sports a -nologo option to its command line to allow unbranding. I'm such a fashion victim.

Interesting that The Economist says (in "Why Naomi Klein needs to grow up", 7 Nov 2002):

It takes journalistic skill of a high order to write page after page of engaging blather, so totally devoid of substance.

Would that the writers of the homogenized, here's-why-we-are-right what-the-rulers-of-the-world-would-want-to-hear The Economist had such skills. I decided I'd rather read careful observation, statistics and journalism than a magazine of op-ed masquerading as journalism, and my subscription to The Economist remains lapsed.

Draw your own conclusions. Always.

Thought about doing a SaVi release - this would be 1.2.2.

Pros: The Tk 8.4 compatibility needs to get out there (okay, so that's just a single added #if testing versions because they changed an api again), I can claim it's gcc-3.2-compatible (didn't have to do anything much new for that; in fact all 1.2 releases should build with gcc 3.2), and thanks to Matthias we're sort-of-Cygwin-friendlier, within the limits of the homegrown makefile. There are also improved standard file dialogs (Matthias again), a display bugfix that prevents clipping in the coverage tiling I did for 1.2.1, and some rejigging of the initialisation process. All of this stuff needs to be in a release.

Cons: Geomview isn't yet gcc-3.2 compatible (its C++ generates errors I don't yet understand), and Matthias' Cygwin suggestions for Geomview have only just gone into its cvs. So perhaps I should wait for a new Geomview release with Cygwin and gcc 3.2 compatibility before trumpeting my tiny bit of work on SaVi with a new release, given how the two are usually used together. I might be able to come up with the odd tiny bugfix meanwhile; the list of things to work on is quite long.

Anyway, an up-to-the-minute SaVi development tarball is available, so it's not as if the new work is particularly hard for anyone to get hold of.

In other news, my T-shirt design seems to be a minor hit. Dave started with 32 in stock, and 23 appear to have already been ordered since NTK announced the shirts on Friday. (I think it's going to become a well-worn phrase; it's taken up residence on my Nokia phone's LCD.)

Or maybe those shirts are just being bought because they've already run out of 'Corrupt Disc Inferior Audio' shirts.