Month: September 2009

A shocking first… even for Windows!

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In checking the documentation for some method, I ended up wondering what ‘_StringBase’ is (as I already knew Ogre::string was a std::string). Taking a look at OgrePrerequisites.h I found an interesting define and typedef:

00148     typedef unsigned char uchar;
00149     typedef unsigned short ushort;
00150     typedef unsigned int uint;
00151     typedef unsigned long ulong;
00152 
00153     #if OGRE_WCHAR_T_STRINGS
00154         typedef std::wstring _StringBase;
00155     #else
00156         typedef std::string _StringBase;
00157     #endif
00158 
00159     typedef _StringBase String;

Since my project is set to use the unicode character set, it would be more convenient if Ogre::String objects were basic_string instead of basic_string at heart. Because Ogre is being used, I have a Source/Ogre folder so I can compile whatever I want without effecting “my base set” and SDK files else wheres; then just move the libraries over to my Buildtarget area afterwards.

Generally MSVC++ is a pretty fricken fast C++ compiler on Windows compared to MinGW, but Ogre is not a midgit. I setup a batch build for release/debug dll/static of all the required libraries and plugins in VCExpress, then I launched SWAT 4. The game takes a little while to startup so I went about my usual stuff; when I returned I found that Windows XP had crashed!

A blue screen of death complaining about a page fault in a non paged area, and noting an nv4_disp.dll (nvidia) file.

Sometime when I can afford the downtime, I’ll likely conduct tests of the machines memory (…), graphics card, and do a reformat of Windows XP. Before any of it, I will also likely compile a custom FreeBSD kernel on the machine as a pre-test of her integrity.

I have never, ever, under any circumstances had a system crash while compiling code., no matter what I throw at it (although I admit, 90% of the time I compile code on a FreeBSD box lol). Run out of disk space yes, shout barely intelligible linkage errors yes, muckle buckle about crappy dependencies yes… but never, has any of these *****s crashed during a compile! So this is starting to worry me a bit… oi, it’s always more trouble when a computer has been both obsolete and off warrentee for a few years.

Dreams of haunted Hexadecimals

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I dreamt there was two of us exloring a large house, of the dark and scary kind, like a brother / sister pair; much younger. The house was rather dark but vaguely reminds me of a real one somewhere; perhaps a strange composite of several places I’ve been. At one point I caught a roach, and she ordered me to put it out side, so I opened the door and let it scurry away – never mind that it was probably on the 2nd floor, but oh well lol. I noted that the clouds were rolling away into the distance, looked like a storm would be done passing by soon. We again returned to the search of the house, the girl being drawn to one of the doors and wanting us to split up; let’s just say, even without any lucidity, I’ve seen to many horror films over the years to fall for that ^_^. So, we headed in, it looked somewhat like a childs room, but not quite the nursery feeling that came to mind; for some reason it makes me think of an old movie about a haunted house, but I can’t remember the name of it. There was a strange picture and the girl appeared to be memorized with this room :/.

My “Spider sense” if you wish to call it so, started busing – ducking my head out the door, I saw Hexadecimal creeping about downstairs, and urged us to flee. No luck, the girl was to hypnotized by the room, another look out the door, showed Hex was creeping up the stair case; I flung open an inner door and rushed into a side room, calling for her to follow. No such luck, so I slammed it behind myself and bugged out FAST, catching sight of Hexadecimal going into the room… In a last ditch (insane?) effort, I shouted until I got Hexes attention, then flipped myself over the stairs railing; making a set of “Drops” until reaching the ground floor. Ok, guess I’ve played to many Tomb Raider games in my life on that account lol. On hanging from the last railing, I excerted some kind of influnce, taking control of the house and demanding that all return to normal; resulting in Hex being deleted lol.

The next thing I can remember, is the two of us looking around again, and going through a hallway on the ground floor, with large windows overlooking the grounds, but it was dark as night out; where as before it had merely been a stormy evening. Someone warned us about our parents being due home soon, and I suddenly got a notion of what happens to movie Vampires when the sun comes up! In further exploring we found a wall that ‘rolled up’, revealing an old man with a work shop. I remember the visuals more then how to describe it, but it involved Python, dots, and a stuffed rabit. The last thing I remember, is chasing a leaping frog around, trying to catch it with a shoe box and get it into the bug catch. When suddenly it became a giant roach, like one of those rain forest critters the size of your hand. When it got lose and tried crawling over my foot, I woke up around 1015Q with my leg kicking at the covers! I haven’t had a wake-up like that in a looong time. Maybe it is a good thing that in the morning, Willow switches from my bed, to the couch in the living room.

My dreams are usually non sense, even at their finest moments.

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So far, no luck in trying to sleep, even have tried burning more energy then normal, alas it appears to be hopeless. On the upside, tonight I’ve managed to overhaul my shell profile.

I spend most of my time behind a zsh, but also have regular contact with bash and various ksh; generally I avoid csh/tcsh on the grounds of muscle memory [sic]. The various Bourne style shells are a lot a like, but also a lot of differences once you grow past the /bin/sh of 30 years ago. I don’t care much for maintaining a profile/rc file for each shell I use, so approximately last year: I just wrote one central ~/.Terry_shrc file. The intention was for that file to be able to handle any OS/sh pair I’m likely to bump into, keeping to a portable subset of the scripting language & general unix. It only makes dialectual assumptions that functions (name() { list }) and aliases (alias name=’repl’) are supported; lesser portable constructs such as the $() and $(()) notations are totally ignored. My profile is so portable, that the bloody thing has even been easily adapted to Interix/SFU and Cygwin environments. The more OSes I encounter, the more portable the thing tends to get… lol. SFU/Cygwin basically required nothing, I just extended the platform detection stuff for the sake of creating workable aliases.

From the get go, the various shell specific rc/profile files were set to source my central profile, which in term was set to source a ~/.site_shrc file for site local changes; which of course is a symlink to ~/.site_shrc.hostname ;). Tonight I’ve extended it to source a .sh_funcs and .sh_funcs.osname for additional stuffs, as well some real improvements on how it goes about doing its magic.

Occasional SAS related stuffs, fiddling with my profile, and hashing out the various rs-* scripts for my rsync system aide, it’s been about 2 weeks since I’ve done any coding, and probably two or three months since I’ve done any hard core coding :-/. I’m always happier when I’m coding more….

Relax or ignore….

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The desktop is still powered on, left her downloading the ISO image for later; right now I’m in front of the laptop. My status message on pidgin, is set to indicate that anything not related to relaxing, is gonna get >/dev/null‘d!
]

I plan to take the rest of the afternoon off to myself, if I can’t get a decent nights sleep, I may as well get a decent day off work, lol. Let’s see, what’s the plan…. Hmm, I need to get a few things typeset, tend to odds and ends—like catching up with a razor blade and a hot shower. Dixie is powered on, so that I can leave her unattended with the music streaming, while I get stuff done. There isn’t much on TV, but that is fairly normal 8=).

The dogs have been chasing me down, they’re angry that they can’t go out for a walk because of the rain :'(. In all fairness, I could use a walk myself; and the rain would help. The only problem is the idea of a 6 kg dog dragging a 73kg man through the mud >_>. Hopefully the rainy weather will subside a bit, so they can get their walks in for this weekend, and the internet connection will stay stable again 🙂

A few Thoughts turn to PC-BSD

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Considering recent threads in the PC-BSD forums, largely centred around the projects deficiencies I’ve made a decision.

I have the DVD version of PC-BSD 7.1.1 x86 down loading, when it is complete, I’ll load it into a virtual machine for testing. Once that is done, I will conduct a ‘deep’ inspection of the systems current state—including the source code. The aim of it is to analyze the distributions weak spots, noting the areas where it does need improvement. After that is completed, I intend to publish my catalogue of the projects deficiencies along with suggested paths for improvement. It’ll probably be posted here on my LiveJournal, with links shared in the appropriate forums and mailing lists.

Why do I feel like doing this? Well, PC-BSD while it has some good qualities, generally fails (in my honest opinion) because of how it is handled. As I have often said and people can feel free to quote me on it, PC-BSD feels like a project born in Kris Moore’s garage: that never left. And like wise, as I have often expressed, PC-BSD development practices do *NOT* reflect those of a real BSD project.

In my experience getting anything done there, that is also worth doing: has usually been caused by the community screaming the developers ears off… perhaps consistently so. So writing an open letter might poke the project into cleaning up their ship, or at least demonstrate to the rest of us what “Not to do”, lol.

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No luck what so ever in trying to get to sleep, I logged off with about 9 minutes of battery power left on my laptop, and spent the rest of the night pondering as usual. It might’ve been 0400-0500Q by the time I finally crashed.

Woke up around 0830Q, having dreamed of Buzz Lightyear leading the Predacons against Optimus Primal and the Maximals, in an attempt to renew the Beast Wars. I know everything is well, when my dreams are total non sense lol.

So much for a nights sleep…

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Well I tried, I really did try! Woke up from a nap and was so tired, I decided to skip the shower, shave, and computer for tonight, and just go to bed and try to get some sleep for a change. Just took care of odds and ends, threw on The Simpsons Movie for something to watch, and made ready to pass out.

Then her royal pain woke up and needed her back scratched, then she woke up Willow who decided to tackle me; *sigh* it is just impossible to win some times!!!!

Upon sleep proving to be a hopeless affair, I gave up and dug up some strawberry ice cream for a quick snack. Largely gave up junk food a long time ago, but sometimes I’m in the mood for something sweet. Finished the movie a lit’ bit ago, then decided to boot the laptop off batter power, and try and pass some time.

Si much for a nights sleep…

I’m sorry, but do I look like a moron?

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I spent some time getting stuff sorted on SourceForge, until I was interrupted by [SAS]_Rct_ESCRT, who was being plagued by a trio of Dummköpfe terrorizing our SAS Proving Grounds server. After resolving trouble via remote, I chose to enter the server and deal with things “Personally” and give the vagrant offender one last chance. In the end, these trouble makers with many names were sorted when the worst was banned. The screen shot below sums up him and his friends efforts:

One thing I failed to tell them in that moment, is I was also the Web Admin from before, who Feldjäger tried to convince me his buddy was talking to 8=). On top of that, I also forgot to mention that I had kicked him previously, but I didn’t want them to feel tooo stupid.

Maybe I am not terribly bright at times, but hey, I am not a fool!

Pissin’ thunder!

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Today we’ve barely had any rain down here, just thunder; yet every darn time we get plenty of either in just the right spots, it’s virtually impossible to keep a steady internet connection!

I managed to survive work, just one more day and I’m free for a couple days… free to be stuck at home anyway, lol. I got home maybe around 1900Z, but I honestly have no idea where the day has gone +S. The most i can remember is making the web’rounds, discussing software over GTalk, and letting a friend dig me into reading X86 Assembly code for a few hours!

Right now, I’m just to freaking tired to get anything done, but to wide awake to just pass out and sleep. So far it seems to be fairly consistent, that once I logoff and lay down, that my brain goes bonkers :-(. On the upside, my dreams have been taking a much more positive light lately, then they have been for the past month or two.

What I really need is an exceptionally long vacation, just get away from it all…. where the most pressing worry, is where to have dinner! Ugh, but that ain’t likely to happen in my life time :'(

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I made it off to work with a bleeding toe again, not as bad as yesterday though, I really miss having 10 healthy toes… but at least nothing landed on my foot today, for a change. Getting through today was an exercise in exhaustion, my stomach wasn’t very happy. I blame it on having 4 helpings of food last night but nothing to eat this morning :/. After getting home, I had a quick cookie to tide it over until dinner time.

Nearly twisted my left hand and fingers off getting the car loaded, had a bad slam into the car frame. I was able to send my arm into the motion to minimize the strain on the joints, but two of my fingers are still sore from it. They’re not going to get any rest either, because while much of the illiterate-majority of computer users are largely mouse bound, I’ll hang someone by their rats tail if I can’t go keyboarding! I type with ten fingers at mental speed, so if I couldn’t type, it would be like a normal person losing their voice lol. The trobbs are starting to subside somewhat, hopefully it won’t be swollen by work tomorrow. Maybe I’ll grab some server time tonight as a stress test.

Last night I took about an hours break from existing projects, to work on a rough prototype for part of an “SAS Realism” skin that I’m interested in making for SWAT 4. There are two different directions I can see it going in, so I started work on a mock up of one. In working on Cara’s armour vest, I had to do a little removal operation on the textures in order to get the text just right; doing that is pretty trivial but left it rather unsightly. In order to make it look good, I had to learn something new, which created a very nice looking end result for the vest textures. To solve the problem, I just looked at it like a sketch and tried to adapt what I would have done to paper, to the laptop in front of me. I chose to take an hours break and work on the mockup so I could refine the technique a bit more, might come in very handy with the next phase in doing Caras skins.

When I was at work, I was thinking a bit more about starting to draw again. The more I learn about the computer side of things, the more it looks like the same concepts are used with a different set of tools. At every opportunity to prove other wise, my mother constantly manages to prove that I can say *nothing* around her without paying a price for anything she finds disagreeable 8=). So, I’m probably not going to return to using paper anytime soon; especially when computers are better creators of privacy around here. Doing graphics on computers has never been my strong point, but it consistently gets easier the more I have to work on images. Someday maybe I’ll be able to do whatever I want through software like GIMP and Photoshop; and it is always nice to have something time consuming to work on, it can be very good therapy. I think I’m going to give it a go in the near future.

With my brain in a deeper level of thought from all of that, I also came up with some ideas needed for moving a program I would like to write into implementation phase. I’m always happier when I’m working on some code then when I’m not. The down side of course, is it usually means much less sleep! Since it was working on her custom skins that started this logic chain, I’ll probably have to thank or curse at Cara later on lol.