Month: October 2009

Present open-loops

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  • General SAS related work
  • Making my game prototype load key=command mappings out of an rc file
  • Finish Cara’s skins
  • Get to work on pipin-ims backend daemon
  • *Several* personal but business related web-projects
  • Continue compiling my letter about PC-BSD shortcommings
  • Setup/test CppUnit, Boost, and POCO
  • Customize Irssi and evaluate its possiblities for replacing Weechat
  • Figure out how much crap didn’t make it onto my todo list before it fell off
  • Work on the SAS Tactical Command Interface
  • Work on several other small SAS-related projects

and all I can think about right now is a quick snack…. lol

Sweet, Google Reader can send things to LiveJournal

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Like many people, I often have things that I want to follow, but can’t be arsed to check up on periodically; the solution of course is RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” feeds. The age old problem is the bother to actually _look_ at the RSS feeds in question lol. A while ago, I switched to Google Reader during a period of reorganisation; a topic that I should probably revisit in a few weeks.

While much of my life is an open book, most of the services I use are not very integrated even when they are capable of it; this is mostly by my intention! Most people on planet earth and beyond, can reach me via instant messenging—the prefered way, since I’ll hang ya if the phone rings >_>. My LiveJournal is my ‘personal’ place, and perhaps consequently one of the most public. There are other mainstream services that I’ve come to employ, which kind of creates a bit of an onion approach to my data lol. LiveJournal serves me, I don’t actually care whether anyone reads it or not, after all it replaced mounds of log files and such, and that is what its principal purpose was and still is ^_^.

One of my friends makes use of Google Reader, so I’ve started exploring Readers ability to share and comment feeds with others; which lead me to this little puppy: “Send To” LiveJournal and Iterasi for Google Reader. Combined with a few other tidbits, this might get more frequent use: most things of interest to me in regard to RSS feeds, end up noted int his journal anyway, well if time permits lol.

The entry I’ve setup in Google Reader, thanks to the help of that link, results in exactly the kind of thing that I want: a suitable subject (that makes searching my lj easy) and a message starter that I can live with.

gnolia tagging ideas

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I’ve been thinking about how to organize tags on gnolia.com, mostly I want something more hierarchical in nature then just top-level tagging. It doesn’t really need to be built into gnolia, just something convenient.

There are two schema that I am thinking about, utilizing a file path style: e.g. programming/c++/qt or the namespace syntax my wiki software uses at home: e.g. programming:c++:qt. Then again, there’s always programming.c++.qt and all sorts of other combinations. Really, I think I like the Java/Python style dotted namespacing or simple folder paths. The issues of dealing with separators that may be utilized within a tag name is always a factor to consider though#—but shouldn’t be a problemo for me. Why do I feel like reading a book on database normalisation? One nice perk, i could always design a little bookmark mangaging gizmo as an external application or an AJAX page. Gnolia seems to have moved developer documentation into the wiki, so it shouldn’t be to hard. I could cook up something client side fairly trivially, but doing it as a web app might be more ‘fun’ in the short term, mmm!!! Short of writing my own program, there’s really no way for the UI to bundle tags within tags, that I’m aware of. (e.g. tag “Google” points to tags “Google/Services”, “Google/Software”, bookmarks for account “Preferences”, blah blah). A simple tags cloud sorted A-Z however, makes it fairly easy to see that kind of relationship though.

I may also play both decks at once, and try managing my data with delicious at the same time; with a review to be made after a month or two. And of course, I can always whip up my own booksmark gizmo and place the server on Vectra for safe keeping.

Manually refreshing Windows desktop wall paper

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Every now and then, the windows box ends up with “No” wall paper; typically due to issues with certain poorly created Unreal Engine 2 / DirectX games >_>. Earlier today, someone asked me a rather stupid question that brought me to thinking, is rundll32 even documented?

In poking my nose around, i found out that (as expected) Windows XP stores the name of the wall paper as a path to the BMP file in the registry; more specifically a REG_SZ in the form of: HKCU/Control Panel/Desktop/Wallpaper. In theory I could write a program to manipulate that value: then hook it up to my wall paper changer in place of utilities like hsetroot, mauhuahaua! The problemo is that Winsucks only seems to read that value on log in/out. The solution?#—Google. Third party programs can change the wall paper in real time, so obviously there has to be a way of doing it (hey, Windows does…), and As far as I know, most such routines would be tucked away in the shell32 and user32 libraries some where; enter rundll32.

rundll32 user32.dll,UpdatePerUserSystemParameters

problem solved 😉

A return to [ma.]gnolia.com

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Today I introduced a friend to the tagging concept behind services like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia, and used the wikipedia articles[1][2] to give her a quick tour of things. In thinking about it for a whilef, I’ve realised that I ought to look into this again myself.

For a while I was thinking about building up my bookmarks again, more formally then my cobweb riddled brain pain that is. Today I figured that would mean using del.icio.us, if I was ever to go with a replacement for my old ma.gnolia account. When ma.gnolia went down, it basically took all of my bookmarks with it (unrecoverably). After that, I basically stopped using bookmarks lol; in fact the only one I’m actively using is a quick link to my usual radio stream, which I load every time I login. Everything else is something I know the URL of, or can Google for the exact address (I love a good search engine more then an old phone book lol). The only thing that I actually miss, is some of the programming articles I had tagged, but bookmarks are a fairly painless thing to loose; well, for a geek like me anyway there’s much worse.

In looking at ma.gnolia’s website, it seems that the wikipedia article is outdated. After a renaming to gnolia, it would appear that the service is alive again. While I expected to end up on delicious (sad to see the domain hack go :’), the revived gnolia is a bit of good news IMHO. I don’t know if I’ll ever establish as large a bookmark collection as I used to have on ma.gnolia but this time as an extra safe guard, I intend to make regular exports every couple months. Perhaps I’ll even check in the file into a git repo, dunno.

The really big question, is how to organize my tags…. hehe. Ok, sure my desk, room, $HOME, and everything else looks like a bomb hit it! But it’s tightly organised, so I can actually find crap when I go looking for it ^_^.

The glory of Raven Shield / Unreal Engine 2….

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OS: Windows XP 5.1 (Build: 2600)
CPU: GenuineIntel Unknown processor @ 3003 MHz with 2045MB RAM
Video: NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS  (8250)

Assertion failed: Actor->ColLocation == Actor->ColLocation [File:.UnOctree.cpp] [Line: 1703]

History: FCollisionOctree::RemoveActor <- ULevel::MoveActor <- NormalSubUzi37  <- UObject::ProcessEvent <- (R6TMilitant04 Alpines.R6TMilitant31, Function R6Engine.R6Pawn.SpawnRagDoll) <- AR6Pawn::UpdateMovementAnimation <- AActor::Tick <- TickAllActors <- ULevel::Tick <- (NetMode=3) <- TickLevel <- UGameEngine::Tick <- UpdateWorld <- MainLoop

Both Raven Shield and SWAT 4 display crash messages like these, so perhaps it is an Unreal Engine 2 thing rather then specific to RvS/S4, but if it is, I would assume there is a way to turn it off. My feelings: This is good stuff to see if you are one of the games developers or testers—but should _never_ be seen by retail customers! Not only is it Martian to regular people, since we can’t go edit and recompile code ourselves, all it does is display information that we didn’t need to know. If I was going to do something like that for crash handling in a *release* product, I would probably make it said “Programmer fuck up, please sue the company for idiocy” 🙂 This seems to remind me, of one time I was on the website of a large north-american company, when for doing nothing at all but routine, their website gave me the most interesting error messages…. telling me enough data to find out several server side paths, there otherwise hidden implementation language, and enough data to clue in on what “stuffs” were being used to make the whole show go. I nearly died laughing lol. Maybe I’m a freak, but I don’t think user should be allowed to see developer information in a closed product like that.

post script: this was my 1500th journal entry

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Despite a more miserable then not day, I’ve actually made some progress with my game project. Fetched Ogre 3D’s trunk via Subversion, built it with CMake/MSVC, setup a suitable SDK spot, then got my project building against it with CMake and executing.

The main adjustments that are needed atm, is building up the configuration file handling and implementing the principal movement commands that remain (e.g. creep, walk, run, sprint). There really is no game engine in the traditional sense, because I don’t want any of the ones I’ve looked at! My intention is to refactor the prototype into a suitable baseline for use with other games I would like to build in my free time; I hate to repeat myself :-P.

It’s still very early for me, but I think I’ll turn in for the night, after I have the servers prepped for tomorrows Live Op. I’m interested to see how it will go, and very much wondering who will end up as the Element Leader, hehehe.