Wow, nothing is happening right now. I thought about going to sleep early, but then I’d just be annoyed that I hadn’t used the 30 minutes to do something constructive.
Of course, now I’ll just sit here for the next 30 minutes doing nothing, but at least I gave myself the opportunity.
Fabulous.
Thankyou BBC2.
A couple of days later than I had planned, but I just finished wtching Insomnia, with Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and Robin Williams. Good stuff, a nice little thriller. Not as good as One Hour Photo though, especially since I didn’t feel quite completely satisfied at the end. Not sure why, enjoyed it as I watched it, just felt like there should have been more I guess.
Next on the list, Simone. Another Al Pacino film. Although apparently absolutely dreadful.
Somebody out there must have the mad sprite skills I need for this game I’m trying to do, or maybe you know somebody who does. Anyone? Please. Help.
The eventual game will be free, so it’s all for fun.
Putting together the Breeze framework that I intend on building Titan on is incredibly difficult. I keep making stupid mistakes. First it was the forms that I realised had no way of getting existing data, and today it was the code to save a value in a file that didn’t actually take the value as one of it’s inputs.
Perhaps the overwhelming scale of the project is just clouding my judgement.
My Cannon Fodder remake came on leaps and bounds tonight. Thanks to Furn initially, and then some messageboard posts I found, I now have a troop of soldiers marching about the screen obeying my every command. Click to walk to the pointer, right click to shoot at the pointer. That’s right, shoot. Got all that code finished, complete with individual accuracy and range ratings for each soldier based on their rank. It’s amazing how quickly it all came together after a few days of just going around in circles.
Next I’ve got to tackle the fun job of drawing and animating the soldier in each of his eight directions of movement, for which my artistry skills may be inadequate. Thankfully that’s the bulk of the animation necessary, enemy troops are just the same in a different colour and apart from explosions there’s no other major moving items. Vehicles could be interesting, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Speaking of bridges, I’ve actually been finding background tiles one of the harder things to do correctly. At the moment I’ve got snow and water tiles only on my little test map, and I’m really not happy with either of them. It took six attempts just to get something that didn’t want to make me throw up.
After the soldier animation I guess I should crack on with the map editor. I like the idea of it just being part of the game, so you can press E to start editing the current map, drop a few extra soldiers down and maybe a new spawn hut and then hit ESC to return to the game and try it out. That’s the way game editing should be, not bulky external tools that require years of practice and learning.
I read this morning that this person thought they had received some spam from Google, telling them that their robots.txt file was blocking Google’s spider and that they really should change that if they wanted more hits. He wasn’t sure whether it was real or not, and neither was anybody else, so I got in touch with Google PR to see if I could clear up the matter.
Result: Not spam.
Pretty impressed I managed to get a reply from them, most companies wouldn’t bother. Also impressed with the tone of the email, it was very friendly, like they were a company with a human side.
If they go public, it all goes to hell.
Just had the sudden realisation that an HTML form that can’t show existing values is a bit useless as an editing tool.
I finally got around to watching One Hour Photo tonight. This is one film that is incredibly uncomfortable to watch, because it’s a perfectly executed psychological thriller. Robin Williams has certainly been picking winners recently, the last thing I saw him in was Death to Smoochy, which I also found great fun. Let’s hope Insomnia, which I plan on watching tomorrow night, is just as good.
I keep typing sidebear instead of sidebar. It’s like a reflex action or something.
I threatened to do it a couple of weeks ago when I first mentioned Blosxom, but now I’ve followed through and dropped Blogger.
I did have a good think about whether or not it was a good idea, but Blogger’s interface really isn’t designed for non-IE browsers (despite what they say) and since I spend a lot of my time on Mac OS X, where using IE is a bit like beating yourself over the head with a blunt object, Blosxom fits the bill better.
I’ve moved over all the old posts and re-designed the page (since I’m no longer using Blogger I don’t feel I should totally steal their design, even if I am still being influenced by their font selection) and am now playing with the plugins to see what I like and don’t like (I’m using Blosxom v2.0 RC2).
As I write this, we’re probably 2 hours away from war with Iraq. I’m sure blogs everywhere are making social and political comments about this action, so to buck the trend I’m not going to bother. Pick a handful of other blogs at random and use bits from each to make up the opinion you want me to have.
Somewhat related, I’ve been hacking away at a Cannon Fodder remake. Eight way smooth scrolling completed and a single soldier walking to wherever the mouse has been clicked. Much of what needs to be done to make it all work is probably beyond what I’m capable of, but hey, might be fun. Been trying to get a hold of the coder on the original without much success so far, but managed to get in touch with Stuart Campbell, who designed the maps for the sequel.
Looks like Orange removed the o2 man.
This was the week I finally had to properly start the Titan project at work. It’s a reservation system for any kind of travel related product (ultimately any kind of product, travel related or otherwise) where each product has a set of rules of who can buy it, when and for how much. Prices change by season, person buying it, who they’re buying it from and many other factors. I’ve got 70 days left to do it and it’s proving to be an interesting challenge. I’ve got a whole load of crazy stuff from self-organising and self-optimising databases to code functions that may be on a different servers for scalability reasons. Lovely.
Thanks to Edward, I’ve now got Debian installed on the laptop and running great, complete with the wireless card doing what it’s meant to be doing and no more crazy white screen LCD madness. Another item in here with a constantly blowing fan. Sigh.
Why should I join Orange when the man is obviously such a fan of o2?
I released a new version of Bearkey Alerts earlier today (well, yesterday now). Amazingly, it’s been over eleven months since the last one, which probably indicates just how slowly I’m moving ahead with this whole Bearkey thing. Or how long it took Furn to get this one finished (it’s a bit of both actually).
Anyway, this version brings with it easier unsubscribing, a clearer indication that the text at the top is actually a dropdown/popup menu thing and extended alert text. This last one is the beginnings of something larger, but for now it means you can see longer descriptions of some of the stories that come from the BBC and more information when you get an alert from IRC Bear. Finally, I fixed some of the sources too (the BBC ones were all broken) and will probably add some new ones in the coming days if I feel so inclined.
So I installed Red Hat.
It’s been a couple of years since I used a KDE based Linux desktop exclusively for a few weeks and in that time there’s been a lot of changes. Certainly everything looked nicer with anti-aliased fonts, Mozilla made browsing a lot better and some configuration was simpler, but generally… I’m still not convinced.
The installation went better than Debian on the same hardware, it correctly detected both my monitor and graphics card, easily found the sound card and didn’t make me choose any strange kernel modules just to make them work. It still didn’t get my Intel 2011 Wireless Network card though and no amount of kicking afterwards could make this work.
The desktop is nice, everything certainly seemed a lot more integrated with Red Hat’s Bluecurve theme across everything and anti-aliased fonts by default do make a big difference. Installing the latest Mozilla in order to get anti-aliased browsing was straightforward too. I was unable to get the TTF fonts that I copied over from the Windows partition to appear in any applications though, despite following the instructions found in various places online. I was also disappointed to see that Red Hat neither detects Windows partitions on other drives and mounts them automatically (ala Knoppix) nor does it even include NTFS support by default. But then, it doesn’t include MP3 playing support by default either, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
Enviornment wise, it still has a long way to go. The menus are badly organised, configuration options seemed to be in three different menus, as did many other options. There seemed to be duplicate options for simple things like network settings, which will initially looking different, ended up taking you to the same place. Performance isn’t stellar, MP3’s skipped while moving things around and flickering and redraw problems were visible occassionally. While updating stuff from the Red Hat Network, the whole system almost ground to a halt. On a 1.7Ghz P4, this shouldn’t happen.
Oh yes, and I couldn’t play any videos I had on my Windows partition, kept asking me what I wanted to play them with. Not even basic MPEG’s would play. Surely these things should be included by default. And no nano/pico either. Idiots.
Impressed? Not really. Mac OS X still wins from the friendly front end on UNIX point of view, so it looks as though that’ll be staying as my only UNIX based desktop for now. Unless of course I can be bothered installing Mandrake tomorrow.
But then with no wireless card working, it’s all a little pointless.
I’m just annoyed now. I can’t get the laptop to do much more than do it’s exploding whiteness, even after the install is complete. So I tried installing on my desktop PC instead, where it refuses to detect either my soundcard (a Sound Blaster Live!) or my wireless network card (the same one as in my laptop, which it did detect, just now plugged in via PCI instead of PCMCIA). I find it funny that an operating system in 2003 can’t detect a card from the largest sound card manufacturer in the world.
So what now? Well I’ll probably take the laptop into work when I go back on Tuesday and see what Edward can do with it. On the desktop front, I’ll try Red Hat later which I just finished downloading.
As an aside, the way Windows handles hardware installation is just as screwy. I bought a 6-in-1 card reader (four slots on it, reads compact flash, memory stick, SD etc) which when plugged into the USB slot on my Win2K machine starts popping up dialogs for hardware installation, hammering the hard disk and asking questions about where to find drivers and stuff. Now these drivers are included in Win2K, yet it was still asking me where to find them. Not only that, but it detected the device, then each of the four slots seperately. Constant questions about driver signing and did a want to continue.
Now, if I was a new computer user, how am I meant to deal with that? Question after question, potentially confusing dialogs, and this was all for something that Windows already recognises. Why does it have to ask me all these questions, why can I just plug it in and have it work? Worst thing is, when I want to unplug it, I have to stop the device first. Isn’t that against the point of USB? For final crazyness, My Computer shows each of the four slots as a seperate drive, but with no indication of what drive is which slot. Fabulous.
Now on the Mac, I plugged the same device in. No dialogs, no hard disk reading, nothing. I put an SMC card in the correct slot and it appeared as a drive on my desktop. Double click, there’s the files. Again, the Mac had the drivers, so it didn’t ask me for them. It just worked.
I’m scared to even try it on Linux. Maybe I’ll do that later if I ever get it installed properly.
I hate computers.
I found a post on Google that suggested typing bf24 video=vga16:off at the boot prompt. That worked, running through the install now.
I’ve got a couple of days off work, so I thought I’d install Debian GNU/Linux on my old PC laptop. Downloaded and burnt it to CD using OS X and booted up the laptop from it with no problems. Starting the install process however looks like everything is running fine as the kernel is decompressed and the usual boot text starts to appear on the screen, but then the screen explodes in white (it doesn’t just turn white, it literally explodes into it) before slowly eating away to blackness. Not quite sure what to do now, maybe I’ll download the latest development copy rather than the last stable release.
Maybe I should just try Red Hat instead.
All content is (c) Copyright 2003-2008 Richard Smith. This is where it ends.
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