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| I Hate My PC | |
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Date: 21/7/2006 | For years I've put up with a flakey Athlon 1.4 and a few months ago I snapped
and bought a Athlon64 3000 (new), a gigabyte nforce3 motherboard (ebay),
1gb of dual channel Geil DDR (ebay) and a Xpertvision 6200 agp (new). Well
that sucked even worse, so I tried a 6600gt by leadtek (new) and that was
worse again. Google informed me that nforce3 + 6xxx series nVidia cards
don't play nice. So thwarted again I dropped that and bought a brand new
motherboard, a gigabyte nforce4 based board (new) and a xfx 7600gs pci-e
(new). Which worked for all of 3 days before the system started crashing. I ran
memtest86 and one of the 2 sticks of ram is bad. #@(*%^@#*(%^@!#)$%!
*@&!)(*&$!)@$*&!@)$*(&!@($*&
Everything I bought on ebay has been busted. Let that be a warning to you! So I've pulled the bad stick of ram, lost 1/2 my memory and dual channel but I think it'll run stable for a few weeks while I sort out this bloody mess. In stark contrast the Mac mini has been kicking arse for a year now with nary a foot wrong. Gee I wonder which side of the fence I'll choose a laptop from! I hate PC's. |
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| Community Service Announcement | |
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Date: 20/7/2006 | Blown Car Fuse Advice: If you are having intermittant issues with fuses that keep blowing for interior features like lights, dash, cigarette lighter and so in your car then heed my advice. Before taking your car to the auto electrician have a look for small bits of metal inside the cigarette lighter, could save you a bucket 'o money.
We were informed that the "short" in our car was in fact a 5¢ peice in the cigarette lighter. Possibly placed there by a small child, as none of us smoke or even use it. So yeah we lost $110 to find $0.05, hmmm. Thats not annoying at all! @$(#*%&#@%*(#@#% May you learn from my experience. |
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| Mac Development Screenshot | |
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Date: 18/7/2006 | So hows that whole Mac port thing going?
The main screen of i.Ftp renders fairly well. The text on bitmaps is still a little out of place but otherwise it's looking pretty good. This week after I clear some high priority Scribe things I'll get some mouse and keyboard input handling going. It feels like I'm over the hump now and it's going to be fairly downhill from here on in. I hope that it'll only take me another few weeks till I get a mostly working build of i.Ftp. At which point I'll have to start putting together a release script or whatever you have to do to build .dmg images for distributing software for a Mac. Exciting! :D |
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| The Franken-Bear-Light | |
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Date: 17/7/2006 | As you might be aware I have 2 kids, 3 1/2 and 2 years old. And we have 2 "bear lights", which are night lights in the shape of a teddy bear. They have a timer mode to switch them off after a while and a 2 monophonic tunes they can play. And of course our little ones love them, "bear light daddy!" is the cry if I forget to turn them on.
Some months ago first one and then the other started playing up, in that they'd turn themselves off for a while in the middle of the night, at which point if the child noticed they would cry out and wake us up. (We don't use the auto off mode). This will not do at all. So after last night's wake up call I decided it's time. Time to hack. So I opened one of them up and it's got all this circuitry inside. I tried to step my way through it with a multi-meter and well I'm not an electrical engineer so all those IC's and transistors were over my head. I gave up on understanding the original circuit and ripped all the active components out, and using a basic light circuit someone thoughtlessly left lying around on the intarweb I cobbled together a working light using the main variable resistor / switch as a dimmer and a resister of roughly the right value I found on the PCB. I drilled some holes in the plastic casing, mounted the pot back on the body of the unit with tiny bolts and screwed it all back together. I'm quite proud of my first ever circuit design... be it simple as it is. Beware the franken-bear-light! |
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| Scribe On Linux Issue | |
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Date: 6/7/2006 | I've been working on the Linux build, getting it to build and run on Suse 10, which is my latest distro. Suse 10 comes with GCC 4 so I had to fix all the build errors that had appeared since I last compiled on GCC 3.x, which took a while. Then I had to fix the keyboard input. The #1 complaint about the Linux version is that is doesn't support international keyboard input properly, so I finally found a way of adding support for that without going insane. The documentation is beyond hopeless with regards to XIM (X Input Manager) and this has prevented me from adding support for XIM for about 3 years now. So this time round I just had a look at an existing implementation and copied it. The implementation that was easiest to understand was SDL, I had tried to extract a usage example from KDE back in the day but that was fairly futile. SDL is much simpler and I got what I needed fairly easily. Now Lgi supports XIM, or more to the point uses it all the time. I expect this will mean that older distros aren't supported but I care little for backwards compatibility in the Linux world. Linux is so backward that the "current" setup is just barely good enough. Thus you have to have FontConfig, XRENDER, XIM to run any current Lgi apps. I'm not going to support X fonts or the old X keyboard input that belong in the '80s. We are in 2006 now upgrade or die! ;)
Anyway, it came to my attention that Scribe can hit the 1024 open files limit quite easily in Linux. So you had 1300 mail in your POP account and you try and download it all, Scribe opens a file handle for each one, all at the same time. Now I could fix this now, but it would delay the test4 release, and for most users you rarely have to download that many mail at once. Is this a showstopper? Or should I just release now and fix it later? I guess users could just change the limit if it effects them. The ulimit command can change that limit if you have super user rights (I think). |
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| i.Mage Scripting | |
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Date: 7/6/2006 | I wrote a simple scripting language for i.Mage last night. Lets you create graphics based on little bits of script that can specify things in exact co-ordinates. This is generally useful to me for generating bits of graphics for web pages and applications that conform to some very specific size and shape requirements. Things like little circular filets for rounding off corners in webpages and the like. But I'm sure others will come up with a whole plethora of uses for it. |
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