pikuorguk

Mont Blanc

2009-11-12T22:50:30Z

A nice photo of Mont Blanc taken a few years ago when I went to Chamonix.

Originally posted from Landscape Photography. Please leave comments over there.

Testing

2009-11-12T22:40:03Z

Here’s a nice test post of an Ambulance. Facebook people should see the Image, Livejournal people should see the image, and those of you watching in RSS should also see it.

Or it’ll not work and I’ll get confused.

OK so it failed, this is an attempt at wiggling things so some new code is tested out. Livejournal and RSS feeds work, it’s the WordBook plugin that’s not working right.

Originally posted from Landscape Photography. Please leave comments over there.

Festive Berries

2009-11-12T21:40:27Z

Here’s some nice festive berries, and a little demonstration of what ‘depth of field‘ is.

Originally posted from Landscape Photography. Please leave comments over there.

Google Mail, five years on…

2009-11-11T23:50:59Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

I’ve installed Google Desktop for some useful and fun gadgets to fill my second monitor with. Currently the GMail gadget is indexing five years worth of email which is going to take ages. I had a look through my mail and found my first GMail ever, it was the welcome message, look

First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.

A whole gigabyte of space for email! crazy! You know what? Five years and eighteen thousand emails later, I’ve only used 700MB. I now have seven gig of space, it’s going to take a long long time to fill that.

I’ve got one of those Google Wave accounts too, but it’s not that useful. I seem to recall mention of it having the ability to work in businesses, on their own servers. I like cloud computing, but I don’t trust other people with my data. I’d much prefer if I could run my own cloud on my machine here. Some sort of Google Docs server would be great, I’d use that all the time. Something where my server is the main store, but then Google’s system is a mirror, with edits and changes magically propagating throughout the whole system. Local data with remote access and off-site backup, all in one system without any extra steps required. That’d be a killer system.

Photography Training

2009-11-11T19:38:06Z

As I teach A-Level Photography, I was fortunate enough to get a place on an exam-board run training course yesterday. Most training courses are a bit dull. We tend to get shoehorned into a small events room in some random hotel, to be waffled at by some bloke and his PowerPoint slideshows. Everyone goes to these for two simple reasons; it’s a (paid) day off work, and there’s free food.

This training session was different though. For a start it was in York, which is a really nice place, and secondly we were told to wander around taking photos of the place to practise our own photography skills. It’s no good teaching photography if you can’t do it yourself, after all. It was great, I go all sorts of places and wish I had just five minutes to walk around and take photos, but never get the chance. Yesterday I was being told explicitly to walk around for an hour and take photos.

I even learnt something too Use the histogram on your camera and try to make it look like a mountain or bumpy field, with no strange gaps or high spikes at the edges. Do this by adjusting the aperture and shutter speed.

Originally posted from Landscape Photography. Please leave comments over there.

Skulltag – What a lot of fun

2009-11-01T00:15:46Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

Skulltag, it's Doom... but with real networking

During my time at school, before overclocking Celerons and wasting my life on the Internet became the “in” thing, I used to spend quite a lot of time playing Doom. It was, in fact the reason I spent 30 quid on a 10Base2 network card, length of coax cable and learnt all about this stuff called “IPX Networking“.

Me and a friend used to take it in turns to drag our entire PC setup – featuring ‘massive’ 15″ monitors and Cirrus Logic VLB graphics cards – around to the other’s house. Since neither of us could drive, this required a willing parent. And then we’d spend all night playing Doom, followed by Doom 2 when it came out. There was even one night where we clocked the frag counter, just to see what’d happen (it loops back round to zero).

All of that was back in 1994, and over the following years Doom has come out on pretty much everything from your toaster to digital camera. Well, maybe not the toaster, but I bet someone somewhere has tried, probably using an Arduino and Twitter account. I must have bought this damn game more times over the years than anything.

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Adding Lua to my software

2009-10-30T19:23:11Z

My code running a Lua script

Well, this is a bit fun! One of the main points of my game environment is that I should be able to easily modify entity behaviour without having to hard code anything into the environment itself. After a bit of thought, the programming language Lua seemed to be the best idea.

I was completely amazed at how easy it was to add this to my own software. After compiling it up, a surprisingly small amount of code is required to get the basics working. It was harder working out how to extract the Lua script from the zipfile I am using.

The screenshot illustrates a very simple Lua script that does nothing more than contain a function called “think” which looks like this

– Basic test
function think(xpos, ypos)

print (”xpos = ” .. xpos .. ” ypos = ” .. ypos)
x = xpos
y = ypos
return x, y
end

So it takes in two parameters, prints them out, then returns them back to the host C++ application. So my C++ application calls the function in Lua, that prints out the values it received, and then returns them. If you look in the debugger you can see it all works

Now to work out how to expose data and functions in the C++ application so that Lua can use them. I need things like “getPlayerPosition” and so on.

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Debugging my boiler

2009-10-30T10:36:20Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

I suppose there’s one benefit to having a knackered heating system – it requires lots of testing, to work out what’s wrong with it. It’s quite nice sitting in a roasting hot house during the day, under the guise of “testing” my heating system works.

Or in this case doesn’t. The water keeps trying to escape. The boiler man came yesterday, it’s the same bloke who does the gas inspections, and we had a bit of a play with it. Of course, since he was there things worked better than just me being there. We discovered that the boiler pressurises the system up to 4 bar quite happily, which is bad – it should only go to 2 bar. Above 3 the safety relief valve should open and send hot water outside through a little drain pipe. Sure enough, dribbling down the wall outside was some very hot water, and the pressure started to drop.

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And my boiler’s broken…

2009-10-27T11:11:54Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

Leaking boiler

What you’re looking at is the underside of my central heating boiler. The crusty white stuff on that pipe is limescale caused by the water in this area. The crusty white stuff shouldn’t be there, it means that pipe has a leak, and is probably partially responsible for my heating system having no water pressure.

I tried filling the radiators back up, but as soon as I started the boiler a fairly fast dripping noise came out the bottom of the boiler. A quick look with my torch showed not one, not two but four leaks on this boiler!

Here’s two of the leaks on the plumbing going to the rest of the house. And in this photo are two more leaks. One is on the pressure relief valve, the other is coming from the back, just above the copper pipe in the background.

Since this is a rented house I’ve just phoned the letting agency who are going to have a plumber call me back. Fortunately the boiler is in my kitchen with all the pipework exposed so I can see and hear this stuff happening. If it was locked away in a cupboard I’d probably never notice.

And no, this isn’t the first time I’ve run the boiler since last winter. I made the point of running it for a few hours each month and it was fine at the weekend when I used it.

Key debouncing and pause modes

2009-10-21T22:53:33Z

For the curious I have spent the past week (off and on) making a pause button work. Yes, after a week of coding I have managed to allow the player to press the ‘P’ key and see a little “The game is paused, press P to unpause, Q to Quit” box appear on the screen. Not only that, but the player can then actually press ‘P’ again and go back to watching a black screen with a red triangle on it (the “game”), or press ‘Q’ and go back to the main menu.

Which makes it sound like I’ve done bugger all really. And that’s the problem with measuring progress by things you create and can actually demonstrate to other people. You see, what I really achieved this week is

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Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Lenovo S10e Touchpad problems – how do I disable browser zooming?

2009-10-18T10:51:02Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

Right then, here’s a nice challenge… please read carefully because it’s not the usual thing you’re already thinking…

I have a Lenovo S10e netbook running XP. It has a Synaptics touchpad with the touchpad drivers installed. For some highly irritating reason, running my finger down the left hand edge (NOT the right) makes my web browser zoom in and out.

How do I turn it off? It’s driving me crazy.

I have been into the Synaptics touchpad control panel and disabled all scrolling, touch zones and everything except the tap-to-click. The really irritating thing is it only happens in web browsers, and only zooms them in or out. And it’s really useless.

Alport Castles

2009-10-17T19:21:55Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

Alport Castles

Today me and my dad went for a walk in the Peak District, to a part we’ve never been to before. At the bottom of the Snake Pass is Ladybower Reservoir and the Derwent Valley. On the moorlands at the top is a place called Alport Castles, a large craggy area that looks like a quarry but is actually a natural landslip.

The walking was fairly easy (which is good, it’s been a while since I’ve been out walking) and once onto the moorland quite flat and straight forward. Once at Alport Castles we walked back towards the reservoir and down to the road where, conveniently a bus turned up and saved us a long four mile trek.

What’re you looking at?

2009-10-16T14:18:35Z

After the fun of getting my “new” film SLR, an Asahi Pentax S1a and the even greater fun of finding camera film (Tesco) and somewhere that’ll develop it (Boots) I shot a reel of test film. The only thing I was trying to discover was whether the camera worked, ate film, leaked light or was completely knackered.

And as you can see, it works! It works very well The lens is subtly different to my Nikon 50mm prime and I like the effect.

Originally posted from Landscape Photography. Please leave comments over there.

Blogs and websites I like to read

2009-10-05T22:25:46Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

I use Google Reader to follow quite a lot of websites, blogs and anything else interesting that squirts out an RSS feed. For the curious, here is a list of my favourites. I’m leaving out the well known things like XKCD, Dilbert, Hack-a-day and so on.

http://uncertaintimes.tumblr.com/ I have no idea what this is about, but it never fails to display interesting and random images at least once a day.
http://cargocollective.com/learnsomethingeveryday Learn something new, every day. Information presented in nice little cartoon drawings.
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/ It’s a sort of programming based blog, written by Landon Dyer who I believe used to work at Atari and Apple back in the day.
http://www.bytecellar.com/ Interesting writings about old computer systems.
http://digitaltools.node3000.com/ A tech blog that writes about various fun and often arty things, such as nice Flash games, strange bits of hardware and art installations.
http://www.trafficengland.co.uk/index.aspx Totally not tech related at all, this site simply tells you all about the state of the UK’s road network. Grab the RSS feed and have your own instant travel update system. If only I could get this in my car and have the relevant reports displayed while I’m driving about.
http://impossible-world.blogspot.com/ An art blog that shows Escher-style “impossible” drawings.
http://fcd3.blogspot.com/ A programming blog detailing the creation of a Z-Machine interpreter for Infocom games.

I often find these kinds of sites while browsing around the comment fields of popular websites. It’s fun to click the random links in people’s signatures…

What are your favourite websites to visit? I’m always interested in new things to read.

Very chilli

2009-10-05T19:33:49Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

It got a bit cold last night. So cold that I had to pile an extra three layers onto my bed to keep me warm. We also had the first frost last night so I made the decision to move my chilli plants indoors where it’s warmer. I’m pretty amazed that they’re continuing to produce peppers, and that they’re big, bright, shiny red peppers too. The last plants I grew produced loads of fruit, but then dropped dead. Perhaps I can keep these plants growing all year.

Hopefully bringing the plants indoors will also produce more spicy peppers.

Engine? Framework? Toolkit? The difficulty of naming things

2009-10-05T19:26:49Z

I’m working away on my un-named project, which is starting to take shape nicely. When it’s eventually finished it’ll be some sort of game engine-thing for making 2D style sprite based games – shooters, platformers, and so on. I have no idea what to call it though – a framework seems to be something like XNA where you have a collection of classes and libraries that can be bolted together and compiled up to make a program. An engine seems to be something similar, or the part of a game you get when all the assets and levels are stripped out – imagine Doom without its WAD files.

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Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Dear Web Browsers… please stop being so slow

2009-10-03T08:57:32Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

It’s 2009, I am sat in front of a dual core 2.6GHz machine. It contains a graphics card capable of throwing millions of polygons around the screen without breaking a sweat. The HDD is capable of some stupidly fast data transfer rate and my RAM is so large I could copy all my 8 and 16 bit software collection into it and still have room to boot Windows. Oh, I also have a 6Mb ADSL2+ connection which is capable of dragging data off the internet at 6-700K/sec (that’s kilobytes, not kilobits).

So why does Firefox take 30 seconds to grind itself into life? What’s it doing? Typing into the Awesomebar produces confusing pauses too. Surely it’s not that difficult to scan a list of previous URLs looking for likely matches.

It’s not just Firefox though. On my work PC IE8 takes forever to do anything at all. Clicking on the “new tab” button results in a frustrating two second constipated pause while it says “Connecting…”. Connecting to what? I’ve not typed in an address yet!

IE8 did like to tell me I’d just opened a new tab, in that irritating way Microsoft products do until I switched that off.

Chrome is a bit of an improvement, but since it has no plugin system I have to put up with adverts on my webpages (yes, I do run Privoxy, but it’s just not as good) and the odd braindead site saying “uhh you’re not running Internet Explorer, go away please”.

I won’t mention badly coded AJAX-driven sites that just … stop … for no reason at all because the background HTTP request has silently died and nobody thought to check for that. Google copes with this very well, Twitter seem largely clueless, and occasionally my own Wordpress installation likes to get it wrong and double-post things or not post at all.

And what’s with the meaningless progress twirlers that spin around and around? Once upon a time we had a progress bar that’d fill up. Now it’s just a thing that spins until either the page loads with the CSS missing, or “That site failed to load. Here’s a meaningless page of gibberish about why, which if you read it all will tell you at the bottom to either try reloading the page, or to ask your system administrator for help. After you’ve gone and messed around with proxy and encryption settings for no reason at all”.

One day we’ll get information instantly and will wonder what all the fuss was about. Although then we’ll probably be complaining that it takes effort to read the stuff, and why can’t it just be injected directly into our brains as we sleep.

Bike Advice Needed: Lights

2009-09-24T09:51:23Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

It’s getting dark earlier now, and there are many twisty paths where I live. The sort of place you often see on the 6 o’clock news cordoned off by police tape and a little white tent nearby. According to our local council they’re called “nature trails” (I think the locals read that as “rubbish dumps”, but there you go) and they’re quite good fun to ride along.

I need a set of lights for the front of my bike that’ll light the surrounding area up well enough to not be decapitated by low branches, fall down holes, or cycle into some waiting miscreant. I also don’t have masses of money to spend, but don’t want to buy rubbish that’ll break down.

Advice please, O wise Internet…

Exploring my local area by bike

2009-09-23T20:56:18Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

I’ve been out on my bike once again exploring the local area. Whereas most people tend to cycle down the river’s edge, looking at the rubbish-strewn dark trails that lead off into the reclaimed wilderness but continuing, I think “that looks an interesting way” and set off down it. Sometimes it turns into a nice little loop full of local interest, other times it turns into a bit of a crap ride.

Today was the second type of trail. It looked quite promising from Google Maps’ satellite view. My aim was to cycle into town but by going down the river. I now know this is not possible, there’s a railway in the way. I did find where the locals dump their rubbish and old fridges though.

For the morbidly curious, here’s the Google Maps link and you can download the KMZ file Deadend trail.

My Google Earth is now collecting a healthy pattern of red tracks running over the reclaimed land either side of the river. Looking at the area now, you’d never think there used to be a gravel quarry and coal mine. I think I’ll now try and cycle North up the river itself, rather than the canal part. Ultimately I’d like to cycle along the Pennine Trail to Leeds and then the other way to wherever it goes.

I took my previously mentioned Asahi Pentax film camera with me. Hopefully the pictures will come out and look good. I’ve almost stopped looking at the back for a preview image

Here’s the stats for today’s ride

Created by My Tracks on Android.

Total Distance: 7.52 km (4.7 mi)
Total Time: 48:27
Moving Time: 33:32
Average Speed: 9.35 km/h (5.8 mi/h)
Average Moving Speed: 13.46 km/h (8.4 mi/h)
Max Speed: 27.90 km/h (17.3 mi/h)
Min Elevation: 68 m (222 ft)
Max Elevation: 84 m (274 ft)
Elevation Gain: 135 m (444 ft)
Max Grade: 3 %
Min Grade: -7 %
Recorded: Wed Sep 23 16:56:52 GMT+01:00 2009

Using a T-Mobile G1 with My Tracks is really really good.

links for 2009-09-23

2009-09-23T14:05:13Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

C++ STL Tutorial

(tags: c++ Programming tutorial vector development stl)

Ungodly freaks of nature found in my kitchen

2009-09-22T15:51:04Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

If Cthulhu made veg

Looking like something that’s crawled straight out of an HP Lovecraft novel, I found these living in the back of my veg basket in the kitchen. Once upon a time they were harmless baby new potatoes, destined to be brutally boiled in water and chewed to pieces.

And then! subject to nothing more than ambient daylight, a quantity of dog hair and cosmic background radiation they sprouted quite naturally mutated beyond all recognition into warped vegetables that Cthulhu itself would be proud of.

It seems the potatoes sprouted, using up all the energy in the main potato and then attempted to root into the air, put out some shoots and generally make a jolly good stab at turning into potato bushes of their very own. Then things went wrong and survival mode took over, causing smaller potatoes to be formed in some crazy sprouting fractal type mess. The result – potatoes for pixies.

Maybe I should leave them in a dish of water to see what happens.

Asahi Pentax S1a SLR Camera

2009-09-21T21:46:30Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

Asahi Pentax S1a SLR camera

I’ve been given one of these cameras along with a zoom lens and 55mm prime lens by Amy. I did some research on the web and discovered the camera was the first SLR camera with a pentaprism and dates back to around 1960. I stripped it down and discovered the clever simplicity of totally manual SLR cameras, there’s nothing inside them!

Really nothing, I took the lens off, opened the back, set the shutter to “Bulb” mode and upon pressing the shutter release ended up with a giant 35mm hole going right through the camera. Nothing on this camera is electronic, and it’s so obvious now looking through the lens and twisting the aperture ring to work out how that affects the image.

It’s been cleaned out and loaded with film. I’ve already shot ten “test” shots and will take it for a ride about on my bike tomorrow if it’s not raining. The Asahi Pentax camera is all metal, with a zoom lens that weighs more than my Nikon DSLR body and lens! The lens also has “Made in USSR” stamped on it This is a camera I’d be quite happy dangling from my neck while walking through town – if anyone tried to steal it I’d just whack them on the head with it

I took a few photos of it, and a few photos looking through the lens. Meta-photography is sort of amusing.

Once I’ve used up the film and found somewhere that can develop it, and assuming the camera doesn’t leak light like a Lomo I should have some nice photos. It’s quite hard guessing the exposure settings by eye, but since I shoot in manual on my DSLR I’m constantly altering the aperture and shutter speeds anyway and I think my guesses should be good.

Day out at Cleggy

2009-09-21T21:33:38Z

Originally posted at The Diary, comment here or over there (better!).

Cleethorpes beach

Yesterday was a nice sunny day, so having not much to do me and Amy went once again to Cleethorpes to do what the English do at the seaside – wander up and down the beach complaining about the bikes, chavs and the price of the fish and chips.

While shovelling small change into the amusements we found a Guitar Hero Arcade machine which managed to extract £2 from my pocket in return for a two player game of Rage Against The Machine’s Bulls on Parade. I think there’s an XBox 360 or PC inside the cabinet.

More photos can be found on my photos website.

It makes you think…

2009-09-18T21:56:25Z

sitting in a traffic jam. They’re not very mentally stimulating, the most interest being the insides of your nostrils and the car in front. So while slowly shuffling my way home today I had a think about the design of my game environment.

I’ve just finished making the engine parse the config part of the XML file. I can now describe using XML what resolution screen to have, whether the mouse or keyboard are required, and whether sound should be enabled. So what should take about five lines of code, now takes an XML parser, some classes and an external file. That’s progress for you

The next step is to get the basic environment loop working. I need to be able to open the screen and have standard things like “quit” work properly. If you just close an Allegro program it freezes and Windows pops up to kill it off, which isn’t any good. Especially when debugging, applications that fail to exit correctly make GDB do odd things.

So, back to the traffic jam, it was very interesting as I managed to get stuck in the middle of a busy junction with cars coming at me from all angles. There’s lots of roadworks and traffic lights in town, they’re all out of sequence with each other and much confusion. A bit like my code, and like my code, the new shopping centre will be built, roads widened and traffic lights resynced with each other. Or something, I don’t think my game environment will have a shopping centre in it. Order will come from the chaos though.

Computers were invented to remove the mindless repetitive work people used to do. There are certain parts of software development that are somewhat repetitive and ripe for automation. All that boilerplate code every project has, collision detection routines, menu systems, sprite manipulation. The whole lot can be automated away and scripted from outside the code. Less bugs. More effort to begin with, but less effort later on.

I think, I’m making this all up as I go along, going off what seems to make sense to me.

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

It’s all about the data…

2009-09-17T21:42:13Z

It’s my opinion, probably because I’ve written lots of database-driven apps, that all software can be reduced to a simple set of data structures, relations between the data structures, and the operations on those data structures.

Take, for example, this blog. There is a database table with the posts in, and then some PHP to turn that into readable HTML. Without the database, the site is worthless. The PHP, while important exists solely to display the data.

The same probably works for games too. Game objects have attributes, it makes sense to store game objects in collections for ease of management – put all the baddies in a collection, put all the bullets in a collection, collision test the baddies collection against the player, but don’t collision test the player against their own bullets. Level data contains attributes that are modified for each level. These also need storing in some sort of collection. Enemy AI is merely a type of attribute for each enemy type, and even the actual AI code should just modify known states for each sprite – ‘find player’ ‘move to player’ ’shoot at player’ and so on.

Don’t forget the game’s menu system and title screens. They’re just more data – “Display splash.png for 3 seconds, or until mouse pressed” “Display main menu until option chosen”.

So, because it’s easier than trying to debug homebrew Nintendo DS code without a debugger, I’m in the process of making a game environment that accepts an XML control file to set the game up. It won’t be predesigned for any particular style of game, but it will be designed for 2D sprite-based games.

It’s my aim that by writing an XML control file, some enemy AI in a scripting language and drawing the artwork my environment can then render the game. The ultimate aim is to have a reusable game rendering environment that lets me create games of a certain style in a less error-prone way.

I have a sample XML file created already, and am now using the excellent TinyXML to parse this and turn it into a set of C++ classes. After that I will reuse the sprite management stuff from my DS coding and expose basic sprite functions – “move_x”, “move_y”, “explode” etc to see if I can make a simple game of some sort.

I’m re-using a lot of code that I’ve used before. I had a basic sprite and screen management system on my DS, which has been ported to Allegro/C++ and some of the code I did in Processing has been used too. I think I’ll stick with Allegro now, it not only has excellent documentation, but it also works and is complete and so simple to use.

Robustly parsing XML is possibly more tedious than writing SQL though.

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.