pikuorguk

Ubuntu Installation Notes #2 – Trac and Apache2

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:26:58 GMT

This follows on from my previous Ubuntu Installation Notes. It may not make sense to you, it’s mostly just so I can repair my server the next time it breaks down. If this stuff doesn’t interest you, go and become creative with Google Image Search.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Attempting to repair my FAL Phase 44 amplifier

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:49:31 GMT

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

FAL Phase 44 Amplifier

Sometime last year my old Kenwood hifi amp stopped working due to the speaker cutout relays not working. The speakers would never switch on, making for a fairly useless amplifier.

While my cousin was sorting out his mess before moving to the US he found this old “FAL” brand amplifier. A spot of Googling reveals this was made by a company called “Futuristic Audio Limited” who also seem to make guitar amps. He didn’t want it, I needed an amp, so it came home with me.

Due to its age I noticed quite a lot of noise when trying to adjust the volume so decided today to take it apart and attempt to clean the insides out. I also bought some switch cleaner to spray in the potentiometers.

The insides were very simple. Here is a photo of the main circuitboard which contains nothing but through-hole mounted resistors and capacitors. The most complex electronic components in this are the four transistors bolted to a piece of metal. There are also some large looking capacitors, and an interesting looking network of diodes.

Unfortunately I think cleaning the contacts on the potentiometers and switches might have messed the electrical characteristics of the amp up. Since this isn’t an IC based amp, I have a feeling there’s a fine balance between the components that makes the thing work, and squirting a load of switch cleaner into things has altered this. When I power the amp up, only the left channel works and the volume goes really loud then distorts – all by itself, without me moving the volume knob. I’ll leave it for a few hours to see if the cleaner evaporates off. It’s no great loss if it is broken, the reason I took it apart was because the sound wasn’t correct and the volume kept wandering between left and right speakers, so maybe it’s finally packed in.

Looking at the electronics inside, part of me wonders if it’s repairable.

Twitter

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:34:01 GMT

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

I will now cross-post this to Twitter

Ubuntu 9.10 Installation Notes

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:23:25 GMT

Karma karma koala...

Upgrading my server to the latest Ubuntu Server has been slightly traumatic. I learnt it’s a really really bad idea to do an upgrade over SSH, because when the machine gets around to restarting the networking, you lose your connection! And then if you stop the upgrade mid process due to losing your connection, the system is in a really messed up state.

I also learnt that on my weird ASUS motherboard Grub2 throws a fit if I don’t use a SATA drive as a boot drive.

Anyway, this post is a list of websites and notes to help me remember how to update the system again. If you’re not into Linux admin, just look at the pretty koala and go about your day, otherwise, hit the ‘more’ link below…

Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Ubuntu 9.10 – Tedious Timewaste

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:54:58 GMT

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

I’m attempting to install Ubuntu 9.10 server edition on my server. To say it’s not going smoothly would be as big an understatement as saying “That Hitler bloke, he was a bit naughty, wasn’t he?”. The damn thing just won’t boot up! It gets as far as saying ‘Grub Loading.’ and then gets no further.

At first I thought it might be the weird combination of IDE controllers and disks I have. I have a 1TB SATA drive, plus two PATA drives. The machine is supposed to boot from one of the PATA drives, and use the SATA as a data drive. This used to work. It even used to work with some crazy extra IDE card in the machine. The motherboard has some half-baked combination of IDE, IDE-RAID and SATA, giving me a total of ten possible disks in the machine. Whoever designed this motherboard was going for a bit of everything, the machine even takes DDR and DDR2 RAM.

Thinking that maybe all this crap was confusing things I switched it all off and pulled out every drive except the drive I wanted to boot from and reinstalled Ubuntu on that. GRUB was installed, it all went well… then the machine rebooted and sat there looking like an oversized doorstop.

I know the BIOS can find the correct disk because I see the ‘GRUB Loading.’ message, but then it seems GRUB fails to find the rest of itself and stops working.

My next plan is to install onto a spare SATA disk I have to see what happens. If that fails I’ll install a previous version of Ubuntu to see if they broke something in this version. It seems they’ve switched to something called Grub2, which has lots of new cool features. Is “booting my system” one of these new features?

Simples!

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:54:19 GMT

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

Definitely not trying to sell me car insurance

Me and Amy went into town today to buy some stuff. I needed some bits and pieces for my fishtank so we went to the local Pets at Home. While staring at the small fuzzy animals I saw a man walking about with a scorpion in his hands. Scorpions aren’t usual animals that Pets at Home sell, neither were the meerkats or the large python we also saw. One of the local animal rescue places was having an exhibition in the front of the store.

Meerkats are cool, but here’s a picture of a giant snake too…

Burmese Python, not called Monty.

Menu Test video

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:11:40 GMT

I thought it about time I showed some sort of progress, so here’s a short video demonstrating the menu system my game engine has. The screens aren’t hard coded, the XML control file defines what screens the game has, how they link up and so on. Even the menu options and their actions are defined in the XML file too.

Now I’m making sprites work, which should make a more interesting video.

The video was captured using CamStudio, which is a neat OpenSource screen capture program. I was going to use Fraps like everyone else does, but it doesn’t seem to record Allegro games.

For reasons I don’t understand, embedding the video here doesn’t work. Instead you will need to click this link to see the video.

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Tales from the late shift – £3/hour and all the books you can read

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:01:07 GMT

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

Back in my college (that’s what we English do between the ages of 16 and 18) days I used to have a part time job. Like most students the part time job was suitably easy, requiring no real skill beyond the ability to stand upright and appear at work when required.

My part time job was working in the local petrol station at unsociable hours during the weekends. So in response to people asking me “what did you do in your student days” I can reply “I sat in a small room reading books, watching people put petrol in their cars”. I didn’t need to go out drinking, the petrol fumes were enough.

I have many tales of weirdness to share with you, so this might become a regular thing until I run out of vaguely amusing anecdotes to tell.

My shifts used to run from 5pm to 11pm, 3pm to 11pm or the horrendous Sunday Morning shift of 7am to 3pm (or was it 8am, I can’t remember. I just remember it being nasty). To pass the time I had a variety of duties, the main one being extracting cash from customers in return for our extortionately priced petrol. We charged 80p/litre back in 1997 which made people grumpy. For the most part they willingly handed over the cash, and few tried to get away without paying.

My other duties included staying awake, watching the local teenagers steal things, talking to taxi drivers and spending three hours mopping the floor. And reading. I did a lot of reading, I think I read most of the sci-fi section of my local library. For this I was paid £3 an hour and it paid for my brand new Internet connection and mobile phone.

Taxi driver came banging on my window one night just as I was closing, evidently in some distress so I opened the door. “Quick mate, need a bucket and some water… some f*cker’s just spewed in my cab!”. People used to wait until I’d just closed up before running across all flustered asking for green rizlas, 10 B&H and a money bag. I wish the local potheads could tell the time and planned their munchie runs a bit better. You know, it’s not like many people want to buy petrol at 10pm so coming then to talk bollcoks at me would be much better.

Same in the morning with the dimwitted types who’d arrive on the forecourt before me and try filling up their cars. Hello! The shop is closed! You will need to hang the pump up or the computer won’t switch it on. No, you don’t understand do you? OK, I’ll go into the shop, turn on some lights and then vanish for fifteen minutes for a crap and a cup of tea while I wake up. You just stand there like a lemon.

And don’t even think of trying to buy your morning fags with that £20 note as you’re my first customer and I have no change!

Where were you when Princess Di died? I was sat in the shop serving customers, it was a Sunday morning and quite sunny. We didn’t sell newspapers so I found out by customers telling me.

Mont Blanc

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:50:30 GMT

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

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:40:03 GMT

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

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:40:27 GMT

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…

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:50:59 GMT

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

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:38:06 GMT

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

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:15:46 GMT

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adding Lua to my software

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:23:11 GMT

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

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:36:20 GMT

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

And my boiler’s broken…

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:11:54 GMT

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

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:53:33 GMT

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

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

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:51:02 GMT

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

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:21:55 GMT

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?

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:18:35 GMT

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

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:25:46 GMT

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

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:33:49 GMT

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

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:26:49 GMT

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Dear Web Browsers… please stop being so slow

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 08:57:32 GMT

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.

pikuorguk

Ubuntu Installation Notes #2 – Trac and Apache2

Attempting to repair my FAL Phase 44 amplifier

Twitter

Ubuntu 9.10 Installation Notes

Read the rest of this entry »Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Ubuntu 9.10 – Tedious Timewaste

Simples!

Menu Test video

Tales from the late shift – £3/hour and all the books you can read

Mont Blanc

Testing

Festive Berries

Google Mail, five years on…

Photography Training

Skulltag – What a lot of fun

Adding Lua to my software

Debugging my boiler

And my boiler’s broken…

Key debouncing and pause modes

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

Alport Castles

What’re you looking at?

Blogs and websites I like to read

Very chilli

Engine? Framework? Toolkit? The difficulty of naming things

Dear Web Browsers… please stop being so slow

Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.