Older blog entries for Svartalf (starting at number 41)

Wow... November... Gotta do better on posting updates to this thing. Well, I've got good reasons...

Ballistics

What can I say? It's taken about 1-1.5 years longer that it ought to have. Part of that is due to my not being quite available because of details of trying to keep a roof over my head, etc. Part of it was due to the same things bedeviling my teammates. In the end, though, I guess one could say it was worth it- at least as a learning experience. Anyhow, barring any other nasty surprises (like this last-minute one that has delayed us another 3-4 months on release...), we should be going gold with it in another couple of days now. I just zoomed the last lingering bug, something that was objectionable to us, but didn't really prevent us from shipping. Something that would have raised the minimum system requirements at least a little bit. When I say just zoomed, I mean that I've just now did the version control check-in, having verified the program working cleanly on NVidia cards, working "well" enough on ATI cards to claim that the issues are more driver ones with a plan to work the issues out with ATI shortly. It feels GOOD.

Open Embedded

Well, I'm still keen on using this, but I've yet to get a clean build out of the full Monotone checkout. So, I guess I need to spend some time trying to figure out what I need to winnow out the stuff that's causing problems and come up with a clean build set for my purposes.

Laptop

Just bought an AMD64 laptop with an ATI adapter (HP Pavilion zv6000)- it was entertaining trying to get a Linux distribution onto this thing. Only distributions I know of that go on without much of a hitch is Gentoo, Slamd, and Mandriva. Of those, I've only experience with Mandriva (but suspect that Gentoo would end up working fine...)- and it's got some small issues with it's use. Every other distribution will invariably choke somewhere in the middle of the install. Mandriva has a slight problem in that there is a bug with PCMCIA support on this laptop that expresses itself with the AMD64 architechture that is fixed in version 2.6.14 of the kernel, but Mandriva ships with the 2.6.12 version. Can't fault them for that one, per se, but I wish they'd make all the little tweaks they apply a little easier to apply for oneself so that someone could do what I'm needing to do- grab the latest and greatest and fix their machine. Anyhow, I've got that mostly done and working, with me needing to sort out the Radeon setup and coming up with an RPM set (as promised) for people with this situation. Decent enough laptop for the price I paid for it (~$1000 over at Fry's...); while I would rather have had a more aggressive AMD64 laptop, $3-4k is a bit outside the budget (The budget was stretched a little bit to accomplish my current purchase...). I just wish that Broadcom would follow in the footsteps of Intersil and do the right thing with their 54g chipset- there's nothing to be gained by continuing to keep it all a secret and it's QUITE obvious that there's nothing special about the software radio stuff that merits what Broadcom's telling us (Otherwise, Intersil wouldn't have open sourced the Prism 2 stuff...).

Hm... Another year alive on this Earth- another year older. Birthday party went decently enough; the week of my birthday was nothing to write home about. Laurie was in the Hospital for mysterious stomach pains up in the 10 range on their little pain scale. She's home now and doing sort of okay- but they still don't know what caused the problems. (I'm none too happy about that, mind...)

Well, on to updates...

ANet

This is pretty much being scrapped. Michael and Company's found a way to allow OpenPlay to work more like it was supposed to so we're running with that for Ballistics (as soon as we can find the engine bug with NVidia's latest drivers- either ours or theirs...). Michael arrived at the conclusion, to which I agree wholeheartedly, that most of the frameworks we have in hand are nothing more than bloated beasts to begin with and he's started, yes, yet another library designed to be an easy drop-in for DirectPlay. No word yet on whether he's succeeding or not, but I'm willing to let the man try it- it's the same thing I was about to do in light of the issues I had with ANET, I just didn't have enough time in the day to do it right at the moment...

Open Embedded

While I've had some issues with the way people are generally treating newbies and the lot with this project (and still DO )- the project itself has raftloads of promise and I think I'm going to use the metadata and build system to frame in my own embedded distribution for media-box/game console use as well as for Coollogic's use. (No, still no final word on funding... Can't say any more than that...)

JXTA/JMF Related Projects

Well, I had to sideline these for a while (no time...) but I'm beginning to pick them back up as they had promise (still do) and I'm interested in pursuing providing the world with a decent P2P IM/Chat/Video-conference application. Don't know if I'm going to bring in SIP support for this stuff; while SIP is the "way to go" in this arena, there's no standards for the meshing support needed and all the players out there seem to be using proprietary (which is bad mojo) solutions and while they claim Linux support, it's pretty much impossible to get a Linux version of any of them at this point (which I consider flatly unacceptable...). If it works solely with JXTA, then there's no sense in doing SIP except for allowing SIP clients to join in to the mesh from the edges or to allow a client to dial out to the rest of the world- which can be handled by cribbing source from SIP Communicator...

Long time, no post.

Still haven't gotten back to any of the Open Source projects yet, but things are dramatically improved. Things are looking up and I think we're going to be on an even keel by the end of this month, middle of next. Got quite a few creditors that we still owe money, but soon...soon... Should be clearing some real money doing work for a small financial trading interest while I wait to see if Coollogic gets their funding (If's really, really too strong a word, considering what I know, but I can't say what is actually happening on that front because of NDAs and all... But, with all the pain I've went through over the years, I'm going to harbor some small doubts until I see the end of it- even if I know it's actually going to happen...) and I should be largely back on track with finances, etc. by next month at the latest.

On a different subject, I found the company that makes PC keyboards the exact same way IBM used to make them. Why would one want one of these old "clunkers"? Because of the positive feedback and solid performance of them- they're like tanks and can shrug off all kinds of abuse that'd kill other, lesser keyboards. Go on over to Unicomp and check it out. Gamers should love the snappy response these gems give to you.

Well, on to the Open Source notes...


ANet

Well, I'm in the process of attempting to resurrect this library. While it was something to speak of in it's day, it's a little crufty- and makes assumptions about things that aren't 64-bit clean. I'll hopefully know more about whether or not I've been wasting my time or not in another week or so as I find time to finish an integration of it instead of OpenPlay in Ballistics. I was hopeful at first, but it's not looking as rosy right at the moment...

JXTA/JMF Related Projects

Ended up getting laid off from my Contract back in March (Damned shame really, he couldn't afford my services because of investor problems- and he's just short of getting his products out the door...) but I've been continuing working on the Java based projects with his blessings. Most notably, there's two frameworks, JXCube and P2People. I got an older CVS version working of JXCube and I reverse engineered the final binary of P2People so that I now have clean compiling code, etc. In the case of JXCube, the video conferencing stuff's kind of kludgy and probably should be re-done as it's streaming raw video and audio, using the Java Media Framework only to capture. (A pet peeve of all of this is that while Sun seems to "rely" on JMF for some of their initiatives, everyone, Sun included, seems to treat the whole thing like a red-headed stepchild... Poor docs, no real books on the shelves... Hmph!) It's going to need some overhaul using snippets of code from P2People to make it work the way it should, using JMF to stream RTP via normal means, SIP/STUN based means, or through JXTA... In the case of P2People, I've got some overhaul to do in that it's been written against JXTA 2.1.1 and things have changed up in the form of crypto code, etc. The code compiles right now, but it's not happy w/1.5 of the JDK. I expect to have working P2P Video Conferencing using Java shortly- if the stuff works decently enough- I've still got loads of reservations. If one could make GnomeMeeting a little less Linux-Centric and could find some way to manage all the P2P capabilities within a SIP->H.323 bridge that also ran on the machine, it'd rock. Well, I don't plan on letting the Videoconf stuff go by the wayside, too useful...

Various Embedded Linux Projects

Haven't worked on this for a little while, but as things slow down a bit around home, I plan on revisiting my energy management solution system code and working on the embedded packaging and LiveCD solution for stuff as time permits. When Coollogic gets things all straightened out, I'll probably shift focus to doing this stuff. Should know more on this by end of next month one way or another... Just went over to the DirectFB site and was anything if not impressed- quite a bit of support there now and it's pretty robust. I expect to be able to use the UniChrome support shortly on my EPIA setup and I plan on coming up with something to work with MythTV- sort of a Media PC/Gaming Console. Yeah, yeah, I know- everybody and his dog has attempted this and failed. Well, I don't plan on making money at the boxes themselves- I just plan on making up a distribution that provides someone with the right toolbox to make one for themselves with minimal fuss.

TuxTag

Well, it's not been forgotten and it's mostly waiting on free and available funds to afford the purchase of a few parts. I'd sidelined it, waiting to see if the bunch that claimed to be almost there were going to produce results or not (Why put any real effort into the project when they're going to do nearly as well as I could- it'd be better if I got along with them to combine forces...)- which they haven't. Expect a possible resurrection of the thing in the future as I move forward with one of the needed components of this project, the embedded distribution system.

Linux TabletPC Project?

I just got a demonstration recently with MS' Windows Tablet Edition. Nice. Too bad it's got Windows at it's core. But then, it got me to thinking. Why can't we have the same capabilities under Linux- and I don't just mean a touch keyboard on the screen like Lycoris did. What's keeping us from coming up with similar capabilities for Linux? Oh well, food for thought, eh?

Well, well... New year, new posting.

Haven't gotten back to any of my stated Open Source projects, but it looks to be that I'm going to be duffing about with some new ones as a consequence of my contract job (the one that pays the bills), LGP (Fun job...), and Coollogic (The "longshot" that I'm sharing spare time with LGP on (mostly on this one at this time...)... Won't bore you all with the details- suffice it to say, things should be a lot rosier by end of February no matter HOW one were to slice it.).

ANet

In the case of LGP, I'm going to resurrect a networking library that worked, worked well, looked similar to DirectPlay on an architechtural level, and was used to produce over 20 commercial titles and was used in several Linux ports done by Loki Games that interoperated across Linux, MacOS, and Windows machines. Once modernized, while it won't be the greatest, it'll be a good arrow in the quiver of game developers and porters that will work across multiple OS platforms comfortably.

Various Embedded Linux Projects

In the case of Coollogic, I'm expecting to further several different user space drivers and create a few new ones as well. Current C/C++ based X10 control libraries do not include support for the LynX10-PLC interface (Something we need to at least get to a demo stage with some of our projects we're working on right now) which is purportedly suported in MisterHouse, so I'm going to add code to the C/C++ libraries because I need those instead of Perl. I'm also planning on coming up with some API libraries for several previously unsupported sensor devices, including some 2D MEMS based accelerometers available from SparkFun in Colorado. I have some other plans in mind, but our budget at Coollogic will probably have to allow for another developer or two dedicated to embedded distribution development to be able to honestly do them as I'm kinda stretched thin (When am I not, right? :). However, if things pan out the way they should, Coollogic's expecting (and this is the CTO speaking on behalf of his company here...) to provide a couple of nice gems for embedded Linux development, pooled from the amazing work people have done on minimalistic LiveCD's and other work we've done in the past and in the present on things.

On my contract side, we're looking at some JXTA based stuff to backfill some of their services offerings. Can't say more than that at this point in time on that part of things