Older blog entries for TheCorruptor (starting at number 360)

Fluffy Cubes

Well, I finally got the bit between my teeth and tried to work out how to properly support Dual Heads for my screensaver. After much struggling I stumbled on a solution that seems to work great. I can span both monitors, and select to use the main display only. But... When using the main display the second monitor fades to black, and then back to white. This has really pissed me off, and for the life of me I can't work out. The only GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT clearing I'm doing is with black, so God only knows why this sub view pops back to white.

I've googled but can't find much that seems useful...

I've been debugging this for about three hours now, as I have a feeling that the second monitor fading to white is about as useless as not having the option at all. On the plus side, it is running a hell of a lot faster on dual heads than it was. I doubt this will be good enough though... :-)

Featureitis

People are never happy with free software it seems. 1.3 of Fluffy Clouds is out and now the feature request is for proper dual head support. There's several complaints that it runs too slow on two monitors.

I hooked the laptop up to the TV with it running 1024x768 on the second screen to test and it ran ok. I guess there's a case for it, but it involves a pretty substantial re-write and I'm debating if I really want to do this. I suppose I'd need it in the future so I might as well go through the pain and do it now.

If you're going to do something you might as well do it right. I'll keep telling myself that as I try to summon the will. Shame about the bad comments Version Tracker users gave 1.3 though. That's really sucked my will to code.

Fluffy Cubes

I thought I'd try out Version Tracker Friday night, and announce my little screensaver on there. I'm almost wishing I hadn't; within two hours I'd had 600 downloads, a couple of bug reports and a few feature requests. Cue the release of FluffyCubes 1.1 an hour later, 1.2 Saturday morning and 1.3 late last night.

I've not exactly spent long on this, about 8 hours of coding in all, but I'm amazed at the amount of people that have had a play with such a simple little screensaver. Seems that's one popular branch of the software tree on OS X.

Anyway, I think 1.3 has most of the features people have asked for, and I'm certainly not inclined to spend much more time on it considering I only did it out of curiosity. It's not some code-opus I planned to dedicate my compiler to...

On the upside I can definitely recommend Version Tracker. It's fast, generates a lot of hits, and ignoring some of the more ignorant reviewers, generates some interesting feedback. When Civil 0.82 is released and the Mac installer is finished I'll definitely be inclined to announce it there. Should generate some more hits for our little project...

I think I mentioned earlier that I was playing with screensavers on OS X, well today I fired up Interface Builder, went through some of the nib tutorials and had a play at extending the basic screensaver I'd put up on my site.

Interface Builder is surprisingly intuitive, and in the space of 30mins I had a working configuration sheet for my screensaver, and lo, a much nicer piece of code. I particularly like the way you connect widgets to call backs and ids. Means you can concentrate on what you need to do, unlike certain other UI Builders I've used.

Apple's docs are a little sparse in places (whose aren't?), but on the whole I've managed to pick up enough ObjC to wizz through the basic bits I needed and get all the widgets working. State is saved (as it should be), but I've noticed that on the first run it's making shite up on some machines and not others. I'll fix that for 1.1 -- in a week or so. ;-)

So, Little Fluffy Cubes for OS X is available. It's just an extension of the cubes I was playing with earlier, with motion blur, blending and user configurable speeds for the movement on all axis. As I've said before. Nothing fancy, but oooo, I've got some nice ideas for other screensavers I may do later in the year.

All in all I'm very pleased with Apple's dev tools. Everything seems to be "within reach", but I it's time I sat down and learnt ObjC properly. Today's exposure to it has lessened the scare factor somewhat.

So, what's next? iTunes plugin perhaps?! ;-)

Mame never felt so good...

Mac Life

So, tady appears to be a good day to own a Mac. :-)

I've been using the browser for about 3 hours. It's fast, I've had no crashes, and I've been pretty happy with the way it's rendered the sites I most commonly visit. However, no tabbed browsing sux... I'm also very pleased that it's using Konq's engine.

The 17" Powerbook has everything I was calling for; built in bluetooh, bigger screen, dvi and faster FireWire. Excellent, except now I have to raise the cash and buy one...

But possibly the most interesting thing: Native X11 on OS X?! I also noted from the apple website that "Experts may choose to replace the native Aqua window manager with their own familiar, standard X Window Manager." Now that sounds *very* interesting. This will make work an even nicer place given the number of Sparcs we have running X...

Phew, been a while since my last entry. Time for a catch-up...

Civil

Not done much over the holidays. Artillery units are in, and the schema needs an update, which is done, but not tested or committed.

I have updated the website a little, and chakie has added a new screenshot. Seems we're back! :)

OpenGL

Well, I've been floating through the OS X Screensaver API and decided to have a go for myself. Knocked up a simple display list thing, which floats through environment mapped cubes. Looks fairly nice, runs fairly fasts, so mission accomplished. :-) You can grab it from my website

OS X

So, the new update landed, iCal and iSync are updated, and everything is running smoothly. Had a fun time this holiday going through everything and testing it out and reading through APIs. I particularly like the Bluetooth packet dumping stuff. Much fun, and I think this will come in handy at work.

I'm really enjoying it as a development environment now. There's of course the odd hiccup, but on the whole it just keeps on getting better and better. Annoyingly, I keep thinking of little applications that I'd like to write, and I just know there's not going to be enough time...

Life

The holidays have been good. Caught up on much of my reading, did some Java, visited Devon and threw one almighty NYE party for everyone here in Southampton.

Back to work on Monday, which I'm not looking forward to, but at least I've had a chance to relax and play with a few things. What more can you ask for? :-)

Oh, I know; Southampton stuffing the Spurs 4-0. MuHaHA! :)

Fun day so far. Installed Mandrake as a dual boot option on my work PC, in an effort to use win2k as little as possible. Fairly impressed with Mandrake from what I've seen so far given that this is the first time I've installed it. Everything went smoothly so now I'm hunting out differences between it and the other distros I've used before...

KDE 3 is quite nice (probably not news to anyone here) and I recently installed it rootless over Aqua via Fink. That impressed me more, and Fink is really starting to become a killer app for OS X. More power to them...

I expect the rest of the day will be spent configuring this machine and installing the various dev tools that I need. Better than work?! ;-)

Work

Finally things have settled down a bit. Looks like this week won't involve more travel... :)

Life

Went up to Liverpool for the weekend. Had the usual lock-in, piss-up and general laugh that you'd expect when you go and visit friends. Even met up with Nikki, who I've not seen in months. Was good to catch up with her and her man woes again...

Civil

Finished the first draft of the Scenario Schema. Needs annotations and some optimisations of the attr groups and local definitions of some elements, not to mention proper enumerated types, but for now it seems to be valid and does the job quite nicely. Of course, things are bound to change...

Everytime I write a schema I swear I'll never do another one by hand again. 280 lines of overly verbose XML. God, sometimes I miss DTDs. I should hunt out a Schema Major mode for emacs or something...

I also finished off the artillery units. Well, finished off in the sense that "these will do for now". I'm bound to dislike them when I see them in game, but they look reasonable enough in photoshop.

Finally, I'm knocking things off my Civil TODO list...

NYE

Plans are already underway for this years NYE party. I'll be DJing again, and it looks like we're going to have a large turn out. I'm also going to setup a webcam so we can link parties with Pap's in Liverpool. That should provide an extra element of fun!

Work

Lots of travelling. Currently I'm home for half the week and away 'oop north' for the other half. Makes doing anything at home a real PITA as I tend to spend at least one day catching up on what I've missed. Ie: Emily! ;-)

Markup for Games

Had an interesting discussion with Tripix re: schemata for games. Looks like Seal Basher will use this a a POC and we're intending to develop a separate library to support (initially) platformers, S.E.U. and B.E.U. type games. Early stages, and I need to sit down and work on some example doctypes while he messes around with a light weight parser.

Should be fun though...

Games

RewiredMind have invited me to start reviewing Game Cube releases for their site. No money involved, but I do get to keep all the titles and promotional material they send me. More for the CV...

Security

Still on a crash course wrt security related issues for our wireless apps and infrastructure. Books are getting bought, and mucho learning is going on. Interesting, and challenging. Just what I like... :)