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Coding: A quick note on how to check things out in a subversion version controled repository
Sun, 28 Aug 2005

I'm still using CVS (and occasionally RCS) for my version control madness, though a lot of folks have switched over to any number of tools from the plethora now available, such as darcs and subversion. CVS is quite mature and is the norm for most open source projects such as BSD and Linux, and is used with SourceForge. As such, dozens of tutorials exist and many or most developers know how to scrape by. With all the newer tools out there, you don't always remember off the top of your head how to get some data out of them. I had to look up the command to check something out of subversion, so thought I'd let you know..

Should you wish to check out the PSP version of SDL, do so like this:

svn co svn://svn.pspdev.org/psp/trunk/SDL

Good luck, my friends in Louisana!

[ Category: / technology / coding ] [link] [Comments]

Is technology or the user to blame? Or, how I learned to start a cooking fire.
Sun, 28 Aug 2005

The other day after feasting on mighty barebecue in honour of my esteemed brother-in-law's 30th birthday, we started to have the nightly hot debate. Perhaps it was the rum and coke talking, or the nature of the conversation, or the fact we're all 30-or-more now, but we raged for hours into the night. While we swung across many topics, one that stuck in my memory was the question -- technology is good of course, but has it made it too easy to be evil?

Naturally, I'm pro-technology. I'm still waiting for the arrival of flying cars and a vacation spot on Mars as promised to our parents as children (though I'll take a pass on the all silver reflecting clothing thank you very much ;) -- I'm pro-investing in science and technology, always saying that we need to train people in its proper and ethical use. I'll avoid going into abortion and the like (I believe its up to the couple and family, not society!), but its easy to talk about other less "loaded" topics -- surely our science has helped produce more and better food, though we should have the choice to eat natural or geneticly altered food at our choice. Likewise, technology has produced superior medicines and the quality of life all over the world has improved (though not enough in the third world, sadly.)

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Reviews: PSP's Coded Arms, Ridge Racer
Sun, 28 Aug 2005

Its been cloudy and/or rainy for each of the last 10 or 15 days, which probably helped lead me to acquiring this shiny ol' PSP. Today mind you has been exceptional.. a day that makes you glad to be alive, enjoying the simple pleasures. Talked to my mother on the phone (something we all should do more of; I really should be talking to my grandmother as she won't last much longer, being 91 or so..), went out for lunch with my wife, and sat in the killer-hot sun and breeze for nearly an hour. You know its a good day when you can't even be bothered to pick up a book or magazine or comic sitting right beside the sun lounger...

Last night I was waiting some lengthy computer work to wrap itself up, so started fiddling with the PSP. So far the device is pretty nifty, though as in my original 'preview' I noted that its likely doomed to 'familiarity' - to ports and franchises, while the Nintendo DS may get some original titles like Nintendogs. Fine by me, since I barely play anything and thus its all new to me. Anyway, some good titles so far (Untold Legends), and some bad ones.. about evenly on both sides. Hopefully as Christmas approaches, new titles will pop out.

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[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / psp ] [link] [Comments]

Tech: DVD Burning - media matters
Sat, 27 Aug 2005

Since before when I figured out how to actually burn DVD data disks from FreeBSD, I've had no luck whatsoever. Every attempt has failed after a few minutes of burning.. maybe 10 per-cent, maybe 25 or even 50 per-cent.. but always a failure (regardless of data size .. 600MB, 1.2GB or 2.5GB. Regardless of speed as well since these discs required a minimum and maxium of 4x burn speed.)

Today, after the 10th coaster or so in the pack I decided to run over and pick up a fresh high quality brand named DVD pack while doing some other chores - this existing pack was an inexpensive no name brand from China somewhere (25 DVD-R's for $8CDN seemed a good deal :) and rather than blame the drive I figured it more likely to be the DVD platters themselves. After all, I was able to burn CDR's no problem.

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Gaming: Microsoft hires 2000 money-counters from Cimmeria
Tue, 23 Aug 2005

My man Apex pointed me to the Electronics Boutique (EBGamestore) page for pre-ordering the XBox 360. I have no interest in the XBox and hope to scrape by on the DVD player we already have (a PS2, purchased years after it was already old news.) But I had to post when I learned the pricing. Hold onto your chest, this could kill you.

The base system (no frills) is $599 USD. Six hundred buckeroos of the mighty greenback. The bigger brother Xboxinator package is a mere hundred bucks more and includes wireless controllers and a hard drive for saving your games. $699. Are people going to put up with this, or line up and hand it over midnight of release day?

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Gaming: Previewing the Sony PSP
Mon, 22 Aug 2005

Updated Aug 22 2005

Alright, so I said I'd never pick up a PSP as Sony are such [explative]'s .. but after all these months (since March! ;) I could handle it no more - and this is one impressive piece of kit. I've entitled this post a 'preview' since I'm still in the gushing honeymoon phase of the purchase and it wouldn't be fair to call it a review without me trashing it all to heck ;)

As I've said many times, I'm more a fan of gaming -- I've not the time to play so can't really call myself a gamer (and I tend to get bored of a title after playing it for an evening anyway, which makes it an expensive hobby.) Of course, retrogaming and collecting arcade cabinets never gets old, so what can I say? Writing a game engine is entertaining, and Halflife 2 was good.. but I just can't blow a night away with Metal Gear. Anyway, we've got a GBA but I've never much bothered with it since it just seems overly dumbed-down for me - simple games are good, but I'm a Civilization III player so if I'm going to futz around for an evening I'd like Final Fantasy: Tactics and not Tactics Advance. If I'm futzing around for 20 minutes in a line waiting at the bank, then I'm fiddling with my PDA instead - I'm not going to be carrying around a game console. (Not to say its just for kids, but I don't commute via subway or train.. I drive. And its just for kids ;) (So yes, I'm a wannabe-gamer whose really just work-obsessed :)

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Here's to the irrelevent hero
Fri, 19 Aug 2005

I know a lot of the time I'm going on about some technogarbage here or about some neat game there, or otherwise ranting about whats ticking me off - but thats because theres a filter over what I write up here - its not a personal diary (since I'm not the sort to write one and you're not likely the sort to care that much :) because the really personal bits aren't for flashing around in public. Theres a time and place, but I do like to go on about technology and running a small business and in general trying to amuse or help out. Naturally, my wife skips reading the blog since she knows the real me and doesn't so much care for the tech-nerd side after a long day of work ;)

A week or two back, she asked why I hadn't posted about a topic that has always interested me, that made me remember that humanity really does have something good in it... She knows that I'm an eternally happy person and wondered why only the playful side was showing up online here, and not the more questing side. She wondered why I'd note written about Everyday Heroes.

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Cinema: Reviewing 'The Island'
Tue, 16 Aug 2005

I'll summarize quickly since I know you're busy and just skimming ;) A number of things ticked me off while watching The Island, and it reminded me of numerous silver-screen classics.. but it did entertain. Although I'm a positive and happy individual (sickeningly so my wife sometimes says..), I just have to rant about this movie - because when I pay for a movie or DVD I do not want to see blatant advertising.

This last weekend was our sixth wedding anniversary (and what can I say - I'm fairly proud of that since half of the marriages out there don't make it this far. We made it, and we're going to keep making it!) and although it was a rainy weekend we decided to at least catch a movie. Some think this is a blockbuster year but so far I've found the pickings a little meagre, but this we both 'sort of' wanted to see, knowing it would be a good idea deluted into another Logan's Run - the TV series.

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Apple: How to make disk image files (.dmg) from the command line
Sun, 14 Aug 2005

On my development Mac (a G4 tower from a few years ago - when the G5's were announced, the prices on G4's dropped by 1/3rd overnight - how could I refuse?) I run Mac OSX 10.2. I've often considered upgrading to 10.3 or 10.4, but in the end I do almost all of my work through my laptop (as a gateway to my other two development boxes) so don't really need the update. Further, as a developer, I find it wise to hang back on versions so that your dev environment shares more with the average user than the bleeding edge user. Anyway, people tell me that 10.4 is a bad update and to stick with 10.3, so I might as well stick with 10.2 right?

Of course, Shadow Plan development marches ever on and I release Shadow Plan updates as .dmg files to make installation of the desktop components a breeze - just drag and drop or even run-from-disk-image. Creating .dmg files from the command line is a little screwy though, so I thought I'd note it down here in case anyone needs to know. Read on, spiderfriends.

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Tech: Your 'net vocabulary of the day, Or, whatinole is UDDI, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc etc etc.
Sun, 14 Aug 2005

A lot of folks sling acronyms around, and programmers doubly so. A number of people recently asked me what the heck the a pile of terms mean so I thought I'd jot it down here in case anyone else is mystified.

Below, find some 'high level' definitions for the following terms:

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Gaming: Remembering Omega
Thu, 11 Aug 2005

Omega was released around 1988 or 1989 for numerous platforms, from 8-bitters like the Apple II through to 16/32-bit platforms like the Atari ST (and Amiga?) where I experienced it. Let me quickly summarize and say.. its a game whereby you assemble and arm robotic tanks and 'script' or 'code' their behaviour for combat in an area filled with other 'coded' tanks.

Historically, I know of a few (not many!) 'coder' games, such as the classic C-Robots (and variants), though at the time this was I think a first for me (aside from screwing with bad Logo samples in the Atari ST Logo book :) In the last few years a couple of games have come out like this, but its essentially a lost genre. While 'construction set' games (Adventure Construction Set, Pinball Construction Set, Wargame Construction Set...) flourished and eventually evolved into the enormously popular modding community we have now, there seems to be no active replacement for this interesting game style.

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[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / reviews / retro ] [link] [Comments]

Television: Getting a fix of retro..
Wed, 10 Aug 2005

For a long time my retro-pervision was limited to classic arcade machines and the requisite 80's music (though retro-night never plays what I listened to as a kid - in the 80s it would've been wank metal and later the early industrial stuff - really, does retro-night at the bar really play what anyones childhood was about? Or has it grown into its own thing especially with new-retro-style music like that of The Killers?) - though eventually I started to get intro retro-game-consoles (the SNES being first to try, even though I didn't have one as a kid) and more recently the retro-comics phase (all these graphic novels and Red Sonja's lieing around :) So this new found fetish was both a way to re-live (and hide in ;) childhood memories, as well as experience things I didn't have access to or couldn't afford back in the day.

Theres at least one other category of the retro fetish I've not mentioned - retro television. For a long time now I've been a fan of keeping my old VHS tapes around (didn't we all record stuff from TV to VHS?) - old Doctor Who episodes, some Robotech and Transformers cartoons, the never re-aired 4 hour Dune movie, etc. Cool stuff.. but two years back my man Aphyd pointed me to Gold Monkey where the guy was accepting tapes of the most unwatched show in the 80s (that I loved) - Tales of the Gold Monkey, and then selling cheap DVDs of the episodes. By gum, if this treasure of childhood has been 20 years forgotten by the studio who made it (and never republished), I might as well nab a copy right?

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Home: Lightning... the aftermath, or, How to help protect your home from future power surges
Tue, 09 Aug 2005

On August 2nd, 2005, a fairly mighty storm swept through Mississauga (okay, not a tsunami, but severe for what we see here.) Hailstones a good half inch or more across made me worry about the integrity of car windows, power was out everywhere, and lightning came down every few seconds.. quite a spectacle that I enjoyed from the confines of my little Honda Civic. The winds were shifting direction every few seconds and resulted unbeknownst to me in a horrific airliner crash while I drove around looking to find a copy of Final Fantasy: Tactics or La Pucelle for PS2 (which I didn't locate.) On returning home I found our home without power and set about turning off the air conditioner and got to reading some Savage Sword of Conan comics to pass the time... though as the hours stretched on and my laptop batteries ran out I started to get concerned...

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Links: P-p-p-p-powerbook and other revenge
Sat, 06 Aug 2005

The p-p-p-p-powerbook story is a tad on the older side, but is just so good it needs to be revisted once in awhile. A scammer tried to 'steal' a laptop and they pulled a fast one on him, and even cost him a few delicious bucks - sexy. Theres other good nabs I've seen over the years, like this fine lad who busted a scammer, and of course the ever-classic ebola monkey who got Nigerian-scammers to send him photos.. (BTW, ebola's site may not be work safe, as some of the photos have crude writing. But getting back at the scammes is worth it.)

P-p-p-p-powerbook!

Some people have too much free time and this is the perfect past-time for 'em :)

[ Category: / day_by_day / links ] [link] [Comments]

Home: Lightning Attacks!
Fri, 05 Aug 2005

I'm not so vain as to think anyone noticed I've been quiet a few days, but its true .. and I'll likely be on-and-off the air over the next few days as well. You see, we're hexed.

Rant. On.

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Tech: Kernel compiling, and failing succeeding to burn DVDs
Tue, 02 Aug 2005

Update: Success! See down at the bottom.

Earlier I started mucking with burning DVDs and CDRs from this new FreeBSD 5.4 box and didn't really get anywhere with DVDs but did get CDRs working great. I thought I'd waste a few more hours and attempt to get DVD-R's to burn - alas.. no luck yet. Fired off a question to freebsd-questions though in hopes others can help.. however, I thought I'd summarize my experiences so far.

'cdrecord' comes with the OS and is the most commonly used tool so I figured I'd work that angle. You use the same mkisofs to produce the intermediate .iso file that is fed into the burning process, so see the prior blog entry for details about that. cdrecord needs ATAPICAM added to the kernel (since the GENERIC kernel doesn't include that option) as it allows use of 'SCSI' devices on the ATAPI (IDE) hard drive bus.

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Cinema: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Mon, 01 Aug 2005

Lets get right to it -- I've thought Johnny Depp was pretty versatile since way back when he was on 21 Jump Street, but that doesn't mean I'm going to like any old movie he's part of. Tim Burton is of course also a force for good (anyone who directed Edward Scissorhands, the original Batman films and Beetlejuice is worthy of recognition) but most notably we must never forget he directed Mars Attacks! ("Nice planet, we'll take it") Lastly, theres of course Danny Elfman on drums, so we've got everyone we need to make a great movie. Alas, they did not.

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