User:	mort_dansant
	Date:	2008-07-07 16:00
	Subject:	First Ski of the year
	Security:	Public

All the family went off up north for a few days and left me alone from Sunday afternoon for a week.

So on the spur of the moment I decided to go skiing, and fabulous it was as well for a couple hours of downhill excitement while listening to Iron Maiden on the iPod.

I was testing out my new boots which seem good so far.

Legs are absolutely killing me though now and I don't think I'll be able to walk tomorrow.

Off to see Hancock this evening

	User:	stinkygoat
	Date:	2008-07-07 00:41
	Subject:	radio fun
	Security:	Public

We got our HAM licenses a while ago and while we've listened to lots of stuff we've never really been transmitting much. We're really more interested in the digital modes and we always fancied doing a bit of SSTV.

After having built the Softrock SDR (a great success in its own right) Giles was all fired up and over the weekend he built a PC interface to the radio to let us have a try. It was finished this afternoon and we spent a few hours sending out hopeful CQ images with no response.

Then after the pub I thought I'd have a few more goes on 20M before giving up for the day and we were rewarded with our first two SSTV QSOs }:-). Really fun to work the mode and get our first responses, from Belgium and Holland no less }:-).





I guess this means that other SSTV operators around Europe will soon be seeing lots of pictures of sheep and trippy graphics "de MW3OXX" then };-)..

that's SSTV... with the power of an OXX! };-)

	User:	matt303
	Date:	2008-07-06 17:55
	Subject:	CamelBaks are not waterproof.
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	accomplished

I'm just drying out most of the contents of my CamelBak after what can only be called a character building ride in the Peak District. It was raining when a mate collected me from my home and it got more heavy as we drove to the start point. The ride was much the same with the rain getting harder the further from the car we got. About halfway around the horizontal rain was getting a bit much so we worked out a sheltered and direct route back. Anyhow I ended up well and truly wet and caked in dirt and I'll have to clean the bike tomorrow.

	User:	mort666
	Date:	2008-07-06 12:53
	Subject:	Ruby tools and Ruby Netcraft Module
	Security:	Public

Well I’ve been busy putting together a bunch of Ruby versions of some tools we use at work, I’ve cleaned up the Google scripts for searching for emails within google. I’ve extended the tool into something that can pull from Yahoo! and MSN Live using their respective search APIs. These are not quite ready to be released as yet.

I’ve also put to get a DNS tool that goes through the DNS on a domain and gathers a bunch of information we use in the reports, so this is pretty much work specific. Pretty good exercise in playing with the Ruby port of the Perl Net-DNS module.

The other thing I’ve put together and will probably release is a Netcraft Module, it is similar in concept to the Perl one that you can find here but rewritten in Ruby and I think it is a little more elegant.

You can also have a play with the Ruby Netcraft module here. It is very basic but does what I need and I hope people find it useful.

	User:	havana_1975
	Date:	2008-07-03 21:12
	Subject:	Affairs of the Heart
	Security:	Public

I have recently had a bit of a knock... felt a bit broken for a few days but now picking myself up and getting on with it all. Though I come across as a pessimist.. and well I am in many things.. I am very much an optimist with regards to people closer to me. So fingers crossed. My future plans have all died and so I need to really think and reassess what I will do now.

Next week I am heading back to Cuba for two weeks for a little holiday. I will meet up with Jaxx, Helena and some Cuban friends. I am looking forward to it... but also not for reasons I won't go into. But this is probably likely to be my last holiday like this for some while. I've really enjoyed seeing lots of the world but now it's time to stop chasing that escapism and find something different.

I've enjoyed taking photos a lot recently so I bought myself a second hand SLR digital camera to try out in Cuba as well. May try and be a bit more serious about it.

I'll update this when I get to Cuba.

	User:	gyratory
	Date:	2008-07-03 09:00
	Subject:	GR++ on HW
	Security:	Public

Originally published at Block Copy Coders. Please leave any comments there.

EDIT : Ooops: Posted this on the wrong blog Should have been on Gamedev blog

Managed to get to grips with the getting my code signed and runnable on production iPhone. It’s a bit of a pallaver to be honest and I don’t really want to go into any detail for fear of breaking any NDAs. However the good news is that it does work, the bad news is GR+++ runs incredibly slowly.

It’s shouldn’t take long to sort out, I’m confident the main code is plenty fast enough; the unofficial SDK version proves that’s the case.

The likely culprit is the OpenGL code that downloads the game screen into a texture. I had a problem similar to this on the mac version a long while ago. I’d created the texture in GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_6_5 format, the same format that the game itself runs in and this went really slow. The reason was that the HW itself doesn’t seem to support this format natively and the driver itself was doing a very inefficient conversion to RGBA. The solution was changing the texture to RGBA8 and doing my own rather nippier conversion from 565. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case this time as well. Gareth mentioned he’d seen someone on a messageboard say they’d had problems with something similar. It’ll be that or the sound I’m sure.

In other news a chap on the yakyak forum has written a really nice looking iPhone game called Rolando, you can see it here. It’s a nice OpenGL based title that uses tilt a lot and has a bit of a LocoRoco aesthetic going on. The web page has an ace little animation showing the game working and I asked him how he’d recorded this and he pointed me in the direction of Screenium by Synium. This little app allows you to make a video of an area of the macs screen which in turn means you can run your game in the iPhone simulator and grab the output of that. Neato. I did a quick (and in much needed of improvement) test here.

It’s been a pretty good few days for random apps on the mac. I can recommend having a look at these:

Viscosity: a great OpenVPN front end for the mac that replaces TunnelBlick which was okay but a bit flakey at times. Even though it’s only in beta Vicosiy has been rock solid the last few days.

Cornerstone: A very slick looking SVN front end. I quite like using SVN from the command line but this is quite nice. Would be handy for artists innit

	User:	saintpap
	Date:	2008-07-02 19:25
	Subject:
	Security:	Public

My time in Northern Ireland is drawing to a close.  I'm signing up for another three months and I think I'm done.  I've been over here for ten months now, and so far, so good.  The lead-out to my time here looks good.  I've got some decent projects on the go, some older stuff doing very well in production and another trip out to the US likely happening in September.  There is a lot to look forward to in the coming months.

It hasn't always been easy.  Domestically, it has been a strain on the girls.  I probably feel it a lot less than they do, as I'm generally a lot busier than they are. 

It has, however, been entirely worthwhile.  I believe that to know a place, you need to work there.  Going on holiday is fun, but it's window shopping.  You're not a participant.  You're a customer.  I am sure Ms Russel, recently returned from a working tour of South America, will agree.

I've got to know two places, over a hundred new people and two different cultures.  Best of all, new people dig what I do.  I'm loving it,  and leaving it.  The future, right now, is the roughest sea off the coast of the New World.  Can't wait to see where I'm washed ashore.

	User:	stinkygoat
	Date:	2008-07-02 14:29
	Subject:	like staring into another universe
	Security:	Public

Sometimes working on shaders is like looking through into an alternate dimension or something. The one I'm working on at the moment just takes images and transforms them according to a set of mathematical rules. It's amazing how the shader "sees" ordinary images.

The Llamasoft logo with the camel becomes this:



The canonical image of the horse's head becomes this:



It's like there's an infinity of universes in there, in the numbers.

I should do a sideline in this, send me a picture and a fiver and I'll send you a print of the snapshot of how my shader sees it }:-D. Hell, it'd probably pay better than the games biz };-).

	User:	stinkygoat
	Date:	2008-07-01 16:14
	Subject:	I've created procedural.... pubes?
	Security:	Public

I appear to have accidentally created procedural pubic hair. I was working on adding some control parameters to a shader that I intended to use for making nice-looking star maps and nebulae, when suddenly the screen was filled with pubes!



They glisten and curl and everything }:-).

The shader was never intended to do pubes or any other kind of hair really, it was more for stuff like this:



Horse head nebula! }:-).

Anyway looks like being a very versatile shader, so I'm away to add some more knobs and widgets to it };-).

	User:	stinkygoat
	Date:	2008-06-30 13:34
	Subject:	KISS THE OX
	Security:	Public

Boi Caprichoso is Champion of the Festival 2008, which makes it a second year running as Champion }:-). The ladies are kissing the ox!

	User:	scot_ay
	Date:	2008-06-30 11:37
	Subject:	Stoners
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	aggravated

We spent a lovely day yesterday visiting Stonehenge and a gander around Salisbury Cathedral and town.
Man, I can't get over how *small* the stone monument is! I also couldn't get Spinal Tap out of my head either... :D



It's harder than I thought trying to explain to Con what hippies actually are. He did get a good look at the strange few who (older to know better) sat in a field in their crushed velvet, home-made outfits with bad hair. The voice guide was a bit lame, gave me no information apart from guesswork to the stones purpose and mocked those who drew thier 'new age mysticism'.

The only spiritual connection is its awesome to see some ancient, human, engineering to get those things up 5000 yrs ago in what was a graveyard.

Anyway, back onto boring meaningless drival -

I've spent the best part of this morning trying to get my old white goods picked up from my old place. I have someone renting it out from tomorrow, a very young woman who is 8 months pregnant. Unfortunately she has her own stuff so I was told I need to move my fridge, washing machine etc out. As Im not in Dundee this is a bit tricky.

I asked the agent if they could arrange to move the stuff on my behalf (to dump as its not worth paying any storage). They never got back to me so I've been chasing up.
I found a great site called Freecycle which is very good - http://www.freecycle.org/
It's people giving away things for free/ recycling in order to stop perfectly good stuff getting dumped. I got a couple of takers straight away after posting up :) Bingo, Bongo right?

Prob is, the agent that I deal with is 'off today' and having to explain my situation again and again to others. I found out they moved my fridge into one of their other empty properties and no idea if they did so with everything. So now I feel I am dicking about this poor women about as well as being completely in the dark in what's going on. *taps fingers annoyingly*

I wish I'd seen this website last year though, I hate throwing away good stuff that I know someone would love and I feel better that its gone to someone who will use it. I've joined the Southampton one, this will come in very handy for the next imminent move ;)

	User:	stinkygoat
	Date:	2008-06-27 21:19
	Subject:	Festival time...
	Security:	Public

...no, not poxy Glasters. I'm talking about the awesome Amazonian Ox Dance Festival held annually in Parintins, Brazil, on the last weekend of every June. Two teams of 3,000 dancers each, representing the two rival oxen "Boi Caprichoso" the Capricious Ox and "Boi Garantido" the Safe Ox perform in the "Bumbodromo", a specially built arena in Parintins that can hold nearly 100,000 spectators. The Festival lasts three days and is stunningly spectacular.

When I first found out about the Festival I was of course intrigued and then absolutely blown away when I found out about the sheer scale and spectacle of it. We follow boi Caprichoso, the Capricious Ox (a black ox with a blue star on his forehead; that's him you can see in the graphics above). Last year at the time of Festival we were working hard at finishing off Space Giraffe and after having not really had a holiday for two and a half years at that point we promised ourselves that as a reward for all that hard work then the next year, *this* year, we would go to Festival in Parintins and support the Touro Negro in person.

Well, tonight is the first night of Festival, and we're still here in Wales.

Hard work is not, after all, rewarded, it seems.

Even if we can't be there I'll still be hoping that Caprichoso do well and enjoy a second victory (they won last year too). And I still hope to get there one day, before I get too old or my health gets too fucked, if I ever get to not be a fucking pauper again.

	User:	dr_rik
	Date:	2008-06-27 19:43
	Subject:	I haz such a hard life…
	Security:	Public

Originally published at www.olpin.net. You can comment here or there.

	User:	mort666
	Date:	2008-06-27 12:49
	Subject:	Content Delivery
	Security:	Public

Something I found today which is really handy is you can use the Google App Engine as your own little Content Delivery Network.

Having been playing a little with the Firebug Extension called YSlow that does the Yahoo! tests to see if a web site is optimized, I was looking at the whole CDN thing as I couldn’t get a decent score with it without it.

So looking around I found some Commercial CDN, an open source one or two, then I found a nice blog post about how to use Google App Engine to make your own CDN..

So bish bash boom, 10 mins later the Virus.Org CDN was born and serving off the virusdot.org domain which I already had registered within Google Apps.

	User:	scot_ay
	Date:	2008-06-26 12:45
	Subject:	Thumb twiddling
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	crappy

One month down.

Im out of work since May. There's no point getting another as Con comes off for the School hols in a few weeks. I would rather he spent the summer out on his bike, seeing his friends, going swimming and taking him on day trips than stuck in a childminder's home with a couple of dribbly toddlers.

It's life priorities I guess.
If I were to work, It's not worth the earnings as childminding overheads cost so much (8am to 6pm).

Downsides-
Explaining at future interviews that my childs welfare/happiness is more important than being 100% business focused. Despite it being the truth (for most), that's not want they want to hear.

No money to do anything. I would love to go away but have zip cos Im not working, so we're strictly budgeting on anything that isn't essential household bills.

Im starting to get lonely talking to myself, I don't have a big network and all that I do know are normally working through the day :(

Im cleaning a lot more.

Upsides-
It's stressfree and I get to fart about pleasing myself for a couple of months.

Enjoy the sunshine and get a tan.

Spend quality time with Con.

Im cooking a lot more.


Bah.

	User:	stinkygoat
	Date:	2008-06-25 14:40
	Subject:	blame SA
	Security:	Public

	User:	gilesgoat
	Date:	2008-06-24 18:18
	Subject:
	Security:	Public

.. before to put some stuff in ..

So what happened ? I was making tea .. some time ago and I let it become a bit too cold ..

Yak decides to re-heat it a bit in the microwave, normally I use the microwave as a "safe" to keep stuff out of Vindy's reach, it's the only very secure place she can't nick stuff from.

Recently I love to buy those "1 pounds packages of bisquits" that are really cool.

Now imagine the microwave so packed with stuff, a bit of a bad illumination and such ...

( And this is what you get ... )

The smell .. just incredible .. like the most poisoninig thing you can think of, I shut doors let the microwave well open and windows to make air circulate.

One thing I think is sure, it's well disinfected/bacteria free now ...

	User:	stinkygoat
	Date:	2008-06-23 15:35
	Subject:	Gathering the sheepies
	Security:	Public

Excuse the couple of burps from Giles };-).