May many more projects be completed this year 
Have a good one!
…I think it’s time to fall down now
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Status Update
It’s been a while (again) so it’s time for the all important update of what I’m working on.
Score Monkey has taken a back seat for the time being. I wanted it done before the new year but since I can’t stick with one revision for more than a week I’m putting it asside for the tme being. Maybe a break from it will make me decide on a proper way to work ot all out.
Apart from that there hasn’t been any huge work regarding anything really. I’ve played a heap of Fable 2 and Fallout 3 (which I’ll post a review of at some point, both are excellent games) and a bit of Castle Crashers and Geometry Wars 2. For the past few days I’ve been working on server V2 for home. IPTables is a bitch to configure by hand so I’m using Shorewall now which is turning out better and it’s letting me do some more advanced things. Plus this time around I should only keep what I use on it instead of adding heaps of daemons just because they sound cool.
And I’m enroled in my cours for next year which is all good, no plans to get a job or anything yet. I’m digging all this free time, even if it is a bit boring at some points. Meh, I’ve got plenty to keep busy with
Oh and be sure to check out the new look for BlueIrn, Scott’s put a lot of time into it and its turned out great. We’re also looking for members, mods and other staff so check out the forums for any oppertunities 
Everything is broken
There must be some correlation between heat and technology. Over the past few days it’s been getting warmer each day (35°C right now) and over the past few days something has failed.
The laptop was the first thing to play up, in the middle of coding the driver started clicking about once a second. Now whenever a drive makes weird noises, it’s usually a sign of imminent failure so I tried to shut the machine down and when that failed I pulled the power. Figuring that Windows was probably broken I booted into Ubuntu to recover some files. Thing was, when Ubuntu was running the drive was fins, sounded perfect and everything worked well. This was a little odd to me since a failing drive is a failing drive, no matter what you’re running. So I booted the Vista disc and after 3 runs of chkdsk (command line scan disk) when I had actually put the right parameters in, it fixed a few indexes and was done. I rebooted to a BSOD so I did a repair from the Vista disc and since then everything has been fine (and I also backed up the impotent stuff).
Next day and my 360 decides to play up, it somehow corrupted my gamer profile randomly and refused to login. Weird thing was I was on the 360 most of that day, on and off and I’d used it last a few hours before playing co-op Fable II. Being the ever helpful XBox error message it only gave me an error message along the lines of “Login failed, try checking the connection”. So I ran the diagnostic and everything was fine, so it was obviously a problem on my end. So the next logical step was to recover the gamertag which caused another heap of problems. So I put my gamertag in and details and it took about a minute trying to find the tag begfore throwing up an error (80150003:0 for those who really want to know). So I googled the error for a bit then hit try again and it moved on happily. It took about 15 minuted to download the profile (XBox live has been slow as shit recently) and then everything was back to normal.
Then the problems seemed to break the containment of my room and the forums broke. The sessions table had been damaged and needed repair, which has never happened before. I wasn’t too worried since it’s backed up daily and restoring wouldn’t be a problem but it turns out all I needed to do was click repair table in phpMyAdmin so that was painless.
And 10 minutes ago my chair broke so maybe it’s not just tech…
And to break this post up, here’s an awesome ad
EA just gives me reasons to hate them
I honestly belive that they think even though you paid some hard earned cash for a piece of software, they still own it and therefore have the right to screw over gamers, again and again.
First they cripple games with DRM and now they think they should ban you from their games for, say, disagreeing with them on their forums. Now fair enough, if you’re forums are being hit hard then by all means ban the people responsible, but don’t add threats like this just to keep people from doing it in the first place. This can only end badly for EA.
Edit: Actually I’m curious now. With the way games like Spore work where the game is single player but stilll requires a login for EA’s DRM, does that mean you can be totally locked out of the game for a ban, or does it affect multiplayer only?
Posted in Rant 3 Comments
TODO
Well I found the source of my problem. All the free time I have that’s not spend studing or playing Fable makes me think about all the stuff I want to make…
I though of another thing to add to the list yesterday, the difference being that it’s for me and it’s not totally coded
I want to make an audio switcher so I don’t have to change cabels around every time I want to, say, use the XBox instead of the computer. It’s fine if I just want multiple inputs to go to one output, there are heaps of AV switchers around but they none fit my specific purpose. I want 4 inputs and 3 outputs so any device can go to any speaker set.
So here’s the setup, I have my desktop, laptop and my 360 that all outputting sound in addition to a spare socket I can use if I need to. Then I have 3 sets of speakers. I have the Logitech 5.1 speakers (which I always run in matrix so it only uses stereo), a Panasonic stereo and headphones that I want to share the inputs between. So the idea is to have the box in between everything and routing inputs to outputs. So I could have my laptop connected to the desktop speakers and also have my 360 running through the stereo simultaneously.
So basically I want to make my own custom switcher. And because it would be boring to just use switches I’m going to use this as an excuse to learn a bot about PIC microcontrollers. They’re small and cheap but they sacrifice some ease of use as they can only run simple programs and are primarily programmed in assembely. I already know some assembly (from GMod CPU) but but it’ll be a learning experiance.
Oh and I also want it to drive a small LCD (2 lines of 16 characters each) to display what it connected to what
I’ll post photos across the build and upload the schematics and code if/once I finish it.
So, taking Scott’s idea, here’s a list of all the work in progress
- ScoreMonkey Only has the framework for getting data done, a few additional classes are finished but still has a bit to go. I want this finished by the end of this year at the latest.
- phpRater A full rewrite and release.
- Static merge with BlueIrn Still need to work out the minor points but the general idea is there.
- This magic audio box not even up to writing anything down yet, but it should be inexpensive and move along quickly right up to the coding.
- Cleaning… everything My room is a mess and my computers are a mess, they need a clean and a format respectively.
- Ravngr.com update I’ll do a better job of the theme, rather than something do in less than a few hours
- Various other web projects and apps at varying stages of development, don’t expect to see much except to occasional Java app maybe.
- C++ Going to keep on learning it
- GMod map and other stuff A distraction, but one that my provide good results.
Still have to wait until Friday for the last exam (I’m actually going to studying for) before I’ll actually start anything. And Fallout 3 comes out tomorrow ! (For Australia, I know the US already has it) That’ll set everything back
6000
Just dugg my 6000th thing in digg
http://digg.com/comedy/Meat_is_Murder_3
And here’s some more WIP shots
And a camera I made in GMod with the CPU (assembly sucks…)
It gets a little glitchey when it runs too fast but otherwise it’s OK.
Posted in News 4 Comments
Back at it… again
I got bored and went back to mapping today.
I messed around with small a indoor and an outdoor map. There’s so much I don’t remember about doing outdoor envyroments…
When holidays come atound I want to kick out a construct map for Garry’s mod. Nothing special, just something that has all the things I think other maps are missing.
So yet another distraction in the making!
Posted in News 3 Comments
Bumping the blog
Been a little while so an update is in order. There hasn’t been much progress on anything but Uni stuff really. Got about 3 assinments due next week which are occupying my time and exams are coming up after that so it may be a while before anything is done on any project. On the bright side my exams finish on November 6th and I’ll have three months to catch up on everything… or get a job (still havn’t decided on that one yet).
To make things better I’m adding a fewother things into the mix. Static (may) be moving onto BlueIrn to kind of give it a kick start and bost the use of the forums. Plus Scott and I try to get eachothers feedback on any new designs or development so keeping it all in one place kind of makes sense. Ravngr will stay around but only as my blog and possibly a few apps I make. phpRater may also be looking at a face lift and actually being packaged up into a proper mod.
So in short nothing soon, but stuff is in the works
Posted in News Leave a comment
Don’t free things before you’re finished with them
Yet more adventures in PHP…
I’m working on the score monkey framework mentioned in the last post. All the base classes (archers, shoot, rounds, etc…) all exists and now I’m working on the façade, the part that does all the work. I was getting a really weird error where mysql_fetch_array would error out mid way through a loop.
Put simply it works like this:
- Run some query X
- Pass X into mysql_fetch_array in a while loop so it goes through each row returned by the query
- Do whatever you need to with the data inside the while loop
Except tonight it didn’t quite go like that. It would get 2 rows, process the first and then error on the second giving an error similar to if the query hadn’t worked originally (because of an SQL error or 0 rows returned). So I had something that seemed impossible, the query was breaking mid loop, even though the query resource was unedited.
It took me ages to figure out what the problem was.
In the MySQL class I made to do all the database functions I was being memory friendly by running @mysql_free_result($result) each time a query was run. I though this would free up memory a bit, just in case and huge amounts of data were received in a query. Problem was that I developed two functions in the façade, get Archer and getShoot. Now as each shoot should have an owner getShoot was calling getArcher whenever a new shoot was loaded into memory. Each time getArcher is called it checks for an existing user and if it’s not fount it is loaded using the query function of the SQL class, wiping out the rows needed for getShoot in the process.
So now I had:
- Run query to get all shoots
- Loop through each row, creating new objects
- Load the archer object as the owner of a shoot by querying the database if the archer has not been loaded before
- Attempt to load next row when the resource has been deleted
- Error!
And this took me an hour to figure out, so remeber kids, memory managment is not always good…
Posted in Development 1 Comment