Long weekend, sun, wine and work...so not much sun really.

We had glorious weather all week while at work, and then the weekend comes and boom its a bit gloomy, but still quite a nice early summers day..

Sadly though I must continue with work, Project Foundations is now in full flow I have a few students to help me with proof reading and testing and preparing the projects for readers, the cartoons from a very talented illustrator are feeding in, and I have to now keep up with them as well as focus on my deadline.


Today though I am doing Colecovision stuff, as I must clear it out. I finished all the code last week when we had a holiday, but a few annoying bugs that only show in hardware are preventing delivery...the fact its only in hardware suggests an un-initialized value somewhere...something I also had yesterday in a book project, but this is much harder to track down on primitive hardware with no debugger...but I am determined to get it out the way and delivered to my very patient client.

I also seem to have lost my OdroidC2, it went back to Korea to get replaced or repaired due to a fault HDMI connection but it never arrived...I had to buy a new one (no freebies) maybe if/when the other gets there they will refund me...shame as its one of my faster units with no fan I really want to use it as a games console on my TV downstairs...that project will have to wait.


Book content is growing, the 2D stuff is almost all complete now, the projects are a little untidy, but thats what the students are helping me with, so I can focus on getting them working and they can clean them up and provide comments and review the difficulty.

Also I will be starting workshops at uni on programming the Raspberry Pi/Nano Pi, which will be my test bed for all the content....this should push me along and also give me a test bed for deciding if the concepts work well enough..Oh and it resolves some nagging doubts I have with 1st year coding students not understanding the basics well enough, so I'll be covering all that in the classes.

Better get on, going over to Maria and Davids for dinner later, there may be wine.....I might not get much done after ;)



Ahthankyew

freebies, if only I'd known

I am getting some free boards from a particular maker,I won't say who. They contacted me to check on delivery addresses which started a chat where I revealed why I was buying so many little boards.

They were very pleased that I was going to mention their boards in the book, and I am though only as an alternate option, and offered to cancel my payment and send me some free boards.

I have to say that is incredibly nice, I probably could have wangled a few other free boards from other makers too, but I don't want to be accused of any kind of favouritism. Most of the boards I've bought so far are perfectly suitable target system, but nearly all,  have some issue when it comes to being used a general computers. this makers units also have a few flaws but I do think they have the best value for money, its a shame they don't have the user base Raspberry has...which is mind-numbingly  massive

Anyway...quite pleased, but I think in future I won't mention my book in any correspondence with makers, I like the idea of the free boards, very much, but don't want to be compromised in my neutrality.

free boards though.....hmmm


Ahthankyew

Dating eh!

Well that was a bit pointless.....went on date at the weekend, very nice lady, ticked all the right boxes, funny, smart, independent...not to mention fit!

sadly not interested in me....starting to be a habit!


I'll climb back under my rock for another year and lick my wounds.

Ahthankyew

ouch......but I was just sitting!! Time to ring in some changes.

Well sitting awkwardly trying to play guitar in a cool way, and I pulled a muscle in my  back....wtf AGE!!!

I hate these little side-effects of getting old, hurting myself sat on the couch...its not fair.

And I need to get a new bed,I cobbled together a repair on my current bed a few years ago when the centre bar broke (I wish I could boast it was due to high jinx but no), but the repair has become unstable when I moved things around to build the wardrobes. It won't last much longer.

After a lot of hunting around at quite absurd prices... I  think I have found a nice semi affordable box divan that will take a TV in the base, which will make the bedroom a lot more tidy. Will wait for the May Bonus to pay for that though, since I have no plans (or partner) to go on holiday. I might as well splash out on a few things I need at home, and also do a bit of decorating.

This year marks 6 years in this house and I've done no decorating at all since I moved in.. So I plan to paint the walls, hang a a few pics, maybe get a new couch, if I can find a decent priced L-shaped couch and of course a new bed for my bedroom. The new wardrobes have de-cluttered the room quite a bit, so might as well get rid of the big old Samsung on top of the chest of drawers and continue to de-clutter.

Also giving some serious thought to getting a new kitchen setup..the house is about 12 years old and this has been here all that time, I think its time for a change, though that will take a bit of help from the bank to achieve. Will see, lets get the bed and decorating done 1st...Maybe the Kitchen is a next year job.



Ahthankyew

'kin hell 2006, this is crazy shit

I was genuinely upset to hear of Victoria Wood's death yesterday, from Cancer...damn. I know I'm not alone in acknowledging this women as a massive genius who made the concept of women comedians as a norm rather than an exception possible...RIP

Today we heard about Prince.....wow...Bowie and Prince, music is just being gutted.

What a shit year this is for celebrities dying, so many. so so many

Ahthankyew

Mega busy

The last weeks before panels have proven to be busy, this seems to be a pattern, with students waiting till the last minute before updating their playlists which we then try to feedback on in a near impossible backlog. But we made it, just.

This week I've done two long sessions of panels, and now I have a bit of a quieter day, jsut a few meetings to do. I'll make a start on prepping for the next block on Friday when everyone is off doing their staff trip. I never go on them, I simply hate the concept of enforced and arranged fun. Besides It entailes a very late return to Breda by why time poor Harvey will have had his legs crossed for far more than the 8 hours he's used to

Been working on the book projects when I can, so the writing part has slowed a little as I need to write about the project. Writing deliberatly bad but working code has been quite challenging for me, I thought all my code was bad, but when I actually make an effort its quite terrible. But it does take some effort, so I don't think my own coding is as bad as I feel it is sometimes

Going to try to devote this weekend to finishing the coleco game, its been hard to find the time and really kill off the last few issues with it. But gotta clear it off the table soon or it will get lost in the deadline chase for the book.

Not much else going on in the world....work, play guitar, code, write...drink....drink again....sleep

life is stable... I say that as tomorrow is the 6 year anniversary of my surgery. I have missed it the last couple of years, but somehow this year it seems to have been marked in big red ink in the calendar.

Will maybe raise a glass or 3 to my surgeon's skill. When I've finished some code!


Ahthankyew

on the mend

Aside from the A/B trots, (I assume they are penicillin based which gives me the runs) I'm feeling a lot better, and so much quicker than my usual issues when I get chest infections.

I went back to work yesterday but it totally knackered me, so had a pretty early night and am almost back to normal,

Managed to tidy the office up a bit too, so can sit and go through student stuff in a much more logical manner and get back on top of things.

Also in the psot got a few toys today, a replacement LCD screen for the one I broke...slipped in with no customs charges which is nice, and anotehr SBC, a Roseapple Pi...yeah I know..crazy name... But it works quite nicely and is fast.. something nice to play with giving me another PowerVR GPU to get working.

thats for later though, for now, gotta make up the slakc on student feedback from doing Battleships then getting ill.

Spent a bit of time this weekend too, getting back up to speed on the Colecovision for the final push on that project...work got in the way so need to get back to it and really make some efforts to deliver it. My client is the most patient I've ever had but I don't want to disappoint him forever.


Ahthankyew

An boom, here it comes

Got the man flu....maybe the general crappiness running up to this week was it prepping itself for an assault on my system..

I am prepared this time, I'm very well stocked up with full strength UK cold meds....bring it on.

(but maybe I'll just a have a little lie down 1st)


Ahthankyew

ok well yeah, not nice.

really wasn't well today, was seeing double as I was working at my screen and have been light headed and woozy all day, and the coughing...grrrr
Even had to cancel band practice, and I never cancel band practice, but I felt I was not safe to drive.

Strange, its not a flu/cold, but similar symptoms, hopefully will feed batter tomorrow, and get back to work.


Ahthankyew

ugghhh what is this

So I have a chest infection, a fever, and am producing mucus than I can swallow in real time...but..I don't have a cold..

never had this before, don't like it, feeling shitty but then again not as shitty as I feel with the mega colds.....

But the choaking mucus is horrible, can't sleep with waking up choaking and swallowing....need to find some meds.

Ahthankyew

But I didn't get a cold!!

Incredibly I have a chest infection, been coughing and spluttering and bit of a temp...I say incredible, because I never got a cold...usually these things plague me for months, but always just after a heavy cold!


Bahh....hopefully this is something less crippling than the post cold ones of last year....so far just a bit wheezy and chesty cough...




Ahthankyew

The Collection is comple.......

Well almost,  picked up a Banana Pi M3 on ebay for half price, and a RoseApple Pi (very fast but tends to run hot) as a swap for a Raspberry Pi...and a few Nano Pi quad cores are on there way, and last but not least an Orange Pi PC.
 My 64bit Odroid C2 needs to go back, it has a faulty HDMI but not a big issue.


That's enough now I think, its getting a bit silly, and it'll be damn embarrassing if I can't get the projects to work on anything other than a Raspberry Pi.

But I basically have the base line and high spec models all of the major clones, so that should be enough to get everyone and anyone who reads the book to get their SBC's up and running.

Also happy to see that my lovely accountant, has managed to restore my self employed status, meaning I can claim all these costs back against tax :D they are pocket money purchases though really, its just that I've done a few this month, but $9 -$20 a time is hardly going to break the bank.

Income from the book, small though it is,  will mean I probably will have to pay something this year to the tax man. But hey how, the benefits outweigh the costs.

The projects main framework is now up and running, though I was very surprised to find I can handle around 3000 software rendered sprites on a Pi3...and the Pi2 managed the same, even a model B managed a few thousand... I was hoping (oddly) for much worst performance so that when I demonstrate the correct way to handle sprites the impact with be much more marked.

But not to worry, I'm sure I'll find a good way to screw it up :D

1st games are starting to take shape now though, so will get them all up and running and tidy ready to paste in some source to expand them. Each project will have a base line set up, with the reader expected to type in code to make it all function...I don't want them downloading working games, its important they enter code and get used to it, breaking an important psychological barrier when it comes to learning to code...actually developing the confidence to type it in is a major hurdle for beginners.




Ahthankyew

Coding highs and lows and fuel fraud

I am struggling so much with a work school project,  I've re-written it twice now but still it does not work...I really can't see the fault, its driving me crazy, and stress is never good for coding.

It has me doubting if I can even code any more.

To calm down I did a bit of work on my book projects this lunchtime...wrote more code in 40-50 minutes than I'd been able do do in  3 working days on the work job...crazy... The project code is more complex and needs more stuff I don't quite understand than the work project...but its the simple work project that has me in knots...very odd...

Anyway, that 40 mins, the code flowed, and I cracked several small issues I was having getting my display fast enough to work, it all works fine now and I can code the rest of the projects with ease. I went back to the work project after luch.......nada....

I'll have to sleep on the work project for a bit.


And today I went to get petrol for the car, and for some reason the payment machine at the unmanned station refused to accept my card, giving me a big red X and telling me to take my card back.

I drove away very annoyed and went to a manned station..

But when I was doing a check on my card online to work out how much to pay this month, there was a 50odd euro charge at that petrol station. It did take my bloody card, but the person who came to the machine after me must have though christmas had come and filled his tank.

grrrr.. Sent a message to the card company to notify them of a possible fraud...not sure I'll get a refund but apparently it has happened in the past...fingers crossed.






Ahthankyew

Maddog not quite so mad

As much as I really like my Maddog jumbo which I bought from Pat at Maddog guitars in December during my UK trip, its given me a lot of trouble.

Pat likes his guitars set up with the lowest possible action imaginable and yes that is indeed nice,but guitars, especially acoustics are living things and breath and swell in different air conditions, so the problem was that as it bent and flexed the low action ended up being a low buzzing or worse an outright choke. Its become almost unplayable above fret 10.

I'd already tweaked the truss to try to give it a bit of a relief, (a slight bend) but it wasn't having much effect, so time to put some nice bridge saddle spacers I had in one guitars welcome pack to good use.

I only had two, and they were very thin but given how low the Maddog is, I put both in, to avoid having to take it apart again if one wasn't enough.

I must say, that 1mm or so raising of the bridge has worked a treat, still quite a low action with 10's on it, (I'm going to try heavier strings, but will use these for now) making it easy and comfortable to play. The slight rise in action is barely noticeable but now I can play notes around fret 12 and up without any more fear of chokes and buzzes.. yeahh for saddle spacers,

I'll need to see if I can find more, just in case.

Ahthankyew

double spacing....not the saviour it seems

Hmmmm so writing has some rules, which the publisher sent me, They don't want me to format the text or add the diagrams in the text, though it does make it easier for me to read...however I don't think that's a big  issue, what I am worried about is my 140 pages in 1.5 spacing with nice 11pt fonts has to be converted to Times Roman 2.0 spacing in 12pt fonts...now its 210 pages

ermmm I don't think I'm going to fit it all in, I'm only 5 chapters in and have a lot more text, code and diagrams to add...

Oh well I'll just keep going and let the editors worry about it :d


Ahthankyew

Now we're cooking with gas

Had the most odd issue, with the Pi code, try as I might I could not get the bugger to display any texture which was created my malloc, even though I assume it was all 0 and therefore transparent, when I moved data into it, it should have become visible. Finally I discovered that if I used memset to put data in there the textures became visible....then later became visible anyway :(

So I was probably doing a combination of little things wrong until I hit the right things

But no matter, I now have a screen sized texture, the size of which I can control, stretched over a full screen image.. :D

I can make a start proper now on the projects and get things moving on the 1st 3 projects which need this rather crappy code.

time for bed

Ahthankyew

reworking the office

Since I'm probably going to be spending a fair amount of time in the office, writing my book (does not sound at all pretentious when I say that now)  I had a bit of a rearrangement of my work station. I like having 3 monitors, it might seem silly considering I have a massive 30 inch baby there in the middle, but when debugging code, having source on 1 screen, debug panels/general mail on another and running projects on the 3rd becomes a nice way to work

The need to hook up my Pi's to a screen during development meant I had to turn over the left screen to it, and switch back and forward on the source button as I needed to. I found this to be a bit of a pain...
So...behold, the old Bedroom TV which was replaced by the old living room TV when I upgraded, which is also an HDMI monitor, has been mounted on the wall exclusively for the various forms of Pi

The Pi's and clones themselves now connect up to an HDMI 5 way switch I not longer use so, I can keep 5 of them hooked up and swap them around as needed.. I'm also getting an old switch unit so I can keep them all networked up and that way all I have to do to try a new target is change a config label.

Though still need to plug in a use so they can use the keyboard/mouse/wifi...I only need to do that when I'm actually playing games on them, and there are ways to convince them to use the PC's keyboard and mouse, which I will look into.

:D

Geekdom rules.

Ahthankyew

:D Well that put a smile on a bad day

Not having a happy day at work at all, no need to explain why, just some differences of opinions that create tension. I was all ready to storm off home to buy a cat to kick, when I got a mail from the publisher.

The book is go!!!!

I repeat the Book Is Go, its been officially approved, contracts can now be signed and I have to get 20 pages a week done so it can be finished in Sept.on and write 10 demo games on a Raspberry Pi :D

woooooo

Its not going to make me rich or famous but I am going to enjoy this a lot.



Ahthankyew

Being bad is fun

Well at least it is when its to do with coding.
I have been trying to get OpenGLES2.0 to do something its not really designed to do, use RAM based double buffers as a display system. There's no real way to do it, as OGLES2  does not let you do CPU manipulation of a texture once it has been set up.

But its an important  "bad design" decision in my book, which will let them do something that works on almost any machine, yet is clearly very CPU intensive and not using the GPU at all well. (sorry mum this is tech talk)

But I managed to make it work by constantly killing and remaking textures every frame to allow a new buffer to be set up and displayed.. It is genuinely an awful system, but..and this is the point it work, perfectly well, you can display any number of graphics you want with little or no effort, since now you can copy stuff into the display buffer and it will magically appear on screen.

But the point its its wasting the power of the GPU and totally consuming the CPU, but it does make code based manipulating of objects very simple, very clear and very very easy to understand...which is the point. The reader can now easily get the idea that putting things on screen is simple, that will let them focus on doing that rather than trying to make sense of the way OGLES2 needs to be set up to do it properly.

Once I've done a few games with this system and we explain the disconnect between display systems and logic,  I will then demonstrate how truly awful it is and talk them through a way to alter the display system to something much more OGLES2 based with a massive boost in performance...Sometimes the only way to let people see that a bad decision that works, is still a bad decision is to let them do it, and expose the limitations.

It was actually very frustrating working out some way to do a double ram buffer, in the end the constant thrashing of killing and adding tetxures is even worse than I imagined it would be...every time you do that routine, a kitten dies!!! Lots of kittens are going to die now.

bwahahahah

Ahthankyew

I sense a return of the flatulence

I suspect I'll be farting with fear for quite a while now...The book has taken another mega step forward to being approved....feedback from reviewers of my proposal has been positive and the editor likes it....though the title needs a bit more work still/

I am gobsmacked that in the space of 3 months an idea I had to keep me busy has snowballed into something so big and fun.

The publishing committee are going to discuss it this month, rather than next, so I'll find out in just over a week if this is definite.

In the meantime, I'm having an absolute blast filling in my chapter headings, writing little bits of mindless ramblings to be edited into something more formal later. And even more fun, prepping my projects to lay out the foundations.

Its going to be 6 months or so of hell, writing and coding, but I can't wait!

And evern better news the Colecovision project is almost done, I got some memory together by procedurually generating some graphics and now I just need a nice cosy weekend to myself to wrap it up...

Can't really get better than that.



Ahthankyew