Monthly Archives: September 2011

My baby just cares for me

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Whenever we went to my Grandad’s house as children my Sister would always insist that we spent some time watching one of the many videos of recorded music performances my Grandad had. My Grandad loved watching these tapes too and so never really argued. In fact, if we weren’t there he would probably have been watching them anyway, he was always arguing with my Nan when she asked him to turn “the bloody row down” – I guess I got my love of listening to music 24/7 from him. There are lots of songs I remember from these tapes, my Sister’s favourite was Rick Astley… that’s right, I was repeatedly Rick Rolled by my own flesh and blood!?

Years after the last time I saw these tapes, after my Grandad has passed away, we were all talking and I was trying to get everyone to remember one of my favourite songs from the tapes. All I had was a badly hummed tune and a description of the music video: the one with the white plasticine cat walking down the stairs. I was met with blank stares. Then a few months ago, this came on the music channels.

Woo woo woo… you know it!

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One of the things I’ve been working on recently is an in app editor for the OGRE based 3D GUI that forms the front end of one of our main products. One of the features that I added was the ability to switch between scenes with the click of a button. I was able to get this working on Windows with little difficulty, but on Linux I constantly got the same assert.

ogre/RenderSystems/GL/src/OgreGLSupport.cpp:56: virtual void Ogre::GLSupport::initialiseExtensions(): Assertion `pcVer && "Problems getting GL version string using glGetString"' failed.

I have revisited this problem several times in recent months and each time my investigation faltered at the same point. The first time a scene was loaded, everything was fine, the second time a scene was loaded OGRE failed to initialize the OpenGL Context. Something wasn’t being released correctly when the first scene was shutdown. I tried everything. With OGRE it should really be as simple as calling shutdown() on the root node and then deleting the root node using OGRE_DELETE, but it just wouldn’t work.

This past Friday I finally got it working though. The following code snippet is from the second time that OGRE tried to initialize the OpenGL render system. The dimensions of the target render window are wrong. For whatever reason, Qt was not able to finish initializing the container widget before I was grabbing the X11 info and passing this onto the OGRE initialization code. A simple decouple using a 1ms timer sorted the issue.

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*** Starting GLX Subsystem ***
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GLRenderSystem::_createRenderWindow "SomeWidget", 1059x0 windowed  miscParams: parentWindowHandle=135727904:0:56624998
GLXWindow::create used FBConfigID = 117

I’m not going to lie, I fist bumped like The Long Island Iced Z when I saw that model reload! :D

Dear Tim…

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I like the way Apple work. I like their vertically integrated approach and dedication to pushing the boundaries of technology. Life inside Steve’s walled garden is pretty epic, but that doesn’t mean to say there aren’t things I would change. After the release of Lion, the standing down of Uncle Steve and with iOS 5 imminent, now seems like a good time to list my annoyances and suggestions.

First off, let me say that customised notification sounds for texts/emails/etc on iOS is a super massive win, the same for unified notifications. If these weren’t features in iOS 5 then they would be near the very top of my list.

1. When you are sending a text message, right after you have hit send, the name of the recipient is replaced with “Sending…”. This lasts for all of two seconds, but feels like an eternity when you think you may have sent that text to the wrong person. The level of terror is heightened by the fact that there is no option to cancel the text.

2. Sure, I now have the option to merge folders, but Finder still feels awkward to use as none of the views feel quite right. I don’t like the way that files moves around the mouse pointer when you are dragging them either.

3. When I connect my iPhone to my MBP, it irks me that I have to launch iTunes in order to sync my contacts, calendar, photos, etc. Bring back iSync!

4. I would like to be able to combine my FaceTime account on my phone with the one on my Mac, so that both “ring” and I can answer either.

5. I know that you can get other browsers for iOS, but what’s the point if the first time I click on a link it immediately opens Safari? Allow me to choose the default browser the same way I would on my Mac.

6. An air like MBP. Lose the optical drive, add support for the external SuperDrive (maybe a new ThunderBolt version?). Replace the HDD with a phat SSD.

7. A pony. I’d quite like a pony.

Go hard or go home

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Oh man. What a couple of weeks. Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Last weekend my bro SMX came to stay (sup’ negro!). I learned several things:
1. He mumbles in his sleep.
2. Split screen CoD is harder than it looks.
3. I should have a pass code on my iPhone.
4. The number of hot girls walking past my window increased when he was in my room*.

As much as I missed SMX when he went back, at least he was available online. My other bro Wayne is about to drop off the map for an entire month. That’s like 30 sleeps. I can only imagine how many thousands of trophies he will be uploading to PSN when he gets back online. 79 days until Cornwall, 115 days until Christmas, 131 days until Florida. Bring on the winter! I know it’s kinda sad, but every time I open my wardrobe I look at my hoodies and think it won’t be long until I can wear them again. Yep, it’s sad, but true.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for various reasons, and yeah, it got me down a bit, but even if I’m not smiling, it doesn’t mean I’m not happy. If I’m struggling to understand something then I might not be smiling, but I’m learning. I live for the thrill of the chase, it’s what I spend all day doing! As I’ve said before, when things get hard you can either give up or go harder and faster. When the music stops playing in my head, then it’s time to worry, but as long as I’m cruising through life to the accompaniment of my own soundtrack then everything is fine. Sometimes the most difficult things can be the most exciting, even if they terrify the shit outta me. Not planes though, they aren’t exciting, just scary. And moomins, they’re some scary shit too!

Haha! Later gators!

* I genuinely thought you were asking the name of the cat and not the girl.