Gratuitous plug

Gratuitous plug
This blog is partly written from the comfort of a Håg chair supplied by Boyce - contact them for everything from the smallest supply contract of a chair or two to a complete office building refurbishment

No animals were harmed in the making of this advertisement (well, maybe one Nordic Elk, whose hide covers the aforementioned Håg chair, but they don't do that covering any more, much to the relief of the Nordic Elk. Chair depicted below does not reflect my actual chair, since the blue fabric is nowhere near as cool as my black Nordic Elk hide, which was probably cooler when attached to the Nordic Elk, although not, I fear, quite as black as it now is. Batteries not included.

Late nights, early mornings

Late nights, early mornings
Another night spent up at the computer until the wee small hours (in this case, 12:48am) working on my new projects. This time, I've been working on the graphics component of my possible new demo. I think the title screen is 99% done now, and short of drawing a little sprite for another part, the rest of the graphics will be generated from the code, which is the one part I've not started yet.....

Once a Codemonkey....

Once a Codemonkey....
....always a Codemonkey. Yep, I've been wielding fingers in a threatening manner towards my keyboard again, and been working on a few little toys (and as usual, they're not finished yet, so no you can't download them

First up is a tool to convert Atari ST Quartet tunes to Protracker MOD files. Bit of a specialist tool for Atari freaks really, but useful nonetheless, and I know a couple of people looking for just such a tool.

Second is a little C# demo in the style of an old Atari demo (have we spotted a recurring theme yet?) - I found a great MP3 remake of a classic Atari chiptune so I'm wrapping a demo around it for fun and learning. Was up late last night working out MP3 replay code, so progress isn't too advanced yet, but you never know, I might actually finish something one of these days.

[Listening to: X-formZ - Ooh Crikey - There are many sheep in Outer Mongolia]

Mac attack

Mac Attack
Been attacking the Mac on my desk at work in order to convince it "yes, you really do want to run a Windows app". So far installed XCode, Fink, Mono and Gnome, and I'm in the process of doing a fink update-all on it (kinda like Gentoo's emerge -u all, ie, 5 hours or more of downloading and compiling!). Hopefully this should be enough to get the new Managed.Windows.Forms stuff in Mono working.

[Listening to: Lagerfeldt - R-Type (Doppelganger Summer Remix) ]

Aaargh users!

Aaargh users!
Spent weeks writing a reporting tool that allows custom report filters for a user at work. The user has been down to see the development progress a few times, watching the app running nicely on my Windows XP machine. Today I finished the app and went upstairs, floppy disk in hand, to install it. The user then decides to say "Oh sorry, didn't I say I've got a Mac?"

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

[Listening to: X-formZ - There are many sheep in Outer Mongolia]

Monotastic!

Monotastic!
Installed the latest build of Mono (and libgdiplus) on my laptop today, and successfully managed to run a .Net application that uses System.Windows.Forms that was compiled on Windows, with no recompiling required. Pretty impressive work from the Mono development guys!

Oddly enough though, the windows didn't have a frame around it to host the Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons, but I think this could be because the original had the window options set to be a floating toolbar style window. I'll change it to be a default window type alter and see if that helps.

This is the direction that Linux desktop apps should be taking - true cross platform tools that don't even need recompiling! Java can kiss my butt!

Falcon flies again!

Falcon flies again!
Managed to get the hard disk working on my Atari Falcon at last! Found lots of handy little utlities, some games, music programs and other bits. Gonna take me a while to sort through it all, but my next mission is to get some sort of connectivity going between the Falcon and my PC so I can download stuff on to it a lot easier. Thanks as always to Unseen Menace from the Atari Forum for his help and support!

Falcon from the ashes

Falcon from the ashes
Gonna have a go at resurrecting my Atari Falcon tomorrow (hopefully). I think its just a matter of putting in a floppy drive, and installing some hard disk drivers.

[Listening to: RedRibbon & Med - Red Line]

Linux things I got working today

Linux things I got working today
Managed to get a few mnore things working on my laptop :-

• Kernel 2.6.11.6 (aka 2.6.11-gentoo-r5)


• Toshiba ACPI extras


• Gensplash (bootsplash + framebuffer consoles)


• Synaptics cpad driver (has an annoying bug with loading images to the cpad though - wrong aspect ratio)


• Nice SVG icon theme

Laptop rebirth

Laptop rebirth
My laptop has had a bit of a revival of late, after I finally bit the bullet and paid out for a new battery (£128.08 + VAT + Shipping). Seems fine, and bizarrely, the intermittent graphics card fault I had in the past seems to occur less frequently.

Got Gentoo Linux on the machine (again), and have been setting up the bits and pieces I want/need, including stuff for my iPod. To this end, I've created a couple of icons for use with the GNOME Disk Mounter panel applet, to show a mounted and unmounted ipod


Mounted


Unmounted