Andrew Wilkinson

I've been a full on contact lense user for the past week now, and it's definitely getting easier as time goes on. I can now put them in first time and wearing them for extended periods of time is not too uncomfortable, however the feeling of having something in my eye does not go away however many hours I wear them for.

The longest I have managed is 8 hours wear on Saturday, and 6 hours today. Unfortunately on both occasions my left eye has given me considerable discomfort starting a few hours after I took the lens out. My left eye is the bad one and I have a special lens which is has a rigid center with a soft outer part. The optician did say that this lens is prone to rubbing at the join, so I can only hope my eyes get used to it and it doesn't cause any further problems.

The improvement in my vision with wearing the lenses is so great that it really shows how bad my left eye is even with glasses, and I really want to wear them for ~14 hours a day. Hopefully my optician will have some suggestions in my checkup next week.

In other news, the DLR is really cool. For those who don't know it's a light railway system serving the East side of London. Not only is it overground so you get excellent views of Canary Wharf, the O2 and London City airport but the trains are computer controlled so they have big windows at the front instead of a driver's cab.

It takes a little while to get used to, but once you realise that it is going to stop at the station and you're not going to die it is quite fun, and an excellent piece of technology. If you have the option, stay on to Bank because the track dives into a tunnel and changes from the worlds worst rollercoster into a twisting, turning, ghost-train-like experience!

I used it because I'd just arrived at the aforementioned London City airport so Sunday combined my plane geekery with my train geekery and my computer geekery! I needed to have a bit of a lie down when I got home...

Today Ellen was at a conference run by EBSCO, an organisation that provides journal services to libraries. In the conference goody bag she was given a key ring, which consists of Tux the penguin with EBSCO printed on his chest. If you don't believe that it is Tux compare the photo below (click for a larger image) to the drawings here.



The question is "why?". Surely they can come up with a better keyring than the Linux mascot? Their website makes no mention of Linux or Tux, so it truely is baffling why they would do this.

In order to get my photos from the Editors gig I went to in Camden last night onto Last.fm I had to sign up for a Flickr account. I've been annoyed at my own home grown gallery script for a while, so I thought why not see if Flickr is usable to store all my photos.

My photo album program, KPhotoAlbum, has a Flickr export plugin but I discovered that it mangled the tags. If you tag a photo with a single multi-word tag in KPhotoAlbum it appears as multiple single word tags on Flickr. A quick download of the svn, create a small 10 line patch, test it, place it on KDE's bug tracker and less than five minutes later it gets applied to their subversion repository. Open source software at it's best :-)

In other, Last.fm related news, I'm through to the second round of jobs interviews there. Keep your fingers crossed.

( For MythTV users... )

In my last post I mentioned the rumours of a Wii homebrew development kit, unfortunately GDC came and went without a mention of it - in fact there was barely a mention of anything new for Wii. This is probably due to Nintendo requesting the Japanese government sell their stake in the company to increase the number of individual shareholders. They were prevented from disclosing new information at GDC in case it affected the share price. I haven't been able to find out when this gag order ends, so I've no idea when we will hear more.

Over the past few days, while gazing out of the window and avoiding the hideously large pile of thesis related work that remains, I've been trying to fill the void of information in the only way I know how - by making stuff up. Below is what I'd ideally like Nintendo to do, to really send interest in their console through the roof.

( Click for more made up Wii ramblings... )

At 6:30pm this evening the creator of Zelda and Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto will give his keynote address to the Game Developer Conference on his vision for the future of computer games. As part of the talk he will no doubt be introducing a range of new applications for the DS and Wii.

There are rumours that Nintendo intends to support indie game developement, and I'm hoping that Miyamoto will announce something along the lines Microsoft's XNA for the XBox360, and not just better support for flash games in the Wii's browser. Only a few hours to wait until I find out if I get my wish I suppose.

Last night I was messing around with my computer's Freeview card and I discovered that I live close enough to Crystal Palace to lock on to the BBC's High-Definition multiplex where they're testing the broadcast of BBC HD over the airwaves, but that the error rate is too high to get a picture from it.

Dang.

It's almost Christmas, so why not make your KDE desktop all snowy?

The first step is to emerge/apt-get/yum (delete as appropriate) xsnow.

Next up you'll want to make it run when you log into your machine. Create a file in /home/%u/.kde/Autostart (where %u is your username) called xsnow-run. Add the following code to this file:

#!/bin/bash

xsnow

You can add parameters to control how xsnow runs, personally I prefer -notrees. Make the file executable by typing chmod u+x /home/%u/.kde/Autostart/xsnow-run. If, when you run xsnow, nothing appears go to the KDE control centre, then Desktop, then Behaviour and make sure 'Allow programs in desktop window' is selected.

If your computer spends some time at the login screen (and you use KDM) you might want to make that Christmassy too. In the directory /usr/kde/3.5/share/config/kdm edit the file kdmrc and add the line 'SetVRoot=true' under 'UseBackground=true'.
Next add the following lines to the file Xsetup:

xsnow &
echo $! > /var/run/xsnow.pid

Again, add any parameters to xsnow that you want. Finally, add the following lines to the file Xstartup:

if [ -f /var/run/xsnow.pid]; then
   kill `cat /var/run/xsnow.pid`
   rm -f /var/run/xsnow.pid
fi

Be careful though, editing your login manager's file could break your computer!

Hurrah! Now your computer is very Christmassy! Why not top it off with a festive wallpaper?

Warning: Geekiness ahead

I wanted to find out what functions are provided by ctypes.h. I typed 'man ctypes.h', scrolled down a bit and found this:

      The following sections are informative.

APPLICATION USAGE
       None.

RATIONALE
       None.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS
       None.

No Mister Man Page writer, that's not very informative!

When I got my GP2x (a handheld Linux gaming device for those not in the know) way back last November I was very excited about the possibilities of developing for a platform where you didn't need $30million to make a decent game. Unfortunately this enthusiasm soon disappeared when it became apparent that developing for it was a complete bitch.

Fast forward six months and firmware 2.0 has been released. Developed by a different company this firmware makes a huge different to the process of developing for the GP2x, and has renewed my enthusiasm for it. As well as being as USB Mass Storage device it can now appear as a network adapter. This allows you to use the built in webserver to view webpages on it, or to telnet in and run programs using bash. Even better is the fact that you can use Samba to mount a directory from your pc on the GP2x, and run programs from there. No messy having to transfer programs over, you just run them directly. It's a breeze!

This has led to me getting back into my OpenGL implementation which I finally have drawing a flat shaded cube. It only uses one of the two processors that the GP2x has, but one of my next moves will be to use both. Initially the cube was being rendered at 3fps, however compiling it with -msoft-float means it runs at 30fps - not too shabby for a command-line option!

In related news Google have recently started offering open source projects hosting, which comes at the perfect time for me and my new found enthusiasm. You can find my low-level library libgp2x, here and my very much work in progress OpenGL renderer, GL2x, here.

Livejournal is launching a new instant messaging service, using the Jabber protocol. To login simply use [lj username]@livejournal.com and your LJ password. Mutual friends automatically appear in your contact list so you can chat straight away!

The service is/will be (not sure which) federated which means you can talk to anyone using a federated Jabber service, including GTalk.

It's a beta release at the moment, so you get a message remind you of this when you log in but it's an interesting step forward for Livejournal.

If you don't know what Jabber is, and want to know why it's great then go here. If you don't have a Jabber client go here.

My laptop arrived yesterday, it's very shiny. I immediately blasted away Windows XP Home and partitioned the disk. I've got Windows XP Pro on there now, and over the course of the next few days I'll be adding Linux.

Naturally the laptop has wireless internet. Ellen's house (where I'm currently living) has no internet access of it's own, however there are five separate wireless networks that are accessible from her neighbours. Four of them are protected meaning I cannot use them without actively hacking in. The other is wide open...

Poll #757756
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

What is your opinion on using your neighbours wireless internet connection if you have no access of your own and they've left wireless totally unsecured?

The good people at Linode have recently celebrated their third anniversary by giving everyone an extra 25% RAM.

\me hugs my Linode.

Yesterday Google released a new version of Google Earth, including a native Linux version. This is excellent news as I've wanted to play around with it for ages.

Tonight I've added support for Google Earth to IndieGigs.co.uk - when browsing the site there are Google Earth icons around the site which will place icons over venues, showing the up coming gigs. You can see individual venues (Fibbers), all venues in a city (Southampton), or all gigs in a tour (We Are Scientists).

Try viewing the tour and clicking play to run through all the venues. It's just like being on tour with the band... well, almost ;-)

Apparently my KML files make Version 3 of Google Earth crash. If you haven't upgraded do it now or it'll go kaplooey.

I probably should have been working on filling my gig database back up as I haven't done any for ages, but this was more fun :-)

Some guy, while working for the BBC on 6music hooked up a custom Last.fm plug in to the radio station's automatic playout system. A year and a half later and it's collected 57751 tracks that have been played over the radio. You can find 6music's profile here. The fact it has the user name 'sekrit' says to me that the guy may not have had permission to do this...

Despite listening to a lot of music that I first heard on 6music I don't appear on the neighbours page. whoatherepickle does though.

Does Google make finding a map of somewhere too easy? What you need is AsciiMaps.com.

Last month I mentioned that I had been delisted from Google. I made some changes to my site, including adding some redirects in to give every page a single, unique address but things haven't changed much - Google only indexes 4 page on my site. This lack of interest from Google has again hit my advertising revenue. My ad impressions actually went up in April from 3,756 to 4,048 (+7%) but the number of click throughs went down from 15 to 4 (-73%) which meant my income went from $4.43 to just $0.44 (-90%).

To try and help increase my visitors numbers I'm in the middle of giving the site a much needed revamp. The core of the revamp is not visible to the user - I'm switching from a mess of code intermingled with HTML to a proper templating system, in this case Cheetah Templates. This is already showing it's worth as able to implement new features much easier than was previously possible. As part of the redesign I'm also switching to using the Mochikit javascript library to provide some basic Web 2.0 type features. There won't be much of that when the redesign is launched, but I have some ideas which will get implemented. The final new feature will be that Google Maps will be integrated into the site - it's ridiculously easy to do and looks really cool!

I'll post here when I actually launch IndieGigs 2.0 :-)

Yesterday I was moaning that traffic to my site went down quite significantly over the past month. There's no point sitting around waiting for something to happen, it's time for action!

My first thought was to turn IndieGigs.co.uk into a cross between a live music listing site and a pr0n site as clearly pornography is the only way to make money on the internet. I'm not sure any of the girls I know would be happy standing naked next to bands, even if the bands themselves would probably be quite keen. On to plan b then I guess...

The IndieGigs.co.uk on Last.fm Greasemonkey script!

Those of you who don't use Last.fm can probably switch off now, but those you who do can now see all the upcoming gigs for artists right on their Last.fm page!

( Screenshot )

Hopefully I can now plug my site without seeming like too much of spammer...

In the back of mind for a while I've had this idea about building an uber powerful tv/pvr/dvd/media centre solution 'thing'™ One of the nice features about a 'proper' DVD player or digibox is that it will automatically switch your fancy widescreen tv between 4:3 and 16:9 mode. In my minds eye this systems involves a Mac Mini-alike under the tv connected to server else where in the house. Most of it's easy (for some yet to be decided definition of easy) software stuff, but the final step, from the PC to the TV is puzzling me.

It's fairly easy to get an S-Video/Component video out of a decent graphics card, and obviously sound is easy, but the whole switching between 16:9 and 4:3 modes is tricky. I'm not quite sure what the benefits of this would be compared to rendering a 4:3 image as part of a bigger 16:9 image*, but assuming there is a compelling reason the only apparent way to do this is via a SCART cable. Looking at the specifications for SCART reveal that there is a pin for switching the TV to correct input and aspect ratio. 5-8V is 16:9 mode, 10-12V is 4:3 mode. As far as I can tell though no one makes a cable that takes S-Video/Composite, Phono and another cable to SCART. Two things spring to mind regarding this other cable that would be used to control the 16:9/4:3 pin - USB or serial. This is where my knowledge runs out though, does anyone out their in LJ land either know of a ready made cable that I could purchase, or have an idea about how such a cable could be constructed?

* One benefit is that the TV will switch to the correct input automatically. Most TVs appear to default to the RF input and not any of the external interfaces, even if they were used last. Since one big goal of the uber media centre solution thing is to make it as simple as possible this would be a big win as it would mean pressing two buttons (tv and Mac Mini-alike power buttons) as opposed to two buttons and find the remote and pressing the correct buttons on it to switch to the correct input.

It's not often you have to write 1232 lines of code in order to print "Hello World!", but now my Python-based interpreter for the YHC bytecode can display those famous programming words...