Tuesday, January 30, 2007

I'm a Retard

Why, i wiped my Mac's harddrive, every last kb. Yes i could of recovered it, but i can't be bothered to build up any hope of getting my data back.

So what happened,

I was trying to install the New Microsoft Vista(Which i'm using as we speak). I used the disk utility on the mac osx install dvd to remove my old boot camp partition. i had split it as follows 103 GB for osx, and 8 gb for linux. It had been that way since the week after i got my mac. I was using rEFIt to manage the boot partitions.

I selected the 8 GB parition plus the nix swap space, and erased them. Before i did so, i clicked the little lock, to prevent editing to the osx partition. after wiping the two, i then reformated them as fat32, and thought nothing more of it, one restart latter osx wouldn't boot. thought it must be a partition table issue. So i reboot the install dvd, and went to repair the drive/partition.

Thats when i saw it. Macintosh HD had 55Mb used, instead of 90 Gb!

So what have i lost

Isolation, and Syndication, The new company website. plus all the recent changes to the HTTP library and Diggr for the last couple months. All of my uni work for the last 3 months, plus about 2000+ tracks. And my cracked cs3.

So .... backups are a good thing.

What i can say, is that Vista isn't too bad. They fixed the performance issues that they had with the last version i tried, 5270. It's nice and shiny, and although i haven't got all the drivers, it's still not too bad. After i've reinstalled osx, i'll set up a proper boot camp partition.

Isolation will be rewritten this month (February), Syndication who knows, Diggr is on hold until i can master palm's C api.

HB HTTP lib, i'll release what i have, but it won't work until the nice folks at HB update the runtime environment or the compiler, to fix the stream writing methods.

So if you'll excuse me, i've got a hard days worth of installing and downloading ahead of me.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Finally!!

So Januarys kinda like done, and i still haven't finished my first app. But the good news, is the weirdest part is done, which was handling data/ captured requests between two servers is practically done.

hence rejoice, for i have screen shots, but no code (i kinda like trying to make money thanks)




Now if you excuse i got loads more work todo, plus i need to stare at this powerbook(not mine) in front of me...


Quote of the Day
"So he came up behind you and began kissing you on the neck, ok"

As i said on numerous occasions, teen drinking is very bad

Friday, January 19, 2007

The Bookshelf gets better




The bookshelf is getting better. Finally after a week of waiting the precious Objective C book is finally here. Time to write some real code, i'm java's slave no more.

The book i got in the end was from my favourite publishers, O'Reilly, but Addison Wesley???? It's called "Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX" by Aridian Hillegass an ex apple and NeXtstep engineer. Only up to page 13, but it's looking good.

Now if only i can get enough to a have a proper reference library...

Plus i sorted out my house for next year, 6 beds, 3 boys 3 girls. Moving in July 1st.

Quote of the Day
Steph "I need you out of the house for a week after we move in"
MeWhy should i, i pay rent too?
Steph "Fine, stay you just won't like what your'll be hearing"

This is what i'm living with... Just kidding it's not all bad

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Deadlines; What are they & how i misuse them

For what must be the first time in while, (think 6/7) i'm performing academically the way i should be. I'm doubting myself and still getting 95% in tests, never mind completely acing others. It's a nice feeling, the torment that was A-level results left my head in a bad place, so it's great to be heading over the ridge.

I like love what i do. Writing code for me is better than ... making money. So it's great that i can use one do achieve the other. However, and employees of DSGi will know what i mean, i like setting ridculous deadlines. Heres one famed example.

A completely automated website to manage a entire retail chains intranet. A normal developer would quote a couple of months. I said 2 weeks!

So how do i make these estimates up?
Easy my calculations don't account for sleep, eating transport times etc. Why, cause i don't plan to do any of it. I'll work my arse off till, i collapse or do other injury to myself.

So where is this going?
Isolation, Diggr and the HTTP lib are gonna be late. Reasons are as follows

Isolation: - No real bottle necks just so much damn code to write; hashing controls, cache algor., multithreaded servers etc.

Diggr:- VB is like AIDS to me right now, and hint that i'm in proximity and i'm running, plus i gotta boot up windows. I'm on the verge of dumping the whole win32 thing for good, i just know its stupid to do so.

HTTP lib:- Palm OS is doing some weird stuff, and things aren't working exactly as they should be, debugging on device is like so yesterday, plus i wanna dump this whole two device thing and get me a Treo 680.

Plus i just kinda sold my beloved TX to a classmate, which technically means i can't finish the HTTP lib has it has to be tested on a device, no ifs no buts. That great treo 680 only has bluetooth (+GPRS but how the hell to i capture packets with that?) which i have no idea how to even begin to use fully. I think i would have to monitor a faux serial port!

So yeah, lifes great

If you excuse i must go food shopping instead of working to assignment deadlines.

Quote of the Day

Jai "You were doing the Carlton Dance!"

Me "Sadly, i just about remember that!"

Teen Drinking is very bad, even if you got a fake id

Thursday, January 11, 2007

TIOTI: Tape it off the internet Beta

For once i can talk about someone else's work. TIOTI, has been around for about a year. I first heard of it on Digg. As usual they was a big fuss, but as the months went by that died. Fortunately for me i have a good memory and was able to sign up for the beta program.

So for the people that haven't seen it here it is.



Thus far, it seems like a cooler version of TV.com. There are user discussion groups on various shows. You can add them to your favourites. You can get RSS feeds for various things, like group discussions etc. It's got a nice balance between web 2.0 goodness, and plain old skool web design



In fact its cross between digg and TV.com. Users swarm over tv shows, rather than stories. After that you can then paticpate in various activities related to your show and get badges and such.
Apparently was i was using was build 14


However there is one sweet addition, this thing schedules torrents, based on your favourites! But it's not only for us Fearless DMCA folks, it also checks for itunes downloads, which it lists a premium content. Please excuse my poor screen grabs, am still getting used to this sexy mac. Oh yeah, this shots are from a mac. They recommend using firefox on osx, so thats what i used. But most of it seems to javascript, css and html so safari performance shouldn't be too far away.]


This is the user account page, i just joined like 5 mins ago, so excuse the lack of friends.

Speaking of code, it's quite clean, all the javascript is placed in external files, so the actual html is very clean, (perfect for greasemonkeying ...)

The future looks bright for this service. I'm glad to say that TIOTI is not vapourware and should become a useful tool in filling the downtime of life, not that i would know anything about that kinda of thing.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Killing my own Ideas

Great idea, a External display via the firewire 400 port on my computer!

Lets do the math
(bare in mind that this done assuming we want 24 bit displays at 60hz)

Firewire = 400 Mbits
SXGA = 1 310 720 pixels
Each pixel is 24 bits / 3 bytes
therefore 3 932 160bytes (3.75 Mb) required to refresh the display each cycle.
average display is refreshed 60 times (60Hz) therefore 60 * 3.75
Total required thoughput of 225 Mb/s
Firewire total thoughout = 50 Mb/s

Thats why it's a express card job

Another reason why Having no express card port on this macbook is starting to suck. a 13" macbook pro would have been really nice right about now.

Another bright idea, external display via gigabit ethernet, nope only 125 MBit/s. Looks like my dream of a dual headed macbook is kinda dead. It's a mathmatical impossiblity :(

Since i was in this frame of mind i wondered, what the thoughput of a DVI connector might be

Single link
1920*1200
6.5 Mb per cycle
395 Mb/s


Dual link
2560 * 1600
11.7 Mb per cycle
703 Mb/s

A nice indication there of how much pixel pushing a graphics card really does in order to devliever a rich high resolution experience. Still no reason for crappy open source support, but it at least makes it clear why graphics cards have to be so damn powerful.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

OSS HTTP Lib is in semi-effect

After months of promises to the users of 1src, the HTTP OSS lib is operating. Most of the code has been written without ever testing it all, which is stupid, but i was too busy reading HTTP docs, to take the time to set up a testing server and go through logs looking to see it i had a hit or not.

In the end i didn't actually do that, i used ethereal, and MAMP on my mac ^_^. The point is, the OSS lib for HB++ developers is practically done. I've started the documentation ....


You might have also noticed, that that is windows. Although i've grown to dislike it, i need it. I had hoped that once i got my mac i could kiss this windows workstation good bye, but sadly not about of wine and vmware can make up for nativity. So until then, Linux on my desktop is dead, less glitz more work.

Now if you excuse me i'm off to tell the nice folks at 1src about this.


Quote of the Day
Me "Dont hit me with that"
Aimee "Why, are you gonna hit me?"
Me "No, but i'm gonna leave busies, and they won't be on your face!"

I think i'm in some sort of widthdrawl, can never get your hands on people when you want to...

Thursday, January 04, 2007

It snows in 2007

I've returned to my little hive in southampton. First thing i did when i got back, was upgrade my linux distro. I'm now running Ubuntu 6.10 with beryl, and this is what my desktop looks like.



I believe myself to be alone for the moment, but everyone should be returning in short order.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Happy new year

First post of 2007, Happy new year to all random vistiors.

Main reason for posting, is progress on Isolation. It's now got its icon, and is almost at a alpha stage.
The Proxy server is working, in one direction at least. The client is coming along. I've written a HTTP interface class, that allows me to do things like

makeGetRequest("/filename.html");

which would return a complete HTTP request string with line feeds and carriage returns. It also has constants of all the HTTP error codes, or at least the 4 most popular.

Sadly this is the last work i'll do for a while, as slightly more pressing issues beckon (Uni work). But all things look to be on course for my first product launch to come by the end of month, if not mid february.

Oh incase you were wondering, heres the icon


In the event that you have forgotten, what this thing is... Isolation Personal Proxy: is a multi-platform proxy server. It runs in the background and caches your content plain/text or binary files, allowing any application that supports a proxy server to get content from the cache without even knowing it's doing so, and enabling almost complete offline browsing.

Finally i've started using the tag feature that they have added to the blogger beta, i'll make a tag cloud one of these days