Code quality

So very true…

Code quality

So very true…

Dear Microsoft

Dear Microsoft,

Yes, we know you’re a f***in monopoly, and yes, we know that on a Tablet PC Linux is even shittier, but this paranoia is something even beyond your usual standards :

Industry standard my a$$. How dare you even call your misfit of a system Professional. Probably only because your Vista sucks even more. Fsck you, Microsoft.

Best regards,

Barts

Dear Microsoft

Dear Microsoft,

Yes, we know you’re a f***in monopoly, and yes, we know that on a Tablet PC Linux is even shittier, but this paranoia is something even beyond your usual standards :

Industry standard my a$$. How dare you even call your misfit of a system Professional. Probably only because your Vista sucks even more. Fsck you, Microsoft.

Best regards,

Barts

Status update – iPhone hacking, Japanese, Ubuntu on M200

This time instead of pitifully justifying my absence, I will just briefly let you know what has been devouring my time :

- I try to revise Japanese for my JLPT exam. Due to other activities this is not going well and I am probably going to fail it. Here are some cool pages that are very helpful when studying Japanese : Kanji test, Kanji reference, Japanese Word of the Day.

- I bought Toshiba M200 tablet on Ebay. Great piece of hardware and I have been secretly lusting for a tablet for a long time. I intend to use it for digital drawing and also it is small enough to carry around. I am setting it up for use, making it dual-boot with Ubuntu. This is time-consuming as hell.

- I bought iPhone. Yes, you heard that right. I have already hacked the activation lock (following this excellent tutorial), but still am struggling with hacking SIM cards and installing extra software (yay for BSD subsystem!).

- Programming a 2D game engine in SDL for a game we are working on with Bellamy, who currently is working in Japan. You have read the post about XML library – that was just one step on the way to create a full 2D alpha version of the game.

- There has been an outburst of PSP games recently : Castlevania, Silent Hill Origins, Syphon Filter : Logan’s Shadow, Manhunt 2 (with the whole story behind it, including creating uncensored version).

- Also, my private life has suddenly exploded (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen). Not at all computer related, but also time-consuming.

The bottom line is that probably it will take a while for the next post to appear.

Having tried coding for PSP (for which I unfortunately do not have time recently), I must say that setting up unofficial PSPSDK under Linux or Cygwin was a pain in the backside, especially if I wanted to have some IDE cooperating with it. All this is annoying to the point where I have started using embedded DSL Linux (via QEMU) under Windows with Toolchain set up in the virtual environment.

Apparently I was not the only one to get this idea. Blake1 from QJ.net development forums made ‘prepackaged’ version of Gentoo with Toolchain and PSPSDK already installed. FOL from PSPUAE has kindly agreed to host the files.

Therefore if you want to start PSP homebrew game development the fastest way possible without too much hassle over the environment setup, download it here and start coding straight away!

Prebrewed SDK

Having tried coding for PSP (for which I unfortunately do not have time recently), I must say that setting up unofficial PSPSDK under Linux or Cygwin was a pain in the backside, especially if I wanted to have some IDE cooperating with it. All this is annoying to the point where I have started using embedded DSL Linux (via QEMU) under Windows with Toolchain set up in the virtual environment.

Apparently I was not the only one to get this idea. Blake1 from QJ.net development forums made ‘prepackaged’ version of Gentoo with Toolchain and PSPSDK already installed. FOL from PSPUAE has kindly agreed to host the files.

Therefore if you want to start PSP homebrew game development the fastest way possible without too much hassle over the environment setup, download it here and start coding straight away!

Great lightweight XML library

I am currently trying to help develop a draft version of the game for a startup studio a friend I met in Japan. Even though I am sorely tempted, I won’t write any details and provide screenshots for now – because the main strength of the game is the idea and game-mechanics, and therefore I am afraid someone might steal it.

I wanted to make the draft version for testing game mechanics according to Agile Software Development practices. Yes, Agile applies to game creation as well – read these guys’ blog to see where I got the inspiration from. I wanted to make the game mechanics tweakable, so that lead game designer doesn’t have to touch the code at all. For that I wanted to use XML documents with game’s parameters.

Now the problem was that the draft is supposed to be small, with simple easy-to-read code – so that any programmer taking over me for the serious development knows what I did and how is the logic. Also, I do not like learning to use overly complex tools – if I need to do something, I want to do it in the most effortless way possible. Yes, I am lazy. Also, I am writing code in C++ for speed – so the XML parser would need to be C++ library.

There is a lot of XML processing libraries out there, but they are usually not small (Xerces!), not simple (different SAX parsers), not very well written, not free… It took me a while, but finally I have found what I wanted to have – Kranf C++ XML Parser.

It is light-weight, small, simple, uses wchar, is configurable and I was able to use it after half an hour, with only minor problem being that the included .lib file was made for Microsoft Visual C++ and I use Dev-C++ (mingw compiler), and therefore it wouldn’t link. That was solved by importing the DLL library project into Dev-C++ (namely xmlParserDLL.dsp), compiling my own .dll and .lib files and linking against them. After that it’s very easy to use the library and the .dll file has a footprint of about 100kb – thus making it exactly what I have been searching for.

Since the author, Dr Frank Vanden Berghen, asks to make a link to parser’s page, should the users like his library, I thought I’d bring it to your attention. Thanks, Doctor!

BTW, my new little hobby means that I will be writing more about game development and programming in near future. And sorry for lack of pictures, but honestly I didn’t know what to put here that would go well with the topic.

Open Document Format petition

There is a petition to ISO organisation concerning Open Office standards. I highly recommend that anybody even vaguely interested in using office documents signs this :

http://www.noooxml.org/petition

The page after jump explains in more detail why this is important. In short, ODF is the only truly open document format. Microsoft’s arrogance deserves a counteraction. I already signed.

Project Seraph

What you can see below is a presentation of my final project at my first specialisation at International Faculty of Engineering – 3D visualisation / reconstruction / image processing program for medical applications called Seraph. Although it was by far the least clean code and the worst design I have ever created, it still remains my favourite child as far as computer programs are concerned, which is why I am showing it here. I guess I am getting sentimental.

The presentation is in French, because I have been studying my first specialisation in that language. I thought I would have some free time to translate it and make presentation more interesting, but since it has been sitting on my hard drive for last five months waiting for that, I decided I would just put it on the web in the very same form it was in 2004.

My only disappointment is that noone continued the development and the program was finally not used much apart from my project, even though I wanted it to became open source. Unfortunately, it is my university that holds the intellectual rights to it and the program has simply remained somewhere there, unused. Oh well, now that I work as fully fledged software developer I am almost ashamed of that code. I guess I will have to rewrite it one day on my own and put it on SourceForge. Then Seraph’s soul will be able to take a rest…