Michael Alexander Mullin

CodeAssistor - version 8 final released

2011-08-12T23:43:00.000-07:00

It's taken me like 8 months, but the codeassistor now has tabs.

Why did it take me so long, because things are crazy at work (good crazy, QNX is awesome to work with).

Get your binaries here

Windows
Macintosh
Linux
Source Code

CodeAssistor on Windows - Tab version now beta

2011-02-14T19:07:00.001-08:00

Ok, so a few more tweaks and we have a feature complete tabbed editor:) yay

Two features you'll notice I left out of the windows version
1) tear out a tab into a new window
2) tear a tab and place it in an already existing window

These two things are more effort than they are worth, so I wont be implementing them any time soon.

Get your binary here and let the bughunt begin!

Tabbing on windows, damn that was a lot of work :(

2011-02-13T16:45:00.000-08:00

I've been working, since my last post, on getting some sort of tabbing for CodeAssistor on windows... my god was it a lot of work, and my codebase has become absolutely spaghetti :( oh well.

I got something that works... Alpha quality, as there are many more interactions that I simply cannot test yet, but anyways, if you want to give it a spin

here

And dont forget the Mac-Beta quality (I haven't found any serious bugs from regular usage yet)
here

CodeAssistor on Mac - Tabs version is beta quality

2011-02-03T18:27:00.001-08:00

The mac version of codeAssistor with tabbing is beta quality

get it here

OMG Seriously? Yes Seriously

2011-01-29T00:18:00.000-08:00

If any of you have done mac programming, you've probably pondered this one question "how do I get tabs like firefox/safari/chrome without doing much heavy lifting"

If you haven't, heres a user exercise. Go to xcode and see what you can get done with an NSTabView... go head, I'll wait.

If you want a hint, here is what you can do.
But finally, some smart guy has come to rescue us from our misery.

Rasmus Andersson

you are my new hero.

Rasmus is the primary developer for Kod - a Mac based programmers editor. As part of Kod, he has developed a project called Chromium-Tabs, which basically gives programmers a nice - easy to use - API for creating beautiful browser like tabs (some say they look like Chrome).

So, I've promptly made a makefile so I dont have to deal with that nasty xCode IDE (yuck!), and integrated the Chromium-Tabs framework into my CodeAssistor project. Now I have a nice beautiful looking TABBED editor :)

All in all, the makefile took me 5 hours, and learing-integrating chromium tabs into codeassistor took 14/15 more.

If you want to play with the Alpha release of 0.0.8 (Mac Only so far), here you go

EDIT: Kod and Chromium Tabs Source

Hacker Monthly - Free for students.

2010-11-18T15:30:00.000-08:00

http://hackermonthly.posterous.com/students-read-hacker-monthly-for-free

I really enjoy receiving this magazine in my email every month. The premise of the magazine is that they take the best blogs highlighted on Hacker News and bundle them up into a nice looking Digital and Paper magazine. Better than 2600 because it's geared towards programmers and start-up entrepreneurs.

I highly recommend getting it.

While Im at it... you should all be reading Hacker News. Much better blog aggregate than Slashdot.

CodeAssistor - Command Entry Implemented

2010-10-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

So for the past week I've added the Command Entry to CodeAssistor.

Right now I've only implemented the search/replace functionality, but the framework now exists to start adding all sorts of awesomeness

So how does it work?

Open up a file and press the ESC key. You'll notice the entry popup

type '/' to start searching, then type in a regular expression (thats right, I said regular expression!)
eg "/#define (.*?) " (thats a space after the (.*?) , dont include the quote marks)

This will find the first #define XXX (but only #define XXX even if there is a #define XXX YYY)
Press ENTER. You've now moved to the next occurrence.

So what about replacing?

Ok continue your Command Entry so that the string looks like
"/#define (.+?) (.*)$/#ifdef \1\n#undef \1\n#endif\n#define \1 \2"
you'll notice that this doesn't replace. It's important to give the user a method of writing out the full regular expression and replacement string.

To actually replace the find add a final "/" to the command entry string... like this:
"/#define (.+?) (.*)$/#ifdef \1\n#undef \1\n#endif\n#define \1 \2/"

The library I am using for regular expressions (the basic scintilla regular expressions derived from Ozan Yigit's library plus some '?' extensions I did myself) doesn't (yet) understand the | metacharacter, so you'll have to write a separate line for "/#define ([^\s]+)$" (aka empty macros)

Half a Days labour

2010-10-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

Hello Source fans!

I just realized a nice anecdotal metric due to some CodeAssitor work I did today.

I noticed when I sat down to work on some regular expression stuff for CA that it was ~1:30 in the afternoon, for some flakey reason, my brain made a mental timestamp. When I finished the feature I was working on I noticed that the time wasy ~5:30.

What's interesting is I completed one whole feature (or at least got the feature from 0 to code complete... which means there hasn't been extensive testing), and quite literally nothing else (no washing breaks, no coffee reheats, no email checking, nothing but code.

The day previous I worked on adding the 0-1 quantifier (?) to Scintilla's basic Regular expression code (RESearch.cxx), and got that feature code complete... unfortunately I didn't notice the time and I was very distracted watching the Chilean miners get free (CHI-CHI-CH LEI-LEI-LEI!), and was doing numerous other things.

Anyway... So I sit down in front of my computer to work on some CodeAssistor stuff and notice the time is 1:34. I check the Scintilla Mailing list to see someone had posted a reply to my ? quantifier work, and someone had. Here is Philippe's email:

On 13/10/2010 20:36, Michael Mullin wrote:
> I've added a small patch to add the ? operator to the built in regular
> expressions in the scintilla version used in CodeAssistor. I haven't
> done any extensive testing, so I guess this is a bit of a 'code
> review.'
> Anyone see bugs? Do you think this patch is useful for the main
> scintilla branch?

Yes, if it works... For this, you should:
- Fix indentation...
- Add documentation of the new operator in the documentation at the start of the file.
The semantic of the operator isn't clear. From a quick glance at the code, it looks like
it is used in place of * with the meaning of 0 or 1 occurrence of the previous token, not
as a modifier to make an operator non-greedy, right?
The latter would be more useful, but it much harder (if possible) to inject in the current
engine. The former can still be useful, though...
--
Philippe Lhoste
-- (near) Paris -- France
-- http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So for the next 4 hours I
1) added the lazy operator functionality
2) did up the spacing how he wanted + documentation

Anyways, it was 5:27 when I finished.

The most interesting part of this endeavor is that you can see just exactly what I accomplished during those 4 hours.

Anyways, I thought this was an interesting piece of data. Especially because I wasn't planning on timing myself, so I didn't change my work effort at all.

Note: its 5:44 as I finish this blog.

CodeAssistor meets Joel on Softwares "12 steps to better code"

2010-09-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

Last night I fixed a crash in CodeAssistor (see: https://bugs.launchpad.net/codeassistor/+bug/647139). compiled the code, and released the binary to launchpad.

I wake up and read this article by "Software Joel" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html and get to point 2 "Can you make a build in one step"

By this I mean: how many steps does it take to make a shipping build from the latest source snapshot? On good teams, there's a single script you can run that does a full checkout from scratch, rebuilds every line of code, makes the EXEs, in all their various versions, languages, and #ifdef combinations, creates the installation package, and creates the final media -- CDROM layout, download website, whatever. If the process takes any more than one step, it is prone to errors. And when you get closer to shipping, you want to have a very fast cycle of fixing the "last" bug, making the final EXEs, etc. If it takes 20 steps to compile the code, run the installation builder, etc., you're going to go crazy and you're going to make silly mistakes

Crazy thing is, I ran into this problem this morning! I had to come into work and put in some "overtime," while I am here I'll get the latest CodeAssistor to work with. Unfortunately, I forgot a critical step in the build process... I forgot to type STATIC=yes on the make command. Thus the build required Scintilla as Dynamic libraries, which I of course, didn't add to the zip file.

Thus codeAssistor-v0.0.7-winExe-alpha4.zip is unrunable. DOH

I'll have to create some sort of "make distribution" command.

CA update

2010-09-22T22:05:00.000-07:00

external editor updates feature complete in linux (thats all platforms), autoindent feature added due to request.

CodeAssistor - external editor notification on windows

2010-09-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

feature complete on the update stuff for mac and windows.... linux todo.

CodeAssistor - external editor notification on mac

2010-09-18T21:38:00.000-07:00

When an external editor (or application such as touch) touches the file you are working on in CodeAssistor, the program now pops up a message asking if you would like to discard your changes and reload from the harddrive

Whyfor CodeAssistor?

2010-09-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

Time for some introspection. Why did I create the CodeAssistor? Isn't there lots of text editors? Why Open Source? What have I learned about Open Source so far?

Initial Inspiration (the itch!)

It was late 2009, and I was interested in looking at the Android RIL code. I work for research in motion on the QCT radio team and was interested in how Android did their system determination stuff for multimode devices. I wanted to look at some of their source and compare against some of the code that I work on everyday. I downloaded the code and started using "xed" to view the source. Xed was my only editor that I had on my Mac at the time.

(BTW, all the really interesting code is hidden from you in Android, at the time Qualcomm had not open sourced the libraries underneath the basic high level stuff... I seriously doubt that they've open sourced the interesting stuff even now... a word of warning for those of you who hold up Android as a pinnacle of freedom and open sourced software... I wasn't able to glean any useful information)

Xed is the editor component for the xCode IDE created by Apple, and although xCode has some terrific components xed started to annoy me for two reasons:

when you run xed, you start up the whole xCode IDE - This takes time to load, sometimes 5-8 seconds. Since Im not working on the code itself, I am simply reading it I didn't want a full IDE, and I wanted some snappy performance, so I could open/close source files quickly
xed uses a different look and feel from all other editors I've used - It's rather hard to describe the look/feel of xed, for those of you who have used xed, you'll know what I mean. While other people may like how xed runs, I wanted something more traditional.

So I downloaded some other editors. I tried TextWrangler first. With TextWrangler I found some bugs relating to opening files from a state where the application is not running... I'd have to open the file twice! Very annoying. Its not open source, so I felt no compultion to submit bug reports (if you are Cathedral style, you're bugs are your own). I then tried Mac ports for VI and eMacs... but I dont really know how to use those editors (I can survive on vi, but I dont want to... I am completely lost in emacs), so they were out. Then I tried jEdit. jEdit was pretty good, but it has the same problem every other java program has... its slow to start.

All these editors that I tried were also very feature rich. Overly feature rich, I simply didn't use most of the features, and the menubars were too full of things. I got lost. Not only this, but the feature-riches bloated the overall size of the executables. Some of them are 30Megs or more in size!

In parallel to this, I use an amazing source viewer at work called SourceInsight. SourceInsight is ABSOLUTELY the best code reading software on the market. This software is like a graphical cscope, but more robust and reliable. Unfortunately SourceInsight has a few major problems:

It's Windows Only - no ways around this... I'd have to run a virtual machine to use it
It's extremely expensive - something like $250 a license
It's not maintained anymore - features like code folding are not supported.
It's an MDI application, yet all editor windows are bound inside a master window... thus it doesn't let you take advantage of multiple monitors
I dont think it supports Objective-C

So I got to thinking... what if I created my own editor. If I created my own editor I could

add a source analyzer engine similar to cscope (like sourceinsight) for easy code jumping
make it small
make it run quickly
make it simple to use
make it support all the languages I care about (Objective-C isn't well supported in editors)

I've succeeded in items 2-5 (#1 is a doozy, its going to take a really long time to do that)

Beginning to Code (Enter the Scintilla!)

It is quickly apparent that writing a whole editor from scratch is a hugely difficult task. Luckily Scintilla handles all the editing tasks for me (folding/colourizing/etc). Unfortunately I found two problems with scintilla

Scintilla is a second class citizen on Mac
I dont like how Scintilla's folding

Regarding #1. Scintilla has been ported to MacOSX in two ways. A Carbon based port, and a Cocoa based port. I actually built a small editor (no frills like saving or anything... but you could type in it) in Carbon, and I found that programming in Carbon is rather disgusting. Its way overly complex and requires a huge learning curve. Add to carbons detriments the fact that programs written in it will never be 64 bit, and I abandoned this and moved to Cocoa.

Cocoa had it's own problems. The first is that at the time, it was only buildable via xCode (isn't moving away from xCode one of the major reasons Im making an editor?). There is a simple solution to this... learn about the xCode build process, and port the building of Cocoa-Scintilla to makefiles. This wasn't an easy task, but I got it done. I submitted my fixes into the official tree of scintilla, so I got a warm feeling for contributing back to the community; I also learned a lot about makefiles which has become useful for my dayjob. Cocoa's second problem is that it uses ATSUI (hehehe Dave are you reading this? Remember that the stuff I was looking at for DPS was ATSUI stuff?).

While ATSUI is great, its carbon based and will hold back porting to 64bit. The new Mac Text stuff is now CoreText. I haven't yet begun to port Scintilla to use CoreText, but its on my future TODO list (its important to simply get the editor working with what exists right now).

Regarding #2. I figured out the way Scintilla folds and did some kludging to make it work the way I want it to. I haven't proposed this code back to the scintilla because what I've written isn't production level code... its a dirty hack. I've released my patches for anyone to see if they are interested in how I am doing it. Sometime soon I plan on cleaning things up, doing it properly and proposing the code back to the Scintilla team.

Why Open Source?

Like I described with TextWrangler, if you run a Cathedral style project, you're bugs are your own. However with open sourced bazaar style, bugs belong to the community. As a single developer I simply dont have time to fully test my code (did I just admit that? did I just say I was a lazy programmer! yes indeed I did. If you've got a problem with that YOU CAN HELP ME OUT). I cant run through every usecase on every platform, but I CAN run through all the use cases I care about (I use CodeAssistor at work (windows port) and at home (mac port)... I'll find most of the normal use use-cases via regular usage... you'll note that I've left out linux port for regular usage HINT).

Using the bazaar style of project management, any bugs that I do not find via regular usage can be found by my users. As a bonus, my users are all programmers, so if they find bugs I think it more likely that they'll help me via patches since they can examine the code.

As a side note: This is why I chose Launchpad to host my source code. Launchpad makes "drive by contributions" much easier than sourceforge or google code. Go read up on it here.

Why BSD? Complex answer, I think BSD is more free than GPL. The BSD is truly free in that people can use the code to do nearly anything with the code (see my license). GPL restricts people from doing potentially interesting stuff with the code. To say that people wont submit code back to BSD where they would submit back to GPL is silly... if someone else has patches on top of my code they recently got SCREWED because I did some major refactoring; they'll now have to do a lot of work to maintain their patches... its easier and better for them to submit code to be incorporated into the trunk of the code.

Short Answer: GPL is way to legalize for me to truly comprehend it... best not to use licenses you don't really understand. BSD is simple and does what I want it to do.

What Have I Learned from Open Sourcing CodeAssistor?

The most important thing I've learned is that it doesn't really matter if you are open sourced or not via the standpoint of bugs until you can create a community. I've had nearly 550 downloads of version 0.0.5 and not a single bugreport (I found a major one while I was late into 0.0.6). "If you build it they will come" is not the way of open source... creating a community is something I'll have to work on, and it's going to be a difficult task.

As a plug, 0.0.6 is the most interesting time to jump on board the codeassistor community. Its now running rather well on the three major platforms, but there are lots of features still to do (the most interesting features at that!).

Another thing I've learned is that there are lots of shareware sites which will grab your stuff, claim it as "shareware" , and use it to promote their sites. Some of them technically they violate my license because they dont include my license demand #3 (see the licence). It's not worth it to hire a lawyer, and Im kind of thankful that they are trying to get the software into the hands of more people. Some of them like Softpedia were very nice in sending me an email and asking if it was ok to include the software, and making sure that my name is on the site as the author; in cases like this these sites are Win-Win.

Conclusion

I'm really looking for some contributors now. CodeAssistor is on the cusp of doing some really interesting stuff soon; CoreText implementation in Scintilla, cleaning & submitting the fold hack back to the Scintilla community, source code analysis engine. At +4000 lines (66,000 for scintilla), CodeAssistor is small enough to be quickly understandable, yet big enough to be complex and intellectually stimulating. It's a lead in towards Scintilla, winner of the Project of the Month for July from Sourceforge, and one of the truly inspirational open source libraries with an active community It uses three different languages (plain C, C++, and Objective-C), and runs on three major platforms, so it's an interesting learning opportunity towards cross-language cross-platform coding.

With help, I think that CodeAssistor can be a meaningful and widely used editor.

CodeAssistor v0.0.6 final release

2010-09-13T16:40:00.001-07:00

Some minor tweaks to Linux (single instance app, icons in the menubar). Ready to Ship!

Source
Linux
Windows
Macintosh

CodeAssistor v0.0.6 in Beta

2010-09-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

Quite a bit of (win/lin) refactoring done during my vacation in Alberta. The GTK/Linux menu is now ready, including accelerators. 0.0.6 is ready for Beta.

Get your Executables while they are hot!

Linux
Windows
Macintosh

GTK Nearly Finished

2010-09-08T19:18:00.000-07:00

I've finished most of the functionality of the GTK/Linux port. Only thing left is the menu accelerators and polishing. Has all the features of Windows (nearly all the features of Mac... Mac has a nice "opened recently" thing that cocoa gives you for free), but accelerators (aka ctrl+s does not save) are not finished.

A rather major find bug was fixed in windows too. I highly suggest you get 0.0.6alpha if you are running 0.0.5-final/beta

Time to release the Alpha

Windows
Macintosh
Linux

GTK coming along

2010-08-24T19:59:00.000-07:00

GTK is opening up the file, folding the code. I have an initial menu (although there are no items in the menu... its a start).

Im having a good time doing GTK programming. I love to learn new (and useful) APIs, and GTK programming is pretty straightforward.

On a not so fun note, I got a bad review on Fossforus :( a user didn't like it that CodeAssistor doesn't have tabs and therefore called the program "useless" . I have to defend my creation... CA is far from useless, I use it everyday at work, its folding capabilities and simplicity really help me. But yeah, tabs would be nice in the future. When you get, say, 7 or more editor windows, things start getting cluttered, and you start to realize that tabs would be nice.

More important than tabs are basic features that all text editors need (eg. search and replace).

That said, I am up to 430 downloads of 0.0.5 :) hopefully someone is finding the program useful.

Soon, very soon!

More Linux Work

2010-08-23T21:05:00.001-07:00

Linux work is slowly progressing. the XC files have been set up for linux compilation and my ScintillaControllers are working on linux. I know very little about GTK so going will be slow until I am comfortable with the API.

One noteworthy thing... Version 0.0.5 just passed the 360 mark for total downloads from launchpad (this says nothing about how many downloads have occurred on all those shareware sites). Im scratching my head at how this happened. Last night there was a total of 91 downloads, and I am unaware of any "lists" that I would have been put on lately.

Im curious about who has downloaded CodeAssistor, and Im especially interested in bug reports. So if you are out there, you're reading this, and you use CA, send me an email or post a comment or file a bug-report :)

Here we come Linux

2010-08-22T12:07:00.001-07:00

Some refactoring has been done, more refactoring will come as I learn more about GTK and see more stuff that I am doing wrong.

Thats said... basic (very very basic... ie it only opens a basic text editor) has been implemented on GTK for CodeAssistor.

I've tested the windows version under WINE and it works really well... but lets make a native app.

Linux here we come

CodeAssistor v0.0.5 final release

2010-08-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

Found one bug from beta, fixed it, ready 2 go so lets shipit!

Grab the final version of 0.0.5

Change Notes
- Single Instance on Windows (already single instance on mac)
- Drag and Drop support
- Folding Fixes

MAC
WIN
SRC

Well that was easy

2010-08-15T17:15:00.001-07:00

So I was able to get the drag'n'drop on windows complete in less than an hour. This is a really quick release timeframe so far, considering that these features are quite major.

Anyway, grab the beta and raise some bugs please
MAC
WIN

Able to get stuff done thanks to a bum knee

2010-08-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

I've been able to churn out a bunch of code this weekend thanks to a bum knee keeping from leaving my computer-den.

I've implemented the single instance application on windows, fixed a small folding bug, and implemented drag'n'drop on mac. I think I may drop the commandline tools for mac from 0.0.5 since well... I dont really need them. That leaves implementing drag'n'drop on windows and ready to release.

might even go straight to beta passing over the alpha phase, we'll see if I can get the win drag'n'drop done tonight.

CodeAssistor Feature Plotline

2010-08-14T15:57:00.000-07:00

So here is what I am thinking for the work items to do for CodeAssistor before I give it the full v1.0.0 treatment

v0.0.5
- Single Application in Windows
eg. Right now when you double click on a .c file, a separate instance of CodeAssistor will be started, even if there is an application running at the moment
- Mac Commandline utilities
eg. Cannot demand codeAssistor to start at a particular line of a file like you can with windows
- Drag and Drop
eg. Drag a file from finder/explorer into the editor, editor should display file
- Folding fixes

v0.1.0 - major update
- Refactoring
eg. quite a bit of duplicated code has crept in (like notification stuff)
- GTK port
- Update the file if the file is changed by an external editor
- Compile on Windows via Visual Studio

v0.1.1
- Upgrade all dialogs
- Add Search & Replace
- Add replace all instances of word

v0.1.2
- Change appearance dialogs (fonts, colours, backgrounds)... store the prefs
- highlight all instances of a selected word

After these tasks are complete, I think CodeAssistor will be a full fleshed out (although bare) Editor. I can start building outward from there

Post 1.0.0 ideas (small/tight IDE)
- Macros/Scripting
- Cross Reference
- VI controls
*- CoreText rather than ATSUI on Mac
- Project like control over many files
- gdb integration

CodeAssistor Major folding bug fixed

2010-08-13T22:35:00.000-07:00

CodeAssistor has had a rather nasty corner case bug re:folding since I initially implemented the feature. It's somewhat difficult to find, but its bothered me since day1. I've had to work around the bug as best I could, but all workarounds were less than optimal. Today, I received a patch from the Scintilla team that would allow me to have an optimal folding experience; gaahhh its 2 days after I released 0.0.4!

Well anyways, the nasty folding problem is gone and the code is in my repos. There is a second folding bug I've found now relating to "fold all" on very simple files... I guess 0.0.5 will be a bugfix release?

CodeAssistor v0.0.4 final

2010-08-10T18:00:00.000-07:00

Bugs fixed, updated the windows compiler to 4.5 (new scintilla requires TDM mingw 4.5). Time for final release.

So I updated the binaries, uploaded the SRC zip, alerted Fossforus and freshmeat. Time to move on to 0.0.5.

Minefields "copy link location" seems to be broken today, so here is the link to all relevant downloads (https://launchpad.net/codeassistor/+download).

CodeAssistor Release Candidate 1 for v0.0.4

2010-08-03T16:58:00.000-07:00

after fixing some bugs found during beta testing, Ive decided that 0.0.4 is ready for the "release candidate" label.

Download it
Mac
Windows

Scintilla update inspires CodeAssistor 0.0.4 beta 3

2010-07-31T13:46:00.001-07:00

Scintilla has updated to 2.20. I did the merging of the current Scintilla-Cocoa project on Launchpad (owned by MikeLischke), and proposed that for the trunk branch.

Then I took the proposed change and added all my folding hacks and created the mpatch2.20 branch. CodeAssistor runs off of the mpatch2.20 branch now after some minor changes to the CScintillaController.cpp file

No user experience changes, just a better underneath library

you can find beta 3 here:
Windows
Mac

CodeAssistor 0.0.4 in beta 2

2010-07-18T14:44:00.001-07:00

Major tweaks to folding (performance & functional), and running windows as a static compile.

CodeAssistor 0.0.4 in beta

2010-07-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

If finished the feature work on 0.0.4 and am therefore going to put it into beta stage

Changelist:
- Proper Java colurizing. all classes from Java API 1.5 are colourized similar to how the c standard library is coloured in C code
- python, php, perl, batch, bash colourized
- python, php, perl, bash folding
- better scrolling
- horizontal mouse scrolling on mac improved
- wider line number margin
- hpp files now recognized
- preprocessor Cstyle folding
- default style is objectivecpp
- can open to a specific line on windows version
- Warnings when attempting to save a file with access restriction.

Download the beta at: Windows or Mac

CodeAssistor - Scrolling and Folding

2010-06-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

I got a little off track today, rather than looking at stuff on the version 4 list, I fixed up some folding and scrolling stuff... now the editor doesn't fold away the cursor during a fold all. when fold all is performed, the cursor line is moved to the top line of the editor. when Unfoldall is performed the cursor stays at the current position (was getting lost before).

Also, now you can only hori-scroll the size of the longest line (plus a little bit of buffer), and horizontal scrolling via mousewheel was fixed on mac.

Ohh yeah, margins are a solid colour on mac now... rather than those nasty lines.

CodeAssistor - version 0.0.4 started

2010-06-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

Version 0.0.4 is started. Java is colourized properly, and includes colourization of all the classes from the 1.5 JavaAPI. Python support is in both windows and mac and is colourized and folds properly... I dont use Python much so I am going to have to depend on other people to raise bugs against python.

Speaking of bugs... no one has raised any yet (I know they exist!), yet I've had ~65 downloads (I make the assumption that there are 15 users from that amount of downloads) since 0.0.3 was finalized. If you users are reading this, thanks for using the software and that your comments/critisms/bugfinds are welcome. Also, Launchpad makes "drive by" contributions very easy if a developer wants to join me by adding Linux support.

CodeAssistor - version 0-0-3 Final

2010-06-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

After fixing a few more bugs than I expected, the CodeAssistor version 0.0.3 is completed and barring any major bugs, finalized. I've updated Freashmeat and FOSSFORUS, placed the binaries and the source as zip files for general consumption.

The major task for 0.0.3 was windows support, however, since CodeAssistor is my primary editor now, I added functions that I really really wanted (such as foldAll).

Version 0.0.4 will target UI polish. I want to do things such as
- Better Java colouring
- Add Python/Perl/PHP/Win-Batch colouring and folding
- Darkmode where a darkcolour is the background ... lots of people like dark backgrounds
(note: I do not want to give the user the power to chose their own colour scheme... this may seem fascist or lazy of me, but my main goal is to have a very simple feature set... adding user defined colour schemes and font schemes adds a LOT of feature complexity, adds to the size of the final binary, and is sort of antithesis of what I want to accomplish... Im not just creating a notepad++ clone, I purposefully want something smaller... and yes, its a lot of work to add that stuff :P)
- Better Windows dialogs - Should be more similar to Windows Notepad.

Windows Executable
Macintosh Application
Source Code (including my version of Scintilla for superior folding)

My Triple Screened setup

2010-06-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

A program called "Air Display" allows Mac users to use their iPads as an additional monitor. This gives me the ability to have three monitors. See screenshot

CodeAssistoro - Scratchpad of what needs polishing

2010-06-18T19:45:00.001-07:00

Need to do all these things before version 0.0.5

Windows
5- Cut/Copy in finder window
3- CTRL+Z should not go before open point
4- Should pop warning to say "cannot save due to file access restrictions"
5- Only a single instance of the application
4- batchfile colourization
4- widen margin to accomidate 99,999 lined files
5- "dark mode" for those who like the dark
3- About Dialog
4- show if text is "dirty"

Mac
4- python perl php bash colourized
4- better java colour
3- all forms of makefile
3- About dialog

CodeAssistor - version 0-0-3 release candidate 1

2010-06-17T20:12:00.000-07:00

I've improved CodeAssistor in many ways over the past couple of days.
Find is fixed (it wasn't the compiler, see previous blog entry).
FoldAll and UnfoldAll have been added (Man this is sooooo useful!!!)
Long Line wrap has been added

My only concern is that pasting into the search box doesn't work in windows... no idea why.

Anyway, grab it while its hot.
MAC
WIN

Never blame the compiler

2010-06-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I demonstrated how I could get codeassistor to perform the exact same sequence of inputs in different ways depending on if the code was optimized or not. Turns out, I was improperly using a structure (didn't set all the values of the structure properly).

Never blame the compiler

An interesting finding about compilers

2010-06-06T16:25:00.000-07:00

In our binary world of software, a set of consistent in-volatile variables has one and only one path it can take through a static codebase. Bugs exist because variables are never consistent or in-volatile; except during unit testing. Unit testing should use a large enough data set to test all possible variable combination sets, but it is nearly impossible to thoroughly unit test certain codebases (eg codebase for a user experience), thus bugs exist.

However, what do you do when your set of variables passing through a static codebase is the same, with two exceptions.
1) user input timing
2) compiler optimization options

Case: "Backwards Find in Windows & TDM of Mingw"
I cannot be entirely scientific with this. Heck this is a blog post and I've found a workaround for my problem. I highly encourge you "the reader" to investigate this more thoroughly and tell me I've overlooked some stupid thing

Problem Desc: When using the backwards find in Codeassistor, backwards find does not wrap around to the bottom of the sourcefile and search upwards for the search term if the search term cannot be found from the current point of the cursor to the beginning of the sourcefile. Unless the codebase is compiled using the -O0 optimization option.

Steps to reproduce
1) grab the codeassistor source and the mullinpatches branch of scintilla.
2) compile the code via "make -f win.mk -j5"
3) after the test application has popped up, press CTRL+F for find and type "ei" (no quotes) then ENTER.
4) Alt+Tab from the find popup to the editor window
5) press F3 for backwards search multiple times

Expected Result:
The editor will jump to the bottom and find the last occurrence of the string "ei"

Actual Results:
The editor will highlight the second character of the sourcefile (in this case a "*")

Continuation
6) Quit Codeassitor; type "make -f win.mk clean" ENTER
7) Edit win.mk and change -Os to -O0
8) repeat steps 2-5

Results (expected and actual):
The editor will jump to the bottom and find the last occurrence of the string "ei"

It seems like the -Os (for that matter all -O optimization except O0) performs the test one way, and the -O0 performs another way.

-Os drops my final executable IN HALF! from 250KB to 124KB. I am not supremely concerned about this because 250 is acceptably small... but what happens if my executable grows to be 10MB ? I would much prefer a 5MB exe to a 10MB one.

Note: the bug might be in the codeassistor, however the code is acting differently to a non-volitle (except user timing) dataset depending on compiler option.

Ipad review after day one

2010-06-06T07:06:00.001-07:00

OVerall there are slight problems but it's features make up for them

Typing is much more difficult than a laptop or even a blackberry for that matter. Holding the internet in your hand is they way it's supposed to be. Reading books on an eink screen is nicer on the eyes but the iPad is still acceptable. Watching Ted.com is great. Reading technical papers is good. The speed of the software is amazing.

Smegol says "It's my birthday, and I wants it"

2010-06-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

I bought myself an iPad today. Cause I wanted one.

I want a larger screen book reader for technical papers (http://www.3gpp2.org). I'll give you a review later on.

CodeAssistor on Windows : Alpha Release

2010-06-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

Super Dooper Alpha release for windows

http://launchpad.net/codeassistor/v0-0-3/v0-0-3/+download/superAlphaWindowsCodeAssistor.zip

Find/Colouring/Goto all the stuff that mac has... but there are bugs
eg
- cannot wrap backwards on find

Im sure there is more, I didn't test very thoroughly, but its bedtime and I'd like to have this available to download on other machines for testing tomorrow morning.

Find: codeassistor on windows

2010-06-02T21:27:00.000-07:00

I have to implement a "Find" dialog for windows. The popup-edit box method I use in mac doesn't work so well because Scintilla takes over from my search-edit box whenever I click the search edit box (the search-edit box is inside the bounds of the scintilla editor).

Im going to have to implement find dialogs anyway, so that there is some better control over find... but yeah, I had to do it for windows right from the get-go.

Anyways, basic find is completed for windows, though there are bugs, you can at least find stuff with it.

Next step is the line-goto dialog.

CodeAssistor on Windows coming along nicely

2010-05-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

Folding/colourizing/etc all major features that the Mac version supports are supported in windows now with the exception of

- shortcut keys
- find/linegoto.

Here is a screeny of Windows and Mac side by side.

CodeAssistor on Windows

2010-05-21T23:32:00.001-07:00

CodeAssistor can now open files on windows... looks ugly as sin, but hey... thats windows for you.

CodeAssistor work on Windows

2010-05-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

I've done some initial work (read VERY initial) for a windows port of codeassistor.

I've only got an editor window open now (no loading/saving/etc, no colourizing). Most of the work was on the makefile to get the project ready for development.

Beware using google groups

2010-05-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

Google groups just ate my homework. MotherFunk!

Neil has been doing some work with Lexers and released a zip file of his latest work on his website. His work wasn't compiling against MacOSX, so I took it upon myself to get the compiling/linking etc done. After about two hours I had everything running and zipped up my work and uploaded it to google groups (the scintilla interest group)

I deleted the file from my hd believing that google had safely stored the info... of course, Google funked up and the file cannot be retrieved.

GAHH.

CodeAssistor version 0-0-2

2010-05-14T20:43:00.000-07:00

CodeAssistor version 0.0.2 has been released. This version includes CODE-FOLDING (wohoo!) and GOTOLINE functionality.

CodeAssistor listed on the Scintilla "Related Projects" site

2010-05-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

Neil has put the CodeAssistor onto his list of projects related to Scintilla

Happy Day!

http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaRelated.html

CodeAssistor once again compiles against vanilla Scintilla-Cocoa

2010-05-09T08:22:00.000-07:00

Mike Lishke has merged all of my changes (mullinpatches/mousewheel/makefilework) into the trunk of Scintilla-Cocoa. Version 66 of CodeAssistor will compile against Version 34 of Scintilla-Cocoa (lp:scintilla-cocoa).

Mike Lishke has also merged in all of Neil Hodgson's main scintilla changes + added some helper functions in the ScintillaView for Font changing and Text searching.

Looks like a good day as far as Scintilla-Cocoa goes :)

Goto Line added to CodeAssistor

2010-05-08T21:31:00.000-07:00

Hmmm... so thats why you do requirements analysis, because if you dont, you forget an important feature (like find... or like line-goto).

Im lucky this time. I was able to "tack on" Finding and line-goto w/o much hassle (its a homework task for my readers to see if my design could have been better if I had remembered these tasks).

Anyways. CodeAssistor now has the ability to Goto lines (CMD-G). interestingly I had to add an "owner" property to the upstream ScintillaView class. I had to add this so that Scintilla notifications would be percolated all the way up to the NSDocument (or NSObject if a Single document model is used) that controls the ScintillaView. I did this so that I could hide the Finder/Goto TextEdits when the ScintillaView regains focus.

Because of this change, revision 66 (and onwards) of CodeAssistor now _requires_ my mullinpatches (lp:~masmullin/scintilla-cocoa/mullinpatches) and will no longer compile against vanilla Scintilla-Cocoa. Previous to this, Vanilla Scintilla-Cocoa could have makefiles hacked up (my mullinpatches has some changes to the vanilla makefiles-which I supplied in the first place anyway) and work properly with CodeAssistor, Although I've fixed a few bugs in Scintilla-Cocoa that MikeLischke hasn't integrated yet, so you would want to use mullinpatches anyways.

The amount of divergence mullinpatches is from vanilla Scintilla-Cocoa is starting to worry me. Right now, I think it's still possible to do a pretty clean merge of mullinpatches onto vanilla since vanilla is static, but if other developers start fixing bugs on vanilla Im going to have an additional chore of updating my mullinpatches.

Not only that, but Im concerned that Scintilla-Cocoa isn't integrating changes from the main Scintilla code stored on sourceforge (eg there was some changes done by Neil Hodgson to the main Scintilla code just 3 days ago... these havn't made it into Scintilla-Cocoa).

Looks like Im going to have to get myself a good visual diff tool (gah, I dont really wanna fork over the cash for Araxis, but it's the supreme tool for this purpose).

Where do I find CodeAssistor?

2010-05-07T16:04:00.000-07:00

Today Dave left a comment on my last post suggesting that I post links of where to find CodeAssistor... SOOOOO..... without further wait.

You can check out the source using bzr via "bzr branch lp:codeassistor"

You can download v0.0.1 executable @ http://launchpad.net/codeassistor/v0-0-1/v-0-0-1/+download/CodeAssistor-v0-1-1.zip

The project homepage is found @ https://launchpad.net/codeassistor

Note to anyone who wants to contribute: Launchpad and bzr make "drive by contributions" VERY VERY easy to do and offer some highly professional workflows (code reviews, bug-tracking, revision control). I highly suggest that all developers create themselves a launchpad account.

HINT FOR STUDENTS: If *I* were to go back to school again, I would ask my teachers if I could use Launchpad for all my coding projects.

The CodeAssistor released v0.0.1

2010-05-05T21:34:00.000-07:00

I've released my first version of the CodeAssistor software. CodeAssistor is an extremely simple MacOSX code editor that works with c,cpp,cxx,h,m,mm,xc,java, and txt files.

Whats an .xc file you ask? Well because CodeAssistor will one day become cross platform I wrote a few helper functions to facilitate using either ObjectiveC code or C/C++ code (via #ifdefs). On Macs the .xc file will be compiled using -x objective-c++ and on other platforms can be compiled as c or c++ code.
With the help of these helperfuncs I've been able to keep the Scintilla Controller classes strictly c++ rather than Objective-C++, and therefore it will be easier to port to windows/linux.
Basically .xc stands for "Cross C"

I like using it a lot. It's my main editor now. I like creating it a lot. There are still LOTS of features to work on (anyone feel like helping? contact me at masmullin@gmail.com)

I released it under the BSD licence, so yeah... have at'er.

Scintilla Cocoa Bzr and Launchpad

2010-04-30T13:01:00.000-07:00

I've started investigating the software product Scintilla. I'm specifically looking into the mac versions of scintilla (cocoa and macosx inside the source tree).

After doing some work with both the cocoa and the macosx version, I truly appreciate how much extra "stuff" apple gives you with the cocoa platform.

In exchange for some control over how things work (ie certain tasks become automagical) Apple gives you really easy ways to implement saving/opening/multipleDocs/"dirty-alert" etc. It's really quite amazing.

I've managed to work on a few bugs for this software because launchpad-bzr is VERY VERY easy to to drive-by-contributions.

So far, I've contributed
- mouse wheel fixes (zooming more like firefox, horizontal scrolling no longer needs holding the shift key, no more zooming 'jumpyness' when using the magic mouse)
- makefiles to build the cocoa project and makefiles to build the sample application

Im currently creating my own Source code Text editor called CodeAssistor because there is a serious lack of light-weight text editing software on the mac.

CodeAssistor is actually pretty solid right now, and I use it for all my editing needs (C,C++,ObjC,make,txt... java is there too but sorta tacked on). The application is comparatively tiny, only 2.5MB (TextWrangler is 28.8MB, TextEdit is 16.3 MB, jEdit is 30.8MB) and blazingly fast. Unfortunately it lacks a Search feature (DOH!) which I totally forgot about when I was thinking about the UI and now have to figure out how to not make the program ugly.

What kind of text editor doesn't have a search feature? DOH DOH DOH. Thats why i have yet to release the software. A textEditor w/o search is just plain stupid.

eBooks, music, and the DRM

2010-02-06T18:16:00.000-08:00

Debate is raging about DRM enabled books throughout the Nerdverse. With Apple releasing a new ebook reader (iPad), which will soon be competing with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader, blogs are abuzz with debate on the merits and flaws of DRM and eBooks in general.

On one hand, text is the -absolutely- easiest commodity to pirate on the internet. The internet was basically constructed to send text messages. Think about it, if the internet were created to distribute video or audio, it would have been named "television" or "radio" (respectively). Sharing textual information is primal to the Internet's nature. Now that eInk devices are being widely distributed, and with them the ability to easily consume stolen text, book piracy will shoot through the stratosphere!

I cant stress this enough; piracy of books is 100x easier to pirate than music, the only mitigating factor against absolutely wide spread book theft is that books lack a medium to consume the pilfered pirate gains. eReaders are this medium. The Amazon kindle is to books what the Mp3 player is to music.

DRM can protect against the impending rampant piracy. DRM can limit the majority of society to be unable to freely redistribute digital purchases, thus ensuring that the costs of creating artistic works is covered.

There are, however, some serious drawbacks to DRM for our societies general social wellbeing! DRM allows a corporation-which by definition, is solely dedicated to profits- to be a single access point to art. DRM allows a company such as Amazon to control what access YOU have to your favourite books. Amazon has already proven its 'culture controlling' power when it removed access to the novel 1984 from customers who had previously purchased it. This power provided by DRM technology is akin to giving a company the ability to remove everyone's Beatles albums!

For the record, there has never been a greater irony on this earth than a corporation causing denial of access to the novel 1984.

Even beyond corporations willful denial of access to art is the unfortunate but accidental ways DRM can cause customers to lose access to their purchased books. If amazon were to to suddenly experience bankruptcy and stop producing the Kindle reader, customers would lose access to their purchases once their Kindles wore out and were unable to be replaced. If all of society used Kindles rather than paper books, this would be a societal disaster akin to the bank implosions of 2007-2009.

My answer to the eBook DRM paradox- where it is a cultural necessary to limit access to media in order to ensure the continued creation of art, yet it is a cultural necessary to NOT limit access to media in case of irrevokable artistic loss and degredation of consumer freedom- is to establish a benevolent hegemony which righteously and judiciously oversees and controls the usage of DRM.

I suggest either the establishment of a government agency to be a central repository for DRM keys and DRM decryption, or some heavily regulated corporation to perform the same task. An entity similar to the public library system or Canada Post. DRM is sadly, a necessity. However it is necessary to remove the overwhelming power granted by DRM out of the control of profit interested companies.

Any thoughts?

If she only had a penny

2009-04-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

If Susan Boyle just had a penny for everyone who watched her on YouTube....

An Upgrade in RAM

2009-03-15T13:35:00.001-07:00

So I Upgraded my RAM today... 2->4 for $60bucks... not bad I thinks. Im running VMware with windows(2GB ram) and linux(1GB) right now...

All three systems are running basically as fast as when I had 2GB, however I am running 2 vms at once now... something I didn't do before. Im going to try LFS again and time what 1SBU is now that I can dedicate lots more ram to the VM:)

LFS - pt3

2009-03-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

So I restarted using EXACTLY what the LFS book says (not using up-to-date gcc or kernel) and I've gotten to the second recompilation of gcc... build broken

Im making slow but steady steps... thank god for VMware and the ability to roll back, I'd be lost without it.

Linux From Scratch - pt 2

2009-03-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

So I've started to compile binutils... time to extract(unzip) binutils is:

extract time:
real 0m18.281s
user 0m6.703s
sys 0m12.316s

time { make && make install; }:
ERROR on compile... ROLLING BACK

2nd try
problem: needed to log out-log in to lfs after setting .bashrc

extract time:
real 0m18.967s
user 0m7.1003s
sys 0m11.503s

configure time:
real 6.68s
user 1.14s
sys 3.246s

time { make && make install; }:
real 3min 1.46sec
user 1m10.925s
sys 1m45.680

Cant build glibc going to give up for today... try again later.

Linux From Scratch

2009-03-14T10:13:00.001-07:00

Im trying to install Linux from scratch on VMware Fusion. This is the first time I've done LFS so we'll see how it goes.

Right now Ive booted the LiveCD, created my partitions on /dev/sda and am in the middle of downloading all the required packages. I'll keep you up to date :)

One change to the packages Im downloading is the gcc compiler... Im downloading 4.3.3 rather than 4.3.2 as 4.3.3 is the latest stable release, command options should be the same as 4.3.2, and I'll always have this nagging desire to recompile everything with the newer gcc if I dont do this... we shall see if this is a mistake

another change is that I am going to use the 2.6.28.x kernel rather than the 2.6.27.x kernel listed.

I took a snapshot after I dled all the packages (before patches)... more in my next post

A response to "Wage Labour and Capital: Introduction"

2008-12-22T17:39:00.001-08:00

This evening I read Fredrick Engels' introduction to "Wage Labor and Capital" by Karl Marx, and I cannot wait to poke holes in Engels' theories contained within.

In the introduction, Engels gives an example of how we can can judge the cost of labour. He states

Let us assume that the money price of these means of subsistence [the cost to keep the labourer able and willing to work] averages 3 shillings a day. Our laborer gets, therefore, a daily wage of 3 shillings from his employer. For this, the capitalist lets [makes] him work, say, 12 hours a day. Our capitalist, moreover, calculates somewhat in the following fashion: Let us assume that our laborer (a machinist) has to make a part of a machine which he finishes in one day. The raw material (iron and brass in the necessary prepared form) costs 20 shillings. The consumption of coal by the steam-engine, the wear-and-tear of this engine itself, of the turning-lathe, and of the other tools with which our laborer works, represent, for one day and one laborer, a value of 1 shilling. The wages for one day are, according to our assumption, 3 shillings. This makes a total of 24 shillings for our piece of a machine.

But, the capitalist calculates that, on an average, he will receive for it a price of 27 shillings from his customers, or 3 shillings over and above his outlay.

Whence do they 3 shillings pocketed by the capitalist come? According to the assertion of classical political economy, commodities are in the long run sold at their values, that is, they are sold at prices which correspond to the necessary quantities of labor contained in them. The average price of our part of a machine – 27 shillings – would therefore equal its value, i.e., equal the amount of labor embodied in it. But, of these 27 shillings, 21 shillings were values were values already existing before the machinist began to work; 20 shillings were contained in the raw material, 1 shilling in the fuel consumed during the work and in the machines and tools used in the process and reduced in their efficiency to the value of this amount. There remains 6 shillings, which have been added to the value of the raw material. But, according to the supposition of our economists, themselves, these 6 shillings can arise only from the labor added to the raw material by the laborer. His 12 hours’ labor has created, according to this, a new value of 6 shillings. Therefore, the value of his 12 hours’ labor would be equivalent to 6 shillings. So we have at last discovered what the “value of labor” is.

“Hold on there!” cries our machinist. “Six shillings? But I have received only 3 shillings! My capitalist swears high and day that the value of my 12 hours’ labor is no more than 3 shillings, and if I were to demand 6, he’d laugh at me. What kind of a story is that?"

If before this we got with our value of labor into a vicious circle, we now surely have driven straight into an insoluble contradiction. We searched for the value of labor, and we found more than we can use. For the laborer, the value of the 12 hours’ labor is 3 shillings; for the capitalist, it is 6 shillings, of which he pays the workingman 3 shillings as wages, and pockets the remaining 3 shilling himself. According to this, labor has not one but two values, and, moreover, two very different values!

As soon as we reduce the values, now expressed in money, to labor-time, the contradiction becomes even more absurd. By the 12 hours’ labor, a new value of 6 shillings is created. Therefore, in 6 hours, the new value created equals 3 shilling – the amount which the laborer receives for 12 hours’ labor. For 12 hours’ labor, the workingman receives, as an equivalent, the product of 6 hours’ labor. We are, thus, forced to one of two conclusions: either labor has two values, one of which is twice as large as the other, or 12 equals 6!

This binary conclusion that Engels presents is the basic flaw of Marx and Engel's theories; when a customer is buying a part from the Capitalist, the customer is not simply buying the part, but she is also purchasing the service of simplifying the acquisition of said part. The Capitalist adds value to the "experience" of purchasing the part for the customer. Without the intervention of the Capitalist, the Customer would need to perform many tasks to obtain the needed part. The Customer would need to obtain access to the machinery, vet and chose potential labourers, calculate the cost of subsistence for the labourers, and transport the finished part to where it is needed. By handling these tasks, the Capitalist can justify adding his 3 shillings to the cost of the part.

Engels does not seem to understand that when a customer buys a thing, she not only buys the thing, but also buys the service involved in getting the thing to her. Thus we can now understand that there is not one single labour cost but two costs of labour added to the raw materials and deprecation value of tools. There is a "production labour" and a "service labour."

Simply put there are not two values of labour... there are two labours, each with value. Engels is wrong when he states "the working class alone produces all values." While it is true that the working class alone produces all _production_ values, the working class produces nearly none of the service values.

Even if the bourgeois Capitalist were to employ someone to manage the service labour involved in selling the part (we will call these labourers "managers"), there is still a labour associated to maintaining the management or a risk involved in neglecting them; for if the Capitalist owner does not oversee management, their business is at greater risk of failure.

Back on my feet

2008-09-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

After a terrible few weeks. Im started to get back on my feet and feeling happy. My work morale has gone up quite a lot, and superiors have started to give me a heavier work load as they see me getting better.

Sadness

2008-08-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

My Step father died today. April 10 1949 - August 28 2008. Miss you Greg.

Mom called me this morning @ 7 and told me to come to the hospital, but I didn't make it on time.

Utopia Attack Calculator Screenies

2008-07-11T20:20:00.000-07:00

Windows and Mac respectively

If you want to try out the pre-beta go here

Pre-Beta Testers for Utopia Attack Calculator

2008-07-11T19:43:00.000-07:00

Utopia Attack Calculator has seen some work put in on it... im nearly ready for some pre-beta testers.

I am looking for people who run Mac/Windows & do not have QT installed.
I am not looking for Linux users at this time.

If you are interested, please sent me an email, or comment on my blog

Please Include
Name:
Operating System:
Email Address:

You DO NOT NEED TO PLAY UTOPIA TO HELP ME! Pre-beta is just to see if there are any problems running the executables

I have the best job in the world

2008-06-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

I have the best job in the world. Last week I got moved up from a team working on "in market" devices to the team working on brand new devices. It feels like I've been called up to the NHL after a short stint in the AHL.

True I spend long hours at work, but I love every second of it!

Anywho... Im also being flown to England this coming Saturday after my Graduation... It's going to be a very busy week for me.

Seeker the Dark is Rising

2008-06-14T21:26:00.001-07:00

I would rather be raped by an elephant than have to watch that movie again.
I felt like burning my testicles to escape from the pain my eyes were suffering.

This movies only redeeming quality is that Bulimics will appreciate the after-meal regurgitation assistance provided by the cast.

-5 stars.

Qt: Utopia Attack Calculator

2008-05-31T07:12:00.000-07:00

So why have I been learning Qt... I've been learning Qt because I play an online war game called "Utopia". Utopia used to be really big with 80,000 people playing on it. On Windows a program called Utopia Angel helps players format and calculate their play.

Utopia Angel is created in a language called Delphi (which I know very little about), is completely closed source and does not run on Linux or Mac unless you use VMware or Wine. Brother Green, the main programmer for Angel has said publically that he will not be making a linux/mac port.

Anywho... Utopia is no longer as successful as when I was in highschool. About 20,000 players play the game now, and formatters aren't really as useful as the game shows you some calculations already. However its still been a goal of mine to create an Angel competitor.

Soo... without further adue here is my version 1 of the Open Source Utopia Attack Calculator (OSUAC).

I need to write some Regular Expressions to scrape the Utopia pages to do formatting... but the OSUAC already monitors the system clipboard (hack needed to be done on Linux because X doesn't share the clipboard like Windows or Aqua).

My Goals are these... To call the program a success
Users: 1000+
Community: 3+ developers, 10+ testers
Programmers must have fun developing the application

So anyway... soon I think I should go to sourceforge and figure out how to share the OSUAC... soon meaning whenever I have some spare time from work (53h last week :) )

Kscope

2008-05-25T17:49:00.000-07:00

Programmers of the world... you must try Kscope... it has most of the functionality of source insight, but isn't quite as slick.

Kscope definately gets my thumbs up (I wish it was multiplatform!!!)

More adventures in QT

2008-05-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

following an online tutorial I made the above last night using QTDesigner... it was really simple.... thats a screeny of the compiled code running.

My awesome car

2008-05-19T11:29:00.001-07:00

My awesome car gets 42mpg on the highway!

Don't be Evil

2008-05-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

**NOTE** Links here (except the slashdot link) are either really fucking disgusting or have got people killed... I DONT WANT YOU TO VISIT THEM

So I woke up today to read this on The Slashdot (the leader of the free world prefaces sites on the internets with the word "the"... I should do the same)

In short... The Google complied to Indian authorities demanding to know the IP address of someone who posted images depicting a Hindu God in a "profane" way. Of course, slashdot didn't link me to the images, so I dont know if they ARE profane or not... but that doesn't matter -- I live in a country that protects a persons inalienable right to free speech, whether that be pictures like this, pictures like this, or even pictures like this.

So the Indian authorities went to the ISP owning the IP address, arrested the man whom had the IP address. They beat this man, and made him eat shit *literally* THEY GOT THE WRONG MAN!!!

So let me sum up... The Google helped the Indian authorities arrest beat and torture a man completely innocent... even if the man wasn't innocent of what they said, the "crime" is something that is an inalienable right in The Google's Headquarters (Google is home in Mountainview California... The US is big on free speech).

Now we come to the part about ME.

I use the Google... I love(d) the Google. The Google provides the best email services/search services/and hosts this blog. I use Google services because they are premier, and better than all the rest. So what am I to do?

I've linked to images that are really really controversial (pictures of Mohammed might get me killed! Christians might shun me for linking to an image of the Virgin Mary covered in shit... Gay Pron is not well received by the masses)... is Google going to give up my IP so that I can be punished for expressing myself?

Should I boycott the Google for Doing Evil? I just dont know what I would use if not for Google.

My Hometown

2008-05-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

Pictures of my hometown... then pictures of what has become of my public school

Highway 7

2008-05-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

Drove to my parents house and took the very scenic highway 7... some pics

Ford just doesn't get it do they

2008-05-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

So on my way to work on Thursday I saw someone driving a "Ford Escape Limited" from Kanata Ford....

Think about that for a second.... a _LIMITED_ Escape from somewhere you Cannat-afford?

I want a full escape for free damnit! There are Model-Ts rolling in a junk heap somewhere.

Man Im tired

2008-05-14T18:17:00.001-07:00

left the door at 8am, got back home at 8pm.... long days are good though, cause it makes me feel needed @ work. I feel special that I was given something urgent to look at in my first 2 weeks.

My first Blackberry Pictures

2008-05-09T16:17:00.001-07:00

So now I really have a reason to blog... I'll have images:) here are the first ones

View from my living-room window

More view from living room

Creek as seen from living room

The batmobile, my awesome car (I get 35mpg!)

Where I work

Off to the distance from where I work

Batmobile in batcave

Front of my home

Pictures of my Living room

the Blackberry, the Pictures, and the Macintosh: A Bluetooth Western

2008-05-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

Howdy pardners

t'Day we gone learn 'bout taken dem der pichers on bakberr 8330, and uploo'in dem teh yer Maa'Intash.

Took me a while to figure out, but now I'm going to give you a guided tour of taking pictures on your Curve, and uploading them to your Macbook via bluetooth.

Step 1: Pair the devices
a) On 8330: Scroll to the Radio Antenna *click* -> Setup bluetooth *click* -> Allow another device to find me *click* -> OK *click -> "Waiting for a connection"

b) On Mac: Bluetooth Icon -> Setup a Bluetooth Device *click* -> Continue *click* -> Mobile Phone *click* -> continue *click* -> BlackBerry 8330 Continue *click* -> Continue *click* -> Remember NUMBERS

c) On 8330: Enter Numbers on Phone -> When "Accept connection request from " shows up make sure to click "Don't ask this again" and then YES
d) On Mac: clickthrough to finish

Step 2: Security Options on the Macbook
In System Prefs -> Sharing -> Enable Bluetooth Sharing.

Step 3: Sending the Media
On Device: Go to the media you want to send -> Send Using Bluetooth *click*
On Mac: Accept in Documents look for your media.

My adventures in QT

2008-05-08T14:51:00.000-07:00

QT seems really nifty. Cross platform GUI API+tools for C++.

Here is where my adventure starts

Bug 1: In windows, after installation you must set full permissions of the install dir for anyone wishing to invoke qmake.

Bug 2: Rather than invoking qmake as explained in most tutorials, Mac users must invoke qmake -spec macx-g++ No one told me this... but Im telling you.

Bug 3: QtWebKit requires you to manually edit the Makefile generated by the bug2 command.... perhaps you need to do more with -spec

figuring out these issues took me 2 nights work (interrupted by a couple hours of TV of course), I hope I saved you that time.

First Day at Work

2008-05-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

I had a good first day at work... of course, I do not yet have access to the source code that I will be working on (red tape), but I got lots of other admin type stuff done today.

I had a good meeting with my new manager (my old manager moved to a different team) and I feel very positive about the work I will be doing.

Of course, dont look here for any tidbits about whats going on where I work... I really cannot speak about anything related to what I do.

Ubuntu pt 3 : The VNC bug

2008-04-30T15:19:00.001-07:00

There seems to be a VNC bug. My keyboard was garbled. eg when I type asdf I get abfs.

There is a hack to fix it located @ https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/feisty/+source/vino/+bug/112955

Look for what the poster wjs writes.

Ubuntu part 2

2008-04-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Ok in this session Im going to configure essential services that I need. This includes

Firestarter - a firewall
ssh/scp - remote sessions and remote file transfer
svn for remote computers
basic http server

1) Firestarter. I already installed it, I want 1114 and 1115 for Azureus. I want 80 for webserver, 22 for SSH. 443 because I intend on putting https sometime soon. All done with an easy GUI.

2) ssh/scp. Ready from startup

3) K, I have to install svn server first. Use synaptic for subversion and subversion-tools... check, copy in a tgz I created from my old repo and do a checkout on the code... check. I have to fool around with svnserve.
Ok I created an unpriveledged user called svn and a group called svn. added my normal uname to the group and changed permissions on the repositories to 'chmod g+rx -R *' I can checkout fine, and cannot commit which my normal user... which is what I wanted

Now I want to figure out how I can submit as the svn user..... --username doesn't work like I thought. Ok... the commit plan is to co as svn 'svn svn+ssh://svn@192.168.0.1/repo change' then svn diff > patch.txt the changed work, then patch -p0 < patch.txt... after that I can commit from the change repo :)

Next step is to allow anonymous access.... inside each repo is a conf/svnserve.conf file... add the line anon-access = read.

4) Basic Http server is ready from install :)

Ubuntu 8.04

2008-04-30T09:26:00.001-07:00

My friend Cesar just asked me to continue blogging... right now Im just setting up my PCs, but in order to accommodate him, I may as well blog about what I am doing. Seeing as its Open Source stuff, I even get to make my way onto the SeneBlog (Chris Tyler's Seneca Planet).

Before I get started, let me make a plea to someone like Andrew Smith, or Cesar, or perhaps even myself to set up a Planet for the Seneca Alumni. I would like to read my friends blogs even if they are no longer specifically writing about Open Source stuff. Another plea to Andrew specifically is to keep cranking out the blog postings... I really love it when you have a new article. Grumble Grumble is my fave.

Anyway, onto installing Ubuntu 8.04. Dont be alarmed by the lack of grammar in the next few paragraphs, I write in my patented "stream of thought" method which needs no grammar.
===
I pop in the disk and get on my way... Lets check the CD to make sure there aren't any errors... OOPS 22 files are in error... lets try again -> still 22. Ok lets download a new iso (FYI: i got the first one via bittorrent... second one via http) and check that... 0 errors. Great. Lets begin the install

I speak English, I live in Ottawa... Oh Noes Ottawa isn't a city recognized by the Ubuntu installer... grumble:( Ok I guess I'll say I live in Montreal, its only 2h away.

Guided-use entire disk for my partition... erase that nasty Windows XP install. Set up my account details, and let the installer do its magic. Im actually surprised I didn't get to say which packages I wanted, but whatever.

20 minutes later... (while playing NINs new free online single Discipline)

Alright, first boot, lets see how this goes. Uname,Pword.... Hmmm something funny, the screen is at the wrong resolution. A "glxinfo | grep render" shows that direct rendering is not enabled (I have a 7600GS Nvidia card on this machine). A few seconds later a pop-up shows on my screen saying something about restricted drivers... click the button enter the password for sudo and chose to enable the nvidia card in an easy to use GUI. Machine is dling the driver, installing, and requires a reboot. After the boot the resolution is nice and glxinfo shows direct rendering, glxgears @ initial window size shows ~3000fps woohooo!

Alright, now for installing the software I want. Open up Synaptic, lets install

Sun Java JDK6
Azureus for sailing the seven seas (yarr!)
flashplugin-nonfree (the real adobe)
doxygen
apache2
php5
mysql-client & mysql-server
openssh-server
firestarter
g++

In total, there is 306MB of data to download... this may take a while. While its downloading, lets surf the Google Images for a nice background. Lookiee here, FF3.05b. Ok that was quicker than I expected. Lets go for some Gnome themes from http://art.gnome.org GlossyP is my fave, so lets install that. For login Managers I picked the Brasillinux Eye, the Gnome Zen, Devils Candy and Falling Angel (my all time fave), put them on rotate so I have a nice variety whenever I use this machine. Still 5min left for my application installs.

And there you have it... a nicely set up Ubuntu Machine in < 1.5h. Stay tuned to part2 where I configure different things:)

The Move

2008-04-24T14:43:00.000-07:00

So we loaded up the truck and moved to Beverley... Ottawa that is. Piles of Snow, Political Stars.

I've been packing and packing, and finally I've moved in to my new Condo... its f'ing sweet. A large living room, huge bedroom with walk-in closet, 2 bathrooms (one is only toilet & sink... other has bath/shower), a solarium (maybe I grow things soon?), and an office... yes I have a freaking office dude!

Hardwood floors all around, which means I have to put little felt things on all my furnature. Speaking of furniture...

I have a new couch, loveseat, and a big fluffy chair, and a 50" TV (1080i... not P) all total $2800. It was a good price for having only 2 hours to shop (had to shop for furnature on the weekend didn't have much time). I have a big Queensized bed too.

My other furniture such as the desk, the sectional, my dresser etc should be coming really really soon, once its here I will be able to complete my move:)

Good Times in the O-town.... Ohh yeah Bell Express View too -- GO HABS GO.

Last Exam

2008-04-17T15:04:00.001-07:00

Its all over but the crying. Time to move!

Schools out forever

2008-04-11T14:32:00.000-07:00

A forgiveness ... this post isn't specifically about Open Source (although mandrake and gentoo are two major actors in my tale)... i just know that my Open Source label will provide me with an audience.

Today was my last day of class -- ever. I'm remarkably sad. I may yet return to school someday, but the kindergarten -> Job lifecycle is complete for me.

This tale is about my experience with Seneca College.

I've learned a great deal with Seneca. C++, OOP, .NET, UML, DirectX, Open Source, how to integrate yourself into a business, what business wants, etc. While I'm not sure how much was curriculum, and how much was personal interest, I am definitely a programmer able to enter the work world and be productive because of the guidence Seneca has given me. Even if Seneca's curriculum did not directly educate me on all matters (eg. Seneca is in no way responsible for me knowing how to install various Linux distros on machines... perhaps the curriculum should look into this... perhaps the various install-fests are all that is needed) it certainly provided me with a good environment in which to foster my self interest.

I'm going to answer questions in this post which I should have spoken up @ a meeting I had with my schools chair & a government deputy minister.

Why did I come to Seneca all those years ago? How come I pursued a degree at a community college rather than somewhere like the UofT?

1) After working at a deposit broker for 2 years doing SQL-like procedural code, I realized how really little I understood about computers -- although I claimed to know a lot. I had just been experimenting with Mandrake Linux and Gentoo and found it so nifty... I could run a webserver on my own machine awesome!!! I could compile my own hardware kernEL AWESOME!!!

2) I needed out of my hometown. I lived with my parents in a big old country house, and life was pretty sweet. My girlfriend had a car and would come pick me up, then give me armloads of candy and we had a lot of fun. but I still needed out. I needed my own life and my own things and I was not willing to settle.

3) I knew that a University would creditialize me better, but I wanted to learn real practical things. I was not really interested in my employability, rather than what cool computer things I could do for myself. eg I want to make video games, just not necessarily for a living (although it would certainly be cool). I knew Seneca to be the best college in 'learning cool things.' The UofT degree certainly turns more heads than Seneca... but I wanted the Seneca curriculum (sans business classes)

4) One Profs website claimed he hated haircuts... I hate haircuts too, obviously I am meant for this school.

Now, there was a little bit of vanity in wanting a Degree rather than a Diploma (BSD is rather similar to the diploma offerings from Seneca... you can think of the BSD as 25% harder/longer than the CPA specialization), but I also knew that I would be more employable with the BSD.

To be honest, Im not sure if I should have. Certainly the extra difficulty brought out something more in me, and I therefore learned with more intensity... but some of the subjects of the BSD are just plain uninteresting to me. For example, I really dont care about my business classes, other than the base fundamentals, I dont particularly want a job where those skills are needed. The business classes are a major factor in BSD differentiating itself from CPA though. Perhaps I would have been happier to drop these business classes and have a more enjoyable club life. I had far too much homework for the linux club which is just hanging out with other nerds who also like linux... the social aspect would have been nice, but I've only seen my highschool buddies a double handful of times over the past 4 years I was in Toronto :( .

However I am surely making more money in the future... which is important to me NOW at the end of the journey than it was at the beginning ... because of BSD.

Thats why I came to Seneca. It seems to have been a good choice.

Anywho, I want to give a thank you to my Profs, McIntyre, Letterio, Leung, Samuel, Boychuk, Czegels, Lennon, Cullen, Adames, Norman, Onzekizologlu, Anastasiade, Roy.

I specifically want to single out three Profs

Szalwinski: For having a truely heroic work ethic, and providing a role-model image for how to get work done.

Weaver: For giving me a really, really cool job, and introducing me to mind-blowing C concepts. Allowing me to flourish as a programmer. For hating haircuts.

Humphrey: For showing me the open source way. For letting me choose between safety and dreams... twice.

Mac Keyboard Layout: Just a rambling.

2008-04-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

Went to school today without my laptop, and I used the schools desktops in Windows.

Dang I wish there was some way of converting a windows machine keyboard layout into mac keyboard layout.

If you dont know Apple uses the "cmd key" (labeled with the apple logo... similar to the key labeled with the windows logo on a normal keyboard) for pretty much everything, and for everything that doesn't use the cmd key, you can use a program like QuickSilver or Butler to do a user defined mapping.

I use these commands regularly
Cmd+Q - Quit the Appliciation
Cmd+W - Quit the current user interface/tab (doesn't close the application, but closes the GUI your currently looking at)
Cmd+R - QUICKSILVER - Start Terminal.app
Cmd+F - Find (in most apps)
Cmd+T - new tab
Cmd+Alt+Right/Left - move tabs in Firefox
Cmd+Shift+[/] - move tabs in Terminal.app (Dang this should be exact same as FF... I should Quicksilver this ... oh well Im too lazy to switch and I've memorized the motion already)
Cmd+N - New thing (like new document in Pages, or New Window in FF)
Cmd+E - QUICKSILVER - New Finder
and so on...

Most importantly, Cmd+c/Cmd+x/Cmd+v/Cmd+s for copy/cut/paste/save!

Anyway... I like the mac keyboard layout, its superior to the windows one I think... but its hard to switch back to Windows. I just wanted to complain!

The Toronto Earth Hour Failure: C3P0 says "We're Doomed"

2008-03-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, March 29, 2008 between 8-9PM was earth hour. It was a total failure.

To start, two of Canada's biggest hockey teams were playing at that time, I suspect many eyes were glued to un-switched-off-sets to watch the hometown Leafs defeat their arch rival Canadiens.

I turned off my lights and went grocery shopping during the hour... because I live in a basement which has absolutely no source of light other than electricity I would have been bumping into things constantly if I didn't. What I saw when I walked through my neighbourhood is about 50% houses with lights on... all the stores at Dufferin and Steeles had their lights on and all the streetlights were lit while I walked past.

While I disagreed with the stated goal of Earth Hour (raising awareness my butt), the reason I participated was because I believe that earth hour was a test to see if humanity could collectively get its ass together and switch off for just 1 hour a year. I viewed the occurance as a sort of Prisoners Dilemma where if we would all switch off together our human race would be saved, if people don't come together and switch off... well then we're doomed.

If you did switch off you are in the worst position, not only are you doomed, but you didn't get to see the majority of the Leafs vs Habs.

Mass Moment of Inertia

2008-03-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

the mass moment of inertia -> how hard it is to change the spin of an object.

Its not the shape that matters when spinning, its the mass that matters. If the mass is closer to the center of gravity it will spin easier because the mass isn't moving very much.

mass moment of inertia is a 2nd rank tensor. vector is rank 1 and a scalar is rank 0. We express as a 3x3 matrix.

Bunch of formula for normal objects.

moment of inertia = matrix * angular access

Safari 100% on Acid3

2008-03-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

My latest Safari trunk is at 100 on the acid3 tests (+8)
Firefox is still at 71 (0).

Use the Force

2008-03-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

Impulse Force : a non-continuous force. Happens in an instantaneous amount of time... infinitely small.
Body Force: is a force which occurs on an object over a non-instantaneous amount of time

DPS912 Semaphores; Shared Memory: Message Ques

2008-03-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Semaphores

Have to do with synchronizing processes (threads have their own method of synch)
Sometimes you have to serialize the access to shared resources
Unix semaphores are known as system V Semaphores (as opposed to BSD Semaphores which are used in threads)

"protect a critical section" - any section of code which could have a race condition.

See "Critical section example from Les' notes

P - V: P = wait for resource ... V = signal when finished with resource

Shared Memory

normally different processes have completely different memory areas... but doing IPC is expensive and hard.... thus shared memory.

shared memory is much like semaphores... shared memory should use semaphores to serialize and synchronize.

Message Queues

Efficient and easy method of sending messages to unrelated processes

Message Queues, Shared Memory, and Semaphores all work similarly.

DPS906 Lecture March 19

2008-03-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

displacement = velocity * time (if there is no acceleration over time)
displacement = velocity * time + 1/2accel*time*time

what we are missing is a justification for the velocity. We do not have a reason for velocity right now.

Causes of Motion
Kinetics
Mass - amount of matter OR amount of resistance to change in motion.
- stationary things are in motion, with a velocity of 0.
Mass is a scalar... no direction
Additive... if a thing is made out of different parts, you can simply add them together to get the mass of the whole thing.

Centroid is the geometric center of a 3d object. The centroid is the center of mass for objects with uniform density.

For objects that do not have uniform density the center of mass must be calculated.

To find the center of mass for a non-uniform dense object...
- pick some point as a reference (it doesn't matter where),
- From that reference point, create vectors to each of the centers of mass of the components.
- center of mass of whole = (m1*v1 + m2v2) / m1+m2

Newtons Laws
1) Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
2) The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors (as indicated by their symbols being displayed in slant bold font); in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.
3) For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

force = mass * acceleration something

New Acid3 Tests

2008-03-18T13:51:00.000-07:00

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE!

I just reran the Acid3 tests on my own personal builds of webkit and firefox. Improvements in both Webkit and Mozilla:)

Safari-Trunk: 92 (+2)
Firefox-Trunk: 71 (+2)

Keep up the good work guys:)

UPDATE: Safari has just released v3.1 which has 75 tests passed (+36 from previous version!)

Raising Awareness

2008-03-15T01:30:00.000-07:00

I just read an article from theStar. about Earth Hour. On march 29th, 2008.

You know... Im not sure how I feel about this. The goal of Earth Hour is to "Raise Awareness of Global Warming"

I like the idea of the entire city going black for an hour... even if its just the spookyness factor, but Seriously, is there anyone unaware of global warming?

Why do we have so many events to raise awareness for things like cancer, global warming, heart failure... blah blah blah. Do we really need to 'raise awareness?' could we not do something better with our time?

So anyway yeah, I am really really tempted to go to this event and walk up to people and say "OMG are you SERIOUS... I've never heard of this global warming! WE have to get scientists to look into this!" "WHAT OJ KILLED HIS WIFE.... NO WAY! Im stunned, he was such a great running back."

SVN Timelapse FTW

2008-03-15T00:26:00.001-07:00

Its 3am and I cannot sleep. I've been working for a few hours on my DPS912 code... the writing of a shell, and I think I am pretty much done. My post tonight isn't going to be about my code assignment though, this post is about SVN and SVN time-lapse.

I've been using svn to keep track of all my coding assignments this semester because I didn't want to go through the anguish of making code mistakes and not be able to revert myself to a previous working copy... something which happens to me a lot if I dont use a code repository. I've gotten pretty good at using svn on the command line now, but I've found a really nice little tool to use with SVN

The tool is called SVN Time Lapse, and is GPL v2, so it can be used by anyone. What SVN Time Lapse allows you to do is look through your code seeing the changes that have been made from revision to revision. Its akin to the amazing p4 diff that comes with perforce.

Here are some screenies

NOTE: the code browsed is from my assignment... please do not steal this code as it is not Open Source and I can get severely penalized if people take my code and use it for themselves.

FUCK OFF ITUNES!

2008-03-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

I am now getting an error message 2ce a week when I start up iTunes. Its fixed by deleting a few files from my iTunes directory and re-importing all my stuff... BUT ITS BLOODY ANNOYING

FUCK OFF APPLE.... quit shipping me buggy versions of itunes.

<- NO IT WASN'T!

DPS906: Angular Motion

2008-03-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Spinning motion

Angular Displacement
- change in orientation, rather than a change in position.
- is a change in the rotation matrix
- DELTA-R = FINAL-R - INIT-R (^r=r-r0)

Angular Velocity
- Euler says you can describe angular motion as the rotation around a vector. This vector is a separate axis to X,Y,Z.
- The magnitude of the vector describes the speed of the spin

BTS830 Lecture

2008-03-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

Previous methods of analysis have been based on timevalue of money. (very objective)

Cost benefit does some of the objective work, but also examines the subjective values.

Goes beyond ROI and helps decision makers consider the value-added benefits. Involves the estimateion and evalutiona of the net benefits associated with alternative courses of action

Reply to the Moz Cause

2008-03-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

Mark Paruzel talks about the recent acid3 tests in his latest blog entry. His entry prompted me to try out my various browsers on the acid3.

I looked at firefox 2.0.0.12 (latest release)
a trunk firefox build I do myself
Safari 3.0.4 (latest release)
a trunk Webkit build I do myself.

Firefox Release = 52 tests passed (same as AA report)
Safari Release = 39 tests passed (same as AA report) -- this explains Mark's bad experiences with Safari
Firefox Trunk =69 tests passed (same as AA report)
Safari Trunk = 90 test passed (same as AA report)

I cannot claim to how verifiable these tests are, I do not run Safari (either build) very much, so I haven't seen very many problems. The "Web Standards Project group" have been around for 10 years now though.

Both Firefox and Safari have meta bugs for Acid3 showing that these two development teams find it worth while to check against acid3.

DPS906 Note

2008-03-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

Velocity = distance / time;
distance = velocity * time;
accel = velocity / time;

Ghosts and the Creative Commons

2008-03-06T14:35:00.000-08:00

Nine Inch Nails (NIN) has just released a new 4 disc album titled "Ghosts." All the tracks are copyright using the Creative Commons licence. Share and Share alike.

If you are unaware, NIN was one of the biggest (one man) bands of the 90s, releasing songs such as Closer, and Head like a Hole. NIN was damn popular back then. Trent Reznor, the main ingredient of NIN has continued to work on new projects this decade with varying success. NINs new albums all sell well and are loved by fans, but his songs are rarely played on the radio and dont usually make it into "top 20s" lists.

Though NIN rarely makes the charts... its music is definitely pop and is by no stretch of the imagination "underground."

NIN/Trent Reznor has recently left his record label, and Ghosts is the first released album post-interscope. Released under the Creative Commons license (go ahead... give your buddy all the tracks) Ghosts is a collection of NINstrumentals. Combining various mechanical sounding noises together with more traditional instruments such as pianos or plucked violins, NINstrumentals are some of Trents more haunting and touching tracks.

None of the tracks have lyrics, perfect for studying to.

Ghosts is good, dont get me wrong. But I feel as though I have already heard this album. The songs are all original, but it sounds to me like Trent & crew are recycling the mechanical sounds created for previous albums, reshaping them. My favourite tracks are 14,16, and 32.

Does anyone else think this of the new album?

Anyway the important thing of this whole ordeal is that it seems like Trent has made a fortune because of his new method of music distribution. The album ghosts is released in several 'value added' packages. Ranging from $300 where you get vinyl records, Blu-Ray disc for sampling, and a book, to .... well free of charge without any added bonuses (NIN website offers the first nine tracks of the album, but I'm sure you know someone on the interwebs who has bought the album and is willing to give it to you for free). Reports all over the internet say that the limited edition $300 package has completely sold out in 2 days (2500 total copies = $750,000).

Its good to see that the idea of moving away from record companies which have gouged the public for years with $20 CDs seems to work for Popular bands like NIN and Radiohead... Its even better to know that an album released under the Creative Commons has made so much money.