libzdl

Developing software for ZDL usually requires a lot of repetitive code, which includes the configuration parser. On my slow but sure quest to work on ZDL Sidekick, I’m working on the libzdl project, aimed at removing some of the hard work required to make a port of ZDL. Written in C++, it takes an input stream, and writes to an output stream, it can resolve variables, do certain translations, and provide virtual sections and lines. I’m also looking into the possibility of implementing a tiny SQL parser.

RIP Chris, Nick, and Troy

Last weekend, two separate incidents took the lives of three people from my home town:

Suddenly, as the cause of a motor vehicle accident, Corey Bates, age 21, of Amherst passed away on Sunday, August 19, 2007.

Born in Orangeville, ON, he was a son of James (Ruthanne) Bates, Orangeville, ON and Kathy (Ron Lake) Bates, Amherst, NS.

After graduating Amherst High School, Corey went on to study Civil Engineering Technology at N.B.C.C.. He enjoyed all sports, especially hockey and baseball. Corey was captain for the Parrsboro Junior C Hockey Team and played Slow Pitch for the “Bunch of Guys” Softball team. His circle of friends were near and dear to his heart.

In addition to his parents, he will be deeply missed by his maternal great grandmother Charlotte McEachern, River Hebert East, paternal grandmother Joan Bates, Orangeville, ON, maternal grandfather Fred Cole, Amherst, maternal grandmother Janie Cashel, Amherst; brothers Jamie and Kyle Bates; step-brothers; Tyler and Shane Lake; cousins, Kevin and Stephanie Ankner, Orangeville, ON, Tristan and Jason Amos, Amherst, Winter and Destiny Sharpe, Chaston and Dawson Button, all of Orangeville, ON; and several aunts and uncles.

Arrangements have been entrusted to the Furlong~Jones Funeral Home 70 Church St., Amherst, NS (902-667-8777). Visiting hours will take place at the Furlong~Jones Chapel on Wednesday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 pm. The funeral service will take place at the First Baptist Church, Victoria St., Amherst on Thursday, August 23, 2007 at 2 pm, Rev. Mitchell Lewis officiating. Burial will follow in the Amherst Cemetery.

Those wishing to make a donation in Corey’s memory may do so to the Amherst Y.M.C.A, the I.W.K Children’s Hospital, or the charity of your choice.

Nicholas Franklin Merrill age 20, of Amherst passed away suddenly on Sunday, August 19, 2007.

Born Amherst, he was the beloved son of Ian and Brenda (Lee) Merrill.

He was a graduate of Amherst Regional High School and had attended Compu College in Moncton. Nick loved sports, especially hockey and played for the Parrsboro Junior C. He played baseball and was a member of the Bunch of Guys slow pitch team in Amherst. Nick was very athletic and spent much of his time working out, playing tennis, jogging and was a coach for a local soccer team. He worked with his Dad in the family business. Nick was a good person who loved life and had many friends and was loved by all who knew him. He was very proud of his new nephew and loved being uncle Nick.

Nick is survived by one sister Cherie at home, nephew Evan Nicholas, maternal grandfather Norman Lee and his wife Betty of Amherst, two aunts Sherri (Gilles) Quesnel of Moncton and Jean (David) Harrison of Amherst, five uncles Timmy and Jonathan Lee of Moncton and David Lee of Amherst, Steve (Maureen) Merrill of Moncton and Jeff (Joyce) Merrill of Shubenacadie and many cousins.

He is predeceased by his paternal grandparents Frank and Irene Merrill his maternal grandmother Geraldine Lee.

Visitation will be held on Tuesday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. from Campbell’s Funeral Home, 98 Church St., Amherst .Funeral service will be held on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at 11 a.m. from First Baptist Church, Amherst with Rev. Byron Corkum and Rev. Charlie and Karen Cross officiating.

Interment will take place in the Amherst Cemetery.

Donations in Nick’s memory may be made to the Cumberland YMCA or charity your choice.

Troy Jason Alain aged 17 years of Maccan, Cumb. Co., passed away on Saturday, August 18, 2007 in Caledonia, Queens Co., N. S. Born in Amherst, he was a son of Remi Alain of Stanwood, Michigan and Bonnie (Tipping) Alain of Maccan.

Troy was a Junior member of the River Hebert Fire Dept and past member of the Cadet Corp. He had a passion for cooking and enjoyed his job as cook at Jungle Jim’s, Amherst. He also enjoyed hockey games, Youth Group, small engine repair, camping, dances, his family and friends.

He is survived by his sister, Tracy (Matthew Crawley) Alain of Maccan; paternal grandmother, Yvette Goulet of New Richmond, Quebec; several aunts, uncles and cousins.

He was predeceased by his paternal grandfather, Dominique Alain and maternal grandparents, Frank and Daisy Tipping.

Visitations will be held 2 - 4 & 7 - 9 Today in A. H. Brown Funeral Home, Springhill, from where the Funeral Service will be held 2:00 pm Wednesday, August 22, 2007 with Mrs. Shelley Trenholm officiating. Burial in Hillside Cemetery, Boar’s Back Road, Cumb. Co., N. S.

Chris and Nick was in a car accident on the Tyndal Road, just outside of Amherst, Nova Scotia, and Troy drown after a late night swimming accident.

RIP Guys. Only the good die young.

Death Sky of evil!

Because the state of California is on fire, the skies over my head can get pretty gnarly. Friday was perhaps the worst I’ve seen it.
Check it out: (No GIMP-ing here)

Normally it’s just a dark|light gray. Friday it’s like the apocalypse.

Amarok Hates me

Well, I’ve historically (tried) to use Amarok for my music playing needs in Ubuntu. Sometimes, for no reason, when I’m interacting with the UI, it just crashes, and pops up a kMail e-mail asking me to send the developers an e-mail. I just tried it 3 times, and all the 3 times didn’t get through 2 songs without it crashing. I even upgraded from 1.4.5 to 1.4.7, changed my package manager to let me use “unsupported” updates, etc. Read on to see the backtrackes.
Continue reading Amarok Hates me…

Playing with Blender

I’ve always wanted to try 3D art, so I sat down and played with Blender for a few hours and made this:

It really needs a texture, but I couldn’t make one that looked halfway decent.
I might try to chop it in half later.

EDIT: Someone in the comments wanted the file so here it is. I made a lot of different renders of this thing so I’m not sure what state it was in when I last saved it. I don’t have Blender anymore (Curse you ATI!) so I can’t check.

As far as creating it goes, I made a line with a few verts and did the “spin” thing. The leaf was trickier, I just deformed a cube and added some verts. That’s about as good as I ever got. Think the blender guys will invite me for one of their movie projects?

Real ID, RFID.

After watching the video, where they talk about the (American) gov’t watching everything you do, to me, it sounds more and more like communism, in that everything, the (American) gov’t can control everything that the people do. Definitely not a good thing. First net neutrality, Real ID, RFID tags, and more. They’re using the media (CNN, FOX) like the old soviet propaganda machine.

IDE!

Ok, well most of you know I work in Eclipse at work for several, highly specialized reasons. Outside of work, I will not touch Eclipse with a ten foot pole for coding in C. Why? CDT sucks. In Linux, I use a terminal and gEdit, and in Windows I use MSVC.

At work, me working on a project involves editing the files, and then going to the target platform and compiling there (running make). This is hardly “integrated”. I can’t even debug (very easily). Trust me, it’s a lot easier to stick my home projects on gdb than it is to stick the vm on gdb (not that it can’t be done, it’s just that it’s so large).

Anyways, I haven’t written anything in a while, and I felt like a rant. Enjoy!

ZDLSharp Shift in Focus

I know, I know, ZDLSharp 3.0.5.0 offers a lot of features that you all really want. But first, I need to write some semi-related code. I’ve been starting on ZDL Sidekick, a cross platform console and GUI based ZDLSharp configuration launcher. It doesn’t offer the same GUI features of ZDLSharp, but will be cross platform (wx or console based) to provide everybody with access to ZDLSharp files.

There are some unique challenges that I proposed for ZDLSharp in the future, and required for ZDL Sidekick. Firstly, a non-destructive configuration reader. I’ve already started work on that, and it’s going really smoothly. I’m bringing in a few new features in ZDL Sidekick, like an enhanced ZDL configuration format called Extended ZDL Configuration. I’m going to try my best to provide backwards and forwards compatibility with ZDL, which should prove to be a challenge.

better than you could imagine

I just want to take a few minutes to go over my experience so far using the iPhone as a computer. There’s something special about me posting this try to see if you can figure it out before I’m done okay?

For starters using the iPhone as digital media center is really nice. Playing music movies or podcasts work just as well as on a computer. Actually, I prefer it to my computer. Obviously it can’t hold as much but it holds my while laptop library so its not too bad really.

Using it for email or the web is also fantastic as ive already said. And by that I don’t mean good for a mobile device I mean good all around. Everything looks way sharper on the screen vs any other display I’ve ever used before. But why it really shines for tjose tasks is that you can (and will) take everywhere you go. Typing is nearly flawless and althought there is no tactile feedback its not really a problem at all. Not for me at least

If you haven’t figured it out by now I’m posting this from the iPhone. Its pretty slick.

Namaste.

more news about that gizmo

Yeah so it’s been a few days with the iPhone, it’s still quite incredible. This is usually the time when I say I’ve gotten used to a new device/computer but I was used to it within seconds, so nothing to report about adjustments.

I finally got the wifi working last night. There were two problems: One, I was entering the wep password as a passcode, not as hex (which it required I guess. This could be a little clearer in the UI) and also there’s a tremendous lack of wifi in this city (Ottawa). Maybe it’s like that in most big cities, and it’s probably because I’m pampered in my hometown of Fredericton. For those of you who don’t know, Fredericton was the first city in North America to have FREE city-wide wifi. Yep, about 2 or 3 years ago we got it. Itty bitty Fredericton. Anyway, it’s all downtown, in the malls, etc. It’s everywhere, and it’s free. It’s really nice for taking your laptop to a coffeeshop or whatnot. Back to my point, Ottawa is lacking in that department. So the only place I can reliably get wifi is in my house. It’s not really too big of a deal, but still it would be nice to get it anywhere. Or to use Edge.

Speaking of that, I never elaborated on my phone’s locked status. I’m sure most of you know, but many people have been asking me: can I use it as a phone? No, I can not get phone service on it yet. It is currently locked to AT&T. The iPhone Dev Wiki is hard at work trying to get it unlocked, so hopefully that will be soon. When they do, I’ll be able to sign up with Rogers. But still, data is going to be a BITCH. Canada has the worst data rates in the world (we’re behind Rawanda). But that’s for another post some other time.

Using my iPhone with the internet however has shown me that the future of computing is mobile. Think of what most users use there computers for..Music, watching movies, chat, emails, and general surfing. I can do ALL of that on my iPhone. And it works beautifully. I even have a tabbed browser. I don’t feel at all crippled, and I’m a POWER user. Typing is pretty excellent actually. Typing on msn, I’m actually better on it than I am a computer (because it autocorrects my spelling and I can type pretty damn fast on the thing). Browsing the web is a treat, as is email. All in all, if Jason the power user can fill 80% of his needs with a mobile device, you better bet yer ass that “normal” people can as well. That leaves laptops as an intermediary, and deskptops as the driving [serving] force behind the scenes. Maybe I’ll elaborate on that later.

Namaste