Diddymus

New home for Blog

Thu, 11 Now 2004 21:45:00 GMT

Please note this blog has now moved and can be found at either http://www.codecrafterstudio.com/blog/index.vc or http://diddymus.is-a-geek.net/blog/index.vc

If you are using the RSS feed please update to pull from either http://www.codecrafterstudio.com/blog/feed.xml or http://diddymus.is-a-geek.net/blog/feed.xml

New v-creator release, VIA CLE266 DRI working

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 21:30:00 BST

After quite a delay v-creator has finaly come out of limbo and v1.2-pre7 has been released. Anyone using a previous pre release is encouraged to upgrade as a lot of work has gone into this versions fixing and enhancing many features.

The other main development is that I have finaly managed to get DRI working on my VIA M10000 Nehemiah mini-itx board with a 2.6.8 kernel and latest Debian testing :) It's not perfect, for example running the lament screen saver shows terrible artifacts when the surfaces animate and neverball is unplayable. However Unreal Tournament (the original version) works fine as do Xine and MPlayer.

To get it working I used the kernel module CVS code from the DRI project on sourceforge with a minor change to via.h changing the DRIVER_MAJOR, DRIVER_MINOR and DRIVER_PATCHLEVEL from 2,0,2 to 1,2,0 to fix a DRM version problem between DRM in the kernel and code from the CVS. The other files used were from VIA's CLE266 Lite Binary download at viaarena. From the download only libGL.so.1.2, libdri.a and libglut.so.3.7.0 were used from the DRI folder. Happily a recompile of XFree86 was NOT required!

Lots of bits

Sat, 03 Oct 2004 17:30:00 BST

Wow, didn't realise it had been so long since my last entry :(

So what have I been doing? Well my daughter has just started 'big' school and for the first three weeks has been going part time to get used to it. So I've had two weeks holiday and a week working from home to take her and bring her home. From Monday she will be going full time and I'll be back at work.

I did have plans for stuff I wanted to do or work on during my time off but nothing really happened, in fact I have no idea where the time went which is a shame. I know some of it I was still working, which I kind of expected. I also spent quite a bit of time helping out JJ to rebuild his machine. He also runs a mini-itx system and had a PCI graphics card in it instead of using the builtin chipset. One morning he fires up the machine and the fan on the card is making a terrible noise, so he removes it planning on using the builtin chipset for a while - and promptly kills the 2.5" drive in it for no reason :( Now how annoying is that?

On a brighter note I've been playing with the evaluation download of Zend Studio for my PHP work. Before now I've been using LinCVS for cvs stuff but also as a mini launch center for Vim, tkdiff and the other tools I use. Switching to Zend Studio for a while has been interesting. It works very well and my productivity has gone up quite a bit, however it's cvs intergration is still a little lacking. Apart from that I love it, I even got JJ to switch from Eclipse with the PHPEclipse plugin for a while to try it. Next week when I get back to work we are going to actually order two licences we have been so impressed!

For people following v-creator things are a little bit in limbo while some issues are being sorted out but a new release is due as soon as things are worked out.

Freezes and Lockups

Sat, 04 Sep 2004 14:30:00 BST

Well it's seems I've found out what is causing my main machine to lockup/freeze. It's because I was running cpufreq to dynamically throttle the CPU based on CPU usage :( In case it helps anyone else the system locked up running kernels 2.6.7 and 2.6.8.1 on a VIA Nehemiah 1Ghz (cpu family 6, model 9, stepping 3) on a VIA EPIA M10000 board.

Stopping the cpufreqd deamon and just running at a constant speed seems to have solved the problem and restored stability. However this is a nuisance as the system runs 24x7 and having it idle at the lower speed was very handy. Don't have the time to go digging for a solution at the moment but if I get any updates on this I'll let people know...

sigh

Sat, 28 Aug 2004 12:30:00 BST

Thought I'd better blog seeing as it's been about 2 weeks since my last entry.

Some readers may remember me saying about Richard Bartle a while ago and I also mentioned his story 'In Sight In flames'. Well he now has a PDF version of the story you can download as well! :) Both the HTML and PDF can be found at http://www.youhaventlived.com/isif/isif.htm If you notice any problems with the PDF version then please let me know.

Now for some reason my main home machine keeps locking up :( No idea why - yet - but it's a real pain. It's the little VIA EPIA M10000 in the Travla C134 case I've mentioned before.

Speaking of pain, I've currently got a problem with my teeth :( Easy to sort out? No. I'm on a month long NHS waiting list with a dentist. While on the waiting list and not actually assigned to a dentist they will neither see me nor help me. NHS dentists that are still taking patients are VERY rare to find. Of course it is also a bank holiday weekend. Trouble is is this an 'emergency'? For example I'm fine now - no problem. Last night my jaw was killing me, giving me a headache and making me feel ill. Today nothing! Gah!

Ouch! :(

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 16:00:00 BST

People do stupid things - stupid things happen to people.

Last night I thought I'd pop over the road to the local village shop. Nothing amazing, usually back indoors within 5-10 minutes without incident. Not this time though. It was about 10pm and dark, I crossed the road and tripped over the curb on the far side and went crashing down.

I landed heavly on my right knee taking some skin off. Put my hands out to save myself - more skin lost off of the palms of my hands, over streached and pulled the finger muscles in the right hand. Rolled to the left landing heavly on my shoulder wrenching the muscles, more skin - upper arm and shoulder. Finally managed to smack my head on the ground before ending my very poor gymnastic display.

Picked myself up - a little dizzy and smarting all over from grazes and sprains - and went into the shop. Went home - 'Hi dear... guess what ...'

Some time later I'd clean myself up, picked all the tiny bit's of gravel out of my arm and hands and was still smarting like crazy. I then sat around feeling sorry for myself and trying not to let clothing touch the grazed and raw skin. The worst part was sleeping - I sleep on my left side *sigh*.

v-creator 1.2-pre6 released

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:00:00 BST

v-creator version 1.2-pre6 has now been released and is available for download via sourceforge :)

Yes - this should have been pre5 but I forgot to regenerate the documentation until I had already tagged everything in the CVS. I could have removed the tag and redone everything but descided to go with a pre6 instead just to confuse people :(

v-creator 1.2-pre4 released

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 10:00:00 BST

v-creator version 1.2-pre4 has now been released and is available for download via sourceforge :)

Firewall upgrade, v-creator updates

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 18:45:00 BST

Finally got around to upgrading my firewall an installing the DFE-580TX which is a D-Link 4 port NIC. Very nice little card and appears to be working very well under linux using the sundance driver. Some people have asked questions about it and for some details on it hence the link to my favorite mini-ITX supplier :) Just a shame they were out of stock when I really needed to order it :(

v-creator is now being pushed more and more which is nice. For instance a few issues came to light last week when implementing a very complex security setup (in the user access level/groups security sense). This has resulted in SEC tags now being able to use nested tags such as |{SEC:|{DATA:current_level}|}| and SEC/SEND constructs can now also be nested such as:

   |{SEC:USER_GROUP}|
      |{SEC:ADMIN}|
         : stuff for admins only (which are in the user group)
      |{SEND}|
      : stuff for users in the user group or above
   |{SEND}|

A problem was also highlighted in the implementation of the quickExitPath logic. This should halt processing of the current page for things like the URL tag which redirects to another page and so processing the rest of the current page is a pointless waste of resources. However if the URL tag was in an included file (using the INCL tag) the quickExitPath request was not propagated up through the various levels. This is now all fixed and working well, as a side effect there is also a small performance increase as well. All these updates should be made available Monday morning as version 1.2-pre4.

v-creator urgent update

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:30:00 BST

Spent most of this weekend debugging and fixing problems in v-creator which I had introduced in 1.2pre2 related to the new cache code :( After the best part of 2 days work 1.2-pre3 has just been packaged and released and looks much healthier.

Also this morning I recieved a nice new DFE-580TX which is a D-Link 4 port NIC. This is going in my firewall so that I can setup a proper DMZ for a webserver which I can run my blogging system on (See last blog entry for my ranting on this). Just need to find the time to upgrade the firewall box, sort out the firewall rules, setup the webserver and write the new blogging system *sigh*.

Just stuff...

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 19:05:00 BST

Another once a week Sunday blogging, why is that? I guess it's because writing a new entry is a bit of a pain at the moment. I edit the XML feed using Vim, then push it through xsltproc to generate the HTML version. I then push them to a local server to check the XML and HTML versions are ok, commit them to CVS (the whole website is under CVS control) and then finally FTP the blog to my site and check the live XML and HTML. Bleugh!!! what a mess :( I have plans for an easier system, all web based using v-creator. I just need to get my other server online and get the code crafter's studio up and running (currently still has a dead site up).

In other news I need to do a new v-creator release. During the week I managed to do some hacking on it and have made some substantial performance improvements. This will probably go up as 1.2-pre2. Should make some people happy. Oh, there is also a new website up for v-creator at www.v-creator.com

Lastly I've been chatting with Richard Bartle, of MUD fame who I mentioned in my blog a few weeks ago. A minor point but what with doing WolfMUD and everything I had to mention it! :)

WolfMUD update!

Sun, 11 Jul 2004 16:00:00 BST

As mentioned on the WolfMUD site I've finally updated the version of WolfMUD the official servers are running! I delayed on this due to the exceptional uptime of over 3000 hours (well I thought it was quite good anyway!).

The official servers can now be reached at the easier location of diddymus.is-a-geek.net instead of chasing a dynamic IP address at last.

New v-creator release

Sun, 11 Jul 2004 14:55:00 BST

Didn't get around to doing this Friday but Friday v-creator v1.2-pre1 was put up on source forge. There are quite a few bug fixes and new features so feedback would be welcome. For v-creator specific things please use diddymus @ users.sourceforge.net.

Power cuts, iBooks and Spellbinder

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 19:00:00 BST

Due to bad weather there was a powercut at home yesturday which explains why my machines stopped talking to me at work. 2 hours or so later power was back and everything except my desktop came back to life and started talking to me again. The desktop not recovering was my fault as the BIOS action as to what to do after a power loss was set to off :(

On a happier note my new power adapter for the iBook arrived yesturday! Now some info to help others who have to order a new adapter: The power adapter I had was model M8482 (45 Watt), the one from the Apple site was M8942 (65 watt). If you call the order line they will not be able to find M8482 as it has been discontinued and replaced by M8942. The fun and games I had trying to find that out :(

I was looking for something on the Web (forget what) and came across a page describing Spellcast for X. Having played a few dueling games like Magic The Gathering and Dragon Dice I was intrigued. However the link to the paper and pencil version was broken so I googled for it and found Richard Bartle's page on it (He developed the origonal paper and pencil version). This has a link to an article were Spellbinder was called Waving Hands that was written after Richard gave permission for the rules to be published. On Richard's page I aso found a story inspired by Spellbinder written by Richard called 'INsight flames' which I am currently enjoying!

Oh dear, oh dear :(

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 19:30:00 BST

Today has not gone well. For starters I took out my iBook plugged everything in and ... no power from the power adapter. Checked and rechecked ... nothing. Tried it with a friends iBook ... nothing. Looks like it has died :( Actually I suspect there is a break in the thin wire from the 'brick' to the laptop plug. So ordered another at a cost of £70! Ouch! :(

Spent the day feeling ill and unproductive. Worst thing is it's one of those I feel ill but can't put my finger on why but I feel queezy feelings. At least those type of feelings are usually short lived (hours) and cured by a night's sleep *crosses fingers*.

If you are wondering about no blogging for the last week ... everything was mostly quiet and boring :)

WolfMUD and Eclipse 3.0

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 01:55:00 BST

I've just managed to download, install and play with the new Eclipse 3.0 which is odd as I thought it wasn't available until the 30th?

After about the 10th attempt I actually managed to import the WolfMUD server CVS module into the workspace and ran it. There still seems to be some rough edges to this if the original CVS module was not started using Eclipse and you want to bring it into the workspace as a Java Project :( Not sure what I did now to get it to work but I still have the Builder to bring in so I'll pay more attention when I do.

All in all a very nice IDE for Java and other programming as well :) I always liked IBM's VisualAge for Java and switched to the Application Developer's Workbench (IBM's commercial version of Eclipse or it was?).

It's a shame I don't really program in Java much any more apart from WolfMUD (which recently has been seldom) as I loved the language and was told I was quite skilled in it *blush*. Now everything is PHP, HTML and SQL which is a far cry from a year or so ago when everything I did was a mix of Java, SQL, JDBC, JNI, EJBs, Application Servers, JSP, Servlets, and XML and the rest of it...

What has become of me and where am I going now? :(

v-creator 1.1 released, VIA mini-itx tweaking

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 20:15:00 BST

v-creator 1.1 has been released on sourceforge.

There are no new updates between version 1.1-pre3 and 1.1.

In other news I've just put linux kernel 2.6.7 on my main desktop which is a tiny VIA EPIA M1000 Mini-ITX in a Travla C134 case. Very tiny and very sweet system. With the new kernel I can now use Longhaul CPU frequency scaling without having to monkey around and so far it's working well. I use it with cpufreqd which automatically switches the CPU frequency based on the CPU load.

v-creator 1.1-pre3 released

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 19:55:00 BST

v-creator 1.1-pre3 has been released on sourceforge.

I was hoping that this would actually be v1.1 but alas it was not to be :( This release fixes some whitespace problems in the form module and adds a new usability feature to the date module. I also remembered to update the reference documentation this time :)

While I am blogging about v-creator a quick plea! If you are reading this and do anything with PHP/MySQL/Apache please consider taking a look and providing some feedback. Even though this is quite a mature project and it has been used inhouse for over a year for many projects it has only recently been released to the 'community'. I have no idea so far how it is being received, if the quick start guide is adequate or anything! So if you have a little idle time maybe you would consider contributing some of it to a worthy cause? Any comments and feedback greatly appreciated. If you need help any help with v-creator then please ask! diddymus @ users.sourceforge.net

v-creator 1.1-pre2 released

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 23:25:00 BST

Just a quick post to say v-creator 1.1-pre2 has been released on sourceforge.

If there are no problems found then this will become version 1.1 with no further changes.

I HATE Bugs!

Sat, 19 Jun 2004 17:27:00 BST

No, I'm not talking about software bugs which can be an annoyance or a challenge to fix. No, I'm not even talking about little critters. What I am talking about are tiny, teeny weeny microbes, bacteria and virus :(

So, Tuesday night I'm busy working and all of a sudden I get a runny nose. No big deal, delt with with a hankie. Then it keeps on running and running and won't stop! Amazing! From nothing to a full blown cold in seconds it seems :( So Wednesday I drag myself into work with the plan of not giving in and just working my way through it. Plenty of tissues later I make it to the end of the day. However Thursday I don't get to work and just stay in bed sleeping nearly all day. Friday comes and I just have a few sniffles and a headache left, so back to work again.

On a brighter note I descided to renew the codecrafterstudio.com domain I have. It still hosts a long dead site but I have a few ideas and plans which I hope to put into action. As soon as I do I'll post some info :)

v-creator 1.1-pre1 released

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 19:45:00 BST

Just a quick post to say v-creator 1.1-pre1 has been released on sourceforge.

2am already? ... and WolfMUD?

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 02:10:00 BST

*Yawn* yup, actually just gone 2am :(

Right then a tiny little bit of WolfMUD news :) The demo servers I currently run (which, yes, I need to update) can now be found easily! They are at diddymus.is-a-geek.net ports 4001 and 4002. If I remember I'll update the server pages and put out some news on wolfmud.org tomorrow (later this morning...).

In other news - plenty of work on v-creator. A couple of minor bug fixes and some new features. Looks like we are about ready for a v1.1 release or at least a v1.1-pre1. Still have quite a bit of work on the new release of the user guide so it looks like that will have to wait for v1.2 :(

No, tuesday wasn't any hotter than Monday...

Far too hot!

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 18:45:00 BST

I've no idea what the temperature got upto today but it's been HOT! It's now 6:45pm and there is a cool breeze which is nice - still 77f/25c though ... and tomorrow is ment to be hotter :(

The weekend was nice as well, even though I spent most of it inside on the computer doing documentation for v-creator. I did get out Saturday evening to do some BBQ bits and Sunday to mow the front lawn...

Saturday night was interesting: Drank far too much coffee, crashed on the sofa, laptop out working on v-creator while watching Buffy on DVD. 3am-ish decided to call it a day.

A little bit of code = the HTML Blog

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 18:40:00 BST

I've had some people asking for an HTML version of the Blog. So I've done it and it's available at http://www.btinternet.com/~wolfmud/feed.html.

I'm still editing the main XML by hand so I just used a few tools to automatically generate the HTML version. First some XSLT to turn the XML into XHTML. This I then run through xsltproc to apply the XSLT to the XML and generate XHTML. Then I have to fix the HTML entities so I run the XHTML through sed to quickly fix them. My XSL skills are somewhat limited so I couldn't manage everything in the XSL :(

Anyway it all seems to work with little effort!

v-creator bugs and documentation

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 20:05:00 BST

Phew! End of the week already...

Found a couple of minor bugs in v-creator today :( One effects odd values in a saved form, it confuses the restoring of the form data. The other effects aliasing where the reference gets broken between aliases under a specific condition. Both already fixed. There is also a new module called 'sequence' which lets you generate a dataSet containing either numeric or alpha sequences. If you need the fixes quick please let me know otherwise there will be an updated release soon.

I'm also working on an updated DocBook version of the Guide. So Postscript, PDF, text and HTML versions of it available soon as well.

Is that it? Anything else? Hrrrrmmmm ... oh yes! Working on a XSLT for this XML feed to generate an HTML version for people who want to read all this stuff in their browser :)

v-creator v1.0 released!

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 21:40:00 BST

After spending most of yesturday and today working on it v-creator v1.0 has been released on sourceforge! This feels good after sooooo long.

So if you do development using Apache, MySQL and PHP and would like a framework that separates the HTML from the PHP, encourages modular development, increases productivity and still lets you use your normal development tools for design and programming why not give it a look? Downloads available from www.sourceforge.net/projects/vcreator

This may only be v1.0 but over the last year we have been using it internally for development for quite a number of projects and so it is stable and has gone through a number of iterations already.

As usual comments, questions, feedback and contributions are welcome.

Another Weekend Gone

Mon, 31 May 2004 02:35:00 BST

Well that's another weekend come and gone, Monday already. Ok so it's 2:30 am but still Monday, but it is a bank holiday.

Still havn't got any more work done on WolfMUD. I've been busy trying to get the initial documentation done for v-creator. This is a project I've been working on for about a year (on and off) for work. The good news is we are going to release it under the GPL to the community! Version 1 is nearly ready for release and just needs the 'Quick Start' guide so people can actually do something useful with it. The problem is I keep thinking 'and they are going to need to know about this ... and this ... and this' and so the guide grows and grows. Looks like tomorrow after some sleep I'll be working on it some more in an attempt to get it finished.

And so it starts...

Sun, 30 May 2004 16:18:00 BST

So finally I have started blogging. Why? Because I want to? Nope. Why then? Well because other people want me to. Related specifically to WolfMUD, people want to know what I am doing and what I am working on. Actually I think they want to know what it is I'm doing to stop me working on WolfMUD :)

However this is not going to be just about WolfMUD. If I'm going to be blogging I might as well go the whole hog and ramble about everything and anything that has the fasintest chance of being of interest to anyone.

For now this is a manual blog, which means I sit here and edit the XML feed directly :( Not as bad as it sounds as it means I can host it from the WolfMUD site which due to my ISP is static content only still! Which reminds me I have about 14 days left to descide if I want to keep the codecrafterstudio.com domain which is about to expire. At the moment it just holds a very poor site for a long dead project. I was thinking of renewing the domain and using codecrafterstudio.com as my personal site and get it hosted properly ... but thats going to cost money :(