Alien Experiment Laboratories

Procrastination

Posted by Chief Experimenter in Journal at 10:02 pm.

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’nuff said.

OK, maybe not quite. Work, Christmas, Life in general, and this is a fun project which isn’t intended to pay the bills, so it tends to fall off the bottom of the urgency queue now and then.

But at least my Linux box is working again. I used the Microsoft Way and freshly reinstalled the thing, not having enough time to fix it the proper way. Also it gave me an opportunity to reclaim the 6GB being wasted for an unused Windows install, simplify my partitioning a bit, remove some cruft, and switch over to the ext3 filesystem. All of which (including the backup and restore of 30+GB of /usr/local and /home so that I could change filesystems safely) was quicker than tinkering with the system for God knows how long with no guarantee of success at the end of it.

Anyway, Happy New Year! My resolution will be to finish this project. Just as soon as I solve another Sudoku puzzle and read up some more on reflexology, that is…

Nothingness…

Posted by Chief Experimenter in Journal at 12:50 pm.

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…is about what I achieved this week. My beautiful, shiny Ubuntu install (complete with AIGLX and Beryl 3D niceness) is currently resembling the raggedy old laptop it resides on, after XFS failed to live up to it’s reputation of being robust in the face of crashes and unplanned power-offs (which happened during my attempts to get that 3D desktop working).

I now have a text-based login, because GDM goes into cyclic restart (but I can start X windows just fine once I log in; go figure…), my USB key and iPod don’t show up in /dev when I plug them in (but the USB hard drive I use as backup does work, having somehow obtained a static device node), and even if they did show up, the gnome-volume-manager refuses to start. forcing me to manually pmount things. Pffft.

Yet, crippled and b0rken as it now is, Linux is still working better than the XP box I use in work. Sadly I have no time to troubleshoot and fix the thing like a proper geek should, so I’ll likely just reinstall and use it as an opportunity to lose some old cruft, simplify my horrible, badly considered partitioning, reclaim the long-unused Windows partition, and switch to ext3 for the filesystem.

Knuckling down

Posted by Chief Experimenter in Journal at 1:22 pm.

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In my (limited) spare time this week, I’ve been doing a lot of scribbling down of near-C-code on paper.

This is my normal M.O., and has been since 1985 when I’d scribble stuff down on the back pages of school exercise books during dull moments in class, then go home and implement the idea on the computer. If I had enough time I would even write the entire program out, longhand, ready to be typed in later.

In this case, I’ve been working on routines for initializing and moving around the play area, and a handful of related utility functions.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoy doing this, at least when it’s on my terms, or terms I can live with. My day job now is great as far as creation-from-scratch and quick results go, but most corporate programming jobs, including my previous 7 or so years of process-driven, delayed results “coding”, just suck the fun and creativity out of being a programmer.

Finally some example code!

Posted by Chief Experimenter in Code, Journal at 9:50 am.

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It took long enough (these things happened so much quicker before I got a life ;-) ) but here, at last, is some code making use of the most current version of z88dk and version 3 of Sprite Pack.

It’s mostly self-documenting, but there are a few places where it begs explanation, particularly when setting up sprites, so I’ve expanded heavily on the comments in the code.

Well, whaddya waiting for? Go download the source code and have a look (But don’t blame me if it makes your eyes go all funny).