It was a huge disappointment as I had been looking forward to the event all week, and the weather was perfect with completely clear sky’s and very little wind. I did manage to get a nice picture of Old Parliament House pre-dawn though so it wasn’t a complete washout.

Old Parliament House

Sphagnum Bog Water

Mmmm…. sphagnum bog water

Stock Quote 2.0

KDE 4.2 has been released, and I thought I should bring out an update to the stock plasmoid. I have done alot of work to make it more usable, and still have plenty of ideas to implement.

The main changes for this release are:

• Data engine backend
• Dockable in panel
• Improved theme
• Improved percent display
• Clickable stocks link to yahoo finance
• Position/resize bug fixes
• Supports stock with commas in description
• Supports kde 4.2

Stock Quote 2.0 is downloadable from kde-look.org.

KDE 4 now provides plasmoids, which are along the same lines as widget in Mac OSX, or those things in Vista that no-one ever uses. The current offerings are pretty slim, so I decided to rework an existing financial stock quote plasmoid to make it more usable. Overall writing the plasmoid is pretty much like writing any other Qt application.

Here is the final product, it can be downloaded from kdelook:

Stock Quote v1.1

So I took the Friday off as annual leave (under the assumption that the show would be quiet as the school holidays hadn’t started yet), and hopped onto the train heading over to the show grounds.

The highlight of the show would have to be the pig racing. Pig racing you say? Don’t worry, I have never heard of it before but I have been told that it’s a common event at the show. We headed over to the pig stadium to check things out and the result? The most hilarious thing I have seen in my life! Check out the action shots below:

Running Pigs

Jumping Pigs

Next onto the farm animal shed. First stop was the ewe birthing station. We waiting around for about 30 minutes for the birth, however the lamb was a no show. I wasn’t too fussed about this because I’m sure the birthing of a lamb wouldn’t be the most attractive thing, so we decided to move on to the baby animal playpen. We followed some kids in pretending we were their parents, but once in, we ditched the charade and ran havoc. How can anyone resist patting a goat or a lamb? After checking out all the baby animals, we scraped the manure off the bottom of our shoes, and went to look at the dog display.

Lamb

Now Holly and I aren’t doggy people, but we fell in love with the Short Hair German Pointers. We stood at the sideline and got to pat them all as they left the arena. Below is a picture of the Schnauzers.

Funny Dogs

Other than that, the day was spent filling up on samples of chips, cheese, chocolate, ice cream, jam, fudge, candy and nuts. So which is better, the Perth or the Melbourne Royal Show? Well I personally like Perth better. It’s just more chaotic and less refined than the Melbourne show, and to top it off, Perth has the Hot Fresh Crispy Donuts ™ which were surprisingly absent from Melbourne! Overall, a most enjoyable day out.

Felix & Archie

Our first stop was the Otway Treetop Walk, which according to the brochure was the longest and highest treetop walk in the world. Well for 20 bucks each, it’s gonna have to something pretty special. In the end it was great fun, except the swaying at the top of the tower gave me an overwhelming feeling of wanting to yak, so we didn’t stay up there very long (just enough to get a quick panoramic).

Treetop Tower

Our next stop was just down the road at the famous triplet falls. We were hesitant to make the walk to the falls (about 1 hour round trip), because of the lack of rainfall in the area meaning everything was quite dry, but we thought it was worth a chance. So after negotiating ourselves down about 300 slippery moss covered steps, we arrived at the bottom of the valley to see the following:

Triplet Falls

Next onto the 12 (8?) apostles. The pile of rubble in the foreground is the latest casualty where the apostle collapsed in 2005. The day was a little smoky so all the photos were washed out in colour, although nothing photoshop can’t fix! Along the way, we checked out all the standard attractions including the Grotto, London Bridge and the Arch all of which are more of the same really.

12 Apostles

So that’s it, another famous Australian tourist destination checked off the list. Now we have to full fill Holly’s childhood dream, and go skiing in the mountains

Even though this register doesn’t go anywhere near far enough as charities, educational institutions, the government and politicians can still call, at least it’s a start (just watch out for those politicians raising money for some fundamentalist cult).

Everyone head over and sign up and if you get anymore telemarketing calls, don’t just yell abuse and slam the phone down, well still do that but make sure to interogate them first and then file a complaint.

Bogan 2: Smells good!

The image area also always full panning support with new blocks calculated continuously as they appear on the screen. Zooming in and out results in clearing of display and recalculation based on the new zoom level.

Fractanoid 0.1

Through the preferences dialogue, the number of threads can be modified to take advantage of extra CPU’s available in the system. This results in extra threads being added to the thread pool.

Download the source tarball: fractanoid-0.2.tar.bz2

Exterminate!

I was seriously blown away. I thought that knitting was all about making socks and scarfs. I especially like the mini tardis sitting in the background. Obviously geeks knit too.

Thanks to Shigella for really making me day.

On Friday we made the journey over to see the “March of the Penguins”. Started just after sunset, a series of lights are turned on, and we started to see a few penguins gathering down at the shore. When they form sufficiently large groups (more than 5), they begin their journey up the beach turning and running back to the water if they are spooked.

Little Penguins

Turns out that this time of year is the perfect time to visit as the chicks have just left their nest, and you can see fluffy penguins wandering around calling out for their parents.

Other than penguins, the rest of the weekend was just spent relaxing. We did find this sign post (below) which really made me wonder exactly who creates the little cartoons as this guy must have been smoking something! I was tempted to venture close to the cliff edge to see exactly how accurate the depiction was, however the thought of having the to be airlifted to hospital didn’t quite appeal to me.

Weird Sign Post

Check out more photos of our holiday here.

The main attraction of the day is the “pick your own raspberries” event. Unfortunately due to drought, the berries had ripened earlier than usual resulting in the “slim pickings” sign. We managed to scavenge a few remaining from the vines, however the main entertainment was watching some kid have a temper tantrum because he couldn’t find any and his mother threatening to leave him behind. At this point, we gave up, ate the raspberries we had found (oops, I think we were suppose to pay for them!) and had a raspberry icecream which was delicious.

Slim Pickings

Overall the day was a lot of fun. Air-conditioning in the car would have made it more fun, but that’s the price you have to pay for owning a Barina :S

Woolly Bush

Now we just need everyone to send us presents . . .

iPod on Wood

Who needs friends when you have an iPod. I can stick on my headphones and thus ignore all the wierdo’s on the train.

Here is a list of my favourite podcasts:

• The Science Show
• Ockham’s Razor
• SciPod (New Scientist)
• TWIT (This Week In Tech)

I have completed my first week at Open Networks. The office is in the CBD, so this involved me getting out of bed, walking across the road, getting on the train, waiting for 25 minutes, getting off the train, walking across the road and sitting at my desk. Overall quite painless although I did feel like I was in a cattle run as I funnelled out of Flinders Street train station along with 10,000 other people.

Now all I need to do is decorate my cubicle a bit. Dang I wish I had kept the parachuting green bear!

Currently we are staying in a funky apartment in East Melbourne (Birches Serviced Apartment). Great location with a quick tram into the city centre, plus it has free parking, reasonably priced ADSL (having tried torrents yet) and it takes pets!

It feels very strange being in a different city. I feel like I’m on holiday, and have to resist the temptation to just sleep half the day, and spend the other half walking around looking at museums and churches. After the mad panic we went through before getting here, a holiday would go down really well right about now.

And yes Matt, we are trucking over the Barina :D.

So to everyone at Nautronix (that read this blog anyway), thanks for putting up with me. I sure am going to miss things (not everything mind you), and I’ll be back to visit whenever I’m in town.

On that note, if anyone is looking to hire a software engineer in Melbourne, I’m available!

chmod +s /usr/bin/eject

Ejecting the iPod, will now correctly disconnect the device.

Well the answer seems to be yes, sorta, sometimes, if your lucky. So I hunted around and pulled out a DWL-G510 (HW Ver: C2), stuck it in the computer and lspci gives me:

00:09.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g

Installing Driver

The card contains an RaLink chipset. There are 3 drivers available:

• Rt2×00 project also has the rt2×00 driver v2.0.0-b3
• Rt2×00 project has legacy RT61 driver v1.1.0-b1
• Ralink has v1.0.4

The first driver from the Rt2×00 project (available in portage, net-wireless/rt2×00) didn’t work at all. I could load the driver, but scanning produced no result.

The second driver (available in portage, net-wireless/rt61) loaded fine, and I could gain a connection with no encryption and WEP encryption, but no matter what combination I used, I couldn’t get WPA to work.

The third driver I downloaded from Ralink’s website and with a little bit of fiddling, I am able to load it and connect using WPA encryption.

Wireless Configuration

I used the following commands to successfully connect to my Netgear DG834G wireless hub:

#!/bin/sh
modprobe rt61
sleep 3

ifconfig ra0 up
iwlist ra0 scan

iwpriv ra0 set NetworkType=Infra
iwpriv ra0 set AuthMode=WPAPSK
iwpriv ra0 set EncrypType=TKIP
iwpriv ra0 set SSID="network name"
iwpriv ra0 set WPAPSK="my passphrase"
iwpriv ra0 set SSID="network name"

After probing the device, I had to sleep otherwise the device didn’t come up correctly. Substitute “network name” with your own, and “my passphrase” with the WPA-PSK passphrase.

Final

I haven’t quite figured out how to get all this to work using the Gentoo standard network init script. The main problem seems to be that the network interface needs to be activated before it had be configured. For now I’m just happy I don’t have to run a 50 meter extension cable through my house.

Well not anymore, after some quick poking around, and a simple script, I am now able to transfer my complete KDE addressbook (including photo), with a simple command line.

Just mount the ipod, and execute the script, passing the ipod’s root directory as a parameter. That’s it! The script loads your KDE addressbook, makes a few simple modifications the iPod requires, and copies it across.

Download kde_ipod_sync.rb

Grab the thread.cpp and thread.h source files.

Introduction

Today I decided to write a cross platform thread class. After a quick look around, the contenders for the job of hiding operating system dependent code seemed to be:

• Boost
• ACE
• SDL

As I’m after simplicity, SDL seems the appropriate choice as the API is basic and quite low level, yet I’m not exposed to any platform specific code. One thing it’s missing that I thought might become useful in the future is thread priorities, but for now that’s something I can live without.

The Class

The three SDL functions I need to use for this class are:

The first thing we need to do is to be able to start the thread. We do this with the following code:

void
Thread::start()
{
    if (!m_running)
    {
        m_running = true;
        m_thread = SDL_CreateThread(runThread, this);
    }
}

First we do a simple check to see if the thread has already been created, then we create the thread passing the entry function to the thread as the first function, and a pointer to this class as the second. The reason behind this combination of parameters, is because the first parameter must be a simple function pointer, and cannot point to a member function of a class. runThread() is a static function of on the class which fulfills this requirement. We therefore pass the the object pointer in as well so we can reference back to ourselves.

This becomes more obvious in the entry point function:

int
Thread::runThread(void *data)
{
    Illuminate::Thread *thread = static_cast
(data);

    thread->run();

    return true;
}

In this function, we first cast the data parameter back to the original Thread object which originally created the thread. We can then call the run() method which is the virtual method implemented in the subclass. We also keep track of the running state of the thread which can be accessed from the isRunning() method, and reset m_thread back to 0 so the thread can be started again.

Usage

Derive from the Thread abstract base class. Implement the void run() method. Construct your new class as an object and call start(). That’s it!

#include "thread.h"

using namespace Illuminate;

class MyThread : public Thread
{
  private:
    virtual void run() {}
};

int main()
{
    MyThread thread;
    thread.start();       // start the thread
    thread.join();        // wait for the thread to complete
    return 0;
}

Problems

The main current weakness of this class is the lack of thread safety, although there is unlikely to be problems in most suitations. A possible scenario which may cause problems is if the join() is called at the same time that the thread is completing as they both access the m_thread variable. The easiest way to get around this is through the use of locking, with which SDL supplies a simple interface for.

Conclusion

Well that’s it. A very simple class which allows a programmer to access some very advanced features. However it’s not all smooth sailing. Once you move down the path of threaded applications, you enter the realm of mutexes, which brings in a range of problems from deadlocking or worse!

I would have to say that writing this theme has been an interesting learning experience in CSS. When I have uploaded the final theme, I’ll make it available for download to anyone thats interested.

• London
• Paris
• Dijon
• Zurich
• Munich
• Salzburg
• Verona
• Rome

Check out the photos at http://gallery.winterbug.com

I joined Matt shortly afterwards with the dream of producing a polished game within a year. Reality then set in that we did still have to function in our full time jobs at Nautronix during the day and that spending hours each night hacking code wasn’t going to cut it. So I guess it has taken a back seat in which it is something that’s tinkered around with during spare time, to learn more about 3D game programming.