Ramblings of a Coder

New Milestone

Wednesday 14 July 2010 at 9:31 pm

The Second milestone for my course M253 was finally released on Tuesday, Its looking like its going to be a fun few weeks working through this one. Quite a lot of work involved right from the onset, Really going to have to get stuck in as a team. We also have to pair off in 2’s, and each person has to be in 2 groups. But not grouped with the same person, So i was bored waiting on the delayed meetings and wrote a little JavaScript program that does exactly that. It seemed to go down well when i shared it with the team, at least it released some of the tension that had been building over the course of our latest IM meeting anyway,

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | ¶ | Coding, Education, M253 | No comments

More Tweaks Incoming.

Friday 09 April 2010 at 8:03 pm

Got some more Blog tweak’s incoming, Got them working on my test version but not quite ready to deploy them to hear yet.

Mostly its just visual things, Fixing the page layout so it works on smaller browser windows. and removing the large list of previous entries. Replaced this with a Slideshow type entry that just switches between them, Just less vertical space which i think looks better.

Also tweaking the graphic’s, which really takes time because i absolutely suck at doing graphical work. Gimmie code anyday.

And most importantly, finally adding in my project pages. Really need to-do this one, Thinking though that I’ll start afresh with this part and only add in projects as/when/if I’ve worked on them from this point forward. Saves having to locate the older stuff and then write about them.

I do have other idea’s for additions, but I’ll leave those so i things to post about in the future. In the meantime,  laugh with me at a picture i took today.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | ¶ | Coding | Two comments

System update for Client

Sunday 07 March 2010 at 04:36 am

Over the past week I’ve been updating a system that i wrong in late 2007, At that time they wanted the “Cart” system to only be available for a single login session, and not to be saved. So that’s exactly what was supplied. Now they want it updated to to be available at any point in the future and have the ability to be saved.

Normally this would be simple, but the entire system has been modified in gradual stages so much that’s an absolute nightmare. First I tried to just modify the code to get the required behaviour, but that failed. So now I was left with the choice of continuing to hack away at it in the hopes of getting it to work as required finally. Or rewrite the whole subsection from scratch.

I choose the latter, and that's been mostly all that I've been doing. Its been a nightmare but I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and its allowed me to future proof the subsystem for the changes I can already foresee in the future.

Downside of it all is I’ve forced myself not to touch any other system within the base system, even though the desire to change quite a bit just to make it easier has been HUGE. But what can i do? I know myself if I started that then I wouldn’t be happy until it was a full re-write and i have neither the time or the patience for that.

Also have a assessment due this month, Not even looked at it yet. Behind on the coursework for it too, mostly theory based coursework and its so dry to read that every time I've attempted to I've fallen asleep. Great for those long nights, bad for assessment time!

Also got a strange project to-do with G for School. Something to-do with a snowman, we really don’t know what's expected though as the school neglected to tell us anything about it. And well G doesn’t seem to know anything about it. We’ve just got some previous entries in this snowman book to go from. Ahh well I've had some ideas and if we can get G to-do them tomorrow then I think his project will be finishable to turn in on Monday. If we’ve got the right idea about it anyway.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | ¶ | Coding, Education | No comments

Update complete!

Wednesday 24 February 2010 at 9:25 pm

Finally, I got round to finishing this update. Well semi finished, Its finished enough to be live now. But i'm sure over the coming week's I'll tweak it ever more.

Parts to tweak are certainly the sidebar, Need to tweak the archives section a bit to a slightly different useage. And fix the links section, Get my friends back in there.

And of course post more! So i'll be creating a nice little projects section. And i DO have some stuff to post in that already. But i'll leave that for another day. For now i'm just going to sit and relax and pray it stops snowing and maybe starts raining so there is no snow left tomorrow morning.

I've recently starting cycling again (Read that as Once so far) but with the snow last night i couldn't get out today, so really hoping its all gone tomorrow morning so i can get back out.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | ¶ | Random, Coding | No comments

Busy Month Ahead

Monday 06 April 2009 at 5:59 pm

Yup, as the title states April is going to be a very busy month for me. Got 2 assessments to start and finish this month alone, and both are due around the 25th too. So I've got to get onto those. Throw in the fact that Garion's at home most of the month too due to school holidays, means its definitely going to be an exciting time. Plus we're actually working towards getting G into school for a whole day too. All of which just means more distractions.

On top of the two things mentioned above, I've also recently "Finished" a little program that displays the latest Eve-Online Wallet entries on my G15's LCD. So i also want to fire on through and clean it up, remove unneeded/wanted processor usage and just overall make it more presentable and fire it out there into the ether and see if anyone uses it. Knowing me this will take most of the month also. Been working on another little "for fun" project too, Takes your twitter feed, and you can link your friends to Xbox-Live Profiles and it takes there avatar and displays this right into your desktop with whatever they've said, or said to you. Kind of a nice little visual Avatar group/conversation. I know, it's a kind of pointless program and serves absolutely no useful purpose. But i don't really care. Its something fun to-do. I'll get around to posting screenshots of both of them at some point this month also.

And now the real project that I'm going to focus on through the summer/autumn. Radio and Computer interfacing. As I've mentioned before Amateur Radio is a sort of hobby of mines. Its always drawn my attention and imagination. And finally I'm in a position where i can actually do something with this interest. It's going to be fun, for me at least. So expect more on this through the summer months especially when my first course wraps up in the next month or so, which will give me some more time to devote to it before i start the third in august. Lets just say that i wont be buying any prebuilt equipment beyond the power supply which i already own and there will be a lot of computer interaction with it. I dare say this one is going to be a long haul project, but I'm eager and excited and willing to learn whatever it takes to get to where i want to be with it in the end.

I'm also going to be hopefully doing some more work within my current house, my small computer room has been great. BUT! I'm quickly running out of room in it and that's just with my course materials, which I'd hedge a bet and say are only going to be getting more plentiful as the course ramps up in difficulty through the years to go on it.  So i need to start thinking of shelving and some more actual work space. as you can see from the recent picture its getting pretty cramped. Maybe move the wall, or remove the wall and replace it with a half height partition. Either way, something has to be done about it. But i still feel the need to keep the equipment separate from the rest of the room.  What i really need is a larger house, but that'll come! Also need to plan out and build a decent computer area for Garion. He seems to prefer a full sized desk and chair these days over the smaller ones that are more aimed at his age.

So that's my very rough plans for this summer and what i want to get done. Isn't as much on that to-do list now that I've written it all down. But course I'm not taking into account all the good weather were sure to get and the endless afternoons of sitting in the garden with a book basking in the sunshine. *wonders if its still sleeting outside*

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | ¶ | Coding, Education, Electronics | Two comments

Xbox360

Thursday 20 November 2008 at 06:43 am

Anyway the dashboard update is a major change to the existing system

Only one game really available at the moment that allows me to use my avatar fully in game, but I'm sure we'll see loads soon.

Sad side of the fully 3d avatar's is that for some ungodly reason your not allowed to use them in community XNA games, but certified games seem to be allowed access to them. Ah well I'm sure in the next few months you'll see something on this front. Or we'll see it when XNA 4 comes around. which going by the previous development cycles will be in 6 to 9 months.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | ¶ | Coding, Gaming | One comment

More Active

Tuesday 17 June 2008 at 2:09 pm

Yea, with the last post about education. I decided maybe it was time for me to be a tad more active with my blog itself, Kind off get into the spirit of doing stuff. Not quite sure what I will mostly be posting about but I'm going to aim for at least 3 decent posts a week covering more than "I played WoW today lolz" which seems to have been my standard thus far.

I'll probably go along the path of my adventures in XNA and starting to learn how to program again from scratch, For no reason that I constantly feel like I skip basic topics in some languages because of my understanding of them in others. At times both a blessing and a curse, Anyway I created a pong clone in XNA (Gotta start with pong) and had massive problems porting it over to the 360 itself. Mostly due to aspect ratio's and the XNA book I was reading citing the Safe zone to be 3%, Which is a complete falsehood and/or misprint as the safe zone is in actuality 30% at worst. Quite a difference between 3 and 30.

Another problem i encountered was the console itself returning the backbuffer size as 800x600 and the console actually running in 640x480 or various other resolutions depending on if I'd selected Pal-50 or Pal-60 and widescreen etc in the actual console settings (Same code running on both screenshots above, only difference was ones on the PC, others on the Console). This caused all sorts of scaling nightmares for me somehow that took me forever to fix. Mostly because my onscreen text was always correctly positioned centre screen, Where as my paddles where just all over the place. Turned out to be because in my Paddle Object i was basing the safe screen zone of the client window size. and the On-screen text of the actual backbuffer size. The console itself scales the back buffer to the correct size for display. But you can imagine i was using a safe zone of 640x480 (and various others) on a 800x600 canvas. the correct text was what probably caused me to take so long solving the problem but was also the solution for me in the end. After I'd ripped absolutely everything else out the game.

So that was my first venture into the land of XNA and the Xbox360 development. I will finish the pong game and upload it in the coming week/weeks, Especially now that I installed VC# 2005 and XNA onto the laptop and don't have to walk between rooms to test deployments to the console.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | ¶ | default, Coding | No comments