Author Archives: Donncha

Demo of my project available at the TSN link to the left. Docs are available on the page.
Clanlib v0.13 has been released. This is a multi-platform game development library. According to their site, http://clanlib.org the same source code can be used to compile on Win32 and Linux. Check their site for more details.

PTC has been released for Linux as you’ve all probably read on slashdot.org already. I searched through comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos for the announcement and here it is:

From – Mon Apr 27 20:20:43 1998
From: “Gaffer”
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos,rec.games.programmer,comp.graphics.algorithms
Subject: PTC 0.72 released
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 00:11:03 +1000

PTC is a portable truecolor graphics system for C++ programmers. PTC handles all the platform specific details of mode setting, surface handling, pixel format conversion and display updates while providing a common interface across all supported platforms.

DOS, Win32 and Linux platforms are supported under a wide range of popular C++ compilers.

PTC is distributed as open source software under the GNU General Public License.
For more information see www.gaffer.org/ptc

cheers 🙂

Small update this time. I’d like to write more but there’s too much to do.
I updated the projects page with a new version of my openGL demo. It’s probably close to what the final version will be like. The deadline for the assignment is next Friday so final version then. Of course, afterexams in June I’m going to develop it a bit more 🙂
Some of you may be interested to know about my 4th year project. It’s a web based time sheet system where users enter details of jobs done and it generates a report for the admin. I’m in the process of renaming variables and the example tables so expect a link to a demo of it within a week, with source code coming shortly afterwards.

Important If, over the past few days you have received an email from xeer@hotmail.com and if you know me and it appears out-of-character for me, or if you don’t know me and receive an abusive email please forward it to me. I logged into my Hotmail account today and found 60 new emails waiting for me from the same sender (diff email addresses though). I also received a mail delivery failure message using my email address as a return address. It had the subject “sucker!”. They are not from me! Looking through the header it would appear that someone is probably testing their email out on their (Linux?) box and just found my email address handy. (Next time use president@whitehouse.gov – they WILL trace your emails and send a secret service guy around, wherever you live on the planet.. Not joking either..)
Copies of all the emails have been forwarded to abuse@hotmail.com.
Now, a plea for help for a friend of mine who’s in a spot of trouble with his 4th year project. He has to implement Dijkstras shortest route algorithm to find several shortest routes in a network. He’s coding it in VB (I know, I know..) but if any of you have had experience implementing the algorithm any help you can send would be most appreciated. It’s possible to email me at xeer@hotmail.com and I’ll forward them on. Thanks.

So busy these days.. Perl and Javascript are cool languages to work with and the project is almost finished. If you have a look at the coding link you’ll find a program called vbe-1.0.tar.gz which gives access to the framebuffer of VESA2.0 video cards. I remember someone posting a message on csipd a long time ago saying that all he wants of an OS is access to the frame buffer to code demos in it.. well, this is his chance 😉
Good things are happening in Northern Ireland.
I downloaded an intro from TG98, it’s the winning intro with lots of raytracing but runs VERY slow on my P133. I seem to recall a cool intro with raytraced bees and luminous lights released a few years ago that ran at around the same speed on my old 486DX33..
Eraser bot is cool 🙂
I just recently upped my swap partition from 32 megs to 64 megs and the difference is amazing! I have 32 megs RAM and the extra swap space made a noticeable difference.

Updates on .plan, coding and projects pages. Also new colours, not sure if I like them though..
Click on the following link to read about my attempts to convert people to Linux!(We were bored in the labs, and that camera was too tempting 😉 (content pasted here)

So there we were in one of the labs working on the computers. I was showing Kevin my homepage and telling him how great Linux was and how he REALLY should install it. Obvously he was impressed, but he wasn’t sure if he should install it yet. He likes his Windows you see. (Nice machine too Kev 🙂
He knew it was the right choice to make, it just felt right, but yet, it was hard on him. He wasn’t sure why it was the right decision, but he told me later, “I just felt that Linux was the way the Human race was supposed to go, but I couldn’t tell you why it was so.” He was afraid to make that bold step into the unknown. Here he is deliberating whether or not to install Linux while I show him another page with more Linux facts and impress him with Gimp graphics.

It didn’t take long for Kevin to see the light though. Here we are celebrating after Kevin decided to install Linux. Also pictured is Aidan who, although using NT for his college project, has RedHat installed at home and is very happy with it for doing other college work and the odd bit of networking. Of course he’s seen all this before so he’s not quite as excitable as me when we get a new Linux convert.

Voodoo2 is a chipset I’d like to see running Quake2 someday and according to www.bluesnews.com there’s a page at http://pama.it.dtu.dk/Voodoo2/ that has a patch to let Linux glide apps use the Voodoo2! I can’t comment further because the site was down when I tried it tonight. (contacting host…)

SDL. New version of SDL (0.5) is out! Check the SDL link on the CODE page.
Microsoft. This is not an April Fools! Telnet to www.microsoft.nl for a pleasant surprise!

Mozilla. Netscape released the source code! Check out www.mozilla.org for more info!
Gravis. According to http://www.th-zwickau.de/~maz/news.html Gravis will release ALL GUS (Ace/Max/PnP/Extreme) driver sources within a few weeks.
They will be available to every programmer who’s interrested in working on them and agrees to certain terms.
One thing though.. Why certain terms? Are they restrictive? The sound cards are discontinued so why bother hiding secrets about them??
Long delays! Sorry about this, but my 4th year project is rolling along at full speed!
To all you HTML authors have a look at HTML 4. There are numerous extensions added to lots of tags!
My project seems to have equal amounts of Perl and Javascript now! I’m probably going to put most of the code on a page here somewhere at the end of April, along with some simple docs.
Javascript is very handy! I have tables on my pages and I allow the ability to edit each record by clicking on an edit button next to each one.
The record then appears in a new window in text boxes. Before I used Javascript I asked the server to create the editing window HTML but now I figured out how to make Javascript create the HTML! This results in very fast creation of the window.
I will mention one thing though. If you’re stuck trying to get the onSubmit function working in your “FORM” tag use onSubmit=”return func()” where func() is your Javascipt function. Make sure you return false if the function detects an error and return true if everything works! I couldn’t find this anywhere I looked until I looked at the source for the guestbook I might use, so I presume it might be useful to someone out there..
Hornet are re-introducing music ratings! I haven’t downloaded a MOD in ages now so I look forward to seeing the ratings again.
There’ll probably be an update on the openGL code on Thursday so hang on!

For the next month or so I’m going to be working hard on my college project so updates may not happen that often, maybe once a week (keep an eye on web watcher). I’m enjoying doing the project though. I’m adding some neat features to the web interface by using Javascript, and I’m thinking about adding Javascript here, perhaps for a guestbook. Either that or I might put the guestbook over to the left under the site links (widening that part a bit too at the same time) and make it easy to add a comment. Try plan-example.html for an example of what I might do.
I think the Linux Open-Source philosophy may have found its way into the Quake2 community. Ridah, the author of the Eraser Bot, might be releasing the source to his bot soon. It may not have anything to do with Open-Source, but it would be nice to think it had an influence. There’s also a Linux version of the bot available, but I haven’t tried any recent versions (the zip file is 2.8 megs!) My favourite bot is still the C.R. Bot even if it only works in Windows.

I might add a guestbook under the links at the left. Read the .plan for details and an example of what it would look like.
I got an email from xoom.com saying they’re upgrading their equipment so you may have trouble accessing my page. It IS still here though!
Slashdot.org mentioned the Linux demoscene yesterday!
Check out the article at http://slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=1025
I’m completely redoing my openGL demo. I’ve introduced a framing system, and I’m trying to figure out textures from the Mesa examples. I’ll also try generating textures (I have some docs here somewhere..), but if I can’t I’ll include some simple ones in the code.
Some of the links have been updated. Check the dates at the side of the page.
I’ve created a Makefile to compile my html pages! It’s really simplistic, but it should also work in college with the AIX machines there. Check out the projects page for it.
I broke 1000 hits! Thanks for visiting all of you! I still recommend you watch The Linux web watcher for updates, but bookmark here anyway 🙂