Wikipedia

Just donated a $75 buck to wikipedia, its not *that* much honestly but its the best I could spare at the moment till my accounts get all stabilized -_-

OneManga GTK Viewer

Oh man this has been a project that I've kind of worked on and off throughout of 2008, then got busy with school again, co-op and all of that bullshit.

Well now I'm working fulltime with IBM and am finding myself bored sometime after work, and I was feeling somewhat inspired so I figured what the heck, might as well dreg up an old project and actually get it committed into GitHub so that people will be able to look at it and laugh at how bad it is :-p

Anyway I've finally got the project committed and am now thinking about and wondering about re-factoring and redoing the entire project in Ruby. Now Perl is one sweet language and I've got about I think 3-4 thousand lines of code in Perl and GTK+ for this project. However it's OOP + Exception handling system is quite awkward to use and since this project was designed to be released to the public along with being as stable as I can humanly make it.... Well the Perl's weakness with OOP + Exception handling was kind of hampering my development speed.

So now I'm busy tweaking the new GUI in Glade 3 and it will be using GtkBuilder library to bring it to life in the ruby code, which should help me get rid of all of the boilerplate code that has been eating up all of my time on the project.

Ruby and OpenGL

I've decided to learn yet another new language, and this time the language of choice is Ruby. I've also been looking into eventually someday building my own little simple tile game engine which primary purpose will be a platform for AI testing and researching.

However I've never quite gotten the light bulb moment for the cognitive leap from simple OpenGL demo programs and an full-blown game/3d Engine. At-least till I finally found a few tutorial on actually building an functional 3d engine in Perl, and another simple C++ based tutorial on creating a simple 3d Tiling engine.

Once that light bulb came on in my head I've been working ever since on slowly building up the actual 3d Tiling engine in Ruby.

I figured I could kill three birds with one stone; learn Ruby, learn some more OpenGL, and also learning how to use the Ruby's C ext binding stuff for re-implementing the slow part of the engine in pure C/C++.

I've even posted up the source code for everyone to see at GitHub. Be careful its a work in progress and probably messed up massivly.

Anyway without additional ados here's some pictures of the latest render of the tiles in the 3d Engine.

Hostname - DNS

Hostnames has always fasicated me, there are so many scheme out there for naming computers, and it ranges all the way from various fancy names to the useful but mundimate systemic naming schemes.

I have been naming my machines after forgotten realms cities, and realms that are more or less the lands of the wizards such as unther.

Anyway so far I have one laptop, one desktop, then one embedded router built with a Via C7 processor, and a tiny OpenVZ server machine running an Intel ATOM processor, and an old 366 mhz dell laptop serving as a server for a total of five physical machines. Then on the OpenVZ machine, there currently is two container running at the moment, but I'm planning on expanding it to about a dozen.

Anyway the names are the following:
amrutlar -- Router
unther -- Old laptop server, currently running cacti, dns, dhcp, ntp, logging server, and a few other daemons
mulhorand -- WRT54G Wifi AP
halruaa -- New server with OpenVZ
miyeritar -- OpenVZ Logging server, will latter expand to logging monitor and processing
raumathar -- OpenVZ Email server for the entire domain
imaskar -- My desktop
netheril -- My IBM laptop

Then there are a few new hostnames I'm thinking of allocating out such as:
yggdrasil
narfell
jhothun
coramsham
jhaamdath
athalantar
eaerlann
xothaerin
cormanthyr
guge
ilythiir
jastaath
aryvandaar
keltormir
illefarn

Protocol design is Hard!

Its surprisingly hard to design a reliable light weight protocol from the ground up, so I wanted to give kudos to the group of peoples who designed some of the earliest internet protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, and etc... Its amazing how these protocol has been extended and reused over again for over thirty years, give or take a few years.

Anyway for my Senior Project (Software Engineering) I'm part of a team that is responsible for implementing and designing a "Workstation" API and the micro-code that will be running on a Freescale micro-controller on the robot that another engineering department borrowed to us for the Project.

Anyway I'm having to create a simple and reliable as possible protocol for communicating over any point to point connection from the workstation to the computer, which includes wireless, serial, and possibly in the future other connection options. Anyway due to the nature of wireless and serial connection, there is a decent chance of the data arriving at the destination scrambled or missing chunks of information, so my current struggle is on how to make sure that the header interpreter does not mis-interpret the data for a header. I've figured out a way of dealing with some degree of corruption by including a simple checksum.

One of the suggestion by one of my team mate is to ensure that all of the header values be in x-y range, while the data is in y-z range so there's no chance of mixing them up, but I'm not quite sure if I like that solution, but it could work, but still it fails to deal with the corruption issue.

Support Wikipedia

Since Wikipedia has been such an awesome resource, I donated 20 dollars to Wikipedia. Sure it does have its own flaws and issues but it has been an excellent starting point on my own research and so forth.



Updated the post to use the square button

Update to the "Japanese IMS support in Gentoo"

This post is an update to the original "Japanese IMS support in Gentoo" post, this time I got assistance from zsitvaij on the Gentoo forums on getting SCIM to work with Qt4 and he also recommended me to ditch SCIM-UIM.

Due to the lack of time and the unstable nature of the packages I'm not going to implement this upgrade to my SCIM system, until I have time, but without additional adios here's the link to the post.