Angus Thinks

Author: AngusThinks

  • WWDC keynote: Games

    (Watching WWDC keynote log over at MacRumors.com)

    (It seems to be a blogging day for me?)
    Gaming seems to be one of the big things at this year’s WWDC keynote. EA is apparently going to be doing simultaneous releasing of some games this year including Harry Potter. This is interesting because EA is so important in mainstream gaming.

    Whether EA will follow Blizzard in putting both games on the same CD (hopefully YES) or have separate releases for the two platforms will be a point to note. Dual platform releases like Blizzard are great because it means that you can buy Mac games at mainstream gaming stores and the titles then get released on budget labels (often with the Mac part still attached). I’ve picked up several of the Blizzard games at my local branch of Game here in Edinburgh this way as impulse purchases.
    (Of course where this leaves the Mac Porting development companies is anyone’s guess)

    They also had John Carmack doing a demo of 3D stuff which looked interesting, but, since I’m reading a transcript and looking at photos, doesn’t really make as much impact.

  • Openoffice aqua looking good

    I just downloaded the new aqua port of OpenOffice a few days ago and it looks good. There are some bits which aren’t finished yet, but it runs quickly, it runs natively and it runs the same as the other OpenOffice platforms. (So far as I can tell). It may well be the best upgrade path for people using VBA macros on the Mac.

  • What have I been doing recently?

    Well no updates for a bit. Humm?

    The main things I’ve been working on:

    1) SQLEditor. Lots of things are being worked on. The user interface is being rewritten to improve speed and increase flexibility, the data layer is being rewritten to switch it to cocoa (instead of java), the JDBC code is being rewritten to make it use JNI instead of cocoa/java and a new crash reporting system based on Google BreakPad is being worked on. There are also some other things too like live source view and assorted bug fixes.
    2) HTMLValidator. Also undergoing development. It recently moved across to use Sparkle (yey!) instead of the SQLEditor derived update system (which will also be replaced eventually). The final 1.0 release is due very soon now and several people have set in nice comments.
    3) A new idea (still secret) 🙂

    4) Web site improvements for malcolmhardie.com. Some have been deployed, others are still waiting to be deployed. Although the biggest one which is almost entirely invisible is the rewritten order processing system, which now supports multiple different products and better management features. But only I (and my somewhat-trusted minions) will ever see it. 😉

    Then when I’ve not been working I’ve been playing Pikmen on my new gamecube. (Many thanks to Leynos!). I’ve wanted to play this game properly for years and years and it definitely meets and exceeds my expectations.

    Although I also played some theme hospital this morning using Parallels 3.0 (new release). It runs really nicely, although since it is an ancient game (1997) this shouldn’t be too surprising. I hope to try out some of my other really old games to see how they perfom under parallels.

  • building antlr 2.7.7 on Mac OS X

    It appears that antlr on Mac os x doesn’t like the jikes compiler, at least when I tried building antlr it gave lots of weird compile errors like this:
    Found 2 semantic errors compiling "ANTLRException.java":

    While it would be a good thing to try to fix the actual code, it’s easier to see if the solution is already available.

    The answer came in this posting which suggests renaming jikes before building. Which works, but there is an easier way. Just declare an environment variable before starting the build.


    export JAVAC=javac
    ./configure
    make

    Changing the java compiler that gets used is documented in the configure script.

  • Is it plagiarism if you’ve paid someone else to write the paper for you?

    I happened to browsing a popular site that allows people to post tasks that others can bid on. The focus tends to be on small to medium sized technical tasks like web page design and small applications.
    But there are other categories too. One of which is for technical writing. Ah! I thought, perhaps people offering to write documentation for pay. Well, no, it wasn’t exactly that. What I found was mainly people wanting essays written. One in particular I found very funny. It was looking for someone to write an essay about a networking topic and the requester had simply pasted in the entire task description, including the instructions from the lecturer. It even included the plagiarism statement:

    Academic integrity requirements. Please remember to use quotation marks when you use the exact words from your references. Also you need to use enough citations inside your final paper. The citations should be clear enough for a reader to separate your work from other people’s work. Failure to follow these instructions may lead the paper to be considered as plagiarism.


  • Java class file version numbering

    http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~leif/opensource/bcver/BcVerApp.html

    This page has a list which shows how java class version numbers relate to java platform version numbering. It’s useful if you get one of those UnsupportedClassVersionError errors.

    This relates to the Java ClassFile structure which defines how classes are represented.

  • HTMLValidator 1.0b3

    A new version of HTMLValidator today. I moved the validation into a separate thread to improve responsiveness. This is also the way that HTMLValidator will be doing multiple page validation. In fact the new release even includes pretty much all of the code necessary to do this, but it doesn’t include the interface yet. The 1.0b3 release actually validates a list of urls, but the list contains only 1 element. The idea is to test that the basic code works as expected before bolting the interface on the top. 🙂

    Also new is a little spinner that spins when the application is doing something, some improvements to error display and handling and a few other fixes here and there. The changelog gives a complete list.

    Next feature is the multiple file validation interface and then probably a 1.0 release.

  • Google Talks: Camino

    Mike Pinkerton of Google talks about the Mac web browser Camino. It also includes some interesting history of the Mozilla and Gecko projects.

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6765603919277760697

  • Linux autologin

    I use a collection of virtual machines in parallels for a number of things, like testing SQLEditor and running web apps that would otherwise require lots of software dependencies. However I’ve been getting tired of logging in to my linux virtual machines all the time. If it were just a case of ssh then obviously I could set up ssh key pairs and do auto-login, but I also need direct terminal access too, in this case in the main parallels window.

    With a physical machine to get autologin in this situation would mean that the machine would boot and immediately log the user in without interaction.

    Important Warning

    This represents some security risk. You need to consider your circumstances carefully first to ensure that this will not open your machine to malicious use.

    (Of course there is always the point that if someone has physical access to your machine then there’s not much hope anyway. But still …)

    Fortunately this is possible and actually quite easy if you don’t mind editing a configuration file.

    The file you need is /etc/inittab

    Important Warning (2)

    /etc/inittab is vital to the operation of your machine. Incorrect editing will cause a number of problems.

    If you are making these changes to a virtual machine simply make another. Alternatively try logging in via ssh to undo the changes.

    The change you need to make is to find the line that looks like:

    1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

    and change it to look like this (where username is the user that you want to autologin as)

    1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --autologin username tty1

    The original source of this is EasyMameCab; which looks like a clever idea in itself. They are using linux as the base system for building a video game cabinet, so obviously they don’t want logins appearing.

  • HTMLValidator beta 2

    HtmlValidator beta 2 has just been released. The new version offers assorted fixes and a slightly improved interface (a green tick or red cross now appear in the validation window!)

    There is also a new downloads page which currently offers an Applescript to validate the source of the front page in Safari.

    Usefully it validates the actual source that the browser received, it doesn’t download the url itself.