Smartwombat Blog

Cell phone adventures

"...I’m not a cell phone guy. I resisted getting one at all for years, and even now I rarely carry it. To a first approximation, I don’t really like talking to most people, so I don’t go out of my way to enable people to call me. However, a little while ago I misplaced the old phone I usually take to Armadillo, and my wife picked up a more modern one for me. It had a nice color screen and a bunch of bad java game demos on it. The bad java games did it.

I am a big proponent of temporarily changing programming scope every once in a while to reset some assumptions and habits. After Quake 3, I spent some time writing driver code for the Utah-GLX project to give myself more empathy for the various hardware vendors and get back to some low-level register programming. This time, I decided I was going to work on a cell phone game..."

This should be fun and the guy who wrote this called John Carmack ;-)

Source.

The Apple Motion Sensor As A Human Interface Device

"...I described the working of the Apple Motion Sensor (AMS), a feature of the PowerBook line of computers, in a previous document called "The PowerBook Sudden Motion Sensor". As I noted earlier, my original reason for investigating the AMS was to fabricate some interesting programming examples for my forthcoming book on Mac OS X internals. The discussion of the AMS generated a substantial amount of interest — perhaps more than I had expected. It is quite interesting to observe how one's fantasy is tickled by abnormal ways of doing the normal..."

http://kernelthread.com/software/ams2hid/

Pushing my old stuff to Community Server!

My first idea was to do a mirror installation of CS on my desktop machine, so I can do fiddle with the database and not risking to screw my life installation (which is actually a pretty good idea if you would like to do anything other than posting). Then I decided that I will do use only the two databases and try something simple to pump the old data to the CS database. I must admit that I am pretty lazy and I did not pay too much attention to understand the db structure of CS. First I wanted to use CSverter but I could not download it (link must be broken). Then I decided to use Dan Bartel's sql script, but I was not able to make it work and I was a bit worried about screwing up the integrity of the db.

After all this I decided that I will write a simple command line tool and will use MetaWeblog API to send the data to CS. Sure, it broke the comments and categories, but I fixed the categories manually and the comments were few so I did not bother to migrate them.

First, I thought that doing some parts manually would be a hassle and major pain, but it was not. Reorganizing my past posts was good and relaxing activity and it also gave me the chance to think about why I am doing this blog and what I want with it. I think I am doing this only for recording the stuff I have seen and some of the code I want to remember later. Do not want to do big statements or evangelizing myself, only an easy to search repository of the stuff I was interested let's say 2 years ago.

Now, I need to do something how the site looks. So, this is the next step I guess. And to upload some photos, only if CS would have a mass posting capability.

Buying my imate JAM next week

Just can't wait. Life is good!

Microsoft Partner Pack for XP

I am not sure if this is brand new or just I found out this late but this is cool. You can download it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/partnerpack/

It contains games (Super Slyder and Serpentine), sharing application, virus scanner (CA eTrust with one year of free subscriptions for the updates), Google Deskbar and Onfolio Express, Desktop Media Gallery. I did not try this last two yet but they sounds pretty cool. There also Post-it software notes and PayPal Payment Wizard. There is also a backup application called Microsoft USB Flash Drive manager in the pack, it can used to backup your presentations and other valuable documents. This is what I was looking for a long time, if only my USB key had not been left in my trousers last week, of course the trouser went to the washing machine, so I am not sure if it is still working but will see :-(

All kinds of subscribe buttons.

Decided to get all kinds of subscribe me buttons, I will try to add more of them later...

How to single step in IL code

Under VS debugger, you can single-step the code at native level, but not at IL level. To achieve single-stepping at IL level, you need to do the following trick (works with C# and VB apps, doesn't with most VC++ apps):

• build C#/VB app, debug version;
• ildasm it with /source option (original source lines will be put into disassembly as comments);
• ilasm the disassembly with /debug option (new EXE/DLL and PDB will bind the IL code to the disassembly's text rather than to the original C#/VB text, but you have the original C#/VB text embedded in the disassembly);
• run new executable under VS debugger.
  

This is posted by Serge Lidin and the original post can be found here:
http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0408b&L=advanced-dotnet&T=0&F=&S=&P=5566

A Coder in Courierland

Programmer quits his job to become a bicycle messenger.

Once upon a time, I was a coder not unlike yourself. My day consisted of coffee, perl and java hacking, meetings, and e-mail. I had a cubicle with fluorescent lighting, my own bookshelf and two computers. And I traded it all in.
Even before Office Space, white collar workers peered out the window (if they were so lucky) and imagined a more romantic life doing real work out under the sun.Well, having no children, no great career ambition and no financial obligations more pressing than a crippling student loan, a year and a half ago, I decided to live this dream.
I became a bicycle messenger and now I'm here to report back.

from Kuro5hin.

Flash vs. Sparkle

Funny cartoon. Watch it.

Steps to migrate my blog from .Text to CommunityServer v1

• Install CommunityServer v1 on my server account.
  
  This step is completed with the help of the Installer app. I am not sure how I would complete the install without it. I was trying hard to all the betas without any luck because all of those stupid db url things. That was a major pain in the previous version as well. But npw I cannot really complain.

• Switching it to single blog configuration.
  
  For converting communitiserver into a single blog site, I was using the following article:
  
  How To: Single Blog/Gallery Site Configuration
  
  The whole process is quite simple itself but be sure to backup the file you are about to modify, because i just had to restart it after overwriting my web.config.

• Migrating the content into CommunitServer.
  
  This can be tricky and needs quite some time to dig into the CS db internals and figure out what goes where from .TEXT.
  I am aware of two tools to migrate your content from .TEXT to CommunitServer at the moment. All suggestions are welcome:
  
  1. CSverter 1.0 is some kind of DTS package creating application. I have not tried this one yet. Discussion. Download. Wiki.
  2. The other is an sql script written by Dan Bartel. His skin is awesome by the way.
  
  My Migration to Community Server Blogs from .Text

• Customize the look and feel for the site.
  This step would involve to make my on kin/design or acquire one somehow. I do not like that the first page and the blog skin is not consistent.

Life is good with CS

CommunityServer singleblog config

After scraping the previous install of CS (my previous attempt to configure cs to singlesite just did not went really well) ust managed to getthis blog to single site. It was always a nightmare to setup .Text for me, I managed to do it once in my life, 3 years ago and then I would not ever touch it for anyone's sake...the site just went black last sunday and that was the final push for me to switch to CS. The next step is I think to get back my old content back and then create my own custome skin. Some more comments about CS coming later ... and also some stuff about my new phone, yes, the JAM!