Blog

Sitemap

Home Blog Forums FAQ YouTube Email
Feeeed Me
Blog RSS Blog
Releases RSS Releases
Page: 0 ... 5 ... 10 ... 15 ... 20 ... 25 ... 30 ... 35 ... 40 ... 45
Cute and sexy as hell...
Date: 23/8/2005
So yeah I'm really enjoying my new Mac mini, so far it's everything I wanted it to be. And I only went an itty bitty over budget ;)

So far I've updated to 10.3.9 and installed XCode and the X11 SDK. I intend to port Lgi using to OS X / X11 first and then try for a cocoa port sometime in the future. However if getting X11 support work proves to be too tiresome then I'll ditch that and go straight to cocoa. I've given myself 2 weeks to work that out.

After working out that I have to power cycle the cable modem when I plug it into the Mac I have most things working nicely. I'm not sure how to get my logitech keyboard's home and end keys to do their thing. Maybe it's a keyboard mapping issue... or it's just different on a Mac.

Another thing that I'd like to use the mini for is outputting to the TV. Now I know some companies make USB2 video out thingos but I havn't found any that explicitly support Mac/OS X so I've held off buying. (EyeTV? um... isn't that kinda expensive?). So I had this brilliant idea right! I already have a Sony DV cam capable of converting DV/Firewire to composite video. I wonder whether I can plug that into the firewire port on the mini and output that to the TV... as a kinda stop gap measure till I get a real TV out. Can you get Quicktime to output to a DV video device?

I also assume that somewhere there is a xvid codec for the Mac? I havn't even had time to look but a lot of my content is in xvid.
(5) Comments | Add Comment

Stupid Stupid Stupid
Date: 21/8/2005
Well, great news (for me anyway), my Mac mini arrived yesterday and I'm an official "switcher"... oh wait... I'm still going to use my windows box. I don't know what that makes me other than confused.

Anyway in protest windows XP has given me the finger and decided to root up the graphics driver. Currently XP won't boot into anything other than vanilla VGA. So I've uninstalled the nVidia drivers and I'm downloading the latest (at a measly 20kb/s *sigh*) drivers hoping that when I reinstall I'll get something more than the screen powering down because of no VGA signal when I boot XP.

So now I have 2 computers the question of networking them and providing net access arises. Obviously it'd be nice to have a broadband router connected up to the cable modem but I don't have one of those (yet). I do have an 8 port switch but I don't know how that would help. 2 computers can't both DHCP into the same cable modem. So I have a flakey 2nd network card for the windows box and a cross over cable so I can do the NAT thing, but of course that means running the noisy PC just to get the silect Mac on the air. Which kinda defeats the purpose doesn't it?

That damn nVidia driver is still downloading *sigh*.

Anyway back to the networking issue, I'm not against buying a broadband router but I'd like to invest in an ADSL broadband router because ADSL is becoming much better value here in .au now that a) there is a lot of competition in the ADSL market and b) the ADSL companies are installing their own DSLAMS in the exchanges to route around the incumbant Telstra monopoly. And I'm in a bit of a pickle because the lovely people at Optus, my current ISP, have hooked our phone line up over the cable network and so we don't have a functional copper pair into the house. It's expensive to get that fixed up and it's very hard to avoid using Telstra to do that. And I'd really prefer to avoid Telstra if at all possible. It seems like it'll cost me in the order of A$500 to get copper hooked up, buy the router and then sign up for ADSL somewhere. A bit painful on the wallet.

There are assorted wireless plans available but they don't hold a candle to the value of the ADSL plans available.

Oh well, rant over. The driver has downloaded... time to go do battle with XP.
(4) Comments | Add Comment

BeOS/Zeta Subversion
Date: 16/8/2005
I've got Zeta 1.0 installed and I'm trying to checkout source code from a subversion database and I get: 

$ svn co file:///shared/CodeRep/Lgi
svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL
svn: Unable to open repository 'file:///shared/CodeRep/Lgi'
svn: Error opening db lockfile
svn: Can't get shared lock on file '/shared/CodeRep/locks/db.lock': General OS error


Now I know about deleting 'db/__db.???' when switching OS, because I do that under Linux and svn works fine from both Win32 and Linux. But under BeOS it just errors out.

Grrrrr :(
(2) Comments | Add Comment

The Rich Edit Saga
Date: 10/8/2005
Well I think I'm finally done with playing around with rich edit controls for a while. I've hit a wall and it's not moving.

I've given up trying to embed mozilla on win32, it's just too large a dependency. So I'm using IE at the moment and the Easy Web Editor as the content. It works fine if you load it into a normal IE window but if you embed it in an application via the IE ActiveX control it behaves differently.

The problem stems from the fact that the body's onKeyDown handle is not called in the activex version. This causes several problems, firstly and most direly the delete key doesn't work. Secondly the key handler fixes IE's editor putting p tags everywhere instead of br's.

So I put together a simple activex test case for people interested in helping fix the problem to download and play with.
(4) Comments | Add Comment

i.Scribe in the Arctic
Date: 9/8/2005
2 intrepid aussies are treking across the Artic reporting their adventures via email. And yup they are using the XGate software and i.Scribe via Iridium satellite phone to blog their progress.

Speaking of Scribe is interesting places I got an email postcard from someone travelling europe with i.Scribe installed on the flash card of their digital camera. Great for internet cafes :)

Anyone else got some cool Scribe travel stories?
(0) Comments | Add Comment

Rich Edit Progress
Date: 9/8/2005
Well, after a lot of poking around with HTML rich text controls I can say that it certainly wasn't the easy solution I was looking for. I've tried both the IE and Mozilla control and they both have show stopper issues.

IE
  • Delete key doesn't work.
  • Lots of weird duplicate p tags everywhere.
Mozilla
  • Layout of iframes can't be made to fill remaining space. 100% width and height are broken in that they get there dimensions off the body element instead of the parent div element. Meaning I can't resize the edit area to the client part of the window.
  • Bug #303829 means you can't implement popup dialogs in Mozilla.
  • No way of reliably calling javascript through the ActiveX interface. Meaning that to save the edited HTML back into a DOM accessable field you have to implement ugly hacks like retasking onmouseout to do the work for you and then programatically move the mouse out of the window.
  • It only works with the 11mb Mozilla ZIP release, not the installer version of Mozilla or Firefox or the Mozilla ActiveX installer. That sucks.
  • No way to get the size of the content without scrollbars to resize the window to fit everything in.
So I have a "kinda" working solution with the Mozilla control but it still sucks in some parts. So I'm not keen to release it on unsuspecting users.

I have learnt some cool new things though:
  • You can disable scroll bars on an element by using the style "overflow: hidden;"
  • There are special CSS colours that map to you current system colours. Very useful for creating UI elements that intergrate with the rest of an application.
  • At least in Mozilla an iframe with "display: hidden;" still appears as empty space in the layout of elements. If you use "display: none;" then you can't address it anymore, it kinda disappears. Sooooo what I did is "width:0px; height:0px" until I needed it and then set it's size with javascript when I needed it. But you do that like this: 
    ctrl.style.width = "100px";
ctrl.style.height = "80px";
    instead of 
    ctrl.width = "100px";
ctrl.height = "80px";
    shrug.
(0) Comments | Add Comment