Slaad's Programming Stuff

So in that previous post of mine where I claimed I was going to spend at least a day over the weekend on BeOS projects? I lied. I realised about 3 hours after that post that my capstone was due on November 23rd. That is; tomorrow. Since that day I've spent pretty much every weekend working 9am - 12:30am on it, taken about a week off work to work on it for similar lengths of time, and several post-work 6pm - 11:30pm nights. All this work has left me looking, in the words of The Wife "Like shit."

The good news is: I sent my capstone to the printers for binding last Monday. I'll be picking it up tomorrow and handing it in. Once I complete my defense next Thursday I will have completed all the requirements for my degree. Pending a pass, I'll graduate. Woot!

At this stage I'm planning to continue working four days / week, which will allow me to work on various projects; including my BeOS ones.

Earlier today I sent off the abstract for my capstone and indicated I would like to be assessed for a Distinction / High Distinction. I still have a lot of work to do on my capstone, but writing the abstract really helped give me a road map of what I want to do with it and how to get there.

What's the got to do with BeOS? Not much. But The Wife is out of town this weekend and like I'd predicted in a conversation with Koki, I bought pretty much a new PC for a MythTV box. There's two upsides to this; First the MythTV box can now flag two shows for commercials at 60fps, whilst recording two, and watching a pre-recorded show without batting an eye lid. Secondly; My previous MythTV / Media box was my perfectly good BeOS machine. I've since reclaimed this. So I have a 100% functioning BeOS (Zeta) machine: Proper disk I/O, accelerated video, sound, etc. So I'll be spending at least one day over the weekend working on BeOS projects. Yay!

And on that note: back to my capstone prototype.

In light of an disheartening response rate after my "Help!" post (ie: None) I did some searching around and found a suitable video card. So I've ordered a brand spanking new Radeon 9000 PCI card. I'm somewhat offended at paying $50au for such an old card but figure it's worth having dual head (again) and the ability to drag windows around on screen without tearing.

I'm also vainly hoping that the new video card will somehow fix DMA disk access getting disabled after several minutes. I'm very doubtful it will, in which case, I'm gearing up to buy a 400gb PATA drive for BeOS. I figure I have no need for SATA in BeOS / the drivers are buggy so I can move my current SATA drive to being a Windows drive... where the SATA will probably be utilised a little better.

With the girlfriend out of the state for a few days I took the time to catch up on some nerd house keeping.

You may recall in the last instalment that I was unable to boot BeOS successfully on my machine. Well... I've over come that. It turns out it was some corrupted settings - presumably as a result of frequent unsafe shut down due to unsupported video. So I can now boot BeOS successfully, but I still have one tiny problem: an unsupported graphics card. Now, I'd normally cop it sweet, and run in VESA mode, but it seems my graphics card doesn't appear to support VESA in my LCD monitors' native resolution (1440 x 900). On top of this, it's painfully slow when dragging windows. Not the snappy experience we all know.

Is all hope lost? Why, no, a new hero enters, stage right; You. So, how can you help? Well, I'm after suggestions (or donations) of a secondary video card exclusively for BeOS use. As such it doesn't need to be very fancy. My requirements are;

• It must be PCI, PCI Express x 4 or PCI Express x 1 (I have no AGP slot in this computer and my PCI Express x 16 slot is used by my gaming card)
• It must support 1440x900 at 16 bit.
• It'd be nice if it supported dual head, with both heads running at 1440x900
• Obviously it must be supported under Zeta / BeOS.
• It must be cheap (< $80au) - this is a secondary card after all

So, with that, I'm all ears. Any suggestions (or donations) are appreciated.

You may have noticed the lack of updates recently. Over the last month I've had a final assignment and a final exam. Which I needed to do work for.

On top of this I started full time work (Well, full time between two jobs). In fact, it's Sunday morning and I'm considering heading into work later today. So I've had precious little time to do any real code.

So you may have noticed that the site has been down / missing for a few days. We upgraded our server hardware and software which generally goes smoothly. Only this time there were some changes to mod_perl2 that broke my code (Which in turn made Baby Jesus cry). This has just now been fixed. Yay

You may have noticed by now I am an absolute sucker for avatars / buddy icons and the like. There's something about putting an image to a person... be it when they send me an IM or post in my blog.

And on that note, I have added Gravatar support to the commenting of my blog. If you have a Gravatar linked to the email you enter when commenting it will get displayed. The layout kind of eats wang, but I'll fix that later.

I am of course a bad example. I'm not at home so I do not have a copy of my famous Sad Orange handy. So when I get home I'll make that my Gravatar. Once you have one that is rated and working it'll work for all your backposts.

Of course, this has application elsewhere. It is my intention, also when I get home tonight, to have the MDR InfoPopper plugin match incoming emails to the Person that sent them. From there I can have it display a buddy icon for the sender, if applicable. So I'm also thinking I might write a tiny app that fetches the Gravatar of all your Person files.

A few people mailed me to tell me that commenting was broken. Indeed it was. We upgraded Perl and it broke the module I was using to keep session state (required for the spam prevention). I've just fixed the session state code, and thus re-enabled commenting.

So there, spring forth! Comment! Be merry and send me money.

So in light of my blog suddenly attracting spam (several a day) I've had to implement CAPTCHA test. For the uninitiated a CAPTCHA test is a form of turing test designed to prevent spam bots.

My implementation is fairly simple, enter certain characters from a string. You must enter them in the order it asks, in the correct case and include doubles. For example, you might get the string "425sdga9a" and get asked for the characters at 5, 1 and 1. You'd enter in "d44'.

It isn't perfect, so I am open to suggestions. I'm not a fan of the image based schemes, I find them terribly hard to read most of the time.

So I added Trackbacking to the software that runs this site. So if you write an article about something on my site feel free to use the trackback URL at the bottom of each post. This way I can be sure to stroke my ego some more.

I guess at some point I'll add outgoing Trackback support, too.

In other, more code related, news uh... the WebIM kicks ass. Man is that thing cool. The template stuff is coming along in a very swanky fashion. You can now do custom date formatting of variables, regexps and URL encoding. I'm sure I'll add other stuff too.