August 2005 Archives

Ok, I released the latest Pocketcity. It was just languishing.
Now on to the complaints, and how can I fix them.

1) I originally downloaded what was the "stable" version .17, and I had color. After running into some of the snags that I will mention below, I decided first to dowload the update which warned that it would have bugs. Well, I lost the color. I have a Tungsten T3 running on Palm OS 5.2.1. Actually, the color shows when I view the map, but the city is now in black and white. I tried deleting the game and re-loading the first "stable" .17, and I still have B&W. Patch available?

I don't think this exists in the 0.17 release version, it sounds like the user uploaded one of the -bw tilesets.

2) The tax rate doesn't seem to have any impact on the rate of development. I tested raising it and lowering it to see if population, factory growth, and commercial growth would (as they should) be stimulated when lower... no connection it seems. Here's one way to have a big bank account... raise the tax rate sky high! They won't move out! :)

True, the tax isn't influencing people. I still have to get the feedback loops working properly.

3) It doesn't seem to matter how many Military, Police, or Fire Stations I build... I can only have one unit deployed to fight monsters. 3a) I kept trying to get more units deployed because fighting them doesn't seem to kill them any faster than just letting them run their damage unchecked. I thought if I could deploy more than one tank, I could stop them. I also tried deploying one tank, and one police car... still no apparent effect except that they seem to sometimes divert course.

Unfortunately you need to surround the monster/fire to nullify it. I need to change them to area effect items.

4) Deploying a firefighting unit seems the surest way for the fire to spread. Instead, I learned to pause the game and bulldoze all around the fire and just let it burn out. Early attempts to use the fire fighting unit ended in exponential spread of fire.

Same problem as 3, it's not an area effect item.

5) Rate of development slows down a lot if I try to build a seperate "colony" further down the river. When the game starts, it's really cool to see it grow. I expected that adding the same config. a little further down or even accross from the river would yeild a similar rate of development. It seems as they are all tied in to a reduced growth rate once population hits a certain level.

This is the distribution algorithm acting up again. I'll have to re-work it to make it deal with this situation a little better.

6) Looking for ways to stimulate population growth. As indicated in item #2, Tax rate doesn't seem to stimulate. I tried trees and water, and no apparent stimulus there. Roads are a must, but after that, I haven't seen increased paces of development from the addition of PD's either. Thought more would move in with better police presence, etc...

Problems with feedback circuit.

Aargh! I just have to get my head out of my ass with this program. People are complaining.

This is a bit of a music/video otherwise problem that seems to not have been sorted out. The problem is that when I've got a long piece of either music or video there is no facility for bookmarking where I am within the file. iTunes has support within files that are either Podcasts or Audiobooks, but outside of that you're S.O.L.

Well I was at Mick and T's combined 10th wedding anniversary and Mick's 'answer' birthday party. If you have to ask what the answer birthday is then I sugggest a swift belt of a towel. The images are still being uploaded - sadly the internet is slow for uploading pictures.

Well I was looking at another batch of laptops - this time by a group called WindowPC, and I found an option to buy a DVD burner with 'LightScribe'. Now I didn't know what lightscribe was before that, but now that I know, I think it's a really good idea. You get to label the physical disc itself, and you can use both text and images. What a really neat idea, producing highly personalized discs without the need to mess with sticky labels.
The website has a label gallery, which has some examples. I'll say it again, what a really nice idea.

This one was a bit painful as I didn't want to mess with the pre-existing configuration of the key files. Installation required a small modification to the standard installation options.

cygrunsrv --install sshd --path '/usr/sbin/sshd' --env 'PATH=/bin;/sbin' --env 'CYGWIN=ntsec tty' -a -D

You need to use the cygwin --path item, otherwise the service won't start correctly (sshd needs to be executed with an absolute path). The env flags are there to allow the service to start, otherwise you end up with an annoying: cygcrypt-0.dll cannot be found error. The CYGWIN environment was there because otherwise it doesn't work correctly. the -D is for daemon mode.

While installing the latest release of Solaris Express on my laptop (which took waaay too long) I was watching Dawn of the Dead on the telly. I tell you those zombies were just way too fast for my liking. It makes for a much scarier experience for us fans of the genre. The experience left me just a little shaken it was done so well. I mean, hell I laughed during Scream, but this had me turning my head on more than one occasion.
Obligatory Link of the Day: V.G. Cats. Humourous computer-game based comics by Scott Ramsoomair. Check out the T-shirts. I'm tempted myself.
Aargh! sucky iTunes just crapped out on me while burning mix cd #8 for the party this weekend. At least I can just deselect the tracks that have been already written and get on with the burning. I suppose it's part of the iTunes does not like writing large compilations (this one's 14.2 hours long). Scratch that - It's decide to keep burning the same tracks. I suppose there's a bug there somewhere. Piece of chit Apple software.
It looks like iTunes tries to make them unusable on computers as well. I have a single badly labelled CD track on the disk.
The music is?

It's old, it's boring, but it's functional. The old Software Engineering Proverbs Page.

Well it finally happened - my hard drive decided that it could no longer take all the beatings that I was putting it through. Clicks, whirs and spinning up and down were the order of the day so I set about to recover as much data from it as possible. Bearing in mind of course that it was split into more than one operating system. Damn these rubbishy small drives. At least I have backups of most everything.
Being that it would take at least a week for my favourite on-line retailer to get me a hard drive, and next day delivery was not really an option I went to the local Aldi, and bought a Western Digital hard drive (250gb, 8Mb Cache, 7200 RPM) for the princely sum of €125, which is a little over 50¢ a gigabyte, which is damned good value.
Thankfully there is no corruption of the partition table, so as I performed for the laptop upgrade, I used the trusty dd command.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 conv=noerror,sync

The difference here is of course that I've added the essential conv=noerror,sync to the command line. This means that it ignores input/output errors, and the sync makes sure that when I/O errors happen that the destination drive gets padded with zeros. It's progressing nicely, and I've only seen 72 i/o errors, and they look to be sequential on the drive. whatever was on the drive at that location has just taken one for the team :)
I'll fire up partition magic once I've all the content transferred. 72 sectors of 512 bytes is not a huge amount of data to lose, and I have a feeling it's in the pagefile.
Update 2005-08-24 12:51 - it seems to be working well so far.

Well the holiday was fun. I got tanned and burned - silly me. The Cure was great, it was about 2.5 hours long, which made for a nice long concert (from 7.30 pm to about 3am). I'd recommend the ice cream and the crêpes.

Off on holidays to France today. I will try not to update this before I get back.
See ya later.

At the start of January I got a new phone. Less than a month later the phone, along with my jacket, was stolen in a night club - from the cloak room. After several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with the phone insurance, they refused to replace my phone. Wasted money, that insurance policy I tell you. Apparently because it was within a month of having obtained my phone, it was far more than a formality. I'll have to remember that in future.
On to new phones. I had a Sony Ericsson V800. Nice phone, but really bad battery life. I've been looking at the S700, which is a better phone (battery life-wise) but a friend was telling me of his new XDAIIs (an O2 phone). But you will lose 3G capabilities comes the cry. Lets kick in with a reality check here - 3G coverage in Ireland is cities and major towns only. Lets talk phone reception - I have virtually No coverage when I'm in the Castlegregory area with Vodafone. It has not improved in the last 4 years, while my little sister has had no issues with her O2 phones.
There is only one kicker. Calls abroad are covered in my minutes on Vodafone, which means that calls to the sister and others are significantly cheaper than they would be otherwise. If O2 would just stretch to that then I would completely swap over to them in a heartbeat.
Ah yes, geeks with their toys.

But it worked when I was at the office yesterday!
This is a typical lament from people who don't understand the problems of loosely fitted hardware. Whenever my hardware stops working after moving the PC, the first thing I do is open up the box and reseat every piece of faulting hardware possible. This normally fixes the problem, and in her case it did too.

It happens - the brother in law peers over my shoulder to verify that I'm not playing a game while I should be programming - like he could really tell the difference based on a lot of the games I play these days. In response, I decided to list what's on my desktop, and the reasons for them being there.

• My Computer, My Network Places, My Documents - ease of navigation
• My Bluetooth Places - bluetooth makes me so happy
• Firefox, Explorer, Thunderbird - web, and email
• Skype - cheap calls
• w.bloggar - web logging
• PE Resource Explorer - occasionally my projects don't compile so good
• Acrobat Professional - Lot of PDFs
• Nullsoft Install System - for making those all important installers (still learning this)
• Nunit GUI. One of these days I'll actually write those tests I've been promising myself
• IDA. The intelligent disassembler. Really good disassembler. This one is old, but I can't afford a new version (~€320 + vat at last check)
• Code-Work, my projects folder. Practically everything lives here. It's not on my desktop, it's a folder-link
• Visual FoxPro 8 - upsizing some code to SQL server. The venerable Fox needs to die, as it has not kept up with the times.
• Visual Studio.NET - I write a few bits and bobs in Microsoft C, C++, C#
• Delphi 2005 - Best Delphi yet, sadly it's got the nastiest price tag also. God be with the days when pascal cost $60
• Netbeans 4.1 - the gui designer alone is worth the download
• Palm OS Developer Suite - I caved, cscope just didn't cut the mustard - pocketcity
• Simcity 3000, UK Edition - reference for pocketcity
• Copernic Desktop Search - partial word search; 'nuff said
• El Bin of Recycling

Making virtual folders. When you create a shortcut to a folder the start menu do not expand them on hover. This is remedied by creating a real folder, then making a desktop.ini file containing the following:

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID2={0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9187-B532F1E9575D}
Flags=2

Follow this with a shortcut called target, which points to the real directory. You can place this folder anywhere. When it's on the start menu you have the right pointing triangle, which indicates that it's a real folder

Went to see Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Yummy; Johnny Depp was just creepy. I liked it a lot.

"Is real life really stranger than fiction, or is fiction about real life being stranger than fiction stranger than real life being stranger than fiction?" Ow.
Dog day.

Came across this one in a piece of C code.

(conditionflag & STATUSBIT) ?
        (KdPrint(xxxx)) : 0;

Edited [ 2005-08-04, 19:42 Pete ] There was no code making use of the result of the ?: operation.
This piece of code is terrible from both a readability and functionality perspective. If the return type of the function is changed to a void, then there won't be a valid left hand side for the evaluation to function correctly, from a readability perspective the developer split the code over two lines, which made it ripe for the more legible form of:

if (conditionflag & STATUSBIT)
        (KdPrint(xxxx));

Ah well, you can't boss everyone around all of the time I suppose.

It's slightly frustrating when you are trying to find out what piece of code created what variable. Desktop search only goes so far, showing you all the references of the name of a variable. I need something along the lines of cscope, but over all my code - C, C++, Delphi, Java, FoxPro.
Does anyone know of something like this, or am I going to have to make one myself?

Here's one from the UK. When people have been in accidents one of the things that are found are mobile phones. Typically their small form factor makes them more survivable in a lot of cases. The suggestion is to put a number in their, listed under ICE (In Case of Emergency). It's a realy simple suggestion, that helps people get in touch with relations and next of kin when something happens - as after all people can have huge quantities of numbers in their phone book, with no idea for the emergency services as to who is to be contacted.