Pete Shanahan's Shack

I find the Palm platform convenient for programming. You can build something using the latest and greatest Palm 5 based SDK and then run it on the oldest cruddiest palm you have. As long as you make sure to not use unsupported APIs your program just works. It’s like static linking under Unix/Linux – all you need to make sure is that the underlying system calls are there (or in this case entries in the trap table.

I’ve been re-watching the new series of Battlestar Galactica, and damn, but it’s great. I’ve played several tactical games on the computer, but I’ve never encountered anything that has had the player in such an impotent position. You are dealing with an enemy that can increase it’s number by simply pressing the ‘more’ button on a console. I don’t think that anyone could play a game that ultimately, regardless of what you did, was unwinnable.

There are a few missions in games (such as the 10 minute survival ones in starcaft) that gave you a sense of just how hopeless it was, but they really don’t contribute to how awful it is.

There are few games that get close to this fact. Freespace 2 was one of them. It concludes with the baddies causing a supernova. It leaves us with a sense of hope. The only problem is that it, at some level, it allows us to feel that we can win.

I want an armageddon situation.

Ok,
We have the X position:
- getMapXPos()
this is a fraction of the overall display:
(getMapXPos() / getMapWidth())
multiply by the width of the display.
Making sure to order them such that there is never a zero value
for the multiplication.

the high resolution support for the PalmOS5 is driving me nuts.
little new pieces of the API seem to appear every now and again that make older code stop working. The testing matrix looks like:

• pre palmos 3.5 device
• palmos 3.5 device
• grey
• color
• palmos 4 device
• grey
• color
• palmos 5 device (simulator)
• 320×320 resolution
• palmos 5.?? device (simulator)
• collapsible display, reorientable display
• 1, 1.5 and 2x resolution
• palmos 6 device (simulator)
• all the 5.?? matrix

It’s quite a trek to make sure that it works in all the devices. I need to codify the testing matrix.

I’m sitting at the trian station waiting for the dart home. It’s been a long
day in the office. I arrived at just before 10am.
Things that happened today: I nearly fainted on the train coming into the
office. That cost me 1/2 an hour waiting for missing trains.
I got 2.6.3 working on my laptop. It just simply refused to boot. I forgot
to translate the modules.conf file into the modprobe.conf file. Aargh!
I’ve been getting it working under vmware too, I needed to build the vmhgfs
module. Rewrote the Makefile to be a 2.6 modules makefile. One fix in the
driver.c file (add a #define for NODEV) and it built and installed fine.
The only problem is that getting the interface status i.e. link up/down isn’t
working so the ifup script wasn’t assigning them IP addresses. A couple of
fixes to that (remove the link test) and it all worked perfectly. I should
probably fix the link test to work correctly, that way I can take the laptop
on the road again.
That’s just about all the work related stuff I’m allowed to talk about the
rest is hush hush.

dear god, I can’t believe I ever managed to live without the z shell. It
is just screams ‘feeping creature’. The filename completion is simply scary
the globbing is something from god.
Moo!

For some reason the building of the overlay zones on rail wasn’t working.
Turns out that the code was missing. This looks like a CVS dodginess thing
in relation to the date/times.
Fixed. Now on to the scrolling problem.
I still can’t reproduce it dadblast it.

The river is missing at the top edge of the graph. I’ve obviously got an
off-by-one error that’s doing this.
I fixed it in the CreateFullRiver routine by specifying
k >= 0, instead of k > 0

Transparency and GdkPixmaps.
Do I need to create a transparency mask for each of the map overlay types?
it seems as though I do.

I really enjoy hiding the ‘alt’ related hotkeys hints when unused. It just
does not seem to stick n my bloody laptop.
something is messing me around I think.