Aegir’s Rantings

My school is pretty much forcing me to do this, so here goes. They want me to do an ‘ePortfolio’. Think online CV/Portfolio, but focussed entirly around school, and full of so much useless crap, that no employer will ever want to look at it. So I’m doing it somwhat differently, Im doing a more usefull CV, and a little portfolio of my work, with maybe some exceptional pieces of school work in it. Bah.

Why did Bob fall off the bicycle?
He was a fish.

Why did Bob fall off the bicycle when he was turned into a human?
Someone threw a fridge at him.

Pray to your gods.

Somone just linked me to this: http://www.roflcaeks.biz/lol.html

That is just downright scary, hardware keyloggers in Dell laptops, I mean, shit. Wheres the privacy?

I personally dont own a Dell, I own an Acer laptop, of a particular make that only sells in Australia and some European countries (Germany methinks). But still, I’m very suspicious… And so should you. Hell, I wouldnt give a crap about their being a hardware keylogger in my laptop, but I’d like to damnwell *know* about it.

So Apple dropped the bomb and announced swapping to Intel CPU’s. Ofcourse they’ll still use their own mobos, so clone macs are out of the question for a while. Aswell, regardless of the fact that OSX now runs on x86, it most likely will not run on most desktop computers. Good thing the kernel is based off of BSD, that means easy driver porting from BSD and Linux. So maybe one day in the future you’ll be able to run OSX on ordinary desktop machines. Woo! God knows when that happens Ill be dual booting again :). Apple will most likely no support this, and will reccomend using OSX on ‘certified’ hardware platforms. No matter. The open source folks are used to that kind of hardship.

Damnit. Patchman integrated my no-ai patch into Alpha 51. And he’s saying its mine. Bah! The code doesnt even resemble mine! Hah! Im not a patch-dev! You cant force me to do anything now! Hahahahah!

Alpha 52 of TTDPatch is now out, and some interesting new possibilities for station coding are now possible. For one, non-crossable station tiles. a51 had this, but it crashed the game (Among other things). Im waiting for GRFMaker 2.18 to implement this. Hopefully the feature will be stable enough by then for implementation within PGS. Speaking of which, there has been little progress on PGS. Astath got me the sprites I needed, although I am a bit worried about the graphical style that he’s using. The main thing Im waiting on right now is Cornelius’ updated station sprites before I can work on pre3.

I’m also thinking of OTTD. I love TTDPatch, and Im loyal to it, but its inevitable. One day OTTD will overtake TTDPatch. Their is talk about using 32bit pre-rendered tiles and whatnot, sure they look cool. But I wont use them. I like the TTD style of graphics (8bit, special pallette). So I’m thinking about later learning C, and I’m also starting to draw some additional sprites for the Trams/city railways that OTTD can use. Im also going to work on some more landscape tiles that OTTD can use. I still hate OTTD, I dont like playing it. But one day I will, one day

So theres nothing really that new in my life as such. Still plugging allong. Keeping up with assignments, Cisco, Data-trak etc… Im worried about Cisco though, a truckload of assignments are coming up which I’m completly un-prepared for. Ach. Ahhwell. Life goes on.

Damnit, Patchman insists on calling me a patch-dev… X|

So yeah, i’ve been upto some different things lately, tinkering with some crude TTDPatch hacks, bugging Patchman and other dev’s for a newtracks feature (Damnit, Im not coding it myself. I’m too nooby.) On the patch front I’ve been trying to tweak the track type detection system for rail vehicles. For tram/city rail ofcourse. I know what I want, but damn, I cant for the life of me figure out how to do it. I suppose thats to be expected, I’m still in the early stages of learning Assembly so far. Ooh, speaking of which I got redirected to a nice manual, Intel Architecture Software Developers Manual. I have volume two which is the x86 instruction set referance. Good read. Thanks ofcourse to Patchman for telling me about it.

I also made quite some progress on the power management front. I got CPU scaling working on a cpu thats not supposed to support it. The non-mobile, desktop version of the Celeron D, 2.8ghz CPU. Ill tell ya, its an arse to find any information on power management for laptops. Moreso for an Extensa 2001lm. A weird quirky brand of Acer laptops that apparently have only been sold in Germany and Australia. On the cheap aswell. Mine cost me AUS$1600, it came with 256mb DDR 333mhz, Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP, 2.8ghz Celeron D, 40gb HD, and a 1hr battery life >.<. Anyways… I finally got CPU scaling working. All I really had to do was mod-probe p4-clockmod, cpufreq-userspace and cpufreq-powersave. Then I added in a new Gnome CPU frequency applet capable of *changing* the cpu frequency to one of the following six increments:

* 100% - 2.8ghz
* 87% - 2.45ghz
* 75% - 2.10ghz
* 62% - 1.75ghz
* 50% - 1.4ghz
* 37% - 1.05ghz
* 25% - 700mhz
* 12% - 350mhz

Very nifty if I do say so myself.

I’m also thinking of adding some specialist sections to my website, some more detailed stuff on the work I do for various games (Kinda brings back memories of my last site), my crude hacks of TTDPatch. Plus reviving the ‘ego boosting forums’ is on the agenda.

So, it looks like this is now going to be part-blog. Well, waddaya know. I guess it can’t be all bad. So what have I been up to lately? Well. Im now officially an Linux nerd. I run my Gnome 2.10 on the awesome Ubuntu. I make crude hacks for TTDPatch, code .grf’s, test GRFMaker, tinker with Wine, tinker with desktop settings (Quite often, I’ve been chasing that ‘perfect’ linux desktop, Im almost there), oh god. Too many things to really mention here.

Speaking of crude TTDPatch hacks, I’ve jumped on the tram/city rails bandwagon lately. Progress for which can be found on the TT-Forums. My idea sofar has been to allow normal trains to drive on monorail track, and convert Monorail to tram tracks. This works, meh, half decently. At the moment my crude code does not allow Monorail vehicles to travel, and thus trams, to travel on normal rail. Normal trains cant travel wherever the hell they want though. Which is good.

I’m also slowly prodding Josef to code a newtracks feature. I have plenty of ideas for this, and although I would love to code it myself, I severly lack the skills and knowledge to pull it off. Maybe one day I’ll be good enough to do somthing like that.

So yeah, now I just have to figure out how to get RSS feeds of my website working. The dream is to one day end up on a planet for somthing…

Damnit. I’ve started using proper tabulation in my sources for this site. Now I have to tabulate the rest of it…