Apr 19, 2020
We’ve been talking about migrating the MLUG website to another system for a while. This would reduce our hosting burden and open up editing to more people.
One promising option was using the free static hosting features of GitLab Pages. The website would be backed by a git repository of some markup and processed into HTML through some commit hooks.
I’ve performed a few experiments on and off for a good few months and took the liberty of creating a GitLab organistion to host the various pieces at https://gitlab.
Jul 02, 2019
A recent task I’ve been working on for `Edict' has been how to represent agent planning and behaviour.
A core idea of the Edict concept has always been indirect control of the village’s population through abstract rules. We might achieve this by allowing players to label regions of the world, modify scalar agent parameters, incentivise specific agent behaviours with learning algorithms, or any of a variety of other mechanics.
However, I am personally intrigued by some level of direct, runtime, interaction with the agents' programming.
Feb 26, 2019
I’ve finally obtained a laptop. It is an end-of-life Metabox Prime-S P950EP; based on the Clevo P950EP6. Its sole purpose is for mobile development and demonstration of `Edict' (and other associated software) at some meetups around Melbourne; I will continue to use my desktop for almost all day-to-day work.
It includes what has become the standard combination of an Intel GPU, for simple desktop workloads, and an nVidia GPU, for the more resource intensive graphics operations.
Sep 10, 2018
The better portion of the last 6 weeks have been spent porting Edict and the 10 years of nerdcruft support libraries to Windows and introducing proper packaging for distribution. Given that I almost exclusively develop under, and for, Linux there are a few cases where my platform assumptions are broken under Windows. A few of the major sticking points I encountered are detailed below.
HardwareWindows IO is appalling. Particularly if you rely on random IO; doubly so if you still use a HDD.
Jun 17, 2018
Recently I had a need to perform some reasonably in depth traffic shaping and monitoring for one of my desktop systems under a variety of software configurations. Ordinarily I would have broadened my knowledge of iptables/nftables a little and done the processing under my usual Linux setup. However in this case I needed to analysis traffic from my Windows installation as well.
Fortuitously I had a `spare' Raspberry Pi 3 laying about which I could draft into service as an overly complicated, though intelligent, wireless adapter.
Sep 15, 2017
This fortnight saw a lot of Vulkan experimentation and further work towards consistent vertex buffer handling in asset loading and dynamic geometry generators.
Vulkan Delving into Vulkan for a week was interesting, but very intimidating. There are an amazing number of concepts that need to be chained together to accomplish even a simple “Hello World”. While I can understand the rationale it was a shock to discover that swapchains, a feature I take for granted in OpenGL, aren’t even a core API.
Sep 14, 2017
The C preprocessor has a deservedly poor reputation as a means to define function-like code. However there aren’t many guaranteed alternatives for trivial code generation without resorting to external tools. I’ve been making use of it for some time to iterate over lists of types when manually instantiating templates, defining enum-to-string conversions, and some trivial (but tedious) free functions. Implementing a map function over lists of tokens using only the preprocessor is a neat way to simplify this whole process.
Sep 04, 2017
The bulk of this weeks work focused on integration of game logic with the render libraries, chasing up toolchain issues, and investigating an OpenGL state management bug. I’m still well and truely focussed on fairly dry technical and internal development details here.
Simluation reintegration We’re now back to the point where we can perform terrain picking and basic zone management, but with the newer and more performant render infrastructure (as opposed to the original OpenGL 1.
Feb 06, 2017
Some Linux filesystems do not natively support swapfiles as they do not implement the required kernel calls or are unable to do so. Notable amongst this list of filesystem is btrfs, whose snapshot functionality I use to streamline my backup system.
Unfortunately, some systems I maintain have a chronic lack of RAM and require a swapfile to complete some long running operations. As a workaround it is possible to create a loopback device from a file, which one can then pass to the kernel as a swap device.
Jun 16, 2016
A note to myself (given that I’ve solved this issue a few times now).
If you’re attempting to cross-compile under Gentoo, and are using pkg-config, certain functionality will be silently disabled. Of particular note for my purposes is PKG_CONFIG_PATH, which I use as part of my autotools sub-package strategy. There is no point filing bugs for this issue as the maintainers have made it explicit that this is deliberate and no patches will be accepted.
May 16, 2016
At some point when debugging one will encounter a scenario where it is desirable to modify or observe an application’s interaction with an external library (or the system). Various techniques are available, but few are quite as straightforward as `library interposition’: the practice of overriding references to symbols from one library with another library at executable load-time.
To dramatically simplify the relevant process: when an application is being prepared to execute, the executable loader will extract from the target executable an ordered list of required symbols and an ordered list of requested libraries.
May 10, 2016
When developing cross-platform code, testing is critical. Access to various families of operating systems will allow rapid identification of (some) inadvertent platform specific assumptions. While there are some public testing services, like Travis CI, you will inevitably need to test locally at some point. I use a set of small virtual machines on my development machine for this.
I could use Xen or VirtualBox, but I am happier with KVM/QEMU in my particular environment.
May 02, 2016
My current project targets the Windows and Linux operating systems. Development is primarily under Linux and uses the Autotools build system. Windows binaries are generated with the mingw cross compilers. This setup isn’t for everyone, but it suits me quite well.
For my testing needs I use Automake’s simple builtin test harness and the simple TAP driver. Automake will add Makefile targets for each executable listed in TESTS. The LOG_DRIVER command will be used to generate test logs and test statuses using any LOG_COMPILER wrapper provided.
Jun 19, 2015
Randomness plays a key roll in many graphics and simulation techniques. Variations in behaviour can make simulations feel more alive. Randomised worlds can keep exploration alive in games.
Often a simple call to your language’s equivalent to rand for will suffice; perhaps modified by a non-uniform distribution. But what if we wanted a smooth transition between generated values? A function of position? Infinite and tilable but non-repeating patterns?
These properties can be satisfied by a 'coherent noise' function which maps an n-dimensional vector to a single value.
Mar 29, 2014
A new project has prompted me to investigate the trading APIs belonging to a number of Bitcoin exchanges. It’s been a fun few weeks and I’ve learned a lot about an area I’ve never really watched in the past.
Credit has to be given to Vault of Satoshi and justcoin for having particularly well behaved APIs (though justcoin does have to be reverse engineered from their trading platform’s source).
However, as expected it’s not all been rainbows and unicorns.
Aug 22, 2013
Every few weeks I come across questions on my regular photography forums which indicate a deep misunderstanding of what is actually occuring under the hood of some popular piece of imaging software.
The most common misconception I see is that a photographic image has an inate physical size, or DPI.
The graphical part of a photographic image is comprised of a grid of pixels; samples of light taken regularly across the dimensions of the image sensor.
Aug 16, 2013
As part of a current project I have access to (mostly complete) metadata on over 200 lenses across a range of consumer vendors. As part of a test to visualise discrepencies in the collected data I managed to construct a few plots of basic metadata over focal length.
As a quick preview to a future longer analysis I’ve thrown in the initial plot of lens weight vs. minimum focal length below.
Aug 01, 2013
After spending the better part of a day reinstalling my operating system (protip: don’t uninstall your system compiler if you’re running a source based distro), I finally got my system back to the point where I had a browser and email.
Immediately the text rendering in Chromium stood out as particularly poor. I’ve seen similar issues before where poorly spaced, uneven strokes, or changing line spaces have indicated errors from misconfigured modelines with ye olde CRT, or mismatched sub-pixel rendering on modern LCDs.
Jul 27, 2013
If you’re thinking of writing a daemon that has anything in the way of configuration files I implore you to consider a small amount of implementation effort for an ‘include’ directive.
This simple addition may not seem like a great deal for yourself, but it will undoubtedly go a long way to easing some poor sysop’s life.
An annoying example from the postfix documentation:
Is there some kind of ‘include’ directive for main.
Feb 21, 2012
After spending a few hours wrestling with the latest web-software I inflicted upon myself, it occured to me I’d best write instructions to my future self for reconfiguring this mess.
For reasons that are irrelevant to this article I need to generate XHTML, and would prefer to generate an HTML5 variant (yes, I know this doesn’t officially exist).
Rails appears to conflate the HTML and XHTML content-types. So we remove the existing HTML content-type and re-register those for HTML and XHTML.