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just another web log

30 May 2008 21:49
Installed compiz on the 10 year old laptop and got the rotating cube (with reflection, caps, transparency and gears), wobbly windows, fire, 3D windows and few other options to work perfectly !
In fact the only problem I had was with them all on the machine would sometimes pause for couple of seconds and the menus in blender did not display.
I showed this amazing eye candy to Sarah and her response was "what am I looking at?" :(
The laptop benefits from having a proper Nvidia card in, many laptops old and new, expensive and cheap have Intel or unbranded on-board graphic cards that can not hack the 3D acceleration.
24 May 2008 11:44
Ubuntu machine just stopped at 197 files rebooted and ... here we go again ...
Now upgrade fails because some files can not be downloaded, 5/2000+ :(
Switched from main Ubuntu GB servers to virgin and files are downloading ...
Update complete, rebooted and ... not wifi :(
Tried to rebuild custom wifi driver ... weird errors nothing on google luckily I have a few wifi cards, tried another and that works, phew!
21 May 2008 22:08
I wanted to update my Ubuntu laptop so I let the update manager find new packages, found a few. Updated those and then rebooted ... and ... ?
No distribution upgrade to Hardy Heron.. googled and searched and eventually found the secret sauce to beupdate-manager -d
now upgrading ...
19 May 2008 21:01
Book review from a few weeks ago.
"In the evil day" by Peter Temple, powerful spy thriller without the spies, loved it, a more adult approach to intense thrillers than Dan Brown.
If you think you can take it, I recommend it !
Starts in South Africa but soon swings between Hamburg and London as the two lead characters are slowly intertwined with repressed memories and force that is wiping out all traces ... of what !
11 May 2008 22:54
119 stars !!
Unfortunately the last level is a real doozy
08 May 2008 21:06
More silverlight woes, but I am unsure if this is a bug or not.
An object (in this case a circle) with a mouse-over that shows a tooltip, a name and mouse-exit that hides said tooltip.
Works perfectly if the mouse enters the circle and exist without touching the tooltip, but if the mouse moves over the now displayed tooltip the circle receives the mouse-exit and hides the tooltip then the mouse moves and the tooltip is shown again, flickering on and off.
Silverlight has a HitTest function so I should be able to test to see if the entry into the tooltip is in-fact still over the circle but NO the mouse-exit refuses to tell you where the mouse is.
hmmm? So I wrote a global mouse-move update global position handler and ...
Same issue. Turns out the mouse-move fires as the mouse moves to the edge of the circle but the moment the mouse exist the mouse-exit fires and at that point my global position is still inside the circle, grrrrrr!
Not sure how to fix this one, the obvious way is to move the tooltip but that spoils the whole look of the application.
08 May 2008 20:58
Todays reason for disliking silverlight:
Error messages; Either you get "Catastrophic Failure" which actually means the XAML is referring to an object that does not exist or one of a number of generic error messages that tell you absolutely nothing about the issue.
I will expand on that last one with an example. I wanted to dynamically create an object and animate it. To do this I had to create a Storyboard to hold the animation, create the object and assign it a render transform (e.g. rotate), create a doubleanimation (thats double as in floating point number), stick them all together and apply them to the root canvas.
This compiled but when I started the animation I would get either an ERROR or and ERROR and a known meaningless hex value. I tried all sorts of things, turned out that the Render Transform had to be created separately and assigned instead of being used from within the valid element I was using.
And another gotcha on that side of things, a doubleanimation has a target property e.g. Angle for a rotate transform and Opacity when you are fading in or out. But where with Opacity (and a number of other animation types) you target the object for rotate you must target the render transform IN the object, even though you are explicitly referencing Angle ...
I found a proper silverlight bug (that I reported), a border object in a canvas is not displayed when said canvas is dynamically unhidden, everything else on the canvas is unhidden along with it but the border stays invisible.
loading results, please wait loading animateloading animateloading animate
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