f-log

chat☆ is coming, in fact it would have been tonight if I had not misplaced a couple of image files...
there is always tomorrow, except I am not doing it then, so maybe Friday.

Do you remember my blender frustrations trying to add a "label" to a glass "jar" ?
I thought I would just do something really simple with the completed object, duplicate it many times at put it on a shelf. So I duplicated the object a few times did a test render and ....
The label was only showing on the original. Checked every thing was in place and after a little head scratching found that my solution of using an Empty to define where the "label" should go was not being duplicated or more the fact it was.
A duplicate contained all the object making up the "jar" including the Empty for the "label" but the material details were all pointing to the original Empty.
After much search I found no way to duplicate the material settings in the blender GUI so I turned to python again.
Not easy and not quick, the final code can be downloaded for educational purposes only shelved.py
You see I had to..
get currently selected object
make MASTER group
add selected objects into the group
make a NEW group
duplicate the MASTER group (this was easy, just ask for a duplicate and tick the box that say new material/texture)
add the new objects into the NEW group
loop through objects and find the "label" and "Empty"
get the materials for the "label"
get the textures for the materials of the "label"
assign the new Empty to the texture of the "label"
(then for fun)
randomly rotate the contents of the "jar"
randomly shift the label slightly
unselect the new objects
select the old MASTER group
rinse and repeat.
It took me sometime to come to that solution and I learned a lot. I have yet to actually make the shelf and produce a final render ...

I have complete Mario Galaxy -ish, well I got the star count down to 0, beat bowser, got the credits and the "the End" message but..
I loaded the save and the counter had reset to more than 40 ! I have now unlocked all the rooms including the "gate" and the "garden" and opened and completed the "trials" leaving me with 93 stars and count down of 27.
I have completed very few of the comets or the purple coin challenges but I have completed all the individual challenges.
The difficult ramped up pretty quickly after the first 50 stars, now every time you reach one you really feel you earned it.

Getting a few hundred spams a day means the likelihood of reading any one is very small but for some reason this one caught my eyeFrom: NationWide Building Society [phishing@nationwide.co.uk]
To: spam@jumpstation.co.uk
Date: Sunday 16:46:06
Subject: Dear customer
Are spammers lazy or just plain stupid ?

We have won the lottery !! and its more than the £10 we normally win once a year at Xmas.
Thats right we are now ........
£58 richer :(
hmmmm does not even come close to the amount we have spent on tickets, still, you have to be in it to win it!

I love valentines. When I first meet my wife she got me a wicked ceiling based flying apache helicopter and this year she has not disappointed.
I got her a nice necklace and she got me a slug!!
The NSlu2 (aka the slug) is cheap network storage adapter. You connect a USB hard drive and an Ethernet connection and that USB hard drives contents are available to your network.
Or you can install debian on it, guess what I am going to do/done?
First off I purchase a cheap 4G USB microdrive thinking the fact it is hard drive would help the life of use as standard USB flash drives are not ideal system drives with constant reads and writes, how wrong could I be ?
First up the NSlu2 has a default IP address of 192.168.1.77 which is not on my subnet, so change my subnet and try connect to the built in web server ... FAIL
I tried a few things including forcing a full system reset to factory defaults and using an old 10bT network hub (couldn't find my cross over cable) before it dawned on me the fact my pings were denied instead of timing out was the firewall was setup for my subnet and was stopping any action on 192.168.1.x :(
After that it was easy to connect change the IP address and start again, I even wrote a wiki page it was so arduous.
Soooo follow debian install instructions and get the firmware updated, easy.
Next step run installer via ssh and partition microdrive. Well the ssh was painful, I tried gnome-terminal,xterm,aterm,mrxvt but it was only konsole that handled the menu characters over ssh.
Then the partitioning, the drive was visible and I selected how I wanted it partitioned then FAIL can not read from drive, odd as it worked on my gentoo box.
Tried a few things, then gave up and used a USB flash drive, ssh disconnected FAIL
There are work arounds for this but I decided to cheat, I repartitioned the flash drive in gentoo then skipped the partitioning in the Debian installer and set it on its merry way, guide said 2 and half hours.
8 hours later it was asking if I wanted to continue, doh! my manual intervention had pulled it out of its default install cycle, it wanted loads of decisions made (all the defaults).
But eventually it worked, ssh'd in and plugged in the microdrive (the slug has two USB slots) worked fine, so I copied all directories to the microdrive and then rebooted ... FAIL
The initrd (and the Debian install flash) for some reason do not have what ever it is that is needed to mount the microdrive :(
I could rebuild the kernel or the initrd but in the end I have decided to sacrifice the flash drive and now have a spare microdrive ...
PHEW

This months LUG was good, mike brought his touch screen epos terminal and we had fun trying to get X to handle the touch screen.
David brought his PC to demonstrate two systems he has created, one is multi drive disk ripper with play list manipulator and player all built in BASH.
But the other project was a python server client model remote presentations system with openGL 3D !
A client machine connect via Ethernet sends commands to a server that displays the contents, including images and text (with auto formating). The text is displayed in 3D and he has plans for many transitions, at the moment there is just an excellerating slide.
All very impressive, and I took my grey missile launcher and shot people ;)

Speaking of stars, a new one is coming soon ;)
That is of course if I get the time to complete it ...

50 stars in Mario Galaxy. Only 200 to go :)
Needless to say I have putting in any spare time into this VERY addictive game.

27 stars in Mario Galaxy, which is not bad considering I am only playing it 30 mins every other night.

After some other bit fiddling I have managed to get images on to the keyring !

Notice the back and white image works fine but the colour images are corrupted.
The bottom two are the same data so the corruption is not in the data but in the process...

I am considering the vast amount of debug data I generate is slowing krum down enough to cause these problems but why does the black and white image always work ?
To get the images on to the keyring I currently use image magick to convert a flat .xcf file to .ppm (-compression none) which gives me a ascii file and a bit of awk'ing and I get the byte data formated so I can drop it into the krum header file.
When I am ready to use an image library it will just require me to load the data in 3 bytes per pixel, krum then converts it to two bytes per pixel.

seems 0x11110000 is not a binary value in c, whoops thats half my problems, now something is overwriting memory. 0x00 0xF0 everywhere ...

Quick krum update, I have managed to upload some data onto the device !!
I say data because its does not look much like the image I started with, but it does have some characteristics so there is still hope.
It is quite mind numbing looking at pages and pages of hex URB USB data or screens full of my hex debug data ...