irl's MOTD

Another Wallpaper: Funky Looking Tree

irl — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:06:47 +0000

Given the amazing response that I received from Reddit on the last wallpaper, here is another:

Funky Looking Tree (1600x1200)

As before, the XCF is available here.

Credit: Tree Graphic – madetobeunique

Actual Time Spent

irl — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:03:38 +0000

Had some time and made myself a new wallpaper using The GIMP:

Actual Time Spent Wallpaper (1600x1200)

The XCF file used to create the image can be found here.

Leaving the bubble

irl — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:25:24 +0000

Christmas 2011 Chocolates

Christmas and the New Year are now behind us, and for many a welcome break from reality. For me, it’s quite the opposite. I leave the nice friendly bubble that the University life creates and re-enter the real world. At University, I am funded by both my student loan and occasional work for the University. Money troubles rarely occur and thus I can spend my time learning by either reading fascinating articles (or slightly less fascinating lecture slides) and implementing really cool things like those I have created in Room 205. It is odd, and exciting, to think that one day I will be plunged into this “real” world where a lot of my friends from college already are.

A few things that grabbed my attention:

Living is really expensive – this may just be due to location, as I returned to Basingstoke, Hampshire for Christmas.
The real world is run by idiots – I cite HMRC as an example, with their new online submission of documents and numbers. I have no idea what it’s about, but I’ve heard of multiple people having serious issues with it.
Things get quite dangerous – The plan landing in Aberdeen took two attempts, with damn serious wind. The plane broke upon landing and all the planes behind us got diverted.

I am glad to have now returned to my bubble. Enjoy the picture of some chocolates; my mum thought the penguin in the middle looked a bit like Tux.

LD22: Finished

irl — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:00:31 +0000

This has been published a little later than I’d planned, as I sort of went home and died in bed. My final game was a side-scroller written in Python using PyGame where you play the role of a kitten. This kitten completes solo missions, thus fitting the theme of “Alone”, in dangerous environments collecting beer, kebabs and cups of water. If the kitten comes into contact with a cactus in the desert or a satellite in space, it will blow up. Points are collected by collecting items, but are taken away for every item that remains, and for every item that cannot be allocated to one of the four kittens at the end of the game. You wouldn’t want 5 beers for 4 kittens, as that’s just going to cause kitten arguments. At the end of each level, the kitten is reunited with its 3 kitten friends.

After all the refactoring, the code now produces a framework for similar games. To create levels, it’s simply a matter of creating some images and defining where some things are within the image. Later, I might put together a simple guide for this.

You can see my submission on the Ludum Dare website.

Kitten's Missions Title Screen

If you hit a cactus, you will explode.

LD22: Exploding Kittens in Space

irl — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 08:00:09 +0000

All the code I wrote has now been refactored. I appear to be getting the hang of the Python way of doing things. The levels are no longer hard coded, and obstacles can be placed in the maps which cause the player to explode on impact.

If you hit a cactus, you will explode.

A third level has now been added, based in space, where you must find water for your hungover kitten friends. Other than the scoring system, everything engine-wise seems to be complete.

The code is now available in a Git repository at: https://github.com/irl/Kitten-s-Missions

Ludum Dare 22

irl — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:15:42 +0000

Whilst not participating in the actual event, I have been learning about Python and PyGame this weekend. Initially, me and two others were going to work as a group, but later it became apparent that our sleep patterns were not syncing up at all which made this all but impossible. As a result, a playable, actually quite fun, game has risen from my “messing about to get some ideas”.

Kitten's Missions Title Screen

Titled “Kitten’s Missions”, the player takes the role of a cat that must go on missions and then return to it’s friends. There are currently two missions; the first begins where the kitten is lost, but on it’s way to a party. On the way, the kitten must collect enough beer for itself and the three kitten friends.

The second mission is slightly more dangerous. As the kittens are now drunk, they must have kebabs, and the player must venture through a desert collecting them. Unfortunately there are cacti in the desert and, as we all know, when a kitten comes into contact with a cactus, it will explode.

I’ve recorded a video of the gameplay using my phone, a better quality video may come later.

Watch the video

Installing Windows 3.11 in DOSBox

irl — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 20:57:01 +0000

This is my first ever attempt at a video howto guide. By the end of this video, you will have installed Windows 3.11 and all the important drivers into a DOSBox system that you can start from your desktop, taskbar or start menu.

Ingredients

Windows 3.11 installation media (don’t ask me for this, try eBay or a local charity shop)
Video Driver
Sound Card Driver
Joystick Driver

Credit

A forum post by Dominus at vogons.zetafleet.com was an invaluable resource in compiling this video. Thanks. (:

The horribly overlaid music in this video is sample music included with Windows 98 and Windows XP.

Reloading my laptop for next year

irl — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:43:00 +0000

My laptop had slowed to the pace that a laptop running Windows will slow too if left for too long. I took this as an opportunity to load up all the software I need and not reinstall the software I don’t.

Operating System

Previously, I’d had my laptop dual-booting Windows 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu 10.10. You’d think, the amount of Linux knowledge I have and the fact that I’m a Computing Science student, I’d prefer Ubuntu over Windows… but I don’t even remember the last time I booted up in Linux. Microsoft Office is important to almost any task that’s “important”, like University related work or my job, which means that if I wanted to use Linux, I then have to reboot after I’ve finished the important stuff. Seeing as I have three Linux machines I can SSH into easily enough, I didn’t see the point in halving the 150GB hard drive space available to me for something that wouldn’t get used. I didn’t go with Windows 7 Ultimate though, as after some research, I discovered that Windows 7 Enterprise contains all the Ultimate features and also has a much later end-of-life date for support.

Productivity Applications

As I’m a heavy user of Office, Office 2010 Professional, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 were obvious choices. Less obvious was the inclusion of MikTeX and TeXworks, which I almost forgot. Whenever it comes to large reports, I find Word just doesn’t cut it, whereas LaTeX handles documents you could wrap round the world twice like they were nothing.

Communications and Social Applications

Office 2010 would be my main choice for email, although I also have Google Talk to tell me when I receive emails if Outlook is closed. This integrates with the Google Desktop sidebar. I then also have Google Picasa and Google Music, which both loosely fit into the category of social applications. I am a heavy twitter user, so TweetDeck was also an obvious piece of software for me to install. I was looking forward to getting GPG working again, but apparently GPG4Win doesn’t integrate with Outlook 2010 and they have no intention of getting it working, so I’m stuck with X.509 certificates and S/MIME signing. I also installed Acrobat Reader. I generally tend to avoid Acrobat Reader, but I figured it is a useful piece of software, and I have the time now to download it and install it. I have no idea how it can be so big.

Security Applications

Rapport is a brilliant piece of software. If you live in the UK (it may work elsewhere) then it can tell you whether or not you’re actually talking to your bank or an imposter. If you don’t have it yet, get it, it’s free. I also discovered HSBC were giving away free 12-month subscriptions for McAfee so I installed that too.

Development Applications

This was not personal preference, just what I need for what I do, so here’s a bullet point list:

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
JDK 7 + NetBeans
MinGW (C, C++, F77) + MSYS
GVim
Python 3.2
Haskell Platform

Design Applications

I’m not very good at the artistic side of things, but if I have too, I can usually make it look like I at least tried. Expression Studio 4 Ultimate contains a wide range of designer tools that should cover every case I’ll ever come across.

Next Steps

Now I’m going to try and create an image of my hard drive using Windows Backup (included in Business, Enterprise and Ultimate). This way if I ever need to reload my laptop again, I just need to put in the Windows 7 DVD and plug in the external hard drive and it will be ready in half an hour.

High-latency messaging via Lego robot courier

irl — Mon, 09 May 2011 20:53:27 +0000

Wireless doesn’t necessarily have to mean radio waves. If you’re worried about people listening in on your conversations, why not use a courier instead?

This is a solution I developed as part of my degree programme at the University of Aberdeen. At each end are two VT100 terminals, these connect to the robot through tin foil contacts at each end of the board. A switch on the robot lets it know that it’s hit the wall and (hopefully) docked with the contacts. The robot then spits out any message it was carrying and asks for another message by displaying a prompt on the terminal and then storing the input. Once the Enter key has been hit, it travels back again to the other terminal.

Remember though, no solution is truly secure, this is still open to man in the middle attacks and the robot can be easily confused by anyone with enough black tape.