Category: Code

Beef Up Your Wireless Router

Josh Kuo posted an interesting [blog entry] describing the open source project [OpenWrt] and then he details a list of Linux services that protect the network. OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for embedded devices. Essentially I plan to use this to load extra usb drivers in my wireless print server to load two 500GB iBooks. That way I can have a wireless-mirrored storage system to keep all my files safe. I should also be able to load drivers for a wireless usb quick cam and possibly drivers for a scanner. Maybe even drivers for a USB hub could be loaded. If that happens I can connect more than two devices to my Netgear wireless print server.

Intel Game Demo Contest 2007 (May 5th-August 15th)

“Contest begins March 5th, 2007. Registration Forms must be received by July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Community judging to determine finalists will begin July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007 and run until August 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Executables of finalists must be received by August 15th, 3:00pm PST 2007. Winners will be announced at Austin Game Developer Conference on September 5th, 2007, and published on the contest website the same day.”

Visit the [2007 Official Rules ].

Snow Day

“Alright!” I took of a video with the camera while sledding the big hill. Watch [the video].

It was a bit of a technical feat to make this video. The camera records a MOV file. So I imported into QuickTime and exported as a AVI. I used Windows Movie Maker to put all the AVI videos together into a single video and output as a WMV file. I used the Divx Converter to convert from the WMV format to a DIVX file. And then I used Flash 8 to convert from a DIVX to a Flash FLV file that plays in the Flash movie.

Wind Storm

We had a nice storm Thursday which knocked out power to one million people. Unfortunately, this outage also took my Comcast High Speed Internet connection with it. And there’s been so much news that I missed in such a short while.

  1. Top news: Microsoft posted the December 2006 DirectX update which includes a peak at [DirectX 10].
  2. Microsoft is hosting an XBox Live Arcade [programming contest].
  3. If you want to compete in the contest, it would be handy to have an XBox Live Arcade compiler. You may find the [Express XBLA compiler] that Microsoft just released useful.
  4. If you don’t know how to program the console that is ok too. Microsoft just released about how to program the XNA.
  5. Microsoft released their [Robotics Studio]. Robotics Studio gives the programmer a handy library to do embedded system programming.

Usually people harp on Microsoft, but this week we can see some good news.

Portfolio Gallery

I had registered the domain name: [TGraupmann] a while back to host my portfolio and to do some website experiments. I decided to experiment with [SimpleViewer].

SimpleViewer takes an XML gallery file, so I wrote a handy Perl script to auto generate the gallery file:

#perl

print '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' . "n";
print '<simpleviewerGallery maxImageWidth="4096"
maxImageHeight="4096" textColor="0xFFFFFF"
frameColor="0xffffff" frameWidth="20" stagePadding="40"
thumbnailColumns="3" thumbnailRows="3" navPosition="left"
title="SimpleViewer Title" enableRightClickOpen="true"
backgroundImagePath="" imagePath="" thumbPath="">' . "n";

while (<images/*.jpg>)
{
   $_ =~ s/images///;
   print '   <image>' . "n";
   print '      <filename>' . $_ . '</filename>' . "n";
   print '      <caption>' . $_ . '</caption>' . "n";
   print '   </image>' . "n";
}

print '</simpleviewerGallery>' . "n";

Bots and Spam

I killed about 3000 spam comments on my stories with a single SQL statement. Beware any spammer from considering spamming me again.
delete FROM `gl_comments` WHERE 1
delete FROM `gl_storysubmission` WHERE 1
UPDATE `gl_stories` SET comments = 0 WHERE 1
DELETE FROM `gl_users` WHERE uid > 50


Also disabling comments worked wonders.

Penny Arcade Expo

We went to the [Penny Arcade Expo] last night. Strange setup at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA. The event had a $20 one day admission fee. The event filled all three levels of the Meydenbauer. We got a bag of free stuff walking thru the door. The event had bean bags everywhere. Every bean bag had a kid on it playing on Nintendo DS lites. Most of the DS handsets where white. We saw a few teal imports. They had a few panels going, we saw a show on Women in the Game industry. Most of the rooms had consoles going. A lot of people playing Street Fighter and Guitar Hero. One dedicated guy in the courner was playing Geo Wars. They used the big room to play the movie [The Wizard]. Next door they were setting up the exhibits for the Expo for Saturday and Sunday. We snuck in and saw all the exhibits while they were setting up minus the rush of people.

We saw one new style of game called [Eets].

Windows Presentation Foundation

[WPF] is Microsoft’s latest challenge to be equivalent to Flash.

To be able write and install WPF websites and apps you need to install:

  • Windows XP / Vista
  • [February 2005 WinFX Community Technology Preview]
  • February 2005 WinFX SDK
    (now called [Microsoft Windows SDK])

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or [Microsoft Visual C#]/[VB Express 2005]
  • [Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview – WinFX™ Development Tools]

    After installing all that you’ll be able to experiment with:

  • [Windows Presentation Foundation Hands-On-Labs – February 2006 CTP]

    Here is an excellent that does a good overview of the WPF feature set.

    Here are some tools to ease your WPF development:

  • [Microsoft Expression]

    • Download OBJ to Ogre.Mesh converter script (Windows)

    This is a little script I patched together to getting a faster pipeline going from OBJ to Ogre.Mesh files.

    I’m modeling in Modo, and didn’t want to manually do all these export tasks for minor changes.

    Read the readme. Run the install. Once installed right click any OBJ file and SendTo->convert_obj_to_mesh.cmd

    [https://tagenigma.com/source/ObjToMeshExporter.zip]