Greatest 4K ever told?

In what is likely to be the most impressive use of 4096 bytes this year, RGBA and TBC have created a world, in a demo called Elevated. It takes upto a minute to start, but simple looks and sounds amazing for just 4KB.

If your computer isn’t up to the task, you can watch a it on YouTube – but try the real thing first!

iPhone therefor I am.

I recently gave into technolust and bought an iPhone 3G. After a rather drawn out purchasing process ( Surely, if someone comes in and walks straight to the counter and asks for an exact phone on an exact contract, you can stop the sales pitch right there and just expedite the process), I left feeling the warm glow of high-tech consumerism and headed home to activate my futuristic communicator. All was well as the apps were stored, my media was podded, calls were made, photos were touched and maps were pinned – except there was a little niggle feeling that all wasn’t right.

Turning the iPhone from portrait to landscape whilst running an orientation aware app would sometimes result in the app rotating, but more often than not, it wouldn’t do a thing, Whilst a good vigorous shake would usually result in the screen locked upside down until it was rebooted, I don’t think this was the effect that Apple had been aiming for. I fired up the excellent App Store and searched for an accelerometer tool, finally settling on iHandy Level. Once installed, iHandy Level revealed that the iPhone seemed to think that being held level was the same as being tilted 45 degrees, although equally as often may just flip 180 degrees. After a soft reset, a hard reboot and eventually a restore, it was clear this iPhone had some issues with its accelerometers.

A quick trip back to the O2 store and an after-sales experience light years ahead of the actual purchase experience, the phone was twisted this way and that for a minute or two, before a brand spanking new iPhone was handed over and I was free to enjoy my iPhone and the forthcoming 24 months of contractual bliss which is certain to ensue…

PHP 5.2.5 on Windows 2003

There is an oddity in the PHP 5.2.5 installer (and possibly earlier) on Windows 2003 in that it’s default install path is C:\Program Files\PHP. Nothing odd there and indeed the install finishes without issue with the PHP Application Extension and PHP Web Extension configured automatically in IIS (I was tried with both ISAPI and CGI) however when you try to view a PHP page in IIS you get a 404.

It turns out that the path of the PHP Application Extension is in 8.3 format whilst the Web Extension is in LFN format – as far as IIS is concerned that these are two different paths. Editing the PHP Application Extension to include the LFN path enclosed in quotes ( e.g. “C:\Program Files\PHP\php5isapi.dll” ) makes IIS happy.

So if you find you install PHP to a path with non 8.3 paths and you get a 404 on PHP pages then edit the Application Extension to get it going!

Mantis, PHP and PCRE

Had an odd issue to look at where Mantis 1.0.6 was sending blank notification emails once they got to a certain size. After looking at the issue long and hard I determined that it was only happening on PHP 5.2.0 and above and seemed to be related to the size of the notification email, but wasn’t a constant size and seemed to depend on the contents of the bugnotes.

Long story short, the PHP function preg_match_all was failing once the email reached a certain size. preg_match_all is basically a thin wrapper around the Perl Compatible Regular Expression function built into PHP and since 5.2.0 the recursion and backtracking limits have been set and you need to edit your PHP.INI in order to increase them…

[Pcre]
pcre.recursion_limit = 100000
pcre.backtrack_limit = 100000

These are the default values that need to be increased, I found 500000 in each happily worked but I think you need to be careful when changing this as you can allow a complex recursive expression to consume all the stack space and crash PHP. Hope that helps somebody.

An Apple tommorrow keeps the boredom away.

The MacBook has landed at the office after its rather sluggish progression across the globe (<19MPH seems a little slow in this day an age...man have I been bored waiting!):

Now all the stands in the way of a geeky Mac love in, is for the ever vigilant Nicky to pop the thing into a couriers hands. So tommorrow I shall begin the process of having my high expectations dashed on the rocks of Revision A niggles and coding in the most square bracket heavy language I have seen…

Speaking of coding, after finishing Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (which I’ll now re-read with Mac in hand), I began reading Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X 2nd Edition which I have enjoyed so far. Hillegass’s book gives a good background on the OS X conventions from its NextStep origins and gives plenty of topics a brief but working introduction. I like working examples simply because it makes it easier to go and find the appropriate documentation if you’ve got class names, and it’s easier to experiment when you’ve got some working boiler plate code.

As an added bonus, the author’s picture on the back cover gave me a chuckle as now I know what the illegitamate child of Brokeback Mountain and The Three Musketeers would look like:

Nintendo DS Homebrew

Fancied a bit of a change, so I began trying coding on the Nintendo DS. It’s a bit of an odd beast, living between the 8/16bit and 32bit worlds but the feature set is so dedicated to playing games it gives you a nice retro feeling. It’s the first machine I have programmed which has two different general purpose CPUs – an ARM7 and an ARM9. The ARM9 is the main DS CPU and would appear to be responsible for the bulk of processing and interaction with the graphics hardware. The ARM7 is used for Gameboy Advanced compatibility and also when in DS mode the ARM7 is responsible for talking to the sound and touch screen hardware – so in order to read the touch screen, the main ARM9 CPU gets data from the ARM7 via IPC.

To start off, I installed DevKitPro with libnds and began working on my first standard learning project using straight C. In this case I went for the Mandelbrot set viewer, it’s a good project for getting to grips with framebuffer mode (15bit color) and also gives a good indication of the floating point performance (which in the ARM9’s case isn’t great for obvious reasons). It didn’t take long to get it compiling and after copying the resulting NDS file to the CF card and slipping it into the M3 adapter it ran and I was pleased.

Documentation is quite scarce, but that is to be expected with everything having to be worked out by those luminaries of the DS homebrew scene (and I dare say a sneaky peek at the official DS SDK). It’s certainly enough to get some impressive stuff working as you can see by looking at some of the homebrew apps and demos which are out there. So my plan now is to add zooming using the touchpad, screen swapping so that the touch screen can be used to alter parameters and edit the palette and perhaps switch the code to using 3/29 integer calculations instead of floating point and try and get both CPUs to calculate in parallel. After that it’s straight into Mammary Manipulator DS…

Oh and because the M3 interface looked too un-DSish(sp?!) I made a skin to make it look more DSish!

WaitBook Pro

Just checked the apple store now for my order status and it’s estimated delivery is 3rd March. My heart sank when I saw that I had another month to wait, another month of resisting the allure of other toys, another month of resisting the relentless march of SLI desktops and PC Core Duo laptops (especially Tablet PCs are looking more and more interesting as time goes on).

In the meantime, I have just started reading the second edition of Learning Cocoa with Objective-C from O’Reilly, but I am not sure how different 10.4 is from 10.2. Also been looking at the Apple Developer Center and I fear if I plan to release any code on OS X then i’m going to need to find someone with a PPC based Mac to test the Universal Binaries. I just hope there are plenty of Universal Binaries available when it does arrive so that I only have to gasp about the technical feat of Rosetta every now and then.

I also uninstalled the Windows version of Quake 4 when I heared that it would be UB on OS X – so i’ll keep that one for OS X (that reminds me, I had better order a multi-button bluetooth mouse for gaming!). I wonder if I can just download the OS X UB and use my Windows DVD? I am guessing that I will so tell me if you know different.

PS3 is unsuprisingly OpenGL

Kotaku is reporting the rather unsuprising news that the PS3 graphics are coded using OpenGL. It has been known for a while now that the PS3 is using a chip based on Nvidia’s G70 architecture, so given Nvidia’s hardcore support of OpenGL and their clear lead in OpenGL drivers on multiple platforms it was probably inevitable that Sony would go for OpenGL. Probably plenty of Red, Blue and Yellow Books on PS3 developers desks already, so it’ll help the familiarisation process – but I wonder if they’ll be pushing CG?

This certainly shortens the Playstation cookbook:

• 1lb of OpenGL
• 20GB of HD video
• 1 commerical physics engine
• A sprinkle of Cell magic

Mix together ingredients and debug for many months at 550Mhz. Tada, your next-gen sequel is complete!

Simple Excel exports

Got some data that you need to transfer into Excel, but ODBC doesn’t fit the bill? Then why don’t you try the new and improved Excel XML format. As far as I am aware, it’s good for Excel 2000 and above:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ss:Workbook xmlns:ss="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet">
  <ss:Worksheet ss:Name="First Sheet">
    <ss:Table>
      <ss:Column ss:Width="100"/>
      <ss:Column ss:Width="200"/>
      <ss:Row>
        <ss:Cell><ss:Data ss:Type="String">Field 1</ss:Data></ss:Cell>
        <ss:Cell><ss:Data ss:Type="String">Field 2</ss:Data></ss:Cell>
      </ss:Row>
      <ss:Row>
        <ss:Cell><ss:Data ss:Type="String">First row</ss:Data></ss:Cell>
        <ss:Cell><ss:Data ss:Type="Number">1</ss:Data></ss:Cell>
      </ss:Row>
      <ss:Row>
        <ss:Cell><ss:Data ss:Type="String">Second Row</ss:Data></ss:Cell>
        <ss:Cell><ss:Data ss:Type="Number">2</ss:Data></ss:Cell>
      </ss:Row>
    </ss:Table>
  </ss:Worksheet>
</ss:Workbook>

It’s fast, it’s simple, it works with anything that can spit out XML (so just about anything then) and the result looks like more work than just a few lines of XML, but with 99% less code than writing to the binary XLS format, it’s a sure winner.

Big Mac…

Finally got my MacBook Pro ordered. The Apple online store saying that it will ship “on or before the 24th February” which gives me a nice month of regretting my purchase whilst I wait for XP or Vista to boot and give me my Counter-Strike:Source fix. I wonder where the delay is? Is it Apple who are not ready for the rush of MacBook Pro orders or is it Intel ramping up for the Core Duo orders? Who cares, in a month i’ll be growing a goaty and criticising everything computer related which isn’t made by Apple.

As for the “Why get a Mac?” question, there are many reasons. Primarily it’s because I want to diversify my development away from using Windows where the only real alternative is some form of *nix and as far as I can see the MacBook Pro is the ultimate *nix laptop. Couple that primary reason with my shallow love of eye candy, my iPod based weakness in the face of Apple branding and general technolust and we’ve got an overpowering dose of the consumers! Finally it’s been suggested that it’s actually a geeks mid-life crisis – just a laptop instead of a sportscar – they may well be onto something there.