Okay, so it’s been ages since I last made a blog post. It’s not that I don’t have things to talk about, I have several things I want to talk about in fact, it’s just I never seem to get off my arse and write about them (to be fair, the whole “getting off my arse” statement fails in this context as I can’t type very well when standing up, so I would most definitely have to be on my arse to make a blog post).
Introduction For those of you that don’t know CMake is a cross platform build system that allows you to define what you want to build and how, before it goes off and creates the correct build scripts for your particular platform and compiler. It is supposed to help you to simplify your build process when compiling for multiple platforms by just having to maintain a single build script that can generate all other build scripts.
Also, why are they dressed in green? My AI assignment demo was finished and handed in. My extension task was behaviour trees and there is a video of the demo below, all in nice shiny HD.
I’ve recently installed Windows 7 on my main PC, removing the old Vista install. While doing this I had some issues getting my on-board nVIDIA nForce 6 network drivers working, and from looking around the internet, I am not alone. The solution that eventually worked for me is as follows: Shut down your PC and turn it off at the mains for ~20 seconds. Turn your PC back on and boot into Windows, it should now be able to see and use your nForce network adapters to access the internet, however if you restart Windows you will find that the adapters become disabled again.
Update: 26 Nov 2011: I’m informed that WebFaction now has built-in installers for Redmine. Since this is something I have recently had to do, and found the documentation to be out of date, I though I would share this working solution with you all. This is based on Redmine 0.9.x, and thanks to Sean F from WebFaction support, these instructions are mostly his. Go to your WebFaction control panel and create a new MySQL database, making a note of the database name and password.
I have now finished the move of all my websites from Hostgator to WebFaction. I’ve been with Hostgator a while now, and while they have been okay, it wasn’t until I set-up the Insimnax website that I noticed how slowly they actually served content; I let it be for a couple of months before I decided to move. I considered getting myself a cheap VPS, something I had done before but was left a little unsatisfied with.
Recently I’ve been doing some work templatifying my two I/O classes, and from that have come to the conclusion that templates and streams make for the ultimate generic programming tool. Previously I had a load of old duplicate bloat code in these classes, that was all removed and replaced by one templated member function, and two specialised template functions from it, and best of all since this code is now able to take external streams as input/output sources, it means that I no longer have one code path for handing files, and another code path for serialising to memory.
Introduction I recently needed to be able to convert any instance of an object in C++ to a file so it could be serialised, and then restored later; I did most of this by writing out each member variable of the object individually at the most basic level. This works fine and is easy enough to implement; but then came the time to do the “generic” version, the version that could write out any object (such as a struct) as a whole.
So to be fair to the PS3, I said that my experience has so far been mostly good (although I have a feeling this is because I haven’t tried to do anything complicated with the XMB yet). I guess my good experience comes from the fact that there are a few games I enjoy playing on it, and also the fact that I can use my debit card in the PlayStation Store which is something I can’t do in the XBOX Marketplace (they don’t accept Maestro cards).
Warning: Rant ahead, if you are a PS3 fan-boy stop reading now. I don’t need your hate. For my birthday this year I bought myself a PS3 to go with my nice new 42” 1080p HDTV, this now completes my collection of current generation consoles as I also have a 360 and a Wii so I can tell you that this opinion comes from someone who isn’t biased to a particular console.