It’s exactly 9 years to the day that I announced that this site had been migrated to Webfaction, so it’s rather fitting that today I announce that is has been migrated again, this time to Hosting UK.
As you could probably tell from the previous announcement, I had grander plans for my little VPS than ever actually materialised. The end result was that I was basically paying $12/mo (~£9.50/mo at the current exchange rate) to host a static website, which was massive overkill, so I’d already been thinking about moving and the recent GoDaddy purchase spurred me on to actually do it.
tl;dr This blog has been migrated from Wordpress to Hugo (a static site generator). As with the previous migration (from tumblr to Wordpress) the comments have been lost (although there were only 2), and you’ll need to update your RSS feed link to this.
I have a few reasons for this; one being that I’m already paying for a webhost (so I might as well make use of it), and another being that a website of purely static content is lightweight and fantastically secure.
Introduction A while back I wrote a blog post based on my experiences using the CMake build system. The conclusion from this was that I found CMake to be a useful tool, but pretty painful to work with due to it using a custom scripting language and being quite lacking in the documentation and support departments. In short, it was something I tolerated rather than enjoyed using.
These issues meant I was open to alternatives, but I never looked for any until I read an AltDevBlogADay post on meta build systems which mentioned premake.
While we wait for my muse to kick in for some non-meta blog posts, here’s some tunes that I’ve found/been shown recently that are really worth sharing.
The first one is Portal 2 related (and probably spoilerish); there’s a song in the game called “Exile Vilify” and someone took that, mixed it with some rain, and put it all on a website. The result is quite impressive, as I’ve found myself listening to this for hours while working and not even realised it’s looped.
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.
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.
I’ve taken to using twitter to post updates on since I can do it more informally and whenever I feel like it.
Firstly, I’ve been using a program called Fences to help sort out my desktop icons and so far I’m finding it really handy to be able to group up my icons and not have Windows randomly decide to re-arrange them for me… bliss. You can see my desktop here.