Blog - stephen gentle dot com

I recently bought a new graphics card for my computer. It’s a Nvidia GeForce 9600GT with 512 MB of memory. Here’s what it looks like:

Now, seeing that this card was pretty recent, it wasn’t supported by the graphics driver that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. Now, I did try to update the driver manually using the driver from the Nvidia website, and it’s times like those when you really appreciate the drivers in the repositories. To put it one way, it didn’t really work. Whereas I had a kind-of-working desktop beforehand, now I was working in a resolution of 800×600, which didn’t look great on my 22 inch screen. So, I did what it seems I always end up doing - upgrading to an untested, unstable early alpha of Ubuntu!

Now, I have to say that it was actually pretty smooth. The update worked first time, and then I was able to just grab the driver for my card from Synaptic. Sure, a whole host of programs crash from time to time, but compared to my other experiences, I had a pretty stable system.
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I have been taking a look at Adobe’s new Buzzword word processor. Basically, Buzzword is a flash based web application, and I have to say, it is very nice. As you can see from the screenshot above, the text rendering absolutely brilliant, with access to real typefaces like Myriad and Minion, as opposed to the boring Arial you generally see in normal web based word processors.

Being written in Flash, it has quite a few other advantages apart from nice typefaces too - nice image wrapping for one; better tables another. The interface is also a lot more dynamic than most word processors - whether they be applications or web based. It’s certainly nicer than the new Microsoft Office look, and is very nice to use.

The application can export to a range of different file formats, like rich text, Microsoft Word formats, plain text, HTML and also Adobe PDF - although Evince wouldn’t open the PDF that I exported… It also boasts good collaboration features (like most other internet word processor), but that’s not much use to me, so I haven’t tried any of that.

All in all, it looks like a word processor that I might actually consider using in the future. It’s certainly a project to keep an eye on. Check it out at Acrobat.com - you have to sign up to use it first.

This is an interesting new feature coming soon to X.org and the Linux kernel - it’s basically moving a video card’s mode setting code (which makes the card change resolutions and so on) out of the user-mode video driver, and into the kernel. It probably doesn’t sound exciting, but it will lead to a much nicer user experience. For example, it helps to make the boot process more flicker free, and will make suspend and hibernation much more reliable.

It also makes switching from X to a virtual terminal much, much faster. There are some videos in the article demonstrating it, but since this is not planned for release until the end of the year, it is still fairly buggy and unreliable.

Read the article at Phoronix.com…

A render of Scarlet with the clip on version of RED’s new mattebox

Ever since RED Digital Cinema’s new professional pocket camera was mentioned at last years NAB tradeshow, there has been wild speculation circulating around almost every camera and video forum and website around. Most people were expecting an HD or 2K camera for around $5000. When you take a look at the specifications of other cameras around the same price on the market, such as Panasonic’s HVX-200 and the Sony PMW-EX1, you can see that they were asking for a lot.

But in true RED style, the announcement at 9:00am at this year’s NAB shocked us all. The resolution that this camera shoots is not HD. It’s not 2K. It’s 3K. To put that in perspective, that’s two and a half times bigger than full HD. It can shoot at up to 120 frames per second, or even as fast as 180fps for a burst of a few seconds. That means that a one second action, when played back at the regular 24 frames per second, becomes seven seconds of action. Another significant aspect of this camera is that it shoots REDCODE RAW. This is a compression scheme that is much more efficient than traditional codecs. This is similar to RAW on a digital SLR camera, but it’s compressed using wavelets. This codec gives you very close to uncompressed quality, but with a relativity low data rate.

Now, judging from other cameras on the market, a camera with these specifications would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be surprising to see it on the lower side of $50,000. But RED is targeting a price of three thousand dollars. They did it with the RED ONE (a 4K resolution, $17, 500 camera now on the market that outstrips cameras like the Sony F950 - which retails for around $115,000 ), and I have complete faith that they can do it again.

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I have updated the blog to the newest version of Wordpress recently. In fact, I am running the bleeding edge version from the Subversion repository. So now when I need to upgrade, all that should be required is SSHing into the server and doing an svn up in the directory.

You’ll also notive that I moved the blog out of its own subdomain, and into the main site. I think its better this way, and makes it easier to keep all the images and media together.

And finally, I hope you like the new design! I have been working on the new site for a while now, and I think that it is much improved from the old version.

I actually fixed my computer a day or two after I broke it, but I haven’t got round to posting since then. Anyway, it’s a very good reminder of why having your home directory on a separate partition is so helpful - it saves having to reconfigure everything. You still have to install apps that aren’t installed by default, but it could be much worse.

Anyway, what happened was a dependency issue with glibc… Apparently it happened to other people as well, but was fixed fairly quickly - so I’m a lot more cautious now. If there’s an important part of the system in the update list, I don’t update for a day or two now - just in case.

Ah, the joys of running a pre-release operating system. I was doing my usual daily update on my Ubuntu Hardy system (the computer I use most of the time), and one of the updates failed to install, saying something about a dependancy not being installed. So, I tried to open Synaptic to sort it out, but it didn’t want to open. I thought that a reboot was in order, but when the computer turned on, it just stopped part way through the boot process. I tried to log into a terminal, but it wouldn’t work. So I then tried the recovery mode, and a few other kernel versions that I had installed.

No luck… It seems that the system is completely hosed, so I’ll have to install it all over again… At least I have my home folder on another partition, so I should keep all my settings. But still, having to install the OS and all the programs that aren’t included by default is very irritating.

I’ll try to pull some projects onto a USB drive - at least it will be a good opportunity to compile them for Windows.

I’ve been working on Eclipse a lot lately. I’ve changed the build system, and also vastly improved the menu system. So, I was thinking that since I’m spending so much time and effort making the game, I might as well make as cool as I can. So, I thought that instead of just making it 2D, I could do a top down 3D view instead. I’m already using OpenGL, so it shouldn’t take that much work to change the current code to 3D. It would make it easier to use particle effects too, so I could have cool looking explosions, and a better looking flame from the ship’s engine.

First, I would have to see if there are any file formats for storing 3D models that would be easy enough to implement. Then, I’d probably set the projection mode to a perspective view (instead of the orthographic view I use now), and get the coordinate system set up the same way as it is now. Then, all I’d have to do is to make a 3D version of the sprite class, and I could program it the same way I am now.

I have to try that out before I start writing game code. It’s a good thing that I have started storing the code in a GIT repository, because I can just roll back the changes if anything goes wrong. I’ve also ported Eclipse to the Autotools build system, and added internationalisation support. I don’t have any completed translations yet, but anyway…

What ever I decide, one thing that definitely needs to be done is resolution independence. Then I’ll need to make two new widgets. A spin-button kind of thing (or drop-down box) to select the resolution, and a checkbox to select full screen mode.

A few days ago I set up a Subversion repository to put some projects I have been working on (like Eclipse) in. I decided to go with SVN because I have worked with it before, and am pretty familiar with its commands and workflow.

But, recently on Planet Gnome, I have been hearing a lot about GIT (the version control system originally written for managing the Linux kernel) and I decided to try it out. I backed up my Eclipse directory and turned it into a GIT repository (which, unlike SVN can exist without a server). When I committed the sources, I couldn’t believe how blazingly fast GIT is - where SVN used to take three or four seconds, GIT is done before you can release the enter key! It seems a lot more powerful than Subversion, but takes a while longer to get comfortable with it.

I also plan to convert the Eclipse build system to Autotools, which is pretty horrible to set up, but can vastly simplify things like installation and cross-compiling if set up correctly.

Tiring of my 15 inch CRT monitor, I recently went and picked up a new 22″ flat panel from Harvey Norman. It is very good, especially considering the price - just $357. The model is HG216D - I got the black model, which matches my computer case (which I painted black last year). The jump in resolution and screen real-estate is really great, and it makes development a lot easier. Now switching between my text editor, terminal and file manager and web browser is a lot easier - I can lay the terminal, editor and file manager on one desktop and the web browser on another (instead of either having to put them all on separate desktops, or have windows under other ones). Even switching from the browser is easier - I don’t have to have my browser maximized now, so I can switch desktops by rolling the mouse wheel on the desktop.

It’s got an HDMI input, which is really cool - but unfortunately we don’t have any HD sources to plug it in to… So for now, we just play HD video through the computer - which still looks great