Blog - stephen gentle dot com

Well, there’s still about eight hours to go until the big announcement, but RED’s Jim Jannard has posted some new pictures of both the RED Scarlet 3K camera, and the 5K RED Epic. Like all the images posted since the redesign, they are small, really close up, and probably just leading speculation away from the truth. Some of these look like parts of the new cameras, but the first one looks like it could be of a new lens - possibly indicating that Scarlet has interchangeable lenses?

Still, it remains to be seen what RED come up with, and I, like most people who have been constantly refreshing REDUser and ScarletUser for weeks, can’t wait!

All images in this post are copyright © Red Digital Cinema Company. Full size images can be seen at Jim’s post on RedUser
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I recently made a new website for my operating system project, Symmetry. The old site I was using for it was basically just the default Wordpress theme with a slightly different header image. The new site is a completely custom theme that I made, and I think it is a lot simpler and cleaner.

I also did a bit of re-branding as well. Although the project has retained its logo, I made up a new name for it - Symmetry. I had been wanting to change the name for a while, but never got around to it until I decided to sign up for free Git hosting at Gitorious. It was a bit of a spur of the moment thing - I needed to put in a project name, so I thought for a few seconds and came up with Symmetry. It fits in with the old logo, and the old name can be used as an abbreviation - Symmetry Operating System (sos).

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.

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

The game engine has been coming along quite well recently. I’ve been doing a lot of work on it, as it’s school holidays.

I moved all the image code over to OpenGL, which was surprisingly easy. All I had to do was change a bit of initialisation code, and then rewrite the code that draws bitmaps. Instead of blitting them onto the screen, now images are rendered as textures. This gives me some very big advantages. Firstly, I have to call one command to rotate an image - something I was having a lot of trouble doing before. Also, I should be able to make it more resolution independent, and allow the user to play the game fullscreen.

I was having some trouble initially with OpenGL - I was just getting a black screen. Eventually I found that I was clearing the screen after drawing everything… At least then I could get white (or coloured) rectangles to render, but I was still having problems mapping the texture to them. After a long, frustrating debug session, I found that I had just accidentally put two arguments around the wrong way on a function call… Suddenly everything worked perfectly!

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A little test application showing some features of the engine

I’ve been writing a cross-platform game engine in C++ recently. The ultimate aim is to create a game engine, so it’s easy to create games without having to worry about coding any image, text, music, event handling or window creation support. I’m using the SDL library, which makes writing this really easy. Right now, the engine supports sprites, images, music, text and keyboard and mouse control. I am still working on adding collision detection and image rotation, and then I will able to start making the actual game.

The game I intend to make, called “Eclipse” will be a remake of an asteroids game I made for a school IPT project, which we were forced to write in Visual Basic (ugh..).
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I’ve been using 7.10 since the fifth alpha release, and it’s really great - a big improvement over Feisty in some areas. The new display manager is alright, but I hope that it is greatly improved for the next release - it’s a little sparse on options at the moment. The new version of Gnome is great too - some nice improvements there (like being able to drag from File Roller to Nautilus).

Here’s the announcement:
“The Ubuntu team is proud to announce version 7.10 of the Ubuntu family of
distributions.

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and
servers, with a fast and easy install and regular releases. A
tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and
an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.”

For more information, see the release announcement,the Ubuntu 7.10 Press Release and the GNOME 2.20 Release Notes.

Well, I fixed the wireless issue that I was having. The solution was to add the rt2500 module (which doesn’t support WPA) to the blacklist (/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist). After I did that and restarted, the ndiswrapper module took control of the card, and I was able to connect to my wireless access point.

BBspot reports:

Microsoft’s innovative strategy to counter this reluctance to upgrade will be to release a bug-ridden, security hole-filled Service Pack 3 for XP. “Most people are happy with Windows XP and have no reason to upgrade, but SP3 will fix all that,” said Microsoft’s VP of Service Packs George Francione. “The bugs and security holes can’t be reversed, so there’s no going back. The only viable solution will be to upgrade to Vista.”

Full Article

-Stephen