Little Spikey Land - August 2003

Just played around with Moho some more. This time done a walking cat, which looks pretty reasonable. Didn't take too long to do, and as usual it's highly functional - I also seem to skip straight to the animation as soon as I can.

Also finally finished reading Megatokyo. I had been reading it every now and then before, but now it makes so much more sense and has really gone up in my estimation. Am now fighting off urges to chuck in computer geek career and attempt to learn to draw properly!

posted at 11:47 PM John

Shut down my main site and the JPL site today, as a little protest against some EU legislation that might allow software patents in Europe. You can find out more here.

Didn't close down this blog, as I figured that no-one will miss it. Closing down the JPL site should get a bit more attention though, as people actually seem to visit it!

Things will return to normal in a few days.

posted at 10:31 PM John

Just came across http://www.sounddogs.com/ which has a whole load of sound effects for download. Just what we'll need for YARTS2.

posted at 10:19 PM John

It's been a while since I bought any Java books and now I've just gone and got two. I guess it's because I'm heading off to Uni again and want to brush up on a few things.

The first book was JDK 1.4 Tutorial, which covers the new features of java 1.4. It makes trying to grok the new APIs a lot easier.

The second is Java Extreme Programming Cookbook which I have wanted for some time. This one is going to be very useful as it covers things like Ant and JUnit. I've already set up an Ant build file for JPL and I shall soon be writing some unit tests, which will help ensure my code is much more robust.

Edited on: Monday, August 25, 2003 5:29 PM
posted at 5:07 PM John

Visited my sister this weekend. She hadn't been feeling very well, and so had a bit of a kip on the sofa. Thought it'd be a good excuse to do a quick drawing of her.

Edited on: Monday, August 25, 2003 5:08 PM
posted at 4:59 PM John

Finally saw City of God this weekend. It was very good, harrowing in places, but good. definitely worth a look.

posted at 9:20 PM John

Only recently got around to trying out the PostScript printer driver. Will be very handy, as should make printing in your typical unix/linux environment a lot easier. Seeing as I'll soon have access to such an environment this will be a good thing^TM;.

posted at 7:03 PM John

While messing around with Moho a bit more I found this site Steve Ryan: Moho Tutorials. Has some quite cool flash-based animated tutorials. I was just impressed at how well the tutorials work, they show you exactly what the guy is doing, plus he's talking about it at the same time. This is the sort of thing that the web was supposed to be like when it got properly multimedia.

Oh and here's another walk animation. (Practice makes perfect!).

Edited on: Friday, August 15, 2003 10:16 PM
posted at 9:19 PM John

I looked at the PsiLinux page again recently and toyed with the idea of installing Linux on my netBook. Unfortunately at the moment it's not too easy and I'd need to do a lot of fiddling to get it work right (and even then I would not have access to CF cards or PCMCIA cards). Plus I'd lose all my data (although obviously I can back that up).

Anyway whilst looking around the site I did come across a couple of interesting things:

• EpocEMX
• GNUpoc

The first is a port/series of ports of GNU software to EPOC ER5. This even includes a bash-like shell and gcc!

I've just installed the bare minimum for now, but it definitely beats eshell. I think my next job will be to try and get it setup to compile java easily. Currently it's a bit of a fiddle.

The second are a set of dev tools for writing Epoc/Symbian programs under Linux. Which is very cool as otherwise you need Windows to do the job.

Edited on: Monday, August 25, 2003 5:11 PM
posted at 2:43 PM John

Found a cool (and relatively inexpensive) animation package a while ago. It's called Moho and is available from Lost Marble. It lets you define bones and constraints, attach them to your drawing, and then uses inverse kinematics to allow you to manipulate your creation like a manequin. It'll even fill in the gaps between key frames for you (what is known as tweening).

It's available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux. I've tried it out on Linux and it works very well. I currently only have the demo version, but it is only limited by the files it saves (when you output as jpg images etc it plasters "demo" all over them). However it does appear that you can export flash movies just fine. I probably shall purchase a license as I'd like to see this program continue being made, and it's not too expensive ($99), but at the moment I'm a bit cash-strapped.

So far the best thing I have done has been this simple walk animation. It took a lot less time than the hand drawn walk animation I did (about 30 minutes, instead of about 2 hours).

The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams was essential for animating those walks.

posted at 2:42 PM John

Well here's a quick self-portrait. It sort of looks like me, but my drawing is not that good. My sister gave me a really cool little sketch book that's great for doing little sketches in (and some good drawing pencils too). Maybe now I'll do some more drawing and get away from the computer screen once in a while.

posted at 2:41 PM John

Lately I have been trying to get Linux running on an IBM Thinkpad, which was donated by my Uncle. It's quite an old laptop and so only has 4M of RAM and a 33Mhz 486 processor. It was running Windows 3.1 when I got it. Needless to say that disappeared quite quickly.

I have been keeping notes about what I have done, and shall probably write them up in the near future, but to summarise here is what I have done so far:

• Used Small Linux to boot from two floppy disks, then setup the harddrive (created swap partitions etc).
• Copied the root disk of Small Linux to one (small) hard drive partition, thus freeing up the floppy drive.
• Copied the root file system of Debian Potato to another partition (using the "compact" kernel).
• Booted up from the Debian Potato installation disks, specifying the root disk as the hard drive partition from earlier. I also had to change to another virtual terminal (ALT-CTRL-F2) to enable the swap partition.
• Followed the Debian Potato installation. Then before reboot I altered /etc/inittab as it was attempting to run some other programs that swapped like crazy at boot up.
• With only 100K of free physical memory and nearly 2M taken up by the kernel I decided to compile a smaller kernel. I grabbed the latest sources for a 2.2 kernel and proceeded to attempt to compile a new kernel.
• A couple of weeks later I managed this (after copying some headers to the right places and installing an older compiler). This booted up, with only about 1M used by the kernel, leaving most of 3M for actually doing stuff in! Unfortunately I will need to recompile the pcmcia stuff, so I can use network cards and so forth, but hey at least I've compiled my first working kernel!

Once I get this laptop setup right it will probably end up as either a quiet firewall/server or a crude terminal thingy, mainly used to telnet in to any computers that I don't have monitors for.

Edited on: Saturday, August 16, 2003 12:26 PM
posted at 2:41 PM John

Guess I was trying to be too clever. Just managed to mangle my blog. I was messing around with the code for Thingamablog and stopped the program in Eclipse, which I guess meant the DB didn't shut down right. The moral of the story: backup!!!

I should be able to recover some of the entries, as the html files are still there, but the date stamps will be wrong.

posted at 2:33 PM John