spatial nodes

netatalk and os x playing up

stvn — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:58:08 +0000

I’ve spent my entire evening fixing my appletalk set up after I accidentally ‘upgraded’ my handcrafted netatalk with the stock ubuntu one. I crafted my own because the stock package doesn’t support encrypted passwords.

I’ve reinstalled, rebuild and rebooted netatalk on the server and I kept getting this error:

“The operation cannot be completed because one or more required items cannot be found. (Error code -35)”

Googling this error didn’t give me much and it took me a while to realize that googling for: error code -35 will give you no useful results do to the minus sign. In the end I discovered that it is not ubuntu but Apple to blame for the error. Apparently at some point in time the globalpreferences get fcked. So the solution is:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

Is it better to burn out, or to fade away?

stvn — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:39:00 +0000

Last week we, the Mapbuilder PSC, have decided to gracefully terminate Mapbuilder. We found that other webmapping projects (notably OpenLayers) had passed us in userbase, developbase and finally also in features. We decided that the answer of the ageold question is to burn out. We’ve sent out an announcement that we have reached the end of life of Mapbuilder. It is a sad day…

Dark skies are looming over me

But in general I think this is a good thing and OpenLayers will grow even faster, it is a great package after all.

New camera

stvn — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:56:11 +0000

My shiny new Nikon D60 with extra lens has arrived, woohoo!! Since I’m still at work I can’t play with it yet, but here is my first shot with and of the camera.

More to follow

Panoramas

stvn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:10:17 +0000

I found an incredibly easy to use panaroma stitcher tool for OS X; DoubleTake. It is shareware, but worth all the few euri it asks for a license. Just drop in the photos of your panorama and 9 out of 10 times it creates the correct panorama. It works with both photos shot in ‘Panorama mode’ and series of photos shot in series without fixed lighting and white balance settings.

As a result my Panorama gallery is growing fast, working my way through my backlog.

Insanely high mountains

… paint it black

stvn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:34:44 +0000

I finally finished painting all the doors and jambs. I managed to squeeze in one black door, although it was not originally red. My bathroom door is now painted with chalkboard-paint and since it is visible from both the living room and the kitchen it serves very well as a todo list. (and no I haven’t found Maartens book yet )

Finished painting

A rift in the internet

stvn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:30:32 +0000

the evidence is finally there that Google is building its own version of the internet. If you search for images in the Dutch version of Google you have the option to search for images or search “The ‘The internet‘” (het het internet). Not to be mistaken for the common internet, currently in use by billions of peasants. Apparently this is a specific subset of the Internet, probably only with content that Google has approved and/or cached. This might be the new internet without the flaws of the current one, like freedom of speech.

Finally it has arrived the ‘The Internet‘

Wii-mote readings

stvn — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:02:59 +0000

We are asked to develop a short game which is controlled with the Wii-controller. Since it is expensive and not too easy to develop for the Wii itself (you require a SDK from Nintendo and permissions once the game is finished) we decided to develop it on the PC. It is possible to connect your Wii-mote with the PC using bluetooth. There are multiple libraries to do so.

I was curious what kind of feedback you get from the Wii-mote and where it fails (in light of the news about the Wii motion plus). There are some issues around getting your Wii-mote connected to a PC by bluetooth, not every stack is good, nor areall bluetooth chipsets, however the MacBook supports the Wii-mote out of the box. So I connected the Wii-mote to my MacBook instead and used the DarwiinRemote application to get a reading from the sensors.

DarwiinRemote sensor readings.

The wii-mote is equiped with an accelerometer, which does not record the position of the wii-mote. What is does is that it records the different forces (accelerations) that are applied to the controller. So in rest it will record a force of 1G down (z= -1). If you hold the controller upside down it will record a force of 1G up (z = 1) (seen from the point of view of the controller). If you hold it on its side the reading will be x=1 or x=-1 or y=1 or y= -1, depending on the side. The other axis will be 0 in rest. Actually since in rest the only force acting on the controller is earth gravitation, which is 1, the absolute sum of the forces on x, y and z will be 1.

Wii sensor reading in three orientations.

With this knowledge you can deduce the orientation of the Wii-mote from the readings above. In the beginning the Wii-mote is held horizontal pointing forward (blue line at -1). Then the Wii-mote is rotated along its body, the left side is pointing up (red line at 1). Finally the Wii-mote is pointing downward (green line at 1). Note that we do not know how the Wii-mote is pointing downwards (whether the buttons facing forward or sideways). When you start moving the Wii-mote the forces applied on the Wii-mote easily surpass the 1G and when that happens it is much more difficult to deduce the orientation. The new Wii-motion Plus extension is supposed to solve this problem. From what I’ve seen and read it most likely will use a gyroscope to calculate the orientation of the Wii-mote regardless of the forces applied to it.

Using blend

stvn — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:10:18 +0000

For various projects I’ve been using Microsoft Expression Blend to do the interface design while Paul and/or Van Exel were coding. Blend is part of a bigger set of tools, called Microsoft Expression Studio. As the experienced Visual Studio people can see, it is using the same .sln files as Visual Studio. However, there’s a major bug in Blend involving multiple projects within a solution. It automatically takes the first project in the solution file as the startup project, regardless whether or not you set that as startup project in VS.

Once you managed to get the solution file to work with Blend (manually moving the correct project to the top of the list in the .sln file), it is major fun. It has a split screen which resembles the reveal codes screen of word perfect, back in the day. The drawing tools are quite good, not as good as inkscape, but since you can edit the XML as well you can copy the exact coordinates over from the SVG. It would be nicer if you could import the SVG directly though. To be honest, Blend is not designed to be a real graphic design tool, MS Ex. Design is. I guess the proposed workflow is that you do your design in Design and then export that to Blend to integrate your design with C# code. I do my design in Inkscape and then import that to Blend so it’s not that much different, just a bit more hassle to get the design in.

‘Onderwater scherm’ of the PlectraeMenu

Blend is the interaction tool of the Expression set and it shows. You can create animations (storyboards) and bind them to events (left top corner in the screenshot) on any object. Furthermore you can use databinding so the coders just manipulate the content inside the databinding without editing the XAML. On the other hand you can change anything in the XAML as long as the databinding stays intact. This way you can work parallel with the coders, their changes showup in you project and yours in their without (too much) interference.

This approach present some new problems though. Since you can do a lot in XAML regarding events and actions, but you can do everything from code aswell, you really need to think where the line of seperation is. You are forced to sit next to the coders and discuss what is done in code and what in XAML, where to use templates and databinding and what XAMLs to create. Since we are all new to WPF we still need to learn what can be done in XAML and what is better done in code. Looking back to the last three projects the general trend is that more and more is moved to XAML, but that is probably due to our previous non-existant knowledge of the possibilities of XAML.

I see a red door …

stvn — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:22:42 +0000

… and want to paint it white. Actually the red door is they only door that I did not paint white. Everything is now in white primer and I’ve to figure out what color to paint the doors and the jambs of the front door. Suggestions are welcome.

Server up ‘n running

stvn — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:06:18 +0000

As no-one should have noticed, this blog is running on the new server now. Building the server turned out to be very easy, just pop in the CPU and the RAM at the correct places, connect some cables and put everything in the case. Installing ubuntu turned out to be much harder. For a starter I needed to have a CD-rom drive. Just before my holiday, I had stored a lot of stuff in my basement(ish). Somewhere there was supposed to be a working CD-rom drive. After discovering 2 scsi drives and 1 non-working IDE drive I discovered my trusty old Philips drive which has installed me many versions of linux so far. Having a working cd drive I switched on the computer once again only to discover that my shiny new motherboard (asus M3n78-emh) doesn’t work on ubuntu 8.04 by default. Luckily I used the old trick of installing OS’s: have a working internet enabled computer alongside! It turned out to be some settings in both BIOS and linux (pci=nomsi) and once you know it, it’s a breeze to install it. So the second computer was build and installed in less then a quarter of the time :).

Copying data from the 4 old IDE disks to the 2 new SATA ones