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Jansic's Blog
| 21st Feb 2011 - 13:35 | We're not trying to be a honey pot, so what's with all the bees? | |
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| Something that has amused me lately is the number of people who register an account on this site. It's hard to do by accident so you would expect most people to have identified a need for an account before registering. People seem to register at random. Some create an account and never return, some create an account and log in regularly for a couple of days before never returning. Very few people have ever posted to the forums. I often wonder what people expect to find, secret games perhaps?
This website-of-not-much-interesting has acquired over 500 users since it started a few years back. Of these users, only four login regularly and that includes me and sneeze. While I do trim the database to keep it compact, it occurred to me just to clear it completely from everybody except the regulars. Nobody would miss out would they? | ||
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| 22nd Dec 2010 - 11:38 | Christmas time | |
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| It's that time of year again; except this year I'm renovating my new house, rather than relaxing with mince pies and wine. I'll be leaving work for the year in a momet; and it looks like it'll be an interesting Christmas full of DIY and other not-very-relaxing things. | ||
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| 2nd Nov 2010 - 13:10 | ZiiO Oh? | |
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| Today we (apparently) released the ZiiO tablet, a portable 10" and 7" mobile device running Android.
I really find this quite amazing because we certainly didn't make it here in the UK. I can only presume it's some obscure subdivision of Creative that's been allowed to use the Zii name. Quite worrying really; I much preferred it when we were called 3DLabs. *sigh* | ||
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| 21st Sep 2010 - 11:53 | VP8... | |
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| Google's new VP8 codec is possibly the biggest pile of rubbish I've ever seen.
The spec is unclear, unspecific and in some places entirely incorrect; it's more like a teen's A-level CS project than something a team of computer professionals would produce. VP8's bitstream layout is x86 centric and carries all sorts of multi-core x86 optimisation baggage making it much less suitable for ARM implementations. The probabilistic decoder is nether as simple and speedy as CAVLC nor as comprehensive as CABAC - it's more like somebody's typed in an example of a huffman coder straight from an information theory text book. The result is a decoder whose performance and capabilities have been limited by the platform it was designed on. The core of the decoder's prediction modes would be a carbon copy of H264, if it hadn't had all the good parts (like 8x8) taken out. A theme that makes it technically inferior to H264 in a number of ways, including a dumb loop filter, no B-frame prediction, lack of YUV 422, 444 and Monochrome support; and bizarre design decisions like overpowered chroma filtering and a minuscule number of reference frames. I question its robustness when streaming for video conferencing too, as there seems to be no way to add redundancy to the video stream. I'm all for open standards but what annoys me most is that it'll be forced down our throats regardless; because it plays well with open source and the company behind it has huge amount of influence in the web world. It's retrograde step in video coding. What's with the name too, WebM? Come on, why rename the Matroska container? Is this some kind of ploy to make something sound better than it is to people who don't know any better? It's like Web 2.0 all over again. </rant> | ||
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| 7th Jun 2010 - 17:14 | Linux *sigh* | |
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| Nothing about Linux is ever low-motion.
I have 2 systems, both Ubuntu, my server runs 8.04 and my work machine runs 8.10. I recently decided that it was time to move to the head of the Ubuntu release schedule and upgrade both. I did my server remotely, firstly upgrading to 9.04. Being a server it lacks any graphical components, that was until it was upgraded. I can almost forgive this, because I installed a gui originally and then pared it back; what I can't forgive it for is changing the way things are configured. All my custom configuration and boot sequences (provided by the sys-v init stuff) all made completely irrelevant by 9.04 shipping with 'upstart' instead. After a good half-hour spent fixing the resulting mess, I then upgraded it again to 10.04 - making a nice new mess of completely different configuration files. Another half hour later after a remote reboot my server failed to come back up. Later, when I arrived home I went to reboot it but all that had happened was the script that updated the dynamic-dns entry hadn't run - because of yet another configuration change. *sigh* I upgraded my work machine in much the same way; with much the same experience as above. Except this time I had nfs, nis and automounter issues to contend with; resulting in a remote home directory full of rubbish configuration data and bad gvfs mounts from differing versions of the same Linux distribution.The work machine upgrade took a different path too. It upgraded itself to 9.04, twice, then 10.04 also twice (I have no idea). I'm certain parts of the upgrade failed silently too, as I appear to be missing audio capability - no doubt some module or codec isn't hooked up correctly in Linux's over-engineered audio chain. *sigh* On another audio related note; I was using Amarok from the 8.04 release; it was reasonably quick and quite functional. What the HELL happened to the verision of Amarok that shipped with 10.04? It's slow, clunky, incongruously KDE and a retrograde step in UI design. Why would I possibly need big chunky swooshy applets with lyrics and wiki pages sliding around!?! I want to add music to a list and then listen to it while I work; I don't want to 'browse' the app! Anybody know of any, simpler audio players out there? </rant> | ||
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| 2nd Jun 2010 - 13:26 | Post holiday | |
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| just come back from a week on the Greek island of Santorini. It's a nice place, good walks, good food and very very hot. Just the thing to clear your mind.
Of course, not having touched a computer for 8 days I've come back with about a thousand different ideas to try and implement. What first? Probably back to DaK, to implement a simpler version of the complicated mess I was creating. | ||
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| 12th May 2010 - 13:20 | Poo Li Ticks | |
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| I'm not generally one to express a political opinion publicly but I'm actually pretty happy with the way the UK coalition government worked out. Heritage and history can give you experience but not necessarily a modern way of applying it, youth can help you foresee the future and react to change. Combining the two together is really no bad thing, providing the communication is good.
From a programmers perspective, bringing old code up to date is often more realistic and robust than rewriting it from scratch without a working reference. Often you can't teach an old dog new tricks; but I hope both sides are willing to educate and be educated. I suspect there are a lot of unhappy Lib Dems out there. You shouldn't be. | ||
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| 26th Apr 2010 - 21:51 | Note to self. | |
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| An article URL, mainly as a note to myself - I'm bound to lose it.
link | ||
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| 1st Apr 2010 - 12:52 | April the 'wtf I can't be bothered...' | |
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| As the years pass, April 1st becomes decreasingly relevant, especially where news is concerned...
'April fools' were a neat thing when you're a child, an excuse to play tricks on people and be almost completely absolved of any consequences, just because of the date. As an adult, April the 1st is just a painful waste of time - even though it's just for one day. I'd like to go to a news site and not have to second-guess the validity of the articles, I'd also like to not have to cope with weeding subtle jokes from real content based on their timezone (who decided that the jokes are only valid before midday anyway?). The worst part of it all is that a plethora of search engines will record and archive this misinformation, regurgitating it later when you're not prepared to deal with it. The more subtle a joke is the more likely it'll slip past you. Eventually, a few months down the line, a journalist will pick it up turn it into headline news for your local tabloid, stirring everybody with an opinion into a frenzy. Nobody will apologise when they figure out the truth either. It's just not worth it. - "Strawberry jelly causes blindness in goldfish!", says anonymous internet scientist... | ||
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| 19th Mar 2010 - 13:10 | Mapping | |
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| My work on the DaK map editor is coming along nicely. You can edit terrain height directly and you can paint textures straigh onto the map. It's now reached the point where it's quite usable and I can actually get back to developing DaK.
Have a screenshot: 
Amusingly the editor is now a better, more functional renderer than the game engine. It does open up a lot of possibilities and may even be suitable for other styles of games; like RTS... | ||
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