blogz0r ___ version fifty seven

Howdy,

It’s me here. You know, Dave. That guy that had a blog that time? Yeah, that loser!

So on my last blog post I mentioned some bullshit about blogging more over the course of the year. Well, I didn’t anticipate getting a Twitter account and pretty much migrating any and all of the insta-bollocks that comes out of my mind straight into 140 characters over there. It’s convenient, it doesn’t mean people who don’t use RSS have to keep visiting the site and ultimately it’s pretty much the reason I’ve not updated in 10 months.

Sorry.

Anyway, my Twitter account is @dave_bullough.

So the past 10 months? Work’s been great fun, home life even more fun, beer making is awesome, drinking beer makes you fatter.

Oh and the answer to my initial question is ‘yes, probably’.

Happy new year!

I spent a pretty long chunk of Christmas travelling around the UK seeing various people – it was fun, but by day 10 I was really ready to come home, you know? NYE was spent in Cardiff, somewhere I’ve never been to before and ended up been a really fun trip – I was expecting it to be rough as (I’m a pessimist about Wales… sorry Jof) but it was way better than Birmingham. At least we didn’t get the car smashed into by some retard in Cardiff.

So to 2009… onwards and upwards! Plans for this year are:

• Release the software I’ve been working on for the past aeon.
• Get a new office job, one that’s actually rewarding other than making me feel like a monkey pushing buttons.
• Get the garden at the house completely remodelled.
• Get a two new bathrooms fitted in the house.
• Have some parties.
• Play more bass.
• See more of my friends.

I think getting just one or two items done out of that little lot will make me happy.

Cheers.

I tend to spend a fair bit of time trawling YouTube watching videos of planes because I’m a sad twat. I love it when this kind of thing crops up.

If you like that there’s a similar manouvre/shit-your-pants-mistake by a Typhoon pilot too here.

*watches again*

I can’t tell the bloody difference.

There’s a curious level at which a drinker’s skill at the game of pool seems to peak disproportionately to their usual ability. It only seems to last around 12-17 minutes before the player starts to exhibit the signs of the effect wearing off (usually by flinging the ball off the table into a passer-by’s face), but during the short time frame the player has their perfect blood/booze level, they can pull of shots with minimal effort that almost always go in, much to the delight/frustration of fellow players. I’ve plotted a rough unscientific graph below describing the phenomenon.

I’ve merged the databases for this blog and my previous one I used for the “tour” version as it seemed a shame to keep at that stuff hidden! Most of the posts are in the Australia category, and I’m surprised at just how many comments that thing was generating. I guess everyone had a bit more spare time a couple of years ago.

Anyway, sayin’.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 the other day, and all of a sudden I couldn’t get any sound from Flash player 10 within Firefox. After checking my player version I was being informed I was on version 9… odd, since I upgraded to 10 a few weeks ago when it came out for Linux. On looking in my plugins folder  (~/.mozilla/plugins) I found another copy of libflashplayer.so in there, so deleted it, reloaded the Adobe plugin detection page and lo and behold, version 10,0,12,36 is back up and I have sound again in the browser.

Sweet.

I’ve been pissing about with Papervision (V2 Great White), the 3D library for AS3. It’s very cool, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to pick it up and have a play around.

Anyway, I got Cube Runner on my iPod and decided to recreate it in Flash. My version isn’t exactly “finished” but as an exercise in controlling 3D space, it was a good one. It has some collision bugs, and some of the physics aren’t quite as polished as the iPhone version but whatever… I just wanted to see if I could do something similar with what Papervision offers.

I want to try and finish it over the next few days and get the following things done:

• Work out how to add more distance on the camera’s perspective, as the cubes tend to start too close to the viewport. They’re being added with a z position of 0 at the moment, but it looks like anything less than 0 makes them disappear off screen… maybe zoom out and let the cubes scale up?
• Improve the collision detection slightly – I’m using hitTestObject() to evaluate collisions at the moment but I don’t think my implementation is too hot.
• The fonts don’t work under Linux (only I’m bothered about that mind).

Instructions: Use the mouse to move the ship left and right and avoid the evil cubes!

Work + Pro Evo 2009 = Most days…

If you’re doing any .Net ADO work with an Excel sheet, and want to explicitly enable or disable automatic handling of the first row of the sheet being set as a heading by the data handler, you have to set HDR=YES or NO in the connection string’s ‘Extended Properties’. OK, you may say, but what I ran into the other day was the following helpful message as soon as those properties were added to my connection string:

“Could not find installable ISAM”.

Huh? What’s happened? Dave’s started banging his head against a brick wall, that’s what.

It turns out that the formatting of the connection string has to be quite strict (read: stick random linebreaks in) to get it to work, so here is how I managed to get the damn thing working again:

OleDbConnection connString = new OleDbConnection(@"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;" +
 "Data Source=c:\somefile.xls;" +
 "Extended Properties=" + (char)34 + "Excel 8.0;HDR=Yes;" + (char)34);

Hope that helps some poor sucker scouring the web who’s run into the same issue.