Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

New setup guide added

Filed under:

• TT Station News

— orudge @ 25/06/2008 12:00 pm

I have added a new guide on how to set up OpenTTD to the site. I get many e-mails asking me to how to set up TTD, and simply don’t have time to answer them all. Hopefully this guide will help people set up OpenTTD, which is probably the easiest TTD-based game to get up and running. If you have any comments on the guide, please let me know.

About Me update

Filed under:

• Site News

— orudge @ 24/06/2008 8:40 pm

I’ve finally updated the About Me page with more information, well, about me! To be more precise, I’ve split it up into a few different pages, depending on what you want to know about me, and I’ve updated details of the likes of the open source projects I’ve worked on.

On another, unrelated, note, I’m thinking I will stick my entire site in a Subversion repository, to make maintenance easier, and also to provide a nice history feature – if I update something and break it entirely, I can go back and figure out what caused the breakage a lot more easily. While this’ll make more or less no difference to you, the end user and visitor, it’ll be beneficial to me. 🙂

Updates and progress

Filed under:

• General

— orudge @ 1:55 pm

Well, it’s been a few weeks since I last blogged properly, so what have I been doing? In no particular order:

• Listening to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust a lot
• Waiting for my car log book (V5) to arrive so I can actually tax the damn thing and drive it
• Working on my Google Summer of Code project
• Waiting even more for my car log book to arrive
• Visiting Mum down in mid-Wales
• Playing Team Fortress 2
• Watching House, Extras, Doctor Who, the new Top Gear (woo yay), and other such things
• Still waiting for my car log book to arrive…

The most important thing out of all of those, and the one which I probably spent most time on, was working on my Summer of Code project, of course. If you’re not aware, I’m working on implementing proper Control Panel support into the shell namespace in Wine. I discovered that the existing support in Wine was more or less complete, but was missing various bits of “glue” holding everything together. After figuring out exactly what was missing, I managed to stitch it all together, and now we have a control panel that works:

That’s a screenshot of the ReactOS Explorer running under Wine. In some third-party Explorer clone I found online, it looks like:

My patches were applied to Wine this morning, which is nice – my first work committed to the project. 🙂 My focus will now shift to creating some new control panels for Wine, and improving the likes of winecfg. I’ll keep you posted!

Now, what else… hmm, yes, I mentioned Sigur Rós’s new album, “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust”. In many ways, it’s quite different from some of their previous albums – the sound is a lot more like that on the Heim side of Hvarm-Heim than the sound found on previous albums such as Ágætis byrjun and (), but I’ve really grown to like it. My current favourites would have to be Festival and Ára bátur – the former showcasing that haunting, familiar Sigur Rós song that we’ve all come to know and love, and the latter swelling into something really very majestic. So yes, go and listen to it on Last.fm, or stream it from the band’s official web site, and if you like it, buy the CD. 🙂

Now, as you’ll have noticed me mention in my previous blog entry, I have a new car, but it didn’t come with the log book as the old owner had presumably lost it or something. So I had to send off to the DVLA for a new one, and say they it may take 4 weeks for it to arrive. Well, it’s been three and a bit weeks already, and it’s still not here. As I also mentioned in my previous blog, I’m meant to be going up to St Andrews for the graduation ball this week (indeed, I’m hoping to head up there tomorrow). I can get the train, of course, but the train tends to be expensive, and it’s also quicker to drive generally (while the train is faster, at up to 125mph, the speed advantage is offset by the fact I usually have to spend an hour waiting at the rather depressing Warrington Bank Quay between trains), so I’m hoping that the log book may arrive tomorrow (wishful thinking, no doubt), so I can tax the car and actually drive it. It’s just been sitting in the driveway for the past few weeks – while I’ve been paying for insurance I can’t use, of course.

Oh, and if anybody reading this enjoys a game of Team Fortress 2, us #tycooners are playing games fairly regularly on my server. If you want to join in, come and say hello – it’s quite fun.

Right, well, that’ll do for now, longest update you’ll have had in a while… I’ll be back in the future no doubt with more exciting news. Until next time…

Foxamp 0.3.8 released

Filed under:

• Site News

— orudge @ 17/06/2008 7:47 pm

I’ve released a new version of Foxamp, version 0.3.8. New in this version is support for Firefox 3.0 (which was released today). The helper application that retrieves the song title and performs some miscellaneous functions is also faster and more efficient, and the playlist number and Winamp title are no longer included in the status bar. If you use Winamp and Firefox, check it out. 🙂

Paris, cars, packing, and exams

Filed under:

• General

— orudge @ 07/06/2008 2:16 pm

Well, quite a bit has happened since I last wrote in this here place. As you’ll no doubt be aware from my last blog, I went to Paris with my friend Caroline for a few days after exams. Paris was generally nice, if rather expensive. Saw all the usual sights, went to Disneyland, checked out some of the Parisian pubs and cafés, and had a quite pleasant couple of days. Photos are up, as ever, in the photo gallery.

After Paris, a few days disappeared somewhere along with final week festivities, and then it was time for me to head down to Wales to pick up my new car, a 1998 Suzuki Baleno 1.6. With only 70,000 miles on the clock, the price I paid for it is really rather good! A lot cheaper to insure than my old Escort, too. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to actually drive it back up to St Andrews, as I had to send a form off to the DVLA before I could tax the thing… rather annoying. So I had to make alternative arrangements to get back up to St Andrews, and to get all my stuff back down to Wales this coming Monday. I’ve already offloaded a carload of stuff that I want to store in St Andrews, need to finish packing today and tomorrow, ready to head down for the summer. I’ll be in Wales until the start of August, with a trip up to St Andrews in a few weeks for the Graduation Ball (while I’m not graduating this year, quite a few of my friends are). Next week will also see me start properly on my Google Summer of Code project – due to the general hecticness of the past week or so, I haven’t been able to get much done with it yet, but that shall change shortly. 🙂

Finally, I got my exam results back this afternoon. Generally quite happy with them, I think for the most part they were better than I was expecting. Got a 17 in the team project, too, which I think we’re all rather pleased about. And that’s another year of university over and done with… just one more to go!