Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

Depots page added

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• TT Station News

— orudge @ 01/08/2008 6:00 pm

I have finally got the Depots page in the Rail Building section complete. I’m hoping to get the Check Points and Stations/Ports sections finished shortly, too, which are I believe the last remaining pages to be completed here. It’s only taken several years. 😉

Don’t forget about the OpenTTD setup guide if you’re new to the TTD world and want to get the game installed!

Twenty-one

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• General

— orudge @ 16/07/2008 2:27 pm

So, what’s new since the last blog? I’ve been:

• Listening to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust a fair bit, although not quite as much as before
• Finally driving my car now that the log book arrived
• Working on my Google Summer of Code project
• Going to St Andrews for the Graduation Ball
• Playing Team Fortress 2
• Watching more House, Doctor Who (the last few episodes were rather good), Top Gear (the Japanese race was excellent), and other such things
• Swimming
• Driving a bit more
• Turning 21

Yes, the car log book arrived just in time for me to head to St Andrews, which was nice. The car’s a lovely thing, drives very nicely, and isn’t too expensive to run. The ball was very good fun, and nice to see everybody again before assorted people go their separate ways. Then I was back down here keeping busy with Summer of Code and the like. I also decided to take up swimming again, having discovered the local pool in Mold, as sitting on the computer all day is probably not the best thing to do be doing, from a health point of view. I used to swim a lot in Orkney, so hopefully this’ll be good for me.

What else… well, last Wednesday, I turned twenty-one years young. It seems to be pretty much like being 20, except that now I can go and buy a drink in the US if I want. (If anybody wants to volunteer the cash for a plane fare, that’d be most appreciated.) My birthday itself was mostly uneventful, really. On Saturday, I went down to Bristol to see my academic mum, Rachel, as it was her birthday then, so we had a bit of a joint celebration that night – good fun indeed. Apart from that, I’ve been doing some more work on Wine – I’ve got an Add/Remove Programs applet complete, which has been submitted to the wine-patches mailing list, and I’ve been improving the old-fashioned non-shell-namespace Control Panel too this past few days. Last week was mid-term evaluation week, where students had to turn in evaluations for their mentors, and vice versa. I’m pleased to say that I passed (if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been getting paid!), and hopefully should be getting some money to pay the bills over the next week or so.

I’m heading back up to St Andrews in about two weeks, for the rest of the summer (and, indeed, the rest of my final academic year). Then, a week or so into August, it’s the second annual Transport Tycoon Forums meet, this year in London. It’s looking like it’ll be much bigger and more exciting than last year. I’ll be staying a few days in London, to see some of the sights, and hopefully not be bankrupted by the experience.

So that’s me for the time being. Has everybody else been having a good summer so far?

New setup guide added

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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!

Indiana Jones

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• General

— orudge @ 22/05/2008 1:33 am

Indiana Jones was rather good fun. Cinema did a midnight premiere type thing, place was packed out. Had the good ol’ audience spirit that previous late night showings of the classic films had. Film itself was very good, I thought – despite his age, Harrison Ford did a pretty decent job. Anyway, I’m off to sleep, so apologies for the short review. Go out and see the film.

Now, I just have to hope that my flight is still going tomorrow, despite this silly French strike. They had to choose the day we’re flying out to Paris to strike…

Exams, Paris, and Summer of Code

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• General

— orudge @ 17/05/2008 8:51 pm

Well, a week on Monday is the official start date for coding for Google Summer of Code, and people are getting excited about it. Unfortunately, I still have exams to get out of the way first before I can start work on the project properly, but I’m looking forward to it – hopefully I can make Wine a bit more friendly for users to configure!

As for exams, had the first one today, Data Communication and Networks – it seemed to go fairly well, particularly with the fact one of the questions was literally taken from a piece of coursework we did a week ago, and another one was an essay question based on presentations we did earlier in the semester, which really was a gift. Of course, I’ll have to wait until the results come out before I know for sure. Logic exam on Tuesday – not looking forward to that one quite so much. Operating Systems is my last exam on Wednesday, which I think should go reasonably well. Then on Wednesday night (well, Thursday morning, at midnight), I will hopefully be off to see the new Indiana Jones movie – certain reviews on the Internet claim it’s not all that marvellous, but I’m thinking it’ll be good fun, even if it’s not all that fantastic as a film. After all, the Star Wars prequels weren’t that fantastic, but they were still good fun by and large. The late night showing of the classic Indiana Jones films were always fun at the cinema here in St Andrews, so hopefully the midnight screening of this will have a similar atmosphere.

Finally, after all that, I’m off to Paris for a few days. I’ve been to Paris before, back in 2001 when I was in secondary school, but it’ll be nice to go there independently (heading with a friend, as opposed to as part of a school trip), and actually be able to use my French – after all, I’ve studied it for some seven years or so, but never actually used it properly in France! The weather ought to be a bit nicer than last time, too, as it was February when I headed off in 2001 (and we nearly didn’t get there, due to snow in Orkney). I get back from Paris a week on Tuesday, and then I’ll be cracking on with Summer of Code, getting dirty with the Win32 shell internals. Great fun. 😀

Aww, still in Memphis

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• General

— orudge @ 15/05/2008 12:35 pm

With reference to xkcd #281. Of course, it’s technically not in Memphis any more, but anyway…

Goings-on

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• General

— orudge @ 23/04/2008 9:52 pm

Well, hello again. Lots has been happening as of late, mainly involving academic work such as that described before. However, I also got some good news on Monday that I’ve been accepted into Google Summer of Code with my application to work on the Wine project. It’s quite exciting, and I’m looking forward to getting started, although I’ve got exams to get through first!

Another new development is that of a new server to replace both Yoda and Dumbledore, imaginatively titled “newyoda” temporarily. It’s a whole lot faster, and has a fair bit more capacity, than either Yoda or Dumbledore, and accounts are being moved over there over the next couple of weeks. This very web site is running on it now, and I’m sure you’ll notice how snappy and fast it is. 😉

Well, I’d best head off and do something more productive, or perhaps sleep – project demos on Friday!

Lots of stuff

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• General

— orudge @ 07/04/2008 10:48 pm

Well, the past few weeks have been busy. Lots of things done in terms of coursework (and lots more to do), as well as a good few events put on in the union. When I’ve managed to get a bit of spare time, I’ve been playing through Half-Life 2, and subsequently HL2: Episode One, and HL2: Episode Two. (With a few more games to play in future, too… “whoops”). I’ve also been busy with bits of PHP work, and other projects, such as a game I worked on back in 2001 that I’ve resurrected. Keep your eyes peeled for more, I hope to release some sort of beta later in the year. If you’re any good at pixel art, I may want to hear from you, too. Leave a comment if you’re interested. 😉

My new server obiwan arrived a couple of weeks ago, and has been working nicely. I have it set up as RAID-1 with LVM on top, for some measure of redundancy, and to enable easy upgrading in the future. I bunged the latest Debian stable onto it, and got it set up with a basic set of services – its primary function is a storage server, but it also performs some additional functions, such as web and database server for a few things. I even wrote a little PHP script the other day that, with a bit of .htaccess magic, makes it act as a “converter layer” for Apache, whereby you can browse through my music collection using the standard Apache autoindex system, and if you select a FLAC file, it transcodes it (or checks its cache for a previously transcoded file) to Vorbis and sends it through. Handy if I want to access my music away from home, as my ADSL upstream isn’t really good enough to send FLAC, unfortunately.

I’m currently on my “Easter holiday” (Easter actually fell before the holiday, this year, so it’s more of a “Spring holiday”… let’s ignore the fact it was snowing this weekend, shall we?). I’m down in North Wales at the moment, at my Grandad’s. I’m currently on the lookout for a new car (well, a “new old car”, to be more precise), as it would have cost a bit too much to get my old Escort through its MOT again. It’s a bit annoying being without a car, particularly seeing as train prices seem to have gone up a huge amount – for me to buy a ticket on the day from Flint to Leuchars (my standard journey from Wales to St Andrews) would cost over £80! Even with a railcard, the cost is still £70-75 (that’s including the £25-ish purchase cost of the railcard). A few years ago, I could walk up and get a return for £35… madness.

Anyway, I have one more week of this holiday, and then it’s straight back into a pretty hectic week at St Andrews. Project tests and demos need to be done, reports need to be finished, and the whole Junior Honours project needs to be completed and submitted within a couple of weeks of our return. I also have a couple of events to coordinate for Ents, as well as normal lectures and suchlike. It won’t be all that long after that until exam time, in mid-May. Only three exams this time round, which is nice, and so far, the provisional exam timetable looks reasonable. Hopefully it won’t be made “unreasonable” when it’s finalised! At the moment, I’m not sure what I’ll be doing this summer – I’ve applied for a couple of things, which I’m waiting to hear back on. I did have a fairly major thing lined up a few months back, but unfortunately, that fell through, which is rather a shame, as it would have been a fantastic experience. But never mind, I shall perhaps try again next year on that score. It’s looking this summer like I’ll be in St Andrews for most of the time, probably going to North Wales for July when I’m in-between leases. Hopefully it’ll give me some time to get various projects done – I’d like to get the new Saved Game Repository finished (it WILL be done in 2008, honest!), and also if I can get my game complete, to some degree, then that’d be great. I also have some patches for OpenTTD I’d like to finish – the new sound engine and music playing system in particular.

All in all, lots to do over the next little while! Nothing new there, then!

Server!

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• General

— orudge @ 14/03/2008 9:27 pm

I’ve just ordered a T2-WHS-A2 (catchy name, eh?)! This will become my main server, taking the responsibility for storing most of my data, as well as running various services. It’ll initially have 1TB of storage, which I shall probably use in a RAID-1 configuration – however, I also intend to take a couple of the hard disks out of this current PC, get some sort of enclosure for them, and use those in the new server (the server has a smattering of eSATA ports). It’s all very exciting, no? Thanks to Brianetta for the recommendation!

Blah blah busy blah blah where did time go etc

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• General

— orudge @ 12/03/2008 4:29 pm

Yes, it’s another one of those blog posts where I go on about how things have been really hectic over the past month and “is that the date already?” and so on. A new semester began not too long ago (well, over a month ago, now), and as usual, it didn’t take long for things to get very busy. Rag Week went pretty well, lots of money was raised and lots of fun was had. Also, as I mentioned in my last blog, I bought Portal, and completed it, and rather enjoyed it. I also ended up playing rather a lot of Audiosurf (my username is “orudge” if you’re on there, as is my Steam ID) – probably far too much, really. I’ve also been playing through Half-Life 2, having got to the “Highway 17” section of the game. It’s pretty good fun, and the graphics really do look very nice in this game. Back in the real world, my academic mum Rachel was up for a few days last week, which was good fun indeed, and very nice to see her again. I also had a brief trip down to Wales to drop off the car for its MOT, which is due at the end of the month – John, the local mechanic and friend of the family, will be taking care of that, which is good. So now it’s pretty much just back to the usual academic work – lots of work to be done on the team project in particular over the coming weeks before the Easter holiday (well, “spring holiday”, as it doesn’t actually include Easter this year!). And I’ve got an Ents meeting at 5pm to head off to, so I’d best go.

Portal

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• General

— orudge @ 20/02/2008 8:34 pm

Oh dear, I appear to have been sucked in.

Let me explain.

Some time ago, my good friend Chris Jones bought some game collection known as “The Orange Box”. You may have heard of it. As part of this, he could donate the games he already owned to a friend – in this case, Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One. He chose to donate them to me. This meant I had to go and get Steam, which I duly did. However, the ATI Radeon graphics card I was borrowing from a friend at the time seemed to have problems with the game – it would randomly crash, freeze, stutter and more. So play the games I did not. Fast forward a few months, and my brother has given me his old graphics card, a GeForce 7800 GT (hurrah, back with NVIDIA again). This card happens to work perfectly with HL2. While signed into Steam, I notice a good number of my friends playing something called Audiosurf. So I checked out the demo, found it very addictive, and bought the game. Yes, I’ve bought a game from Steam, something I didn’t think I would ever do! I also discovered an NVIDIA promotion, which gives me a free copy of Peggle Extreme, HL2: Deathmatch, HL2: Lost Coast, and a demo of Portal, entitled “First Slice”. Today I played through said demo, and have now somehow ended up $19.95 less well-off (actually, $23.44, when you include VAT), and with a copy of Portal on my hard disk. Whoops.

The only problem I have now is finding the time to play it – and indeed, these other games that are now sitting in my Steam account. This week is Rag Week, and it’s been a pretty busy week for me already. I have the comedy to run tomorrow, and then I should be going to the Pirates vs Ninjas bop on Friday. I also have some coding to do and lots of comp sci stuff to get on with, amongst other things. But no doubt, I shall be able to squeeze in some Portal. And some Audiosurf.

And yes, I know that the cake is a lie.

To Aegir, re: “Re: Owen”

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• General

— orudge @ 17/02/2008 5:36 pm

The £1100 is third party, fire and theft insurance, I believe – i.e., if you dent somebody else’s car, they’ll pay for the repairs to their (but not your) car. Fully comprehensive insurance is quite a bit more. Insurance premiums are ridiculously expensive for young drivers over here, it’s rather annoying for those of us who are actually competent drivers and who don’t go about driving like chavs.

To Aegir, re: “Raor. New Car.”

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• General

— orudge @ 2:41 am

I was going to comment on your latest blog, with the text:

Hmm, $271 for 3rd party insurance for, what, a year, and you’ve only been driving a year or two, haven’t you? That’s, hmm, £124/year… in my first year driving, insurance was around £1100/year – you crazy Australian bogan drivers. ;P

However, your silly Vox site insists I sign up before I post a comment, which is not something I am going to do. Don’t suppose you can disable that in any way? Don’t expect many comments on your blog if you can’t, anyway, I daresay most people can’t be bothered to sign up for some random site in order to post. And this concludes my message.

Photos from Brazil up

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• General

— orudge @ 12/02/2008 12:46 am

As a little followup to my last post, my photos from Brazil are now up.

Back in town

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• General

— orudge @ 10/02/2008 8:02 pm

Well, the past few days have involved lots of travelling. Thursday was the day of our flight back to Britain, with the flight leaving Natal at about 6.30pm. However, I was awoken on Thursday morning with a couple of messages that did not seem to bode well: there was a problem with the car (which was thankfully fixed fairly quickly), and there was a demonstration of sorts on the main BR-101 road up to Natal, which meant that no traffic could get through. As a result, our taxi was going to be delayed. The estimate was for the demonstration to finish by 1pm, which meant our taxi would be an hour or so late, at 2pm. (The intention was to get the taxi at 1pm, arrive at the airport by about 3.30pm, in plenty of time for the 6.30pm flight.) Fortunately, the taxi did indeed arrive at 2pm, and we got to the airport by around 4.30pm, only to be confronted by what’s probably the longest queue I’ve ever seen (well, actually, the queue for the Blackpool concert in August was probably longer). I’m not quite sure why, but it was taking an awful long time to check everybody in for the flight (seemingly, the flight was the only one leaving the airport at that time, as all the other check-in desks were closed). After about an hour, we got to the front of the queue and checked in, as well as having to stump up money for the departure tax (which seemed to be included in the flight price the last time I flew from Brazil, but apparently not this time). Once we finally got into the departure lounge, it turns out the plane was late due to it being late setting off from London earlier in the day. Anyway, eventually, we got on the plane, and the plane took off, and we flew back over to Britain. As usual, I didn’t manage to get any sleep on the flight, which made the 250 mile drive back up to North Wales fun. Particularly fun when the M40 ground to a halt due to an earlier accident. Thankfully, we were only delayed for perhaps half an hour there, and the rest of the drive was fine enough. Yesterday, after 14 hours sleep, I then drove up to St Andrews, which was really rather pleasant – the weather was lovely and there weren’t many cars on the road (and even less lorries). So that’s me back in St Andrews, with semester 2 starting tomorrow.

I’ve now flown a total of just under 56,000 miles in my life, it seems. The map is below (click for more details):

Still got to cover Africa, Asia and Australasia!

The most dangerous roads in the world

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• General
• Interesting Sites

— orudge @ 05/02/2008 7:21 pm

Came across this link earlier today… some rather scary-looking roads there! In the winter (wet season), the track down to my Dad’s house in Brazil can be a bit wet – indeed, very wet – but it’s nothing compared to that Siberian road!

Speaking of Brazil, I shall be heading back to the UK on Thursday, arriving on Friday. It’s been a nice couple of weeks out here, and the weather has been lovely (although I did get fairly badly sunburnt the other day at the beach). Photos will follow on when I get home. Exam results should be out tonight, and semester 2 starts next Monday. All very exciting!

Until next time…

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