redwyre

So, I haven’t blogged for a while. I know, I’m sorry.  I was going to say alot has happened, but that would probably be a lie.  But a few things have.

First thing: my wisdom teeth are no more. My bottom two wisdom teeth were impacting, and the top two were starting to point outwards since they had no teeth to keep them in check.  I had all four wisdom teeth removed under general anesthetic, which was an interesting experience. They clipped a heart beat monitor on a finger on my left hand, and inserted a needle in the top of my right hand, and put a blood pressure thing around my right arm.  I could hear my heart beat in the form of beaps, which I could hear increase as I started to get nervous.  Then they started the anesthetic, which felt like a cold steel rod being pushed up my arm.  I was staring up at the ceiling, feeling the anesthetic run up my arm and as I felt it coming towards my shoulder, and wondering when it would kick in… and of course at that moment my vision went grabled and I was instantly out.

The next thing I know I’m waking up in another room with an icepack in a sling around my face and feeling very groggy.  Apparently around two hours had passed.  It wasn’t very painful from what I remember (the dentist had given me some local anesthetic to help), and the bleeding had already stopped.  This was great compared to when I had teeth pulled and had to put gauze in my mouth to stop the bleeding myself, which was rather uncomfortable and annoying.  Then my mum helped me walk out which must have been a sight to see.  I couldn’t walk straight, it was like trying to walk drunk in GTA4.  It seems it can take a while for the anesthetic to completely leave your system, I felt groggy for days after.  I had them out on Thursday, and took Friday and Monday off work, though I probably would have taken another day off if it wasn’t for the milestone.  My mum helped me out alot by looking after me and making me soups to eat.  I’m glad I’ve done it and it’s behind me now.

During my time off for the wisdom teeth, I had my new oven installed.  This took the plumber and his assistant a few hours of making alot of noise, but now I have a new shiny oven with grill and cook top.  Since then we’ve started getting alot of oven cooked foods, such as chips, hash browns, potato pieces, sausage rolls, meat pies, and crumbed fish.  It suits the cold weather quite well, and it doesn’t hurt that they’re dead simple to cook.  Also, I’ve cooked two cakes.  One was an upside-down pudding thing which was delicious, and a chocolate cake.  I think we’ll start doing that at least once a week.

That’s enough for now, I’ll write about work later.

 The properties of the memristor were firstpredicted in 1971, and now have been proven to exist.  This discovery is huge, because it allows a new type of memory that is smaller (HP have already prototyped memory with over 6x the density) and doesn’t need constant power to keep it’s contents. Basically it replaces RAM and HDDs.  Also, the memristor has analog memory properties similar to synapses, so we will probably see some advances in neural nets as well.

Some more links:

• http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080430a.html
• http://www.dailytech.com/HP+Invents+Fabled+Memristor+New+Class+of+Electrical+Components/article11652.htm
• http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13812-engineers-find-missing-link-of-electronics.html

I woke up on Monday morning to this:

..accompanied with a light buzzing sound.  Fortunately for me it seemed to break when it went off at the scheduled time, so I got to work on time.. but for the rest of the week I will have to rely on my mobile to wake me up. And I don’t like it’s chances.

So today I finally got my Arduino Mini and it’s associated USB adaptor, and when I pulled it out I was kinda shocked at how small it really is.

This little beauty has an ATmega168, with 16k of flash, 8 analog inputs, 12 digital i/o pins, 16MHz clock and a package that is easy to use in a breadboard.  Currently I don’t have a breadboard so I can’t do anything with it yet other than stare longingly…

But soon my pretty… soon…

So, I’ve been trying to get my Asteroids game (the first game I wrote in my engine, back in 2002) working again.  Since I wrote it, I’ve done a few major changes, and not bothered to keep it up to date.  So, after a number of fixes, I manged to get it somewhat working again:

There’s some asteroids, and the title text.  I have no idea why the text is upside down, but hopefully it will be an easy fix.  The actual gameplay doesn’t work, you just get an awkwardly rotated ship floating off into space.  But I’m looking forward to getting it running so I can fly around and see the cool particle trails I made 5 years ago!

I spent some time playing around with a piece of normal glass, but it turns out that normal glass almost totally blocks near infra-red light! You can clearly see it’s green when viewed side on. However, it is possible to get almost perfectly clear glass that is clear side on. I got a small 8mm piece and tried it.. it works fantastic!

Here’s the setup, I’ve got the leds aimed into the glass, and a bit of foam blocks light leaking underneith the glass.

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When I first got vista, I looked around for some articles on the Desktop Window Manager, since it can do cool things like real-time thumbnails previews of apps. So as I was exploring, I came across the actual API to do it, and there are some functions that can be used to extend the “glass” section of windows when you have Aero on full. This got me thinking, if I could make my window transparent, could I render transparency with XNA? The answer is, surprisingly, yes!

I don’t know if the XNA team did it on purpose, or it just happened to work out that way, but it is possible:

So, today I got my shiny new 8800GTS, and I decided that maybe this new DX10 stuff (along with my frustrations with XNA) was a good reason to get back into coding and adding a DX10 path to my engine (while retaining DX9, so an exercise in semi-cross platformity).  It’s worth noteing that I wrote most of this engine before I started working, so it hasn’t had much love over the last 4 years.  So, after checking in files, moving libs around, adding libs to dependancies, commenting out code that used and older version of lua and fixing compiler errors, I got it compiling and linking.  It didn’t run though, which I found out was a call to loading the lua io lib which I don’t use, so I commented it out and it actually RAN.

Since it’s the most complete game I have (it was my main demo when I applied to Pandemic), I think I’ll do a bit of work cleaning it up a bit before I start on anything new. I’m thinking of maybe making an RTS, so the tile-based ground might make a good starting point.

Finally got around to wiring up the circuit for the first string of LEDs.  Here’s a first test with the modded web-cam:

I tried beaming it into a piece of glass to test FTIR, but it didn’t seem to work… I’ll have to see if I can get a piece of perspex to try it with.

If you, like my friend, have a tendency to put electronic devices such as mobile phones and audio players through the wash (or other hilarious scenarios) here are some steps to save your device’s life.

First and most important, take out the battery.  The longer the battery is in there, the more damage is done from corrosion.  If the devices has a built-in battery, time is even more important to following the rest of the steps.

Next, the device needs to be dried.  This can be done more effectively by pulling it apart and drying it with a heat gun (or hair dryer).  If you aren’t confident in doing so, you might want to take it to someone who is.  It’s probably a good idea to clean tight spots with some water dispersant so there are no minerals left from evaporating water.  If you can’t take the device apart you could try putting it in a container of something dry like rice to absorb the water, or perhaps a better choice would be to first submerse it in some kind of non-conductive oil or alcohol, or even clean distilled water.  The key is getting the impurities in that water out of the device.

Now if there is any corrosion you will need to remove it, use some water dispersant and scratch it off, making sure you clean it away with the dispersant.

After the device is all dry and clean, put it back together and see if it works.  Hopefully it will!