Mike’s Musings

So on Monday night me and a few friends went to go see Ironman.  Well let me tell you it was damn awesome, if you get the chance go and see it.  It did what I thought transformers should have done had a few token human characters and then got the hell out of the way while the robots (well men in robotic suits) fought.  It also had it’s fair share of funny moments which served as a nice counter balance to the action.

Also if going to see it wait until the end of the credits for a bonus scene.  It doesn’t add anything to the storyline of the movie but it is several degrees of awesome.

Last week my desktop computer (Spidey) died which was a bit of a bitch as I had assignments due, though it had thankfully lasted a good 4 years so I wasn’t too angry (if it had waited a week I would’ve been a lot happier).

But every cloud has a silver lining, this one was I got me a new desktop computer, zeddicus.  It’s a 3 Ghz Intel core 2 duo with 4 Gigs of ram, unfortunately I don’t game much anymore so I couldn’t justify buying a new graphics card so it’s using the GeForce 7950 GT from spidey.

All in all I’m very happy with my and a little sad to see my old machine die after having it so long.

Today I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress (2.5.1) from 2.3 and I’m happy to say that it was a very stress free and quick upgrade.  It was nice and easy and I’ve found no problems so far.

I’ve finally finished reading Watchmen, and what can I say apart from ‘Wow!’ I can’t think of anything that accurately describes this book, it simply is great and I would recommend it to everyone to read.

Now that the new server is up and running smoothley I decided to migrate my two relatively new project into the svn repositries on this sever, at some point I’ll make a better post about each project but for now a brief introduction will have to do. Both of these projects are available for anonymous checkout from svn and the source is browsable online, a link will be posted so you can do both these things.

Axalon

Axalon is a collaborative GUI designer written in C# and is being developed on windows, I haven’t quite yet decided what license to release it under, but chances are it will be the GPL. For those that are curious it is the rewrite of my research project I did at university last year, after seeing how to do things better I figured a complete re-write might be easier. The svn repo (also where you can browse the source on line) is:

http://mlowen.com/svn/axalon

gIDE

gIDE is a simplistic IDE designed for the Gnome desktop enviroment written in C++, it uses Gtkmm and various other related librarie. gIDE is being released under version 2 of the GNU GPL, the svn repo is:

http://mlowen.com/svn/gIDE

With both these projects feel free to check them out and play around with them, they are both in early stages of development and not really all that useful, hopefully I will have pages up for them by the end of the weekend but don’t hold me to anything.

Earlier today I installed some new ram in my laptop (NEC Versa E2000) which was really starting to feel the crunch with only 256 ram. After adding a GB of ram I decided to re-installing stock Ubuntu and once again ran across the problem of my key which is meant to produce | and \ instead produced < and > I found the fix to this at the Ubuntu forums but decided to document it here as well.

To fix this problem you need to have the following command run when you log in:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 94 = backslash bar'

Following on from yesterdays post, here is another task which I couldn’t find code for when I did a quick google search. This time around it’s setting the right syntax highlighting when using gtksourceviewmm, this example does use the function from the last post. For reference this code snippet is part of a function for loading a text file, which takes a Glib::ustring called file_name as a parameter.

m_uri = Gnome::Vfs::Uri::create(file_name);
Glib::ustring buf;
 
if(!read_file(m_uri, &buf))
	return false;
 
// Time to add the data to the sourceview
Glib::RefPtr<gtksourceview::SourceBuffer> buffer = m_text.get_source_buffer();
 
buffer->begin_not_undoable_action();
buffer->set_text(buf);
buffer->end_not_undoable_action();
 
// Set the syntax highlighting
Glib::RefPtr<gtksourceview::SourceLanguagesManager> manager = gtksourceview::SourceLanguagesManager::create();
Glib::RefPtr<gtksourceview::SourceLanguage> language = manager->get_language_from_mime_type(m_uri->get_file_info()->get_mime_type());
 
if(language) {
	buffer->set_language(language);
	buffer->set_highlight(true);
}

Recently I have being working on a project (which I will post about later) in which I wanted to use GnomeVFSmm the c++ port of GnomeVFS, but when I looked on the web I noticed a distinct lack of examples or tutorials using GnomeVFSmm, in the end I managed to figure it out, but for future reference and others looking for similar code here is a function for reading in a file.

bool read_file(Glib::RefPtr<Gnome::Vfs::Uri> uri, Glib::ustring *contents)
{
	if(!uri)
		return false;
 
	if(!uri->uri_exists())
		return false;
 
	try {
		Gnome::Vfs::Handle file;
 
		file.open(uri, Gnome::Vfs::OPEN_READ);
 
		Glib::RefPtr<Gnome::Vfs::fileinfo> info = file.get_file_info();
 
		char buffer[info->get_size() + 1];
 
		file.read(buffer, info->get_size());
		buffer[info->get_size()] = 0;
 
		(*contents) = buffer;
 
		file.close();
	} catch (Gnome::Vfs::exception &ex) {
		// Raise an exception dialog here
		return false;
	}
 
	return true;
}

Granted GVFS isn’t too far off but until it’s released this might still be helpful.

With a new blog comes a new license this blog is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, I’ve wanted to do this for a while but figured with the change of server that was coming up I would wait until it was done, the losing of all the old content just made it a cleaner break.

Also for a list of plugins that this site is running  check the about page, which I just finished writing.

Welcome to the new mlowen.com if you’re here it means the the dns has swapped over. The story behind it is we found out that for the same price as what we were paying GoDaddy for a virtual server we could get a dedicated server from Layered Technologies and so here we are, once again I’m sharing this server with Paul and Ryan.  Unfortunately after installing our blogs we found out we couldn’t import the posts from out old blogs so here we are with a fresh start.