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Posted by Nat Tuck
Apparently in Java you can’t just read a file. First you have to create a FileOpenerFactory which has a createFileOpener() method, which returns a FileOpener, which has an openFile() method. The openFile() method returns nothing, but then you can call the getOpenedFile() method to get a File object. You can’t actually read from a File object though…
Read more...Posted by Nat Tuck
I recently got a nice big monitor - 25.5", 1920x1200 - and I discovered a neat feature of modern windowing systems that I really hadn’t used that much previously: non-maximized windows. On my monitor, it’s possible to put two windows next to each other and still have a useful amount of text in both.
Any application or web page that I do that with gets an oddly shaped "screen" to work on: 960x1200. That’s not quite the with of a 1024x768 screen, but something targetting 800x600 will fit fine.
Read more...Posted by Nat Tuck
In spite of my attempts to avoid it, I’ve been doing some Windows development and evaluation of Microsoft technologies. Getting a Windows development environment together is quite a challenge. Initially, I thought that it was more a C/C++ issue than a Microsoft issue - putting together a solid C/C++ dev environment with an IDE and non-platform libraries is non-trivial anywhere. But… that turned out to not be entirely accurate.
My experience with Microsoft development so far is well summarized by this error message:
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On CNN.com today I got an error message - I can’t watch a video because "it requires flash player 8 or greater" and I have flash player 10. Screenshot below.
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http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html
This article describes a solution to pathfinding in 3D game levels that looks pretty solid. It’d definitely be quite a bit faster than any automatic terrain based solution, at the cost of having to manually define the pathfinding mesh.
Posted by Nat Tuck
Mozilla Firefox 3 limits usable encrypted (SSL) web sites to those who are willing to pay money to one of their approved digital certificate vendors. This policy is bad for the web. Not only does it make users less secure overall by reducing the number of encrypted connections, it damages the basic principle of equality among web participants.
The problem is this: When a Firefox 3 user visits an encrypted web site with a self-signed certificate or a certificate signed by an unapproved (new or non-profit) provider, Firefox doesn’t show the page. Instead, it shows a scary "you are being hacked"-style warning that requires 4 clicks and an "add an exception" dialog box to bypass.
Posted by Nat Tuck
When Dell first released their Ubuntu machines, there was significant fear that they would be the same price as Windows machines in spite of Ubuntu’s lack of a licensing fee. As I showed, that turned out to be false.
http://pandion.ferrus.net/uml/dellbuntu/
Again, this is content from my personal site at UML that I don’t want to lose.
Posted by Nat Tuck
I did some research on nuclear (fission) power and produced this site arguing for it as a long term solution to the energy problem:
http://pandion.ferrus.net/uml/nuclear/
This was a school project, hosted on my personal web page at UML, so I figure I should move it here before I somehow lose all my data when I get upgraded to a grad student account.
Posted by Nat Tuck
SWIG does an excellent job wrapping C++ classes for use as a Ruby extension module. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look to be designed to handle some of the issues that I’ve run into when embedding Ruby to extend a C++ application. Specifically, how to pass C++ objects to Ruby calls in such a way that they can be passed back to SWIG generated methods requires a bit of hackery.
