Scott T: The Blog
Feed Issues
Posted Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 2:16pm by ScottTagged: ssc, this-site
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Just a quick note to mention the web feed has been playing around a little today. Has been some minor teething problems since I've updated from V2 to V3 of SSC!
Hope the new style looks ok across all browsers as I'm still in the process of checking each one.
Pushing for Performance
Posted Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 1:10am by ScottTagged: games, programming, ssc
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After the recent work by spookypeanut on the Groovie engine for ScummVM, I spent a little bit of time trying to overcome these performance issues using the SdlDotNet implementation. Unfortunately, it seems things aren't much better than last time although I managed to break things in the process. Initially, I wasn't incrementing the surface pointer correctly followed by incorrect colour assignments. I got there in the end although there's still some minor opcode fill issues for the VDX files as shown on the 4th shot below - notice the rather jagged bottom of the "photo" in the book?
[[img|/images/gallery/4/77_med.jpg]][[img|/images/gallery/4/78_med.jpg]][[img|/images/gallery/4/79_med.jpg]][[img|/images/gallery/4/80_med.jpg]]
I might trial using pointers with the XNA framework next to see if that makes any noticeable difference. I've also noticed many searches for T7G and Vista coming via my blog - to those who read this, you can try out dosbox or the windows patch although neither were particularly stable for me.
I've also been working on V3 of this website as rather than uni work. Things are mostly ready in the front-end (excluding image gallery) and I'll update this site once I finalise it. The back-end will need more work for a few of the less commonly changed settings but I don't want to delay the upgrade. I'm working on a new theme for it as well but short on ideas - the progress so far is still looking a little drab.
Enjoy your weekend everyone :)
V3 Progress!
Posted Sun, Mar 02, 2008 at 6:42pm by ScottTagged: ssc, uni
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Probably not very interesting for the rest of you, but for me, I'm quite excited. I've just finished knocking up a first revision "simple" text module for V3 of SSC (the PHP application that runs this site). Unfortunately, uni starts tomorrow so progress could slow a little. On the plus side, only the news/blog module and photo gallery to go until I can upgrade - I'm certainly looking forward to it :)
Oh, and did anyone notice the three posts before this were each made 10 days apart on the 5th, 15th and 25th? I only did after I made 3rd one.
Apache and Vista's Symlinks
Posted Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 2:26pm by ScottTagged: programming, ssc, vista
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For those not in the know, Vista does support a form of symbolic link (also known as a symlink). While these seem to be used all the time in *nix systems, this is one of the first Windows based systems with them, however they seem to not be flawless.
Now to the point of this post - I'm currently dabbling around with V3 of SSC and had created a symlink from my workspace (C:\Users\<blah>\workspace\SSC\trunk) into Apache's wwwroot for simplicity (c:\wwwroot) of debugging. While this worked perfectly initially, the .htaccess file worked wasn't being parsed :s
I'm not certain of where the problem lies in this instance but it seems that the <DirectoryMatch> directive for the wwwroot wasn't catching the SSC symlink but then again, neither was adding it's true path (the "c:\users\...") one. Unfortunately it seemed the only way around this that I could find quickly was to remove the initial security added in the default install.
Is there anyone else who has been bitten by this and found a better solution?
RSS feeds
Posted Sat, Oct 20, 2007 at 5:43pm by ScottTagged: on-the-net, ssc
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I have a feed... Two in fact. Put simply, pages like Bloglines, Google Reader, etc can now subscribe to this page.
I spent most of last night (6pm till 1am although half of this was fixing fixing various bugs for other parts of the site) and today (10 till 3) working on getting two feeds together. The easy one was the RSS feed (edit 26 Oct: now removed as Atom is more flexible). I got that completed just after midnight and spent a little while just fine-tuning it.
The slightly more interesting one was the Atom feed. I had quite some trouble getting this one to behave with Firefox trying everything from downloading it to attempting to display as a webpage to simply showing the document structure. It was only after uploading to one of my test servers and running it through the Feed Validator that I noticed I had spelt the namespace wrongly.
Feeds are currently generated nightly so the atom feed linked above won't be present until sometime overnight. Similarly, any posts I make during the day won't hit the feeds for several hours. If there is demand, I might increase how often the feed is updated.
Links to the feeds are available on the bottom of each blog page, in the address bar for Firefox or the (hopefully) now orange feed icon next to the home icon in IE7.
As I was thinking previously, I've also moved the blog to the "front" of the website. Unfortunately there were a few minor problems but work-arounds were hacked together.
On a different note, I need to head across to the other side of the city for the second (and final) practical on Monday.
Edit @ 6:30pm - I suppose now I need to really consider a proper title to these pages rather than just "Blog" so the title on feed is actually relevant ;)
