rackbits

At a recent LAN I went to I had the urge to play some Red Alert 2. The only problem is that it’s netcode is based on the IPX protocol which has been phased out of Vista. A little bit of google searching later and I found a patch that lets you play Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun over UDP rather than IPX.

Download the patch here.

All you need to do is extract the files from the archive and place the wsock32.dll file in your RA2 folder alongside the game executable.

You may need to enter the network options screen before you can enter the network section of the game. On my system the network game menu would not open, but would rather return you immediately to the main menu. Going into the network options and returning seemed to fix that.

A slight slip of the hand and now I have no default theme. Thank you Mac OS X, for not letting you merge two folders together X(.

In any case that means a new site design is on the way.

I have a strange obsession with networking gear. Here is a pic of my latest purchase, it’s a Cisco 5513 with 2 x 24-port 10/100mbit cards and a WS-X5530 Supervisor Engine III-NFFC which enables 3.6 Gbits/sec of backplane bandwidth.

I don’t think I have ever loved any of the mobile phones I have previously owned. They, for the most degree, worked but never for anything more than making phone calls or texting people. Take my old LG flipphone for instance - it could take photos and videos but provided no way of easily getting the photos or videos off the phone. It lacked bluetooth and didn’t come with a data cable. Completely useless. My Nokia which followed was not much better. You could easily get your photos or videos off (if your computer had bluetooth) but this was offset with Nokia’s painfully slow interface. The thing crawled and was quite painful to use for anything other than making voice calls or texting people.

This is where the iPhone seems different. Not only is it capable of making ordinary phone calls (does anybody make those anymore?) but more importantly it is a compelling platform to deploy additional applications. It is like what smart phones should have been, without the pain and misery that Windows Mobile is.

While developing Gridware I needed to decide on a method for the operating system to allocate physical memory. For simplicity and convenience I divided the physical memory space into frames of equal size to the page size for the architecture I am using (Intel processors typically use 4 kilobyte pages). This allows my operating system to easily allocate and page in memory.

I wanted something light and fast without unnecessary complication. I could have used a buddy allocator like Linux however it was too complicated for my needs. I had no need to have allocatable blocks of variable size. I also had no need to allocate more than one frame at a time (because paging would be used to make memory seem contiguous).

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Unlike what everybody thought - my os development efforts are never dead. Only put in suspened animation until the time is right. In another burst of effort I have begun writing a PCI Bus driver. It can currently enumerate the PCI Bus and display the devices vendor and device names

Pre-post note: I should have posted this before the foobar post, since it did happen before I downloaded and started using foobar. Whatever. This post will be short, anyway.

My Saturday the 7th of June was spent paintballing with people from the Overclockers Australia forums as well as a large group of real-world friends.

Glasnt, one of the OCAU members, has posted a lot of photos from the event here for everybody to see. Actually it looks like most of the photos are from post-paintball events where we went to the pub and generally went crazy.

It was a whole lot of fun punctuated by short periods of sharp pain and much cursing. I must also add at this point that my legs have been destroyed by more running in a single day then in the entire 6 months prior.

I think what we were doing in this photo has something to do with Meowmix (a member of OCAU). Glasnt wanted it so it was done.

I was an iTunes user. It worked with my iPod and I generally liked the interface and feel of it. There was only one little problem - it is slow. Very slow. Everything from scrolling to seeking within mp3s was greeted with momentary pauses which (if you were too fast) would result in the computer not realising you ‘let go’ of the mouse button making every subsequent mouse movement change the position of time in song you are at.

While trolling the Overclockers Australia forums I came accross some advocacy for a audio player called Foobar. It’s quick, light and simple but quite customisable.

I installed it and customised it a little, selecting one of the preset layouts (Album list + properties tabbed) and colour schemes (dark blue). I also loaded in all my music folders. You basically point this program towards your music and it adds them (quite quickly too).

I am currently redesigning the interface for Bluetrait Board which is a program written by Michael Dale that lets him track house expenses (as he lives in a share house).

Here is a small preview of what the redesigned interface looks like. Enjoy.

After three years of learners plates and being restricted to 80 kilometres/hour I have finally gotten around to doing my provisional license test. I passed in my first go, to much excitement, and now can finally drive by myself.

I already had a car - a 1998 Mazda MX-5 (manual, of course) - and now I finally have the license to go with it.