Making an ISO file from terminal in Ubuntu October 6, 2008

Today I discovered the mkisofs command, a general linux command not specific to Ubuntu. This command enables you to make an ISO disk image of any folder or group of files on your hard drive or external media. I used it today to make an ISO file of a CD which appears to have worked perfectly using the following command

mkisofs -o EPSON.iso /media/cdrom0

As far as i know the -0 paramater signals that we are giving the command an output file (in this case EPSON.iso) followed by the path to the cd drive which contained the CD i wanted to make an ISO from. This command has literally hundreds of paramaters which are explained better than I would even attempt here.

Launch an “explorer” window in ubuntu October 6, 2008

Thanks to my friend Dave I today learnt the command in ubuntu that would be the equivalent to

explorer.exe “E:/”

And that is…

nautilus “/media/cdrom0″

The reason for wanting to do this was i wanted to make an application launcher on the tool bar link to a location, some to network paths ( smb:// ) and some to local mount points.

As with the structure of the windows command, nautilus is a window manager as is explorer.exe on windows. Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop and any valid path can be passed as a parameter in terminal.

Making Flash and Javascript Communicate August 27, 2008

Making actionscript communicate with javascript is something I have achieved before by using the following action

script….

getUrl(“javascript:”+js_code_here);

However today I found a much better way to provide stable communication between the two languages One benefit of the method described here is that it does not make the “link clicked” sound in IE6+ which the getUrl actionscript call will trigger.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/scripting/ActionScriptJavaScript.aspx

NVIDIA PhysX Particle Fluid Demo August 13, 2008

A tech demo based on particle fluids for NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated PhysX technology.

This video was recorded on a machine running an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512 graphics card with Forceware 177.83 drivers and PhysX 08.08.01.

read more | digg story

GDC LBP Videos August 3, 2008

Odbc Memory allocation error August 2, 2008

Today I tried upgrading the odbc drivers on my server from 3.5 to 5.1. I immediately ran in to troubles and got a “Memory allocation error” when executing a non query to mySql. After reverting back to driver version 3.5 i found that the error was caused simply by a “data too long for field” error which i quickly fixed in no time at all.

I am not sure if the memory allocation error i received with the new drivers was related to this but if anyone could explain this I would love to know whats going off. If anyone gets a memory allocation error in 5.1 it might be worth checking to ensure the data your inserting fits into the row.

Debugging full screen DirectX Applications August 2, 2008

Today I was trying to step through some code for intialising a vertex buffer, as something was going drastically wrong along the way. However my application needed to be tested in full screen mode which made debugging through VS impossible as the application I was trying to debug takes full control of the screen.

There seem to be two solutions in this scenario;

1. Modify your code to run in windowed mode (easy enough to do, just change your window class registration and DirectX initialisation routines)
2. Use multiple monitors –> Goto control panel, choose DirectX, Goto DirectDraw tab, choose Advanced and enable Multiple Monitor Debugging.

Oriental Photoshop Brushes & Vectors For Mysterious Designs July 30, 2008

It is possible to find design resources in many themes. But, when it comes to oriental design resources, they are hard to find out as there are few free ones.

This is a collection of oriental Photoshop brushes & vector images for more mysterious designs : ).

read more | digg story

New Windows Vista Ads That Will Crumble Apple Mac Propaganda July 30, 2008

My friend was a part of this project and its quite interesting, take a look

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/#

read more | digg story

The new Facebook! July 30, 2008

Im not sure exactly when this happened but I think it was some time today that facebook has a new look, well if you choose it that is. When viewing facebook I was offered to try the new skin / layout and was very impressed.

I’m a moderate user of facebook and have always favoured it over other sites for being a little bit, well, organised! Myspace was a mess and none of my friends used Beebo and eventually everyone moved over to facebook.

Anyway, the new system looks great. The first thing I noticed is that it seemed a bit nippier when loading, although this may be because not many people are currently on the new testing version, who knows.

Everything is accessible from one page and photos and information load dynamically into the page, which means no more clicking through pages of photos and waiting for a reload, the current batch of images nicely swooshes off to one side and the next batch appear!

The wall and recent activity panels have been merged into one activity log, with wall posts and recent activity logs all in sequence, giving a better view of what has happened over time, without looking through yourself!

Even though i would allways praise facebook for being tidy and well organised, this was probably exagerated as anything looks tidy and organised when compared ot myspace! Anyway, the new look feels even sleeker and makes full use of the width of the screen, instead of the narrow layout emplyed previously.

The new site feels like a true web application and less like a web site, huge improvement, what do you guys think?