Dan North

It’s been a while since my last update… not that anyone actually reads this place (not that I care). Work on Osiris is progressing slowly since the last reformat I had to do on my computer. I have, however, been working on different approaches we can take during the creation of the application. Before I continue, this is for everyone who is in the dark regarding Osiris. Osiris is a project centred around the production of an OS-independent, joint HTTP and IRC server. The HTTP element has been successfully implemented in older versions of the software, so that’s just a copy and update job. The IRC stuff I am not too sure on, though it can’t be too hard. OK, back to Osiris. I have been working on making the source code more organised than previous versions. Security is something being considered more in the version, ranging from configuration parsing to socket handling. I have also created a simple file archive system that could be used to update Osiris via an auto-patcher. So far it’s not very efficient so this will need to be worked on, but the principle still stands. An archive containing 2 images was successfully extracted. Yeah, I know that file archives aren’t exactly the most exciting, or difficult, things in the world, but I don’t have much experience in having to make one. Jamie’s done nothing towards this as I haven’t been able to raise him… probably drunk.

On another note, I’m applying for another course (this should be my last one), though this one is based around computing rather than Bioscience (thankfully).

Meh, that’s it. Nothing else to say. Adios!

In an attempt to get back into using OpenGL and generating worlds procedurally, I have once again been messing around with Perlin Noise functions. The original intention was to create textures using the noise function that I could use in a random world. To create this random world, I decided to use perlin noise as well, which has produced some interesting 256 * 256 heightmaps. All I need to do with these is to translate them into landscape vertex positions and I have my world. The next step is to create the textures that will be used to make this world more interesting. After reaching this stage, I will start looking into creating world objects, such as trees and underwater plants procedurally. This could turn out to be an interesting mini-project. Just for the fun of it, there are some sample heightmap textures below that I took a screenshot of.

In other news, Osiris is on hold until next week (possibly longer if I continue to work on procedural generation). It is at the stage where it can parse the new configuration files though, so that’s a plus. Technically, we (By we I mean Jamie and myself) could just attach the old classes to it and it’ll work ok on Windows, but we want to make Osiris compatible for as many OS’s as we can.

The site rework is also on hold. So much to do, so little time. I haven’t forgotten about it, but if I’m going to continue working on different projects now, I could update this blog more often. I do need to consider what I intend to do about the blog though as I am still unsure whether to keep it as a development and personal diary, or to start adding articles as well. Alternatively, I could just shut the site down… ok, not going to happen. Not until a later time at least.

It’s been a long time since I last posted anything on here, and nothing’s been that great since I finished with the procedural stuff. I will be revisiting this in the future, though there are other matters that need to be addressed first.

First, I’ve dropped out of the Bioscience course after finally realising that the course was not right for me (thanks to lower than expected exam results). Not that I really care. It was boring me and at least I save money now. To give myself the greatest chances in the future, I’m looking into a second degree course in Computer Science. Due to the level of my experience and knowledge with respect to programming and computers in general, I’m going to try something rather cheeky and attempt to skip the first year (properly). This would be beneficial for me as I won’t waste a year covering what I already know, and I also won’t use up a slot in the new year as joining in the second year I could fit into a free slot (drop-outs).

On a non-education related front, this site is going to be rebuilt some time soon. Keep in mind that soon could mean any time between now and next December. My plan is to return this site to its original function: a programmers and web-developer article portal. For a laugh, I may restart the WDN after Jamie fucked it up back in 2006 by purging the forum database. I am left wondering whether to give him top-level access to the WDN this time around. It’s not that I don’t trust him, it’s his lack of forward planning I don’t trust.

Oh, Osiris is also going to be rewritten so that it is cross-platform compatible. Considering it was written as a Win32 web server, this might seem backwards. I have nothing better to do at the moment, so I’m going to actually start the rewrite soon (see above note on the concept of ’soon’). Just for a laugh, I thought I’d make an OpenGL interface (yay for SDL) so it can be even more of a memory hog.

OK, in summary - Cardiff is a shit-hole, Computers are good, Osiris is good, OpenGL > Direct3D, and some other stuff. The obligatory spam count is 5,203 to date. Thankfully the rate of comment spam has slowed.

Sorry about the lack of updates since mid-October but I’ve had a lot of work to do. We’re pretty much given assignments every week that initially don’t look too bad, then they quickly spiral into a mass that has several thousand words. I suppose it’ll all be worth it in the end.

So, what have I been doing since the last update? Well, last Friday we went on an Ecology field trip. Well, I call it a field trip but it was more along the lines of a “torture the little birds day”. Basically, they have this mist net (it’s like a fishing net but with very small holes and a very fine mesh) and directly behind it they have a bird feeder. Birds then fly into the net and get caught and quickly start panicking in an attempt to get out. Then some big ’scientist’ comes along and grabs the bird, pulling it from the net and stuffing it into a bag. Admittedly, darkness calms birds down but the length of time the birds were stored for was a little on the excessive side. After the humiliation of being stuffed into a bag, the birds were then extracted, paraded around and subjected to an examination that must have been so distressing it left one bird playing dead. It wasn’t actually dead as it flew off when whacked around the head! This procedure left the birds disorientated and confused to the extent where one flew straight back into the net and had to be removed again. Well, after the torture of the birds we all had to go on a walk to see bats, badger sets, a stream and willow. The bat was pretty cool though. All in all, ecology’s not for me.

We also had to do a write-up on bioethics. Ethics! What is the point in ethics if not to slow down the progress of science and make the lives of people more complicated? Our topic was ‘Reproductive choice’, which is a rather touchy subject in the media and at large. Basically, the pro-force campaigners, who call themselves pro-life, want abortion, birth control and genetic screening banned as they are a bunch of religious zealots with an intellectual capacity lower than a goldfish with mental retardation. The belief in God is one thing, but believing that techniques that their ‘mythical superbeing’ allowed us to develop and use are evil is just stupid. Not only do they want to force women to have children that may have been the result of rape, an accident whilst using contraceptives or just plain carelessness, but they want to ban genetic screening technologies that may ultimately have the effect of ultimately wiping out genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease, Cystic fibrosis and many others. So basically they want people to suffer and die of these diseases. These are the people who claim the ‘moral high-ground’ over pro-choice campaigners as ‘killing embryos is murder’. Go fuck yourselves! On the other hand you have the pro-choice campaigners who have the right idea but a weak argument. They whine, mope and groan about how abortion is rare, safe and legal. Yeah, I can see a few holes in this. The legality aspect is what you’re arguing about for goodness’ sake, so you don’t want to bring attention to that every time you state your view. Safety is a valid point though pro-force campaigners bring up the one case in every million or so where it failed or left the woman in a bad way. However, there are psychological problems after the procedure so these would need to be taken care of. Rarity is really irrelevant as if a woman wants it done, it will be done one way or the other, either via a professional or with a rusty coat-hanger or turpentine. They should be using stronger arguments like “It prevents children being brought up in a household that doesn’t want them” or economics. As for me, I support forced abortions and euthanasia amongst the worst people: druggies, benefit scroungers (they have way too many kids!) and religious fundamentalists/creationists. These people offer no benefit to society so they should be removed. Hell, lets take it to the next level and control breeding to remove negative traits (disease, religion) and to add superior traits (greater athleticism, intelligence etc.) or better yet, reproduction by cloning with genetic modification at the early stages. Remove all of this randomness.

OK, now that all of that’s covered, now onto the programming stuff. Work on ACOS has stalled as paging seems to be crashing the kernel. Everything is fine until I have to set cr3 which causes a triple fault. I’m working on a way that will hopefully fix this and add the FAT12 filesystem at the same time, which would be win-win if it works. Work has restarted on ImgBBS, the Image Board based on text files (though a database version will be released at a later time). So far it’s around 30% complete, with important areas such as the admin console and user accounts yet to be touched. The basic framework is pretty much in place though, so they shouldn’t take too long to add.

Right, I think that about sum’s everything up. Obligatory spam count: 4,810 (bastards!) spam emails caught and filtered out. That’s right, you’re wasting your time, so fuck off (damn bots)!

Well, the first thing I have to do is apologise to the tiny number of users who actually read this site for the lack of updates. This is due to having an absolute load of work set as part of my course. I’m also trying to sort out my research project group, though this is probably going to happen at the beginning of next week.

Right, on to the important stuff. In case you couldn’t guess from the post title, I’m returning to ACOS (which is the operating system I have been working on). So far I’ve been plagued with compiler problems due to dos commands only taking 127 characters (which is rather stupid) so I’ve built an executable that allows me to bypass this for now. However, it is likely that as I progress with the project I’ll have to change my linker script to move arguments inside of the linker script file rather than in the command line. With that little problem out of the way, I’ve started work on a standard library for the operating system kernel containing functions such as atoi() and itoa(). These functions will be essential for handling command line arguments which will be added soon, along with memory management and file allocation (when I finally get round to it). One of the minor changes I did make to the project was to output all registers during a RSOD (Red Screen of Death… aren’t I original?) which could help debugging, though mostly it looks more useful. The image below shows what I mean after a Division by Zero error (putch(1/0);).

I’m also working on using CPUID to obtain cpu information. This isn’t too difficult so I’m not allocating too much effort to this. If all goes to plan, I should have the framework to handle user commands by this time next week, though I’ve yet to write functions to tokenise command strings though it shouldn’t be too difficult. It’ll just be a case of scanning a string adding each character to a return string until a specified character is met. The return string will then be returned. Well, that’s the theory I’m working with. Realistically there’ll be a little more to it so I’ll write up about it when it’s finished.

OK, obligatory spam count: 4,252! Asparigus.com would like to thank all of the idiots and bots who continue to try and post this stuff for wasting their time. Hmm… I really need to make/get a theme for this site.

Well, I thought it was about time I started posting here again. I will also be writing articles in the future as well as a personal blog, though these will probably be on another blog that I will upload to the server at a later time. Topics that these articles will cover will vary from Web Site Development (though Idevs covers this pretty well) through to procedural generation. Most articles will probably use C/C++ though.

As a side project for when I’m not in lectures, I’ve decided to try an rewrite Osiris to remove the annoying bug where plain text files would crash the server. I think the problem lies somewhere in how the files are handled. The rewrite will open all files as binary rather than the text mode currently used for non-image/media files. This will probably cause the server to crash all of the time, but it’s worth a shot. I’m also looking into rewriting it in D, just to familiarise myself with the language. I probably won’t do this as I consider C/C++ to be superior and the chances of me using Java to create it are virtually zero (actually, they’re less than 0 as I count Java to be a pile of shit!). Maybe I should write it in ASM…

Obligatory spam count: 3,797

Ok, I’ve done it again. It’s been over a month and no update. Hell, I’ve not even had time to update Ikao as I promised. Why? Well, I’ve been in Spain for a while, been preparing for Cardiff Uni and sleeping. As for Cardiff, I’m moving in to my accomodation tomorrow, so yay! Therefore my next post will be from my little box of a room. As for the University, everything’s really organised so far… they haven’t given me any enrolment info (I’m assuming I’ll get it there), course info or anything and I’ll probably find out about it last… it’s always like that.

On a more important note, I’ve been trying out the D programming language. It’s not too bad, as Object Orientated languages go. I’ve not got past Console apps yet but I’m hoping to be on better programs soon.

Oh, customary spam count: 3,423

Well, I had to go to Cardiff for an interview today. Unfortunately that meant taking the train. As you may be aware, the British Rail system isn’t exactly the most reliable in the world. Therefore I left home early and, as luck would have it, everything ran on time so I ended up in Cardiff almost an hour earlier than planned. Then came the fun task of the interview which actually went pretty well all things considered. After the interview I spent a couple of hours exploring the city (mostly trying to find the train station without heading for it). At about 4pm I received a phone call offering me a place in Cardiff which I accepted. Therefore as from October, I will be studying Bioscience for 1 year with an MRes as the final result. Now all I need to do is sort out accomodation…

There’s not much coding news for you. What I’m working on with Jamie won’t be disclosed until we have something substantial. I did finally shut down the old CASTL forums. There was too much spam. I get the feeling they were one of the main reasons this blog attracts so much despite the lack of any decent content. I’m sure no-one gets any real pleasure reading about my life. Maybe I should start writing articles. Then again, I really have to start making more comics for Ikao. Lots of things I should do, very little I will do.

From this post onwards I’m adding a spam counter, just so you can see why I’m always pissed off about it.

Spam count: 2,618

Well, I’ve finally heard back from Cardiff University. I have to wait until Friday (10th) to see whether I’ve been shortlisted for the MRes course. If I have been, I assume it’s off for an interview I go. Following Murphy’s Law, if I have to go to an interview, it’ll be when I’m in Spain. Anyway, I’ll keep you all informed.

Work may restart on the Osiris Web Server soon, though until the error caused by loading text files is fixed, not much can be done. As it is Jamie’s code that handles this, I’m going to leave it to him to sort out the error. We also want to switch to streaming rather than sending all of the file data in one massive chunk. As for me, I might start again on the Server Side Scripting language being designed for Osiris. So far it can only “echo” and handle simple variables. A decent parser that can identify functions, variables, operators and other code will be needed to make OSS really useful.

I can’t really think of too much to say at this point, though the 2,321 spam comments caught by Akismet so far are actually an interesting read. Do I want mobile phones from Africa? Nope! Does anyone? No! So why the fuck do they insist on posting the damn things? Therefore I propose that all spammers, and members of the Big Brother House and people who watch/enjoy Big Brother should be shot. It’ll certainly make some parts of the world a much better place.