Google Chrome

Google entered the fray with nothing more than a simple search engine - but it revolutionised the way we think of the internet. Since then, the company has grown exponentially. With the onset of Gmail - a revolution in online email - Picassa, Google Earth, Google Maps, among many other products, Google is a household name.

One of the biggest advantages to Google's products is that every single one is free - their advertising schemes provide enough revenue to allow them to release everything for free.

And so, the newest entry in the world of Google betas is their browser - Google Chrome. You can check out the Google blog entry here, and if you just can't wait you can grab it here.

I could bore you all with all the technological workings, but I won't - just know that it's fast, secure, and so far I haven't been able to fault it. It's far better than Firefox or IE (or ) in my opinion. It's even open source - so the entire development open source community has free access to it as a base for future projcts.

Check it out if you haven't already.

Foot Photos Continued!

Yes, that's right. I'm keeping the tradition with yet another photo of my feet at an unusual place. I went ice skating on Saturday, and so I figured I'd get another foot photo in:


This could be an interesting idea to look back on in 10 years time...

Mattise Progress (and blog updates)

Well, it's been a while since I talked about Mattise here, and although I'm not sure exactly how many people follow its development I think it helps me as much as it helps everyone else to know exactly what's going on...

The current working copy of Mattise (ie, Mattise 3.0) has the following features:

• Powerful bitmap-based page allocator
• Simple kernel heap allocator (possibly changed to dlmalloc in the future)
• Paging support, with reference counting for mappings
• ELF binary support (loading modules, which are basically object files, and linked binaries)
• Rudimentary VFS (currently just performs replacement based on a prefix/device binding, soon will replace the old device manager)
• Device manager (soon to be replaced with VFS)
• ATA driver (hard drive I/O)
• Console driver (/dev/tty basically, though no terminal compatibility at all yet)
• FAT32 support (no other FATs though)
• Tiny bash-like shell
• Functional newlib port
  
• Runs NASM, binutils

The last point is what I'm most proud of.

Also, to avoid making multiple entries within the space of such a short amount of time, I'm going to mention some new things that I'll be bringing into this blog:

• More personal stuff (photos, anecdotes, etc...)
• Updates on projects
• Informational articles
• (Rarely) A discussion about some concept (eg, "Gaming: Pick up and Play or The Epic?")

Enjoy!

Thailand/Laos Trip: Foot Photos!

In my not-so-recent-anymore Thailand/Laos trip, I had a thing where I took photos of my feet at different places. It's about time I actually put these up somewhere, so here they are!

This is outside a temple, if I remember correctly:

This isn't really a foot shot per se, but it looks cool.

This here is at the Plain of Jars (Site 1) in Laos.

This is at a bus station in Thailand, just before a long and tedious 12 hour bus trip. I dunno why we sat around waiting, because it would've been smarter to use up all of our energy and then get on the bus and sleep away the hours...

This is in Chiang Mai International Airport (who knows, you might stand on this exact spot one day...) waiting for our flight (in the checkin area though).

Next overseas trip I do I'll make it a goal to get a shot of my feet in all situations I'm in, so I can continue this idea.

By the way, I did actually remove those shoes during the trip - they just happened to be more comfortable than my pluggers every single day.

A final foot shot...

None of those are my feet, but it goes to show what motorbiking in rural areas can do to your feet.

Seagate's External Hard Drives

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop (500 GB) to store my music, disk images, and video editing scratch data. It was fast enough (even over USB) to suit my needs, and I was extremely happy with it - and it even looks stylish in comparison to some of the "bricks" you can get these days. I was a very happy customer.

Until Wednesday.

Turns out I've now experienced something a lot of other FreeAgent Desktop owners have experienced - the drive simply doesn't get recognized anymore. This of course causes no end of frustration as I have a couple of hours of video I can't ever get back (that's *extremely* important), several disk images for different operating systems (multiple Linux distributions), and my entire music library stored on a now unaccessible drive.

Every troubleshooter I've done points to internal failure, and at the moment I'm pretty sure the internal controller is fried or something. I've seen many people put up pictures showing how to pull apart the case and get the hard drive, but it's completely useless to me because I don't have another enclosure (and I need it for my laptop).

I highly suggest not getting a FreeAgent Desktop if you're looking for an external hard drive solution, but instead I would point you to a FreeAgent Pro, which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem.

EDIT: To update with what's going on, it turns out I need to send my faulty drive to Seagate and they'll ship out a replacement to me. Of course, I need to pay to send the drive to them. Data recovery isn't included in any of this, so I'll have to pay extra to get my critical data off the stupid thing. Obviously the warranty is totally useless to me because it doesn't cover any data on the drive, so I may as well crack the case and shove the drive itself into another computer (or buy an enclosure).

I'll say it now, I used to have faith in Seagate as a brand, but right now I'm drawing a line in the sand and saying that I will never be buying another Seagate device again. Sorry, Seagate, try harder next time.

The Forum User Problem and Taking it On

Recently I've been reading around on osdev.org, and have been unhappy with what I've seen. It would appear that a wave of people are joining the forum, and in some way or another turning the forum against them. I'm not going to name any specific usernames, though...

I'm sick of these people posting to a thread with no knowledge of the subject to pick apart the original topic, and point out what's wrong with it - even after a moderator or a more experienced member has posted with assistance. Further, I find it frustrating when a user is told an answer and replies along the lines of "laziness" or something like that and yet continue to complain about their issue.

In fact, in a recent discussion assisting lukem_95 with his PCI Numeration code, he posted a "Smart Question" (which increased my respect for him/her) in which he explained the problem he was having well, provided his problem code, and showed evidence of attempting to figure out what went wrong himself. An answer was given, all seemed well, until another member decided he didn't like the question.

Here starts a flame war that continues on and on, and includes a statement "I don't think there are any real programmers here" (paraphrased) - an extremely inappropriate statement considering we have a university lecturer (slash doctorate) as a moderator (Combuster) and several industry programmers (ie, JamesM, omin0us, et al).

So what can we do to tackle this problem, when threats of a ban, comments about a member's behaviour, and generally going against the community doesn't stop anything?

I believe there are several ways to solve the problem:

• User suspensions: suspension for a week (or longer/shorter depending on severity of issue) that gives the member time to think over what he/she did and lets any flamewars cool down
• Thread locking: a feature of most forum systems that I believe isn't used enough. Locking a thread stops both parties from continuing the fight
• Personal messaging: let the two concerned parties continue with the discussion in a personal message chain. I know that PHPBB2 forums support multi-user personal message sending, so this is not difficult. A problem with this approach is a lack of moderation.
• User bans: ban users who break the rules.

I dislike the last option, because it's final and harsh, but it is definitely justified after several warnings.

Forums are online communities - let's try to get along with each other - and think twice before hitting that "Post" button.

OS Development and Debugging

Well, I've finally gotten back into my OS developing - this is now the third rewrite of Mattise (titled "Mattise 3.0") and I'm truly starting from scratch on this one. I'm spending a lot longer getting the basic x86 code implemented (stuff like paging and the descriptor tables) and putting it through a lot of tests to verify that it's ready to do the job. Once I've finished with these tests I can add layers to it, such as context switching (threads and processes, although processes are really just a set of threads) or a driver system.

Debugging all this is proving to be the hardest thing out of all the code I've written. At the moment I have to use a whole bunch of printing calls to output state until I finally figure out the source of the problem (and hope it's not those same printing calls). I've heard of people writing a dprintf interface to the Bochs port E9 hack but I personally think that sounds pretty, well, hacky, and means testing in other emulators is harder. My favorite idea is a debugging system that talks to the kernel via a serial line, but I'd still need to verify that the serial line works properly. A serial driver could even be written inline, not using a proper driver interface, to make life easier.

I'm happy with my first couple of days re-entering the fray that is OS development on the x86 architecture. All I need to do is wait for the Intel Manuals to arrive in the mail and I'm set. I'll make an effort to keep this blog up to date with all that's happening as a reference point not only for everyone else but for myself.

The project page hasn't been modified yet but it's at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/mattise.

WikiForAll - a wiki devoted to comedy

Yes, that's right, a new wiki enters the world...

http://www.wikiforall.net/

If you're in need of some humour, this wiki is the place for you.

On Dvorak Layout and Game Design

After a mate suggested I try out Dvorak because, I quote, "your fingers fly, man!", I figured I had nothing to lose and setup the Windows language bar to let me switch input modes from the standard US keyboard to US-Dvorak keyboard layouts. Needless to say, the switch has not been seamless. It is so much more difficult to learn a new layout when I've been typing on the standard US layout for such a long time (it may also have something to do with the lack of proper labels on my US-style keyboard). Even having an image in front of me of the layout doesn't help much.

And, to make it worse, I keep hitting the key combination to o,cyjd mre.o (switch modes) accidentally. One day when I get really bored I'll just open up Notepad and type "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" over and over until I can get it nice and fast. But who has time to spare, in this fast-paced world?

Me, obviously. After all, I have taken on a project at school to write a multi-player RPG for my class to play when assessment finishes. As of the time of writing, it currently supports scrolling the map when the local player moves too close to the edge, drawing other players (although I have not yet plugged in the networking code to update these other players), an inventory manager (though no pickups yet or anything like that), and am in the progress of implementing a statistics manager (experience points and such).

When complete, I hope to do a test run with the class and if successful recruit some of the more artistic members to draw the tiles for the game (as it is a 2D, top-down, tile based game). After creating some nicer tiles, I can then proceed to optimize the code like crazy, making it run really quickly locally so that network latency is not as much of a problem as it could be in a 3D game where the local version must update the frame and wait for input from the network.

I actually have had an ingenious inspiration relating to NPCs in the game as well. Instead of having them built into the game, which increases code bloat and makes life harder, NPCs will be programmed as clients to the server, meaning that an NPC is nothing more than a basic program with AI logic in it to respond to game events, that connects to a specific server as if it was a human player. This method allows the NPCs to be easily customized on the fly, and makes testing the program much easier (once the server is started, it doesn't need to be quit again just to fix an AI bug).

The only thing I can't figure out is what to call the game. If you like, you can post tile ideas as a comment to this post. Who knows, maybe your suggestion will become the name of the game!

On Game Development

Due to my recent lack of success in game development (a 3D FPS is quite a challenge at times - more on this later), I've decided to go back to the first game I wrote - a simple "Pong" clone with a couple more features and a nasty AI.

My 3D FPS works nicely, it loads levels and you can move around in them, but I never got collision detection setup in the engine, or any guns or any FPS-related stuff. I was mainly concentrating on getting a scripting engine setup for it, and after I got boost::python to work in the engine I realized most parts of the engine needed to be rewritten anyway because they were slow and causing massive code bloat.

My old Pong game works nicely as well. You can load it up, select the difficulty level from the (extremely) rudimentary menu, and the AI can get tough. Unfortunately it was plagued by my lack of knowledge of the DirectX APIs and hence code is scattered everywhere in an attempt to make a working game.

The new one will use a simple structure to do its work - not one massive procedure called every time the screen needs to be rendered. With a separate procedure for AI, physics, and drawing, the internal code base becomes much simpler and easier to work with. Monolithic functions (ie, those with > 100 lines of code) will be split into multiple (smaller) procedures.

And, possibly one of the most important things, the menu will be separated from the main game loop.

I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote the first revision of Pong, but for some weird reason I decided it'd be a good idea to put the menu code into a conditional block:

if( inMenu )
{
   // do menu stuff
}
else
{
   // do game stuff
}

The initialization for the menu was a bunch of hacks to get a bunch of strings into an array - now I know better methods for doing this. Often the menu strings would mingle with each other and end up becoming quite confusing.

The new game will hopefully fix all these bugs in the initial code base and utilize the full power of DirectX 8 (instead of DirectX 1 which I was using before). The final planned feature is something that all my friends suggested after playing the first version - "Add networking". It should be fun to write a basic protocol that updates paddle and ball position for a single client. Or even to have a fancy "spectator" view and a "tournament" mode for those who wish to have a LAN party with a bunch of mates.

It shouldn't take too long (hopefully no more than a month) and I'll post a link to the final binary when I'm done.

Gaming: Pick up and Play or The Epic?

Has anyone noticed a trend lately in game development?

We have near-realism in our graphics (see some screen shots of F.E.A.R or Half-Life - they look incredible), with advanced sound systems that allows us to hear something "behind" us, and artificial intelligence that makes your enemies seem that much more real. Games almost make us feel like we are playing a movie.

Who cares?

Why is it that a simple game, with terrible graphics yet a fun concept, can leave the player entertained for hours?

Yet, after viewing screenshots and attempting to play a game called "Ragdoll Smasher" (see here), I realized that this guy had figured it out. The graphics are simple (at best) and sometimes a bit jerky, and there's no story, but you can sit there for hours throwing bodies around trying to knock over the obstacles.

Another simple yet fun game is "Thermonuclear War" (see here) - basically, you have a bunch of nukes and blackness in which to nuke. Take out all your enemy's cities, you win. It's written using the Windows console, so it's not gorgeous, but interesting nonetheless.

Small and simple games like these can become quite addictive, because you don't need to spend a long time at the computer to be engaged in the gameplay. They're literally pick up and play games. For a casual gamer, such games as Ragdoll Smasher (for the violent types) and Thermonuclear War (for the control freaks) can often be a quick boredom buster.

I don't want to discount the success of Half-Life (or other similarly successful games). They are excellent games and a lot of hard work has been put into them. But if I just want to play for a half an hour, I won't be satisfied with my progress in Half-Life as compared to a win in Thermonuclear War.

Direct3D Mistakes

My stupid pyramid shape was rendering wrong, and I was getting somewhat confused at this until I actually asked some people over at GameDev.net and got some help. Nothing they did helped, so I looked through my code. After some searching, I found I was disabling depth buffering! Enabling it was a quick fix to my problem.

Read your code often!

Frustrating Forum Users

This really frustrates me: http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/forums/thread/153675/#153675

The person asks for some help to learn the language and instead gets given hundreds of lines of code, which is poorly commented and in no way helps him.

To make it worse, it's an assignment this guy is doing, and to get given code like that can get him in trouble for cheating on his assignment. I just don't think it's fair on him for such a person as "Mohammad Rastkar" to give him all that code, and not give him any real understanding of what it does, and why it does it.

Rant finished.

My OS and 3D Graphics (not related)

I was talking to a fellow devver on AIM this morning, and he asked to see my OS GUI, which of course I agreed to. I'm going to post it here so I can look back in a year's time and see how far I've come (click to see it in full size, it's 800x600):



The cursor you can see is the one in my OS, and the wallpaper is that of a fave band of mine. So far so good, I'm going to rewrite my window manager because at the moment it crashes. Once done, I can post the image of windows in my OS here.

Anyway, other than that, I've been toying with Direct3D, which I was talking about a couple of months ago. After giving up I've decided it's time to try again, and I've succeeded! I can create (and, most importantly, modify) a spinning pyramid! I'm really pleased, and I'm about to texture it, which will make me even more pleased.

In other news, I'm planning on porting Descent 1 to my OS, and once complete it will be the first 'official' game for my OS.

And now, I must go because I need sleep.

Compilers and Such

Since the last time I posted, a lot has happened in my development life.

At the moment, I have 3 main projects which I am working on:

• My hobby operating system (Mattise - http://mattise.sf.net/)
• The TI-Basic compiler, for Texas Instruments graphics calculators (http://tibasic.sf.net/)
• Neural Network System ('learning' AI)

Add in exams and school, and I'm pretty busy! So I decided to save myself a lot of time, and wrote a simple linked list class, that I'm going to post here.

//--------------- CLinkedList: Linked lists for any type ---------------//
// Copyright 2007 _____________
// Created 29-5-07
// License: GPL

//--------------- Includes ---------------//
#include
#include

//--------------- Class Definition ---------------//

/**
The CLinkedList class basically is a shell around a certain data
type. It allows linked lists to be created for any data type,
hence saving coding time.
**/

// main class
template<> class CLinkedList
{
public:

// initializes the list
CLinkedList();

// destroys all data in the list
~CLinkedList();

// dumps the list
void Dump();

// clears the list
void Clear();

// inserts data at the given offset, shifting everything else
int Insert( _T, int );

// pushes data onto the end of the list
int Push( _T );

// pops data off the end of the list
_T Pop();

// gets data from the list
_T Get( int );

// deletes an item
void Delete( int );

private:

// the list type
struct myType
{
_T data;
struct myType* next;
struct myType* prev;
};

// the start of the list
struct myType start;
};

template<> CLinkedList<_t>::CLinkedList()
{
// set the next and prev fields of start to null
start.next = start.prev = (struct myType*) NULL;
}

template<> CLinkedList<_t>::~CLinkedList()
{
// clear the list, free the memory
Clear();
}

template<> void CLinkedList<_t>::Dump()
{
// iterate through the list, displaying information about each item

// running pointer
struct myType* curr = start.next;

// running accumulator
unsigned int i = 0;

// delete each item
while( curr != (struct myType*) NULL )
{
// print it
cout << "LIST[" <<>data <<>

// get the next pointer
curr = curr->next;
}
}

template<> int CLinkedList<_t>::Push( _T d )
{
// find the end of the list, then append the data

// running pointers
struct myType* prev, *curr = &start;

// wait until curr is null
while( curr != (struct myType*) NULL )
{
// save the current pointer
prev = curr;

// load the next one
curr = curr->next;
}

// check that the one we want to add to isn't null
if( prev == (struct myType*) NULL )
{
// fail!
return -1;
}

// safe, so append - we need to make a structure first
struct myType* m = (struct myType*) malloc( sizeof( struct myType ) );
m->prev = prev;
m->next = (struct myType*) NULL;
m->data = d;

// fill it in
prev->next = m;

// success!
return 0;
}

template<> _T CLinkedList<_t>::Pop()
{
// find the end of the list, and remove it after saving its data

// running pointers
struct myType* prev, *curr = &start;

// wait until curr is null
while( curr != (struct myType*) NULL )
{
// save the current pointer
prev = curr;

// load the next one
curr = curr->next;
}

// check that prev isn't null
if( prev == (struct myType*) NULL )
{
// return start's data
return start.data;
}

// prev holds the data we want
_T ret = prev->data;

// now unlink prev (the previous one's next is NULL)
prev->prev->next = (struct myType*) NULL;

// and free the pointer
free( prev );

// return the data
return ret;
}

template<> _T CLinkedList<_t>::Get( int offset )
{
// loop through the list until we hit either NULL or the offset

// offset into the list
int o = 0;

// running pointer
struct myType* curr = start.next;

// keep on going
while( o++ != offset && curr != (struct myType*) NULL )
curr = curr->next;

// we've hit the offset or NULL
if( curr == (struct myType*) NULL )
return start.data;

// return the data
return curr->data;
}

template<> void CLinkedList<_t>::Delete( int offset )
{
// loop through the list until we hit either NULL or the offset
// then unlink it

// offset into the list
int o = 0;

// running pointer
struct myType* curr = start.next;

// keep on going
while( o++ != offset && curr != (struct myType*) NULL )
curr = curr->next;

// we've hit the offset or NULL
if( curr == (struct myType*) NULL )
return;

// unlink the item
curr->prev->next = curr->next;

// free the memory
free( curr );
}

template<> int CLinkedList<_t>::Insert( _T d, int offset )
{
// loop through the list until we hit either NULL or the offset
// then append data to it

// offset into the list
int o = 0;

// running pointer
struct myType* curr = start.next;

// keep on going
while( o++ != offset && curr != (struct myType*) NULL )
curr = curr->next;

// we've hit the offset or NULL
if( curr == (struct myType*) NULL )
return -1;

// create a new item
struct myType* m = (struct myType*) malloc( sizeof( struct myType ) );
m->data = d;
m->next = curr->next;
m->prev = curr;

// link it into the list
curr->next = m;

// success!
return 0;
}

template<> void CLinkedList<_t>::Clear()
{
// iterate through the list, freeing memory as we go

// running pointers - never start at 'start' because it isn't heap allocated
struct myType* savnext, *curr = start.next;

// delete each item
while( curr != (struct myType*) NULL )
{
// save this one's next
savnext = curr->next;

// delete this one
free( curr );

// get the next pointer
curr = savnext;
}

// and make sure start is setup properly
start.next = (struct myType*) NULL;
start.prev = (struct myType*) NULL;
}

It's extremely simple to use:
CLinkedList ll;
ll.Push( 5 );
ll.Push( 6 );
ll.Push( 7 );
ll.Delete( 1 );

You might say, 'what about std::vector?' The above class is more portable, and works without modification in my own OS.

I'm gearing up to post a multitasking tutorial someday, so keep your eyes peeled!

Bye for now, not forever!

Operating System Development...

It's been a while since I've posted here... Been too busy working on my newest project: Mattise, my hobby operating system. You can see a couple of screenshots and download it at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/mattise. Many thanks to all the people over at OSDev.org for helping me with all the problems I had with it.

The other project I'm embarking on alongside my operating system is a physics class which can be inherited by other classes. For instance, the physics class is called 'PhysicsObject'. If a user wanted a box, he creates a class called 'PhysicsBox' that is derived from 'PhysicsObject'. At the moment it is extremely experimental but covers velocity changes and acceleration.

If I get around to it I may post some little tutorials on operating system development here. Keep your eyes peeled.

Programming Languages

Well, yesterday I was happy to see that I was the number 1 most active user on Developer Fusion... Not that that's an achievement! Apart from that, my newest project is a programming language (interpreted, as I couldn't be bothered writing a compiler). It's really simple, and has the same sort of functionality as, say, BASIC... But it's a programming language, and I made it, so that's all that matters.

I've also written an email sending system on my server that connects to small via libgmailer and allows me to send emails without much effort! I also finally got around to making my forms look good with good old CSS so I now have good looking forms (using a bit of a hack... Using a DIV in the background with the input box on top).

Finally, I am continuing to work on my Winsock class - next thing to add to it: server-side stuff! I can't believe I forgot all that! Once that's done, I'm going to write a web server and hope for the best.

Bye for now, not forever...

Microsoft makes it intentionally vague...

I've finally given up on looking and now I'm writing a class for sockets - so far it works for connecting to my home web server so hopefully I've done someting right.

Yesterday I learnt how to use Amazon Web Services so now I'll be able to extend some of my websites to include searches for Amazon stuff (I'm already using it with ISBN numbers on a website!)

I'll keep you all filled in on the happenings of my programming and may even get around to posting some code, if you're all lucky!

Hey, we all make mistakes

Ok, ok... I have been greatly mistaken. It was almost going to happen, wasn't it. I actually searched the DirectX SDK directory and, lo and behold, found a help file with everything I need to know to make anything in Direct3D.

Moral of the story? Read the manual.

In other news, I'm writing a discussion board system that runs completely off XML files. When its done I'll put the link into one of these posts. In fact, I think I might write a simple website just to hold the projects I'm working on so that anyone can download them.

Farewell for now.

DirectTutorial - Game Programming with Direct3D 9

DirectTutorial - Game Programming with Direct3D 9

My mistake, there is actually a tutorial on the net, this will easily be converted to Direct3D 8 with a bit of editing... It's for Visual C++ 2005 (or one of the Express Editions, which is what I have).

Just shows what Google can do, doesn't it (search Simple Direct3D Tutorial C++ in Google)