Ruby Game Library

Game libraries fascinate me no end, I'll write something just to play around but I have never complete any meaningful games for the past 2 decades. Sigh.

Anyway, I just came across a Ruby game library. Looks fascinating. I could learn Ruby just to figure out how this works.

http://mon-ouie.github.com/projects/ray.html

Let's see how far my itch takes me.

Page to unlock AD accounts

I've not touch IIS and C# for a long, long time, and I'm just curious enough to want to write something that I've been itching to write for a long time - like having a web page to unlock AD accounts.

My current role is a pure Word+Powerpoint+Spreadsheet kind of job(yeah boring I know) so I'm bored enough to try this. Let's see what I can come up with in the weekend.

The lazy coder vs Garbage Collection

Automated Garbage Collection has made me lazy.

I'm building a libgdx android gamelet for the past few days and I've intentionally left a few dynamically created primitives in my game loop to hammer out the logic first.

Game performance wasn't enough to irritate me until I started adding Strings for status display updates. Boom, jerky gameplay every 20-30 seconds! LogCat was showing GC triggering every 20 odd seconds for as much as 300 milliseconds. Close to 8k objects were being recycled. Ouch.

Went through the code and weeded out for(int i=.......) codes. Removed variable creations in critical functions. Replaced Strings with StringBuffers(I finally realized libgdx BitmapFont.draw uses CharSequence interface instead of String object.. d'oh.

Game is looking good now. No more GC triggering for the past few minutes.

Dell 24X7 Support number: SINGAPORE

Can't find the Dell 24X7 support number via their webpages, normally this won't be a problem because I was in shop that had tons of Dell hardware, the support number is pasted on almost every server in our datacenters

Now that I've left my previous job, I'm kinda stuck when I need to log a call about my dying Alienware. I'm putting this for anyone who's trying to find the 24X7 support number for Singapore

24x7 Phone support: 1800-394-7464

Good luck!

Gimp annoyances in OSX

I realized I had to click twice on Gimp buttons to get the function to work - wasted some time undoing some damage when I forget to check if the functions were double clicked and activated.

To fix this double clicking annoyance, you'll have to change OSX's X11 settings.

Open Terminal app and type:

defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true

Restart X11.

Powering down XPS 1210m webcam in Linux

The built in webcam is always an annoyance because it gets pretty warm and consumes power. It's pretty easy to disable it in Windows but for linux you will have to send the commands to suspend the device.

I've just reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 and I had to disable it again.

To suspend the QuickCam in XPS 1210m:

1.switch to root

2. issue:

echo suspend > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-7/power/level

echo suspend > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-5/power/level

You can read the power management writeup here:

http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/devices-power-management/usb.php

Android code finally coming together

Got the code up and running reasonably well, going collect my HTC Hero phone later. I'll load the apk in the device to give it a go.