Tomorrow the World!

It’s possible that I’ll be changing the way this place works. I’m reviewing the blogs/sites/projects that are current, and making some decisions.

I need a personal blog. I need somewhere to store any comics I draw, things I write, songs I record, and just to blab thoughts.

If this happens, Dev Dawn will change. I’m thinking down a "review" site, or maybe more. Not sure.

Pimp My Clarion will stay the same, except more focussed. I won’t have personal inane posts going up. The same will go here.

It may take a little time. But reorganising is definately going to tighten up my agendas. My milestones and wotnot.

This will mean the Dev Dawn template will go the way of the Dodo. It was fun to create, actually, it was a nightmare .. but I learnt a lot. Today the lame javascript comic viewing code, tomorrow the world!

News From the Clarion World (October 2007)

It’s been a while since I’ve put together disparate journalism on what is happening in the Clarion World.

It seems Russ (here and his blog) has been moving and shaking around, changing his company, acquiring products, and generally pimping Clarion 7. I believe he’s heading down our way (Oz) early next year for training and so forth. Should be interesting to see how the release of Clarion 7 pans out, hopefully it will be here by that time. Kudos to Russ on his revitalised direction!

There’s been little excitement on the newsgroups, that I could ascertain. The usual help questions and responses.

I saw one crazy school-yard brawl. A thread about Clarion Jobs and the number of Clarion Devs looking for work was the topic of much angst. Robert Paresi (his new look site) asked what I thought came across as a pretty innocuous simple question about the quoted number of Clarion Devs looking for work.

Bam. Flame On as Johnny Storm would say.

Of course, anyone who’s read the newsgroups before knows well the antagonism between particular individuals. So any question or answer will be read with intent to fire up. From any of the factions that exist.

Factions. Like the Horde and Alliance. FOR THE HORDE!

I’ve got a pretty cool solution for the Community.

Let’s not BAIT and let’s not BITE.

Do not Bait, and do not Bite.

This post is only a little bit of bait, in as much as any blog is

Really, there is plenty of other stuff that’s happened. More products are being released all the time.

  • There’s a fantastic looking Full Record 2.0 from Huenuleufu Development.
  • Gary has released JMedia, a control for playing media files that has no need for the Window Media Player OCX .. nice!
  • AWDebugger (was released a while ago I think), which I really think looks cool, but haven’t got around to using yet.
  • And from the team at Capesoft, we have RightReports. From what I’ve heard, it’s fantastic. Easy to use, as is customary for Capesoft products, and with the best Support around! A pity they hail from the place that should have lost to the Wallabies in the World Cup final. [ crying, Stu turns away ]
  • And more .. much more, but I’m skimming .. apologies for anything that’s not here, but I hardly think I’m any kind of good list collator .. ClarionMag is a far more comprehensive News site.

Yes. The weeping continues. Every time I remember that fateful game against the Poms. No. I’ll be strong. No crying.

More than anything, it seems the world is waiting for more news about Clarion.

I’m off to write a boring post on baiting and .. biting. Hmmm.

Mambling Rambling

Now that I commute to work, there has been a rather large shift in my habits.

Before the move, I lived a block from where I worked. I could come home for lunch. I could arrive back in the afternoon, spend a couple of hours with the family, and work for at least 4 hours a night.

That has all changed. All destructed.

Commuting (plus the sun rising and the kids) means I get up at 6.30 ish. I get home 5.30ish. By 10.30, or even 9.30 at night, I’m bushwhacked.

This has cut seriously into my work habits. Blogging is a real pain. For a number of reasons. I’m tired. That makes it hard to come up with stuff that’s not lame. Or that’s interesting. It’s also hard to find the time. I started out this week thinking I could blog for 1/2 hour at the start of working. That never happened.

All of my work time has been dedicated to Jaymoe. I’ve just restructured the db into a more "social" friendly foundation. But also, as said before, it’s UI has undergone a massive makeover. (Friendly Foundation, Massive Makeover .. there’s a word for that).

Apologies for the self-serving piece. I just can’t think of much to write about Clarion and/or Development. Hopefully that will change as the dust settles at home.

Oh. Something that might help (ha ha) is a new laptop arriving next week.

Is Connect, Is Good

A lot has happened since we met.

The Springboks won the World Cup. Okay, Bruce, Jono, Geoff, and all the rest of you .. Kudos. I’ll just say that once.

Sniff.

Anyway, other stuff happened too. We moved out and in. We spent an inordinate amount of time moving boxes and making storage in places where no storage existed. We also managed to keep 4 kids alive and not go totally insane. ALSO, managed to squeeze in the new Heroes eps. Totally wack.

The internet is back. But in a far weaker and diluted form. The exchange nearest to us isn’t ADSL2+’d through my internet provider. I’m a loyal fan, so I went back to 1500/256.

It’s stretching my loyalty. Going from awesome in a bottle to a piece of sand wrapped in crab poo. I know, I know .. a few years back and this was blazingly fast. Doesn’t change the fact that once you have water from Urd’s well, it’s hard to go back to plebian sewage.

Yes. I’m a little steamed.

Speaking of Steam .. Valve rules. Almost as much as Blizzard. Possibly more. Depending on where I’m at, which game I’m playing.

Okay. Onto the development. My current distance from works means I no longer can afford to do everything. Stay up late, walk to work, spend time with fam, watch telly .. something has to give. And so far, it’s been nighttime work. Which bites.

It more than bites.

So I’m putting into place some disciplines that I hope will enable me to do the best with the time available.

Jaymoe is such an awesome project. The Ext rebuild (version 2 of Jaymoe) is taking it’s time. Mostly because I haven’t had a good few hours to spend on it since before we moved. Things should settle down.

But yes, Jaymoe. It’s the way of the future. Or at least, what is behind it is.

Enough said, for the moment. Hope this missive finds you all well and hale and hearty.

May the Wallabies become good again.

Leave of Assent

I mean, Ab-sense.

In the interests of posterity (have loved that word ever since hearing it in "The Princess Bride") ..

I’m moving house, signed the Lease yesterday, and will probably be without internet for at least a few days. Not that I have been posting here with anything approach even weekly recurrence.

Jaymoe Version 2 is kicking along. And I mean kicking. It’s just a problem that the scope of change I jumped eyes-closed into is very huge. But the experiment with Ext is a success.

Again, I have no proof to show you, unless I jump on the skype channel with something to brag about.

Things That Change .. Things

Life for all of us has it’s craziness. I can imagine life for the Soft Velocity guys must be pretty hectic right now. Hectic would probably be the least of it.

A while back, I posted regarding my latest project, using Clarion and the NetTalk WebServer.

I’ve been pushing myself, working on 5 or so hours sleep a night, not just once or twice a week, but 5 or 6 nights a week. It’s intense. And not really long-term. Can’t be, the body starts to fall apart.

Last week, to compound my absolute excitement about this project (http://www.jaymoe.com), as mentioned before, only goes to the demo site at the moment), I stumbled upon a javascript library.

It’s going to change the world. Wait. I think it already has. Originated from the Yahoo! UI library I believe.

Anyway, I’m purposely keeping things a little behind the scenes. Need something concrete to show. Suffice to say that combined with Clarion and NetTalk WebServer .. what you can create is just awesome. More than awesome. I use that word too often, so imagine it’s being spoken by a gruff mountain axeman who rarely speaks except to deliver such epitaphs as "Eat my blade" and so forth (Obviously, "Ate my blade" would make a better _epitaph_).

Awesome.

The Solo Blog

I’m having trouble distinguishing between blogs lately. My other blog, http://www.pimpmyclarion.com, is a bastion for all things Clarion. Well, no .. it’s a repository for my opinions vaguely centered around Clarion.

So I must return here to post about other stuff. The stuff that comes to me in the night, the thoughts, the crazy ideas.

Yesterday I received a rather awesome present.

A Dell XPS 1730, nicely specced. Not to the max. The max was quite a few thousand more.

Nonetheless, it performs amazingly. Also, quite astonishingly, Hellgate London also arrived in the local EB Games yesterday.

So I had to give the beastie a wee testie.

There were a few issues. Some big ones that I hope are fixed. It seems there are a few problems with DirectX 10, the XPS’s use of NVidia drivers for it’s dual 8700M GT’s, and the fact that SLI isn’t apparently supported by NVidia for these cards. Of the last, I’m really not sure. It’s all wierd.

Anyway, for a long time, I couldn’t get the game to run. I was fiddling with different configs. Nothing with DirectX 10 chosen will work. With DirectX 9, I had to not have a couple of higher-end settings chosen.

But for the first time, ever, I could crank out AA, and the game ran like a dream. I’ve never owned a piece of machinery that could have ANY level of Anti-Aliasing running. Very sweet.

And the game itself is awesome. I think we (Oz) got it a day earlier than other countries (I generically laugh in their direction). There wasn’t any news at all on the release online, and although the game window says there is a patch, I couldn’t get to it. Also couldn’t register for an Account. That sucks. I want the patch!

Not that the game doesn’t run .. because it does. And how! It really does seem like it’s gonna suck the hours like D2 (or the first in the Diablo flava).

Anyway, I’ll also be using this thing to work. Yes. Work. Indeed.