Hardcode
Making it happen
ACM update
May 23rd
In my first contest after four years, I managed to qualify in the next round. Still I have to practice more for my skills to come back to highschool level. My team-mate Adrian has also qualified, and we think about inviting the guy that got the first place to our team (he is really good, won gold medal at IOI 2004).
Nokia stuff
May 12th
Finally, I’ve managed to copy files on the device by simulating drag’n'drop on the virtual folders created by VFSWrapper. This VFSWrapper *has* a COM interface, but totally unusable (although good function and parameter names, I couldn’t get it to work). Nokia Multimedia Converter is in the same situation, COM interface but no way to get it work. We may resign to use some 3GP codecs, if we find some. In the end, the good news is that some non-Symbian, Series 40 phones may be compatible with our solution as well (6230 seems to mount its filesystem also, for example).
GUI design
May 12th
I’m very interested in designing the GUI for our next products we’ll be working at. MDI is *very* outdated, I won’t ever bother to search for .NET components in this area. Tabbed GUI like VS.NET’s are also nice but not for our application (they fit better with Firefox). SDI is the latest trend in this area, so we’ll let Windows’ window manager do its job. Another issue are the panes – here the old-fashion style is the using docking ones. 3D Studio’s scrolling panes are original but not very usable, and the conclusion is that floating panes is the way to go.
PNG for pictures ?
May 8th
I’m not sure that this could have a big impact on camera phone picture quality, however it is worth trying (the storage may be a problem though, the pictures are 8 times larger).
Bluetooth audio streaming
May 7th
Some friend of mine working for Symbian told me it’s not possible (I’m talking about streaming in the opposite direction, i.e. from phone to PC) because the major operator companies feel that this will threaten them (VoIP is just an example). I will surely take a look over the existing APIs to ensure they don’t allow this and afterwards study if it’s really not feasible at all.
Symbian developing
May 7th
Best resources for Symbian are of course at forum.nokia.com. “Series 60 2nd Edition SDK for Symbian OS, Supporting Feature Pack 2″ is a nice SDK containing an emulator with debugging and many other features (remote debugging not sure though). As for data transfering between PC and device, SyncML would be an option but I would recommend using OBEX over TCP/IP and also direct access of the embedded file system using the shell extension provided by Nokia (Phone Explorer) (this may need some hacks I assume).
ACM
May 3rd
Next year the final of the ACM (or ICPC?) contest is in San Antonio, Texas. I was lucky enough to go in 2002 in Honolulu, Hawaii for the finals, and now I think to get into ACM again. What’s cool about San Antonio is that iD Software is pretty close, I’m starting to get excited about seeing John Carmack.
The regional phase will be in autumn but until then we’ll go to some internal competitions in our University. As for the team (there should be three people) we are still looking for one person, me and one friend Adrian ‘Micutzu’ Drumea being definitely together. But beware, the third mate should be from our University too.
Anyway, I got some sites where the contestants practice before the official competitions, they are http://acm.timus.ru and http://acmicpc-live-archive.uva.es/nuevoportal/ . So I open a new category of posts entitled “ACM” for all the comments related to this contest, hoping to get into problem solving pretty soon this month.
MDI window menu
May 3rd
The IDs for the items in the “Window” menu (for MDI apps) are not documented, but we found a case where we need to handle them before MDIActivate gets called. They start from 65280 and are available to be handled either in the mainframe or in the childframe.
Mozilla bug
May 3rd
Or the float:left attribute is deprecated? (however couldn’t find at the first sight something to replace it with). I guess tables, but I don’t want to mess this way the .Text asp.net code. If you didn’t see the issue, beware that the posts should be left-aligned in the browser window (just open the page with IE).
UPDATE: Dragos (no blog, no link) told me how to fix it (there is no Mozilla bug actually), however there are still some issues with the page layout (a big margin somewhere). We all want it to be corrected.
Far distance
Apr 28th
Strange bug in OpenGL today, some guys did code a routine to intelligently compute the far distance (I guess by getting the maximum distance to all vertices in the scene, didn’t bother to check this but I take the best case). However the visual effect was interesting, the far clip plane was moving almost randomly. Of course I removed it and replaced with some big but fixed constant, while feeling bad for cutting some potential intelligent coding. Did they write it in the 16-bit zbuffer era? Anyway, now in 24-bit there’s no need for it.
