I haven’t updated in a while but the world has basically changed since Feb, what with COVID and other crap injecting itself into our lives it’s not surprising that so much has changed.  It was clear that COVID early on was going to have a serious impact what with lock-downs, social distancing, mass layoffs, entire businesses that still haven’t really gone back to work.  For me though luckily COVID has been mostly a good thing, work wise anyway.  COVID encouraged companies to ‘work from home’, and I believe initially that the thought was that the company would lose productivity not being in the office but within a few weeks it was clear that most of management’s fears were unfounded.  I can’t help but think it was difficult for management to let go of the concern that people wouldn’t do their job, but with the full time move to AGILE and weekly sprints there really wasn’t much to worry about.  It was clear that if people weren’t doing their job that it would be easy to tell who wasn’t pulling their weight, with weekly retrospectives it was clear what issues were holding people back so being in an office or being at home really makes no difference.  Now people can be comfortable working at home, the company usually gets more time out of it’s employees since they no longer have to potentially spend hours travelling to the office and overall most people’s outlook improved as the work from home concept has helped a lot with the work-life-balance.

My office basically shut down, we moved all the IT infrastructure to AWS (Amazon Web services) and for the most part the overall day-to-day work process has improved.  Yeah sometimes AWS is unreliable, getting IT support can be a mixed bag, voice comms and meetings can be a mixed bag, mostly because I despise Microsoft Teams but I can tolerate it if it means I don’t have to travel on the cattle car daily to downtown to an office cube that is noisy, disruptive and effectively spirit-crushing.  Probably didn’t help that I had to switch offices 4 times in the span of 2 years, each switch worse than the previous.

With COVID and the lockdowns I had a lot of time to improve my knowledge of Angular, bought a few online courses and revised my long-standing game prototype from Thymeleaf and Bootstrap to a pure java REST servelet to an Angular front-end.  The code is a lot easier to understand and maintain as Angular is a great framework as opposed to loose and raw HTML and javascript everywhere.  I did have to relearn a bunch of things that I was familiar with Bootstrap, some things are harder to do (stuff that expects to run on bootstrap javascript) but overall I found work arounds with Angular that work well.

I also found Selenium which I have playing with recently.  In using Angular and Arquillian I was pretty confident that I could unit test a lot of functionality but with Selenium there is no reason why the entire application couldn’t be tested as well.

On the topic of gaming I will likely skip the new console launches this fall, there just isn’t enough compelling software for either machine at launch.  COVID likely put the hurt on a lot of dev houses so it feels like a lot of software won’t really be available to 2021 so I can wait until then, consoles should be a lot easier to come by then as well.

I do want a new GPU but considering how hard it is to get a 3080 I might have to wait until 2021 for that too which is a drag.  I’m hoping AMD has a competitive product so I could skip Nvidia this gen but I’m not convinced yet.  I’ll happily eat crow if the new Radeons are as good as the Ryzen CPUs at being competitive.

I’d also like to pick up the Quest 2 or the Reverb G2 however without a new GPU there isn’t much point, my current 980 just isn’t up to snuff for the beating some of the newer headsets would put on it.

I took the last few months off doing development at home, spent some time with family and friends and taking a break from development at home.  I find that I get burnt out programming all day then spending a large part of home time programming as well.  It’s not that I don’t love programming and learning but I personally need that good work/life balance to stay sharp.

In the meantime however I’ve finished the Witcher 3, I had it in my backlog for a long time but didn’t want to start playing it because I knew it would be a significant time investment and not really something you can pick away at without forgetting story-lines, characters or the myriad of controls required to be any good at the game.  I finally finished Witcher 3 and all the DLC which clocked in around 125 hours which was good value if you’re talking cost/vs time spent playing.  I enjoyed the game a lot, it feels like it’s been a really long time since I’ve played a good RPG, I’ve started others but abandoned them due to either boring combat, silly storylines or some other game coming along that caught my fancy.  I had tried previous games in the Witcher series however the combat in there just felt dull so I never did get very far however Witcher 3 is significantly better from an action point of view and the storylines were really memorable so it’s worth your effort if you’re considering it.

I also got invited to the XCloud beta Microsoft is putting on.  Overall I’m pretty impressed, I can’t help think that much of companies cloud offerings have been a lot of hot wind (Looking at your Stadia) however XCloud has been really stable and really easy to use.  If Microsoft packages XCloud as part of Gamepass they will have a winner in my mind.  It’s biggest downfall is bandwidth used.  Playing for around 45 mins used 1.6gb of data (when I was on WIFI) which is pretty crazy.  You’re not going to be using XCloud when you’re on mobile anytime soon, certainly not with how overpriced mobile data is here in Canada.

I also starting doing courses on Angular .  Last year I spent quite a bit of time learning Thymeleaf and Bootstrap as well as familiarizing myself with javascript so I thought it would be interesting to approach web development from a different angle (see what I did there) and since Angular is well recognized it felt like a good topic to learn on.  I’m still very early into my research but thus far I’m excited.  I like how typescript has a lot more type-safety than regular javascript however I find it’s still pretty easy to chop your feet off in Angular and get into a state where understanding where your bug is pretty difficult.  It’s pretty easy to mistype something or poorly name a field or method and have the code break without a lot of feedback why it isn’t working.  Much of that I’m sure is related to my inexperience however.  We’ll see as I get further into my online course if I am off base and being too critical of the tool after being spoiled by using eclipse/intelliJ for so long where I’m very familiar with finding and fixing bugs.

I guess I’ve as usual been slacking and not updated my blog for a while.  Busy at work, enjoying my life.  I haven’t been working on anything for a while but I did find a useful guide that hopefully some of you might find useful.

I have a laptop that I need to keep clean, I won’t go into details but the device is very locked down but is also pretty high end and would be nice to use for other computing reasons, it’s designed for 3D graphics however so locked down that I can’t install any new software on it.  I wanted to install Windows 10 on it but via bootable USB (SSD) but the standards Windows installation doesn’t allow for that, until I found the following post:

https://decryptingtechnology.blogspot.com/2015/09/install-windows-10-on-usb-external-hard.html?m=1

Yeah it’s old, a posting from 2015 but it still works thankfully.

I did have a similar problem that another person had in the comments

I can’t find the file “install.win” in sources but I find install.ESD in the CD of windows 10

however as mentioned, you can google how to convert .ESD to .WIN and continue from there, it’s another step but relatively straightforward.

At this point most of the problems I have is forcing the laptop to boot from USB, the bios on the device is finicky and often won’t boot via USB all the time, but it does work and that is more a side effect of the laptop’s bios rather than a problem with the blog posting guide.

So for the longest time I’ve been avoiding web development, not because I thought I wouldn’t be any good at it but rather I find that front-end web coding required a lot more artistic skills than programming skills, and since I have difficulty drawing stick men I would struggle making something look good on the web side.  It’s not like I’ve never done web programming.  When I ran my PixelSystems consulting company I wrote some java code that built my HTML website whenever I got new pricing from my hardware vendors.  Yeah that sort of thing isn’t done any more, most systems now build the HTML on the back end, certainly the content specific stuff anyway.  But when I wrote my translator stuff I didn’t have access to hosting that allowed for a java servlet and at best I could only really use PHP for server related functionality so it just was the best way to get a dynamic website and grow my business.

Things are changing now.  There aren’t really that many of us old school ‘application’ developers left.  Most everyone these days are ‘full stack’ web developers, with everything moving to ‘the cloud’ and the notion of ‘SAAS‘ the need for actual application developers to write both computational code as well as UI code in Swing or SWT is lessened. Back in September I forced myself to start looking into servlets, how to develop them, how to connect the front-end to the back-end, build dynamic modern websites, how security, OAUTH works and tying an overall idea into an over-arching website.  So far I’ve learned a lot an am actually having fun.  I’m attempting to re-create a pen-and-paper RPG that I played many moons ago but turn it into a web service/website that allows users to come in, build their content using tools I developed then run through scenarios using the pen-and-paper rules built on the back-end having the server drive and enforce the rules.

It’s slow going because as expected the learning curve is nearly vertical.  Thankfully though the internet is a fantastic source of information.  Sometimes I wonder how I grew up in an age that didn’t have such easy access to information.  How did I actually learn to code without a debugger, without instant access to a search engine that can point me to a problem I’m fighting with in code or ways to troubleshoot issues I’m having with my software?  I don’t think new developers today (the ones I’m trying to learn from now) really understood how much harder things were in the old days, when the only way to really debug your code, certainly on some of the more archaic platforms, was to println or console.log variable contents and try and mentally visualize what was going on in the code and why it wasn’t working properly.  I have NO interest to go back to those days but I do think it’s what made me so resilient today when it comes to troubleshooting problems.  My project has a long way to go before I start talking about it.  I would be lucky if I am 10% done and I have been working on it for about 6 months already.  That being said I am a lot further along with it than I expected and much of that is due to having access to the internet as a resource as having so many years experience in finding solutions to difficult problems.

I also had my 25th anniversary at work this month.  Hard to imagine, working at one place for 25 years.  Well, I suppose it hasn’t been at one place since as with the software industry, even from the beginning, we got bought out lots, but thankfully with each buyout I was allowed to keep my seniority so March 14th was effectively my 25th year there.  Even more strange is that there are 5 of us left that have been working together for all those 25 years.  How many people these days, in the computer industry, can say they’ve worked with the same 4 people for 25 years?  I’ve known some of these people longer than I’ve known some of my family.  I guess it helps that for the most part I get along with them well, that after 25 years we know each others strengths and weaknesses and we are a fine-honed machine for producing good code that the company can sell.  All of us at this point are patented developers, my patent isn’t actually official yet but as with most things government related it will take time but I suspect within the next 2-3 years it will be official so that will be another feather in the cap.  

I suppose I’m simply lucky, to have found something I’m good at, that I enjoy and that I can do to make a living at.  We have to spend so much of our lives working to survive and I was lucky enough to find something I actually love doing that actually puts food on the table.

Many moons ago I used to be pretty proficient at 3D programming.  Not really for work but more side projects, fun, to learn.  I wouldn’t say I’m artistic, hell, I can barely draw a stick-man.  I do know what looks good though thematically, a side effect of 25 years of UI and software design I suppose.

I haven’t kept up with things though, which is part of why it’s always difficult for me to understand people who say “I’m bored”.  There are simply so many things to learn, to spend time tinkering with and have fun playing with that I never have enough time.  I suppose I’m used to the old days, the pre-internet era where you had to learn everything the hard way, going over endless books, chatting on BBSes, finding examples in magazines and so on that I find it extremely easy to find side projects to play with on the internet and relatively quick and easy to become proficient at those new toys and techniques.  Not saying I’m an expert in everything I mess around with but I usually get enough knowledge to have fun and feel like I learned something quickly.

Anyway, back on topic… In one of my numerous daily meetings I found out that there are a number of projects that plan on using the three.js system for 3D rendering.  While listening to the presenter discuss their techniques I loaded up the information on three.js and saw they have a ton of pretty cool demos as well as a very cool example page that shows off the myriad of features the engine supports.  I was impressed.  How is all of this possible inside a browser window?  When did that happen?  I always found web pages rather .. bland.. when compared to the demo/intro scene of yester-year.  This ability to render 3d objects and effects in a browser window seemed like fun.  I hate the logo you see at the top of the screen and wanted to try and replicate it but animated, using this three.js system.

Well, after experimenting and reviewing their examples I had a bunch of things working and was excited to play more but hit a roadblock.  Well not a roadblock stopping me from work but something that I’d fight with every step.  Javascript.  Javascript is the back end language you use to leverage your three.js content.  You might say “well Will, you write java code every day, you have been for more than 15 years, why would you consider Javascript a roadblock, surely you can apply some of your daily practice and be proficient at javascript instantly”.  Well sir, you’d be wrong.  I suppose after 25 years of professional development and countless years learning in grade school I’ve been ruined by structured programming languages.  Javascript is the wild wild west, the rules are so loose that you can chop your feet off and not even know it until you start running.  I found it very difficult to organize my ideas into logical pieces then have them communicate with the code effectively.  I’m very sure it’s an experience thing but I like having organized ideas that are totally encapsulated.  Where the concepts do not contaminate each other except for what you wish to expose.. With Javascript you can do anything anywhere, making the code, in my opinion, messy.  If I try and code up nice tightly composed ideas I find with my idea of keeping the ideas separate and easy to use.

I can work around javascript, its just a matter of relaxing the years abuse of writing small cohesive pieces of code and being more relaxed with my designs.  Sadly though the WordPress CMS backend I’m using for this website it’s exceedingly difficult to embed javascript elements without re-writing much of the theme you’re using.  I wanted to change the logo above to make it animated but realize that I’d have to rewrite the theme I’m using to accommodate for doing that and I’m lazy so I’ll just post my example to a supplemental web page instead you can visit here:

http://www.pixelsystems.net/proto/logo.php

It’s not really a 1-to-1 translation of the graphic logo animated but just me learning how to load 3D fonts, implement tweening, how to programatically fill a cat-mull spline polygon and so on.

What is impressive, after all my complaining is the cost of entry to start learning and having fun with javascript and three.js.  The cost of entry is nothing, beyond the time required to read and experiment.  I was always impressed what you got for free with Java (free language, free IDE, tons of source code), with Javascript it’s even easier, there are tons of good editors out there for writing code, many of which interface with libraries like three.js and offer code completion, running right out of the IDE and other niceties that we take for granted now.  It’s very easy to write code, save it and run it instantly.  You can debug it instantly in your browser so very quick access to the data structures, their contents, console logging and so on, with nothing else to install and set up.

I’ll likely add this stuff to the endless parade of “play more with when I have free time” items on my plate.

I really haven’t had a lot of time to spend on new things, I’ve had a lot of personal distractions over the past 2-3 years that have really limited my time and interest in learning new things.

I have however spent a little time looking at HTML5 game engines.  Not that I would have time to actually write a game but I always like reading about and experimenting with graphics and HTML5 seems quite suited to that.  I only experimented with a few game engines, I looked at quite a few but the two that I found the easiest to use and understand were http://www.kiwijs.org/ and http://www.pixijs.com/.

I spent the most time using pixijs simply because there were enough tutorials and web resources to get a better understanding how the pieces tied together.  It’s one thing to write your own engine that you think other people can use, it’s another to actually show people how to use it rather than assume they want to spend hours pulling it apart and actually understanding how things fit together.

Eventually I would like to get back using pixijs and modify the pixelsystems.net logo a the top of this page to make it animated, perhaps some simple 2D effect from the good old Amiga demo/intro days.  I’m just surprised how far browsers have gone where you can write a legitimately good looking and fun game in a web based language instead of C++.

Wow I haven’t updated in a while.  I’d be lying if I had a lot of new things to talk about but I suppose there are some things of note.

I have some vacation property in BC that we visit regularly but still the commute is still quite far and so we don’t visit enough to feel secure about the place.  That and the fact that it’s vacation property so often when stuck working on a project that’s frustrating it would be nice to see what life is like where I’d rather be.  I figured, I have internet at my cottage, I have an old laptop that is collecting dust at home, I have a few old webcams, why not make a poor mans security system or web cam host at my cottage?

The problem is, a lot of the free web cam software is either terrible or not really free at all but subscription based.  Being a cheap mofo I’ll always go for free software, especially if it means I can tinker with it a bit too.

I discovered yawcam a LONG time ago and really like it.  The things typically that clobber these type of projects is that they either don’t work with the cameras themselves well, are too limited on the type of output (file, streaming, etc) they produce or they’re so poorly designed that they’re a nightmare to use.  Yawcam doesn’t have any of these problems (well that’s not entirely true but I’ll get to that later).  Yawcam does have some nice features too in that if you want you can have the software detect movement from the camera too so setting up a ‘cheap’ security system as well.  I installed Yawcam and configured my main camera that I bought cheap off ebay for $8 from Hong Kong and instantly it worked.  The nice thing was this cheap webcam I bought also had LED lights too which meant  could use it indoors for 24hour motion detection and security.  This is where I started running into troubles though.

1) I did have two cameras, I wanted to have one camera pointing outside so I could see what the weather was like, who was in the neighborhood, etc.  The problem is that the camera I wanted to point outside has terrible light compensation. Basically the entire image was SO blown out (due to the outdoor light) that it was impossible to see anything.  This meant that I had to use the camera that had LED lights on it to point outside and so no night time type monitoring.

2) yawcam does not ‘play well’ with multiple cameras.  The software supports being launched multiple times (for multiple cameras) but under the covers the configuration files would overwrite themselves so you have to have multiple copies of the same app in multiple folders otherwise all the configurations you did for one camera would overwrite the other camera’s configs.  Also the output stuff (I picked streaming) will actually cause one of the other streams to crash, even though the application looks like it’s running a user could not stream to one or the other stream, that entire camera was basically disabled.

What I did end up running was yawcam with webcamxp 5.  Webcamxp5 is okay, it pales in comparison to yawcam in terms of features but it works well enough in tandem to yawcam that I am happy with it.  If I ever find some free time I may look at debugging some of the odd behavior with yawcam in regards to multiple cameras (and their configurations) but for now what I need is working.

When submitting your app to Google marketplace you’re given a nice screen that shows where people who ran your app encountered bugs.  You can use this screen to help point out problems in your code that perhaps you missed or overlooked.

SudoTape v1.2 and v1.3 now available on the market addresses a few of these issues.  Some bugs make sense and it’s pretty easy to see how the problem occurs but some bugs you can see how it would crash but it’s really difficult to envision how the code would have crashed there.  Sadly not many users actually write in the report how they encountered the crash to give you input on how to fix the bug.

I adjusted the camera media manager of SudoTape and updated CameraTest accordingly.  It seems to work even better on my device, hopefully others will agree.

I finally released SudoTape to the market.  The last stretch was around testing and getting some of the final artwork done.

I initially listed it in the photography section of the market but this morning I revised it and put it in the tools section.  You don’t really need to have a camera on your device in order to use it so it makes more sense to put it in the tools section.  I don’t know if the market automatically filters stuff out so even if you don’t have a camera and the app doesn’t really need a camera I’m not sure if you’d see it as available to download or not.  Not that it matters though, I presume most devices come with at least one camera now anyway.

I had problems creating a signed APK, I never really read anything about it and Google’s information online is sketchy at best, at whatever documentation I found was related to Eclipse so it wasn’t much help since I use IntelliJ.  Luckily IntelliJ’s created signed APK wizard wasn’t too tricky so I uploaded the app and some art/screenshots last night.

Going to see if anyone downloads it to see how much I want to support it.  I’d like to add some other features like saving the files to DropBox, perhaps unit conversions on the define markers options dialog, etc.  If there is little interest I’ll hold off adding more features and think of a new project.

You can find SudoTape on the market here:  https://market.android.com/details?id=net.pixelsystems.sudotape

You can read SudoTape’s basic documentation here: http://pixelsystems.net/?page_id=66

Just playing with the Android version of WordPress..
Very cool!

I am reminded though on how difficult it is to write more than a few snippets on a mobile device.  But the idea is sound, you could use your phone at a spur of the moment to jot down notes for a posting, then when you got to a real keyboard finish the post using your notes as a guide for your thoughts.

Either way I was impressed that WordPress interfaced with my site that I set up.

1. logged onto siteground, added WordPress (2 minutes)
2. Used Appbrain, found and installed WordPress app (30 seconds)
3. Attempted to launch WordPress on phone, got failure message with enough info in the message on what is broken on my site
4. logged into admin section of WordPress on my site found flag that corresponded to the message on the phone.. click and save flag
5. Retry on phone, works!

Great stuff.  This is why I’m so interested in mobile development.  Gone are the days where the PDA was so isolated from the PC and the networking of it was for the most part an afterthought.

Doesn’t make my wife any more happy on the cost of buying a phone and a data plan but exciting enough for me to put up with the complaining.