Programming by Robert Massaioli

This blog has had it's day

2010-01-18T23:44:00.001+11:00

Hi all,

If anybody actually reads this blog then I am letting you know that it has been moved to: massaioli.homelinux.com/wordpress

That is it's new location, it looks better and is easier to use. Complete with all of my new progress and information.

Thanks for reading and join me in the new blog,
Robert

FUPPES

2009-12-10T08:39:00.003+11:00

I have finally decided to work on an open source project and my candidate is the Free Universal Plug and Play Entertainment Service, better known as FUPPES. This project serves the purpose of providing a server of media content which is perfect for anybody that wants to stream videos from their computer to their TV via some UPnP device.

I will be working on it and ensuring that it progresses. I am looking forward to making the project better and something more commonplace that people use. I would recommend trying fuppes out if you have the time.

Putty shows accented a (â) instead of quote (')

2009-11-16T15:34:00.001+11:00

Small problem today. I was ssh'ing from a windows machine to my linux server and using PUTTY as the software tool on the windows fide of the fence. However, some characters appeared incorrectly, most noticeably in the make process for any software where the accented a 'â' would replace a single or double quote " and ' respectively. The solution to that problem is to make sure that PUTTY uses the UTF-8 format for characters and nothing else, then everything appears correctly.

You can find to problem solved here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/building-with-makegcccc-over-ssh-via-putty-onto-rhel5-gives-not-quotes-743107/

A Hack to play .avi files on fuppes of ushare (with the Xbox 360)

2009-11-03T14:31:00.003+11:00

An update this time to show you how very clever microsoft are and how, in their brilliance, they decided to support the .avi file type but not the mime type for it. The mime type for an .avi file is:

video/x-msvideo

However the XBox 360 will only understand (and be able to read them) if you pretend that they are wmv files:

video/x-ms-wmv

So in order to fix this problem in ushare you have to:

# sudo vim /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml

:%s/msvideo/ms-wmv/

And in fuppes you have to edit the fuppes.cfg file and do the same thing. Replace msvideo with ms-wmv. This is so pointless and is quite confusing the first time you try and figure out what is happening.

Want to Generate a favicon?

2009-10-28T09:22:00.002+11:00

So your website is missing a favicon.ico? You want to create something quickly but you can't be screwed downloading a program? You just wish that there was some website that you could goto that would let you do what you need? Well there is:

Use this convinient page: http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/

I made a favicon in a matter of secconds that I was happy enough with, and let's be honest, unless you some major company you don't need to goto that much effort on a favicon.

Cat (or Dog) Powered Food Dispenser

2009-10-24T17:20:00.006+11:00

I recently got a letter from instructables telling me about an automatic food dispenser I could make for for my pet cat (or dog too I quickly realised). The project itself can be found at:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Cat-Powered-Auto-Feeder/

The Device In Action

How The Device Works

It is really a very simple gravity feeder. When nothing is touching the device the elastic band pulls the ball into the top of the bottle making it act as a stopper. When the pet in question touches the bottle a gap appears and food falls out; the pet is then free to eat. When they feel that they have eaten enough they don't tap it anymore.

My Recommendations
It really is a great project to try out. After you get all of the parts then it might take you about 5 to 15 minutes depending on how quickly you want to assemble the parts. And what you end up with is quite awesome; incredibly useful. It was amazingly cheap, I had all the parts lying around the house already so it did not cost me a cent and most people will find the parts naturally too.

How Zebbie (my cat) Reacted
On day one the cat was rather oblivious to the function of the device. We sat there trying to teach her to use it but after looking at it for a while she merely went back to her bowl in search of more food. From now on though we will merely guide her to the dispenser and give her food from there until she gets hungry enough one day to get the food out herself. And then our problem has solved itself. We have a self feeding cat, that gives us good company and is happier because she is always well fed.

Should you happen to make any great cat bowls or have any good ideas please post them here.

Useful Javascript: scrollIntoView()

2009-10-22T10:26:00.001+11:00

Time for another small update on a useful javascript function: scrollIntoView()

Problem:

You have an element on the page that you want to scroll to or you want to jump to some part of the page. You need to do it in a cross browser manner. In summary it is a cross browser page jump / scroll change.

Solution: Use the javascript scrollIntoView(boolean) function.

See the Firefox API for it here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/element.scrollIntoView

The function is supported in all major browsers and can be applied to every and any element. Make an invisible element and scroll to it easily. Scroll to a visible element easily with the element placed at the top or bottom of the screen respectively with the argument set to true of false respectively.

This is a nice function and I highly recommend its use; it helped me out recently to solve a problem in one of our clients websites.

JQuery slideDown() is Annoying

2009-10-19T11:35:00.000+11:00

I recently ran into a very odd feature of the JQuery slideDown() function. As it turns out, whenever you call that function on a DOM element the final result of the function is to set the css 'display' property of the element to 'block'. Which is just plain stupid. That means that if I call slideDown() on a <td> element then it will finish with a display property of 'block' instead of it's appropriate default display property. This wrecked havock on a website that I was building because I thought that show() and slideDown() were interchangible; they are not.

I found somebody that had the same problem: here. But they proved to be little help; I personally believe that they deal with it the hard way.

The solution to this problem was easy but a hack really. The slideDown() function has a callback function; a back door for fixing up its behaviors if you will. The function prototype is:

slideDown(speed, [callback])

That means that I merely defined the following function:

function clear_display() {
$(this).css("display","");
}

And then I proceed to call the call the function like so:

$(".some_class_on_a_td").slideDown("normal", clear_display);

And that is all, problem solved, kinda. I have posted to jQuery and asked them to explain why it behaves in this manner. I'll edit this post if I get some more information but for now I hope this helps somebody.

Blog: A New Purpose

2009-10-16T09:14:00.001+11:00

The New Purpose of this Blog

I doubt that anybody reads this blog but as a change of pace I have decided to post here when I get particularly stuck with a programming problem and eventually solve it. I am hoping that eventually my posts will start being cached by google and become a good resource for people suffering similar problems. It will not be a blog that you are supposed to read through but merely one that contains a few little insights per post. I will try and make them all of good quality.

Right now I am searching through various Matrix Libraries and attempting to find a good one for the purpose of making a neat raytracer. I will try and blog in the future about my experiences with all of the various math libraries around, how to install them, how easy they are to use and how they performed.

Other News

In other news, my other two laptop batteries have completely died; the price of high laptop usage. And as a result I have bought two new (and very cheap ones) from hotbattery.co.uk. I will blog about the quality of their batteries soon I think. Please note that this means that the last battery that I bought lasted me 555 days. Which is not bad for a cheap battery that cost me about $100. That means that the battery cost me about $0.18 per day which I think is reasonable. Well see how long these next ones last me.

Making a PIC Programmer

2009-06-13T12:13:00.000+10:00

Long time no post but I have decided to get into PIC programming again. The PIC websites out there are not central enough so I make a small website of my own to fix that. We'll see.

I have also decided to build this really awesome PicKit 2 Clone that can be found at Building a PicKit Clone. I Am just preparing all of the parts now for pure awesomeness.

While I was at it i discovered something really interesting. I wanted to buy the PIC18F4550-I/P from Jaycar Electronics. This is an image of their website and the price that they are selling it for (~$44):

Understandibly I thought this was a bit rich so I took a look at the microchip website and they sell it for ~5USD + ~$15USD to get it to Australia. So I could buy two microchips from America (Thailand Actually) and it would still be cheaper than buying one from Jaycar.

Edit: I contacted them and they never got back to me. As of 20 Oct 09 it is still selling for that price. You can see it here.

OMG First Virus

2008-04-25T00:21:00.002+10:00

Something really bad just happened to my main computer. I was trying to get 'Big Bang Theory' episode 13 off my computer on the bus because it was running out of batteries and then we could play it on Mark's computer. So Mark gave me his USB to put the episode on. The second I put the USB into my computer a virus installed itself and froze my system with some sort of CPU intensive infinite loop as my CA Antivirus Software fought the Win32/Frethog virus.

Today I finally found a good article that explained how to solve my problems and it seems to have worked wonders. I will redirect you here if you also happen to have this virus. Once you finish the steps there then run your virus scans again.

I am just pleased that I have removed this virus from my system.

A Brief Respite

2008-04-09T21:21:00.000+10:00

I'm finally in a period of time in which I have a breif respite. Comp1917 is taking a break to let people learn how to program. Engg1000 is pacing ahead at full pace. Math1081 and Math1141 are giving simple but important tests. All in all the hectic past few weeks have slowed pace a bit and it is time for me to pick up speed and try and get ahead of the work while I have the chance.

On a Really Good Note my Laptop Battery Arrived Today!!!!!!!!!! I am going to charge it tonight and try using it tomorrow. I'm so excited.

This is the collest thing to happen in a while and I also scored my first point by killing
username: jati097 in the CSE 'Murder' Game. This gives me my first point and I hope to get more; my next target will be fun because I know him pretty well.

On another good note I have a 160GB Ipod coming in the mail. It should be here within 8 days. I'll be pretty excited when it comes out and I'm going to try and ask people what songs they think I shold put on it.

Anyway that's all from me. I'll probably make another post sooner rather than later.

The Blog Begins

2008-04-02T22:52:00.000+11:00

The way I see it the next four years of my life are going to be spent at UNSW and it would be good to have a record of everything I went through to reach this point. This initial post contains nothing more than the statement that I will try to update this blog as frequently as possible.

Just so that you know I am currently working on:

Stylistically improving taskEinn
An assembler for the Comp1917 8918 machine code.
Considering building a p2p brute force program to solve the 4917 Busy Beavers Problem.
All of the Challenges on the Comp1917 wiki.
Building my own set of useful C++ libraries when I have the time.
And many more smaller things...I should note that I only ever work on one or two at a time and the rest go under consideration.

Oh...I would also like to state a few ideas I have had that I think would make the CSE department much better:

A Slurpie Machine (best idea ever)
A Laptop Recharging Room
Basically a place that you can leave your laptop to recharge without the fear of it being stolen.
A person that acts as a seller of all those awesome t-shirts you see people wearing with phrases like 'Save Water - Shower with a friend' :)

And finally, since this is my blog I think I will put a picutre of myself somewhere on the page.

Some awesome things I think you should take a look at are:

"The Big Bang Theory" Series - Funniest thing ever. If you don't like it within the first five minutes then you can post about how stupid and uncool I must be to love that series.
Red Vs Blue - A Machinima based on the halo series. If you have ever played halo this is a must.

Cool...that's about it, thanks for reading,
Robert

N.B. I am involved in the CSE 'Murder' game...so watch your back...if you can...