Harry

My nephew Harry was born yesterday, to my sister Miriam and her husband Lawrence. All reports point to a healthy mother and child, which is a tremendous relief. The nephew was born in Saudi Arabia, has an Irish mother, an English father, an Irish uncle living in the US, Irish grandparents (at least on his mother's side of the family), and an Irish aunt and uncle living in Ireland. I'm sure he'll have quite the multi-cultural upbringing.

So: I'm now Uncle Ewan, and my parents are now Granny and Grandad Oughton.

Good times.

In other news, it's Thanksgiving here, which means I get to have a 4-day weekend. God bless America. We're having some of Samantha's friends over for dinner and drinks, I'm really liking having my own place.

My draw shoulder has finally loosened up, so I'm going back to archery training soon. I've been reading Inside the Archer back and forth, coupled with what Jeep has been showing me I think I have the beginnings of a stable shot. Taking it nice and slow.

Work continues apace; writing some interesting stuff. Can't even begin to elaborate on it.

I bought an extended battery for my ADP1 off Dealextreme; for $12 (yes, twelve US Dollars) I've doubled the battery capacity of my phone, and it'll now do three days between charges, at the expense of considerably increased thickness.

Speaking of the adp1, I finally got a public alpha of TargetScheme out the door. Feedback so far has been positive; I'm working on adding in some needed features and stabilising it before putting it up on the Android Market.

Going home

My boss emailed me to let me know my visa application has been approved, and I'll be able to start back at Treyarch October 1st.

This makes me immensely happy.

My life and career have essentially been on hold since April, when I said goodbye to Samantha at LAX and got on a flight to Vancouver.

I've been busy getting this game out the door. Nearly done. First time since Quantum of Solace that I've written production console code, it's proving educational.

Once I get back to LA, I've got to get my MX5 off the axle stands (thanks once again to my awesome friend Neil for babysitting it for me), and find an apartment to move into with Samantha.

I've also got to get my hands on some low poundage limbs, ( I left my archery gear in Vancouver when I jetted off to parts unknown to help finish this project ) and continue the form reboot. Before I left it was starting to come together - especially the new alignment of my bowshoulder - I'm hoping I'll get to try it at a low key competition like a FITA 900 at Woodley Park.

Living with an amazing, one of a kind woman I'm in love with, working on Big Games(tm), driving around in the LA sun.

On balance, it's not a bad existence.

Memorial Day weekend

Finishing out the memorial day weekend watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and banging out a blog post. Samantha arrived Thursday night with my Casio Exilim FC100, and my HTC ADP1. Went to watch Ireland win vs Canada in rugby on Saturday. Samantha wasn't feeling that well, so spent the remainder of the weekend looking after her and generally trying to keep her comfortable. In between, I got a prototype of TargetScheme running on the ADP1 - needed to rework it a bit to take into account that I'm pointing with my finger instead of a stylus, but I think I have a workable solution. Currently have the UI layout hardcoded, need to figure out how to use the XML layout so I can add in menus, score lists etc.

Samantha just landed at LAX - I'm looking forward to doing the same, I'll find out in July if I'm here for 6 months or a year. It can't go quick enough (don't get me wrong, Vancouver is nice, and everyone I've met up here has been lovely), but I want to get on with my life with Samantha, and my career with Treyarch.

Samantha

I miss her an epic amount. She's sick with the chickenpox and miserable, and all I want in the world is to wrap my arms around her and make her feel better. But I can't, because I'm stuck up here in the frozen wastelands of the north. Fucking visas.

SCALE7x

Finishing up the last talk of SCALE7x - a worthwhile weekend. Notable talks included "Undermining the Linux Kernel: Malicious Code Injection Via /dev/mem", "BUG Update: Building open source gadgets with Linux", and "Scripting with Python" - very informative talks, as always when it comes to SCALE. I'm typing this from the "Low power Linux" talk, which is giving some really interesting insights into power consumption - I had no idea that the northbridge in my mini 9 uses more power than the atom cpu itself. Good times. "Building, Burning, and Flashing coreboot" was also a very interesting talk, giving some great insight into what it takes to bring a system up - CoreBoot manages to go from real mode to protected mode in 10 instructions, allowing the majority of CoreBoot to be written in C and compiled with gcc. Really interesting work.

Samantha joined me for the second day of SCALE; I wasn't sure she would enjoy it, but she seems happy and is learning a lot. I never thought I'd have a Linux-using (never mind Linux-enjoying) girlfriend. I'm a lucky guy.

Thanks to Orv, foo, Gareth and the rest of the SCALE crew for another excellent conference. Roll on SCALE8x!

More Samba fun

My adventures with Samba continue apace; it appears the real root of the issue is the fact that I was using smbfs, which is apparently out-dated. So, I try cifs, but it doesn't work. After some trolling of a nearby samba irc channel and sending some packet dumps to a samba dev (thankyou Kukks) it appears I need to get my hands on a newer version of cifs than the one that ships with debian edge.
So, I get my hands on the 2.6.24-etchnhalf kernel, except it appears to have a dodgy vesa-mode init or something, because even booting into single mode gives me a corrupted display on my Geforce 6600. Boo.

Now that lenny is out, I'll give dist-upgrading to it a try and see what the fallout is...


In other news, I appear to have Monday off due to it being Presidents Day, or something similar. Might make an appearance at the archery range, now that my back is starting to loosen up a bit. Myself and Samantha have also booked our flights home for the trip in July. Given I won't be able to enter the US for 6 months (God Bless America), I'm flying Vancouver-->Toronto-->Dublin, and Samantha is flying LAX-->JFK-->Dublin. It's her first international flight, so I'm kind of bummed I can't accompany her. Hopefully when I make the trip home for Christmas I'll have a shiny new US visa, and we can make the trip home together.

Citizenship

I had the pleasure of watching my better half Yoeum (now Samantha, for the confused - she's changing her name along with her citizenship) be sworn in as a United States citizen this morning. 6000 people all becoming citizens. I'll need to be here 7 years as a permanent resident before I become eligible.

Things are starting to come together for the move to Canada - looks like I'll be up there for 6 months at the least. Still in two minds on whether to bring the mx5 up with me, or put it up on blocks and stick a tarp over it till I get back.

Linux photo rescue

I got to recover a number of "deleted" images off an SD card today, after an iPhoto crash on friend's laptop; after a quick google, I encountered this guide, which details the use of PhotoRec, an opensource util that scans at the device level to recover photos. Handily, it's available in apt on Ubuntu Netbook Remix under the name testdisk. The only deviation I made from the article was to mount a dir on my desktop over sshfs (I couldn't be arsed making nfs or samba work), as space is at a premium on the mini9 (photorec has to put the recovered pics somewhere) - which reminds me, I still need to put the new SSD in the mini. Will do it at some point when I feel motivated, or the root fs hits 100%.

In other news, Yoeum is at a conference till Tuesday, so I've been filling in the time catching up on some books, namely "iPhone Open Application Development", which details how to write applications for a jailbroken iPhone using an open source toolchain. It's a well-written book, and has certainly taken the edge off the crawling horror that is ObjectiveC. I wish it had gone into more detail on 2D graphics primitives, in the case where you want to draw directly on the screen (say for an archery scoring application) it basically tells you how to address a buffer and swap it, how you populate the pixels is up to you. Bummer. Once I get around to jailbreaking it, I'll start some experimentation; some googling will probably turn up some useful 2D library calls. I hope. It occurs to me as I write one could just kludge up some OpenGL to come up with a pretty decent approximation; this may indeed be the way forward. Time will tell.

I also have "Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics" to get through, as I'm tired of my half-understood 6-year-old-highschool-physics understanding of the subject, and I want to get busy with an Arduino.