10xshot

Google Maps on the ADP1

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:57:00 +0000

The most recent Google Maps update never worked for me on my ADP1 running 1.6 - it always gave me "Package not signed correctly". After some googling, I found this did the trick - in essence, one has to remove any trace of the installed google maps, and manually uninstall the apk using adb. I then re-downloaded google maps from the market, and it worked. Hurrah.

Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:45:00 +0000

Writing this from the food court at ATL, awaiting my connection to LAX.

Due to the actions of a certain moron there were "extra security measures" in place at Dublin Airport - a pat-down and a baggage search at the gate before we were allowed to board. Thankfully the no electronics or getting up in last hour rule appears to have been rescinded.

Ironically, there were separate boarding queues for men and women (so as to line up with the male and female screeners) - this struck me as something the average Islamic extremist would approve of. Good times.

As for the actual Christmas holiday, it was an enjoyable one.

Highlights:

Samantha meeting the folks and friends.
Catching up with said folks and friends.
Showing Samantha around the Irish countryside.
Christmas dinner with Samantha and the folks.
Newgrange attempt 1. Roads were so iced up the shuttle bus from the visitors' centre to the Newgrange site wasn't running. Nearly got stuck in the car park, took to the top of 3rd gear in the Toledo to get up a verry icy hill at the car park exit. Ended up giving a lift to some ILUG people who were stranded in nearby Donore village. Good times.
Birthday dinner with the folks and Samantha in Bellinter House
Newgrange attempt 2. Weather greatly improved, was lucky with the timing, there were only 2 other people in our session, Samantha got some good photos.
Galway. Stayed at the Glenlo Abbey hotel. I was distinctly underwhelmed. Upon arrival we were informed the heating in the Pulman restaurant was broke, and hence closed. The internet connection remained broken for the entire evening. The room itself was rather chronically underheated (even for a hairy Irishman), and the breakfast service was decidedly bad - took a good 15 minutes from being seated to someone coming to take my order, and that was only because Samantha caught the eye of a waitress. For the money, I wouldn't return to the Glenlo Abbey.
New Years with Samantha, Sharon and Alan, had a low-key dinner and drinks at the excellent Eastern Seaboard.

The parents gave me the loan of (and insured me on) my old Seat Toledo, which made getting around and showing Samantha the country a lot easier. Much appreciated.

I should be back in LAX around 9:30pm local time - by that point I'll have been awake around 22 hours, so with a good night's sleep I should take up reasonably adjusted back to PST tomorrow. I better, as I'm back to work in Treyarch monday morning :)

Harry

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:39:00 +0000

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.

Time goes by, tables turn

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:45:00 +0000

I need to blog more. I used to blog at regular intervals, but life has been busier, and frankly, I just can't bring myself to use Twitter.

I've been playing Borderlands. The depth and range of weaponry in the game keeps me playing. The storyline is pretty decent too. I'm usually quite averse to RPGs, but the first person shooter aspect in Borderlands makes it a lot more appealing. I'm glad to see they've patched the matchmaking tech in the game, it was a bit.. rough to begin with.

I bought a box of Coors Light in Costco at the weekend. It's actually not too bad, but I'm going back to Stella next time I'm beer buying.

Samantha reliably informs me it's 44 days until we arrive in Dublin for Christmas. Samantha will be in Ireland for the first time (in addition to meeting my family / friends etc.), so that should prove interesting.

Modern Warfare 2 is almost upon us. I will of course play it through out of professional interest. It's using Steam for distribution; first time in a long time the most secure SKU for any game has been the PC - usually it's the first to appear on various torrent trackers.

I've finally given up on the Heretic technique, and have joined the ranks of BEST shooters here in California. My friend Jeep coaches the USC archery team, and he recently completed his level 3 course with the man himself, Ki Sik Lee. He gave me some insight into the BEST method I had been unable to glean from the books. I dutifully gave it a go, and was able to get into much better line than previously. Still feels a little unnatural, but so far the results are promising.

Tomorrow (Thursday) marks the two year anniversary of my start at Treyarch. Time flies. I've shipped two games in that time, consulted for 6 weeks on a third, and generally made a reasonable niche for myself. I can't blog about what my job currently entails, but it should prove to be quite the challenge.

Command and Conquer: The First Decade

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:08:00 +0000

So I picked up C&C: The First Decade at Best Buy the other day, and got around to installing it on my Windows 7 box last night. I proceed to fire up Red Alert 2, but it bombed out telling it can't init the string manager. I let it run as an admin, and up it comes, the excellent invasion of the US intro and the cheesy acting really bringing it all back. I then find that once battle control went online, all my units died instantly and the mission failed. After some googling, it appears this is because the Red Alert 2 exe thinks it's been (amatuerishly) cracked. I put the exe in Win2000 compatibility mode, and all is well. Good times. As a games developer, I have no great love of pirates either, but whoever at Westwood decided on this "feature", clearly leaning on some undocumented / not well supported part of the Windows API, this was a really bad idea. How many First Decade sales is this 10 year old crappy piracy check going to cost you?

Back to the hack

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:39:00 +0000

As you can see from the Google Latitude badge on the right, I am indeed back in Los Angeles. Flew in yesterday evening, Samantha picked me up at LAX. Had steak at The Galley in Santa Monica - oddly, I think I've gotten used to smaller portions in Vancouver, I managed to finish my usual 11oz fillet mignon, but barely got halfway through the fries and onion rings. It felt pretty heavy too - going to try some lighter sides next time, and perhaps (shock horror) a smaller steak.

Got myself a T-Mobile 3G sim (on contract) today. They use the same frequencies as my ADP1 - no more dealing with Rogers EDGE. Hurrah.

I'm rather happy to be back. Samantha picked an excellent apartment, close to work, large, decent aircon, hardwood floors, gated parking etc. She makes me very happy.

One of the two cats (Cleo) has taken a liking to me, but the other one (Stalin) avoids me most of the time. Oh well. First time living with cats. It's proving interesting.

My experiences trying to setup an xe.com FX account

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:05:00 +0000

So, I've been living pretty cheap up here in the frozen wastelands of the north, and have been saving as hard as I can. The up-shot of all this is I have more cash than the 10 grand limit customs allows you when entering the US. Go me.

So, I go through the hoop-jumping of setting up an xe.com/fx account:

Send them a recent bank statement
Take a long lunch, and walk up to a public notary to get a notarized copy of passport
Sit through a phone interview

Then, I get the same automated email again, asking either to turn up at their North Vancouver office, or submit a notarized copy of my passport / drivers license.

I ring them up, explain that yes, right now I am a Canadian resident, despite having an Irish accent. I explain that my company has moved me around quite a bit, and no I haven't been a resident for the last 2 years.

The lady on the other end wants me to go to their office in North Van to submit to what I can only presume would be a vigorous cavity search. Given I'd already spent 25cad and half an afternoon getting the notarized passport copy, I was in no mood to undertake a 10km round-trip, either by public transport or taxi, either in terms of money or time spent.

So, xe.com have declined to do business with me, missing out on getting their percentage of the $bignum I'm moving to the states.

Fail.

It's a go

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:11:00 +0000

Went to the consulate this afternoon and got my hands on my visa.

Have to fill in a mountain of relocation docs, and the relo people are coming to my house to box up my stuff on the 21st - I expect I'll be on a flight to LA shortly afterwards.

My purgatory in the frozen wastelands of the north is coming to an end.

00 status confirmed

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:20:00 +0000

I ended up being awake all night thinking about the consulate interview.

I then went to the consulate this morning, waited for 3 hours and 58 minutes, and then had a 2 minute interview, at the end of which my visa was approved. I can pick up my passport on Thursday, and enter the US any point after Sept 15th.

I need to get the relocation people going on coming to my place and box up my stuff, and that's about it - then it's back to LA, moving in with Samantha and two cats.

Now, I'm drinking scotch, watching The Outer Limits, and chilling out.

I note Android finally finally has a Facebook app. Hurrah. I've also just found the joy of Android Widgets. Pretty cool.

Back in the USSR

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:47:00 +0000

Staying up for the 30 hours was worth it, woke up naturally at 9am local time, so I guess I beat the jetlag. Wandered up to the excellent Wazubees on Commercial Drive and had breakfast outside. Going to spend the afternoon cutting the grass and unpacking, and then back to work tomorrow.

International man of mystery

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 06:50:00 +0000

I've had 3 hours sleep, I'm in LHR and I've just found my flight is delayed 8 hours.

*snore*

Going home

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 11:15:00 +0000

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.

Always remember, this is the life I chose

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:59:00 +0000

I'm moving across the world to somewhere undisclosed, to work on something undisclosed, for an undisclosed amount of time. I'll be going back to Vancouver again afterward (and, obviously, to LA - once I get a visa sorted out).

It means not seeing Samantha for a while :( Somehow, she has decided to stay with this workaholic madman. I'm a lucky guy.

Catchup, again

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:15:00 +0000

Been busy.

Work continues apace.

Samantha starts in UCLA today, this pleases me.

Going home next month for a week, looking forward to it.

Had the busiest Sunday ever yesterday - started off packing up 6 months worth of recycling and driving it out to the dump with my landlord; then drove out to pick up a Yamaha Virago 1000 he managed to spot for free on Craigslist. Got the bike loaded onto the trailer, drove it home. Did some gardening - cut the grass, dug up all the weeds, fertilized the beds. Help landlord take bike apart slightly.

Really need to get on with TargetScheme development - all the hard bits are done, just need to hook up dumping the scores out to SD card, and some menu contexts and it's ready for a public alpha. I've been using my ADP1 as my primary phone, and I've been very happy with it. The only issue I've encountered so far is Google Latitude sometimes stops updating my location, from googling this appears to be a known issue.

I've had some good progress in archery - it occurred to me whilst reading ArcheryTalk that I was rotating my bowshoulder toward the string instead of rotating my scapula / shoulderblade toward the string. I changed this, and my bowarm became a lot more stable, and I was able to shoot more. Time will tell if this is viable long-term, as setting it up doesn't quite feel natural.

Still haven't pulled the trigger on any new archery gear - going to wait and see for a while, no hurry.

There is a pawnshop around the corner from where I live - I'd never been in a pawnshop, so I wandered in over the weekend. Turns out they have quite the selection of XBox and PS2 games - got myself Spiderman II for 10CAD.

My sister Miriam texted me the other day to inform me I am to have a nephew soon enough. Wee.

My WRT54GL died quite suddenly - flashing power light and capacitor whine, it's well and truly dead. Shipped it back to Linksys today.

Memorial Day weekend

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:31:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:12:00 +0000

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.

Catch up

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:46:00 +0000

It occurs to me that I haven't updated the blog since I moved to Vancouver. Have found a really great house to live in, just off Commercial Drive.Really great landlord, and really friendly housemates. Sharing a house has really worked out, as living in an apartment didn't seem like a good idea when I'm here on my own.

I've joined an archery meetup group - it's proving to be a lot of fun, as I can just shoot a wooden bow, relax and concentrate on my form. I've ordered some low poundage KAP limbs from a local archery supplier so I can really go to town on my form with the X-Factor. I've been thinking about a complete gear change - right now it's a toss-up between the Bernardini Luxor and the W&W TF Apecs . Very different bows, and I'll have to think about it carefully. The torque compensator in the Apecs is very interesting, and from what I've seen Frangilli has switched back from the Bernardini to the Apecs, and I've moved away from heavy risers since I gave up the 2001 VBS. More research needed. Either way, I'll be pairing the riser with W&W Apecs Prime Limbs and some form of stiff single rod stabilization, like the Soma CEX2 or Fiberbow S3 or something similar.

I dropped Samantha off at the airport earlier today, she came up to visit for a week. I miss her. It was really good to see her. She's very good to me.

Work has been busy; they've given me my own office, which has been kind of odd, and a little bit lonely sometimes, but such is life. I walk the 1.8km to and from work every day, and it's doing me good. I have a bike getting fixed up in the local bike shop, which will be useful for getting around.

Moving country again

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:27:00 +0000

Got up early this morning, rented a UHaul - after driving an mx5 for a year, it felt like driving a tank - and moved all the stuff I'm not bringing with me to storage. I then drove out to my awesome friend Neil's house, and parked up the mx5 there, as a rear wheel drive convertible in Vancouver wouldn't really be worth the hassle, not to mention having to drive it up there.

I then headed for LAX, where I said goodbye to the love of my live, my wonderful one of a kind girlfriend Samantha. She's coming up to visit often, but I shall miss her terribly none the less. I'm sitting in a departure lounge at LAX feeling rather sorry for myself.

As I've said before, always remember, this is the life I chose. Canada will be the 4th country I've lived in - Ireland, Germany, USA, and now Canada. Not bad for a 26 year old hacker from Drogheda.

Banana Republic

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:59:00 +0000

As many of you will know, I refer to my home country of Ireland as "The Glorious Republic" from time to time. This is part piss-take, part nostalgia for the old country. The current Irish government, along with a long line of its predecessors, frankly couldn't find their own arse with a compass, two hands, an a judicial enquiry costing hundreds of millions.

Recently, a guerrilla artist hung a number of nude portraits of our current Glorious Leader, Brian Cowen, in a number of art galleries in Ireland. RTE, the "national broadcaster", dutifully reported on this. Someone in the current... regime didn't like this, and the next day RTE issued a swift apology.

Ten minutes of economic turmoil, and we're back to the 70s - strikes, public funding cuts, crumbling infrastructure, and infallible taoiseachs. The "celtic tiger" has been for nothing. We're right back where we started.

Sorry Brian, at least Haughey was a charmer.

Edit: Fellow ILUG blogger Donncha has put it better than I ever could.

Oh Canada

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:38:00 +0000

It's all happening. Relocation people coming to apartment next week to get an idea of how much stuff I have to move. Went to the Canadian Consulate at 6am yesterday and was successful in getting my hands on a work permit. Work continues apace. Been hunting on craigslist for a furnished apartment, shouldn't be too hard. Looking forward to getting home in July.

The Galley, Santa Monica

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Dear Galley,

When I book a table for 7pm, I expect a table in or around 7pm. I don't expect to spent 40 minutes (and counting) standing in the corner getting my toes stepped on repeatedly.

The Galley has been my Friday night steak place for a year now, but you've pissed me off sufficiently that I'm going to go try somewhere else. That's a good 300usd a month going towards someone else's bottom line. Not to mention finding anyone else in this economy that still tips 20% :)

Yours in steak,

Ewan

iPhone toolchain continued

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:53:00 +0000

After attending a python talk at SCALE7x, I did some googling, and it turns out there is a port of pyobjc for the iPhone - whilst useful, I wanted to get into some proper 2D graphics coding, especially with the excellent Cocos2d framework. My last attempt at building a toolchain on my Debian Lenny box ended in failure. However, I came accross iphonedevonlinux which gives you a neat little bash script that abstracts out all the pain of building the iPhone toolchain on Linux. Worked pretty well, I've just compiled my first HelloWorld to the iPhone and (after calling ldid to "sign" the binary) it worked perfectly. Only requirements are an apple developer login (free) and the iphone sdk from apple (downloadable from apple). The script does the rest, including grabbing the latest firmware if you give it your apple dev id and pass. Only non-obvious but was when it died immediately trying to build the toolchain with a misplaced @ error - turns out I had to install gcc objc support - once I did that it compiled straight off. Good times.

The move to Vancouver is becoming a bit more real - I have an appointment at the embassy next week. I've been doing my research, and I should have an archery club within reach. Once I'm settled up there, I intend to get some low-poundage limbs and spend the long lonely evenings working on my form; my current Samick Extremes are just too heavy to do any kind of meaningful form adjustment.

SCALE7x

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:04:00 +0000

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!

Shot cycle

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:18:00 +0000

I went shooting for the first time in over a month today, as my back is feeling pretty serviceable, and I missed it. Shot pretty well; it occurred to me my shot cycle was far too long (on the order of 10+ seconds); I was starting out with the bow arm too high, and I was losing the rhythm of the shot getting the sight into the middle of the target. I concentrated starting with the bowarm lower and concentrating on the expansion, and it appears to work - groups tightened, and my shot timing became more consistent.

Fear and loathing with the HUR1-SU2LA

noreply@blogger.com (ultrahax) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:12:00 +0000

So the HUR1-SU2LA turns out to be basically No Use(tm) as a NAS device, but it seems to do pretty decently as a usb attached device, so I've just decided to do that instead. I've successfully created an ext3 fs on the thing with no loopback trickery, and I'm now rysncing my /home dir. If I ever feel the need for actual NAS capability I'll plug into an NSLU2 or something.