For a while I’ve been looking for a good way to put together some animated title screens and level selection for an upcoming iPad game.
I’m using cocos2d for the game itself, which is great, but I was looking for a nice visual editor that could create a few screens the user could navigate through and select the level they wanted to play.
I came across Tumult Hype when looking for a new editor for my website. It turned out to be (almost) perfect for this job too. Read on for how. Read the rest of this entry »
If like me you use a Mac Mini as a media centre underneath the TV you may have a number of USB drives attached to it. Since upgrading to OS X 10.7 Lion I’ve found these are getting spun up at least once an hour even when the system is entirely unused, which is noisy, a waste of power, and probably shortens the drives life. After some digging around I finally managed to fix this. Read on for more details. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been assumed for a long time, by myself and others, that RAID 1+0 is the obvious choice for enterprise storage from a performance and reliability point of view. I’ve recently had cause to review this opinion and (re)read some articles about the subject.
There are 3 ways to run Linux binaries on a Solaris Express X86 server.
xVM VirtualBox
xVM Server
Linux Branded Zone
This post takes a look at the interesting world of the Linux branded zone. I’ve posted about VirtualBox before and I hope to take a look at xVM Server (Xen) in a future post. Read on for my first steps with Linux branded zones. Read the rest of this entry »
For many years I’ve used an install of Gallery to manage my photos online, with a customised front end written for AxKit, and I’ve also been using Aperture to manage my photo library. Managing two separate libraries became a chore and meant that photos weren’t been uploaded for friends and family to view. I tried the built in Aperture web gallery functionality and found it to be rather inflexible and it didn’t handle hierarchies very well, the other option was to export to flickr or something similar, which I wasn’t keen on as I’d rather host the images myself.
So instead I decided to write my own exporting tool, you can see the end result at http://photos.tyr.org.uk the default view is a match of the project/folder/album structure within my Aperture library and the ‘quilt’ view (see top right) is just for fun. To export photos to the website I just tag them with the ‘Web’ keyword then run the export/sync script, it couldn’t be quicker and certainly much less hastle than maintaining two libraries.
Read on if you want to know more about how it was put together
‘Your Next Bus’ is the system used in West Yorkshire (and other regions) to provide live bus timetables. Some time ago I wrote a Dashboard Widget to display live timetables on a OS X Dashboard. I had a request to develop this for the iPhone and so I knocked something together with Dashcode and came up with tyr.org.uk/bus. Browse to in in your iPhone and see it in action, requires Version 2.0 of the OS.
Please feedback with any bug reports or feature requests.
I’m writing some training documentation for Veritas Cluster Server (VCS). Reading through my notes I was reminded of the ‘VCS Simulator’. You can import an existing cluster config into the Simulator and use the (Windows) GUI as if it was a live cluster, changing the config, faling things over etc. It’s just the ticket for a training aid, it’s just a shame there isn’t a CLI simulator.
You can download it here (needs a Symantec login) and there’s a Flash video explaining how to import an existing cluster here.
I’ve been wanting to have a play around with both the Solaris Cluster Express work that’s coming out of OpenSolaris and also VirtualBox, a virtualization platform that Sun recently acquired and have moved under their xVM banner. So wanting to kill two birds with one stone I thought I’d try setting up a VirtualBox Solaris Express cluster. Here’s a run through on how to get the same thing going if you’d like to try.
VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta is out. It’s a free upgrade for all current VMware Fusion users. Notable updates include Multiple Monitor support and Direct-X 9 Shader Model 2.
To give the Shader Model 2 a whirl I fired up Half Life 2. It had refused to run in any previous VMware Fusion release but this time it runs! Ok, it’s runs but it’s nowhere near playable as it’s getting about <5 FPS. However it’s a promising development.
