I’ve been using a patched version of JEdit with tango icons for a while, but seems like I missed the fact that 4.3 pre 14 came out with Tango support.
Go forth and download…
Via http://deadcabbit.blogspot.com/2008/05/jedit-pre14-tango-has-arrived.html
Tango is a project to bring tasty icons to open source projects, those on windows can also see tango icons in the current version of the gimp, in linux you can see them in gnome and kde.
Just found this while going through my phones photos. This is from my last contract, the company used to be Psions software division, we found the tape in the bottom of a desk draw, who knows maybe it is the master tape for this game?
Update: Link to PsionSoftwareLTD promotional information on worldofspectrum.org
Just had a nightmare finding a binary for windows that wasn’t cygwinized… eventually found it here
http://www.hackosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/nc111nt.zip
[update]
Jon Craton has mirrored this file in case the other link goes down
http://joncraton.org/files/nc111nt.zip
(Cheers 
While I’m greatful for examples like this J2Me GameCanvas example I’m not so happy about this bit of it:
/** Starts the canvas by firing up a thread
*/
public void start() {
Thread myThread = new Thread(this);
// Make sure we know we are running
running = true;
done = false;
// Start
myThread.start();
}
What’s wrong ? Quite simply ‘myThread’. You see the ‘my’ prefix used in code all over the web - it’s extraneous… extra noise, you may as well add ‘the’ to the beginning of every variable.
Variable naming is to a certain extent a matter of taste; a lot of people would say that it is worrying about nothing. The problem is, that most of the time spent with code is reading it, not writing it; as such we should try and be as succinct as possible ‘my’ adds absolutely nothing here.
In the example above it would be better to either leave out the ‘my’ or call the thread canvasThread.
Where possible variable names should reflect what you want to use them for, if your naming is fuzzy then others will use them for things you did not intend and then your on the downward spiral…
This is the other crime in variable naming, over generalising… quite often you see variables called ‘data’ when the name of the type would do fine… usually it is only in IO based applications dealing with arbitrary data that the name is appropriate.
Of course, if you can’t think what to name them, then don’t pad them out as well, it’s pointless.
A quick search on coders (excluding mysql) finds 301,040 hits for ‘my*’.
That’s a lot of noise… stop the madness: ban ‘my’ now… if microsoft can remove it from Vista, how difficult can it be?
The Wine project has been going since 1993, and has got to the point where a large percentage of windows programs run well in linux.
A perennial question is when 1.0 will be released, excitingly it looks like this will be sooner than we thought - as seen from their mailing list today:
Paul Vriens <paul.vriens.wine at ??????> writes: > Just noticed that the dates attached to the versions on > http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan are not correct. > > 0.9.58 came out on March 21st. > > Does this mean we still stick to May 9th or do we stick to 0.9.61 as being > 1.0.0.rc1? We should stick to May 9th, we’ll just have to wait for this date to coincide with a release. If my calculations are right this should be release 0.9.218 on May 9th, 2014. Hopefully we can clear the 1.0 bug list by then. – Alexandre Julliard
I’ve recently been learning python and decided to note down the *very basics* that took longer to find out than I would’ve liked.
Without furtherado, heres my 5-minute-python.
It can be useful to test sounds in your current engine (esp for testing MOD support), so I’ve made a tiny sound player for pygame. The code is just this:
import sys, pygame
from pygame.locals import *
import pygame.mixer
if __name__=="__main__":
pygame.display.set_mode((120, 120), DOUBLEBUF | HWSURFACE)
pygame.init()
try:
filename = sys.argv[1]
pygame.mixer.init()
sound = pygame.mixer.Sound(filename)
print ‘Press ESC to quit, any other key retriggers sound’
sound.play()
running = True
while running:
for event in pygame.event.get():
if event.type == KEYDOWN:
if event.key == K_ESCAPE:
running = False
else:
sound.play()
except IndexError:
print ‘Usage tplay.py filename’
The file is attached here: Tiny pygame audio player.
The good news is, my laptop can run the Blender game engine at a decent framerate.
The bad news is I found out that is the Vista taskbar that more than halves it. I run without Aero, as Aero completely borks OpenGL (quite apart from the fact that Vista limits you to OpenGL 1.5). It’s bothered me for a while that in Blender I could never get over about 30FPS - on the weekend I found out that I can have the window as large as I like and get much better framerates as long as the window doesn’t touch the taskbar.
This is the kind of thing I hope SP1 will fix, but I severely doubt it 
My dad found this old advert for the Osbourne I… at only £1250 + Vat (and with a free 12 Inch amber for a limited time), this is The One To pickup… or not as they were never popular. Weighing in at “below 24lb” (10 Kilos!) this was a proper computer running CPM the anscestor from which DOS was cloned. It’s interesting as this was before the 8 bit wars had really kicked off in the U.K. with well known computers from Spectrum and Commodore, Amstrad and Acorn.
[EDIT - Add Flickr link]
As our washing machine broke, I was in the Laundrette where I saw this on the wall -
The writing on the bottom says
£1000 Reward!
Will be given to any person who can prove that this soap manufactured by Lever Bros.
Port Sunlight on Mersey
Contains any form of adulteration whatsoever or contains any injurious chemicale
In Victorian times adulteration of products was widespread and it’s interesting to think that some of the big brands we have today came out of this - Cadburys being the famous one, their unadulterated cocoa essence leading to the Adulteration of Foods Acts.