ReidNews > 2004

Programming: exact width integers

Posted by rae in development
at 9:54 am on Thursday, 29 January 2004

Apparently the C99 standard defines a new header file, <stdint.h> (probably accessed in C++ as <cstdint>), which finally defines types for the various integer sizes:

Type	Description	Type	Description
int8_t	signed char	int16_t	short int
int32_t	long int	uint8_t	unsigned char
uint16_t	unsigned short int	uint32_t	unsigned long int
int64_t	long long	uint64_t	unsigned long long

So can we all scrap the vendor-specific types we’ve been using for the last twenty years or more? Please?

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In Today’s Internet News…

Posted by rae in the Net
at 1:39 pm on Wednesday, 28 January 2004

A complete idiot guts his G5 and slaps in a PC motherboard. He gave the G5 guts to a friend with a G3, with the idea that the friend could somehow put them into his G3 case. Ya, with about 15 fans maybe. (Thanks Peter!)

Apple and Pepsi have started their great iTunes music give-away. Only valid in the U.S. of course. *sigh. (Thanks Iain!)

Frank briefly had City-TV video out-takes on their site, but lawyers made them take ‘em down. Glad I got my copies!

Creator of SoundConverter also has a free porn browser. Egad!

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Snow face

Posted by rae in family
at 9:26 am on Tuesday, 27 January 2004

We had quite a bit of wind last night. A bit of snow, too, but the wind was pretty fierce. The result at our house was that Ronnie’s snow fort in front of the house took on an ominous appearance, especially with the red lighting of the sodium streetlights:

The face from Mars has moved to our driveway!

With that red lighting, it does look vaguely reminiscent of the “face on Mars” sillyness. Hah.

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Mars Science with Mac OS X

Posted by rae in science
at 9:15 am on Tuesday, 27 January 2004

his article on MacOSXHints details software you can download that is “a lite version the software that NASA uses to work with the two rovers”. It’s written in Java and needs a special 45 MB update to run, but it sounds interesting.

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GarageBand site (ya, I’m hooked. So sue me!)

Posted by rae in software
at 10:02 am on Monday, 26 January 2004

Shortly after GarageBand shipped, two sites for GB users started up called gbusers.com and GarageBandUser.com. They’ve merged now and named the new site MacJams.com.

One of their top stories right now is that you can download a bunch of free loops at Bitshift:

Nifty. Also useful is MidiKeys, which lets you use your (typing) USB keyboard as a (musical) USB keyboard.

Hm, the phrase “USB keyboard” is too ambiguous now!

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Get books cheap

Posted by rae in the Net
at 9:17 am on Monday, 26 January 2004

(as in free)

The Baen Free Library is a good place to get some half-decent fiction. You won’t find any best sellers, but it’s entertaining stuff I think.

Right now I am reading With the Lightnings.

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iSight and Garageband don’t play well together?

Posted by rae in software
at 3:15 pm on Saturday, 24 January 2004

I bought iLife ‘04 recently and have been trying to get audio recording to work. It’s not that I’m a great vocalist or anything, but it would be nice to record some soft sounds to add to my GarageBand-ing. But it seems that no matter how hard I try, I cannot get GarageBand to use my iSight as a source of audio. It says something in the dialog about “not 44.1″ (kHz I presume).

I’ve looked around on the ‘Net, but I haven’t seen any other postings about this. The kicker is, I have a really good microphone, but the G5 doesn’t have a microphone jack anywhere (although it *does* have digital audio in/out). Apparently I have to buy some $30 (US of course) USB thingee that has a microphone jack on it or something. The alternative is that I could use the old slot-loading (as in, no LCD monitor) iMac, which will accept my good microphone just fine. But that’s more than a little inconvenient.

Bah.

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GarageBand and Halo togetherness

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 10:41 am on Tuesday, 20 January 2004

I spent about 10 minutes playing around with GarageBand and came up with this 30-second start of a song: rae-01.mp3. One thing that bothers me about GarageBand is that every time you start it up, you get this spinning progress dialog for quite a long time (at least on a 733 MHz G4). I’ll see if it’s any faster at home on the G5 later on.

In other news, I was alerted last night by my spies in Madrid that a patch for the Mac version of Halo has been release, which allows it to play nicely with the PC version. Wooo! Now Jeff, Iain, Peter, Michael, Ronnie and myself can all play in the same game! [David Brake too, if he is awake at the same time ] This will require serious testing of course. Maybe tonight..

Update: Peter and Jon have also made some Garageband music. Check out number one with a bullet!

Hey, if everyone gets in on this, we should make a community music library! Woo.

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A week at Alias

Posted by rae in Reid
at 4:43 pm on Monday, 12 January 2004

I’ve been working at Alias for a week now—January 5th was my first day. It’s been interesting; I wander the halls with the theme from Welcome Back, Kotter percolating its way through my brain..

my desk at Alias

I worked at Alias from March 15 1989 through to the end of June, 1997. I’m not sure why I remember those dates, but I do. I started off as “the repo guy”, a job now best described as “Build Engineer” (apologies to Tony and Walter for the use of the word “Engineer”). I would make sure that Alias/2 built every night, and chased down those resposible if it didn’t. After almost exactly a year, in 1990, I moved to the newly-formed “Style!” team, which was building a new 3D modelling app from scratch using the new langauge “C++”. Well, to make a loooong story short, that app ended up becoming Maya.

When I left in 1997, Maya was moving from Unix to Windows, and I didn’t have a lot of interest in the Windows platform, so I ended up at MGI, which became Roxio. There I worked on the Mac version of PhotoSuite, an OEM-only app that very few people have ever seen, I am sure.

Alias moved to a new building shortly after I left, and that’s where I’m working now. It’s more or less on the northwest corner of Sherbourne and King—the address is 210 King St E. If you want to give me a shout, call 416-874-8506.

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Spirit on Mars

Posted by rae in science
at 12:29 am on Thursday, 8 January 2004

The Spirit probe has sent several stero image pairs, and I haven’t seen anywhere on the web that displays them in such a way that you can actually try them out. The idea is that if they are side-by-side, you can kind of de-focus your eyes and merge the two images into a single 3D image. It’s way cool if you can get it to work.

Leave a comment saying whether or not you were successful with it!