HP ProLiant MicroServer: thoughts

I’ve been looking for a new home server for a few months. Recently (the last six years) have been running EPIA Mini-itx motherboards in Cubid cases. They are basically silent and powerful enough to run a small fileserver and webserver.

My EPIA boards were starting to show their age …

Graphing Electricity Usage with Current Cost and Munin

Many years ago I bought a Current Cost meter. Infact it was so long ago now that they have called my version The Classic. I wanted to see how much electrical energy all my servers, home computers and gadgets were using.

The Current Cost package contains two main parts, a …

Using Python and Tkinter to capture script output

In order to build the assets for my games I have a series of python scripts that know how to take files TexturePacker, Tiled, and Blender and build them for use within the engine. My main platform is OS X and it has good terminal support and more importantly I …

Generating Anagrams in Lua

I’m working on a game where I need to generate anagrams of words. My new game engine, which is Max Astro’s engine but with a few tweeks, integrates Lua and all the game logic is in Lua.

So given a string like “chicken” I want “kcehcine” or some …

Starter Blender Exporter

I’ve settled on using Blender 2.6 both as a level editor and modeller for my next game (code name BBM). BBM is a 2D game but modelling the characters and rendering the sprites will save a lot of time. Blender isn’t the best level editor but it …

Logical Bit Operators in Lua When Using Floats

I’m making some changes to the codebase that drives Max Astro before making my next game. The biggest change is that the engine is going to be controlled by Lua. Lua will run the main logic loop and lua will be the configuration language.

One of the oddities of …

iPhone App Version Information In XCode

When you create an iOS Application in XCode by default the version of the application is stored in-Info.plist. It would be really handy to get this in to code for compile time checks and #defines.

PList files are actually XML files which makes them easy to read in a …

Metalify - A Spotify Clone

For a few months I’ve wanted to make a clone of Spotify but I haven’t been able to justify the time. Last week I decided to take a week off and give it a go. The justification for this is that I wanted to deploy a Django website …

Apple TnC Changes and Lua

With the beta release of iPhone OS 4.0 Apple has changed the terms and conditions for developers who want to target the iPhone platform (note that includes the iPod Touch and iPad).

There has been a of discussion about changes to clause 3.3.1 most notably by Gruber …

NvStrip and Blender – Stripifying Models for the iPhone/iPad.

What Is Stripification?

Stripification is the process of turning lists of triangles in an arbitrary order into as many lists of triangles that contain adjacent edges. There is a great explanation of a triangle strip of wikipedia.

Why would you stripify?

On most platforms Triangle Strips render more quickly. The …