Torsten Curdt’s weblog

Megademos, trackmos and intros – they are graphical presentations programmed in Assembler. With the challenge to make the impossible possible on a 7MHz machine. Very low level programming with highly optimized code. In the days before Direct3D and OpenGL you had to be a bit more creative to make fancy 3D animations in real time. (Ahhh – sweet memories!) For a couple of times already I tried to get an AMIGA emulator working to play all the cool old classics and have them preserved for eternity as a video. (No idea whether my old AMIGA 500 still works these days). Unfortunately the results with the different emulators where quite mixed. Especially in the last production I have been involved in we must have done something really quirky. It just refuses to work on any emulator I’ve come across so far. (It’s amazing how complicated it seems to be to properly emulate an old 7MHz AMIGA even on a new 1.3 GHz Intel machine!) Now recently I discovered that even our last production made it onto youtube!! Yay! Not further need to muck around with the emulators!

While at that time I was very proud of the moving mirror part and even the rotating circles it looks quite lame these days …with all the power the graphics boards give you. But it was fun. The vector calculations, the optimized square root approximation, the sin/cos optimization, the line drawing algorithm where we counted clock cycle, the smart circle algorithm. And all in good old 68k Assembler.

Finding the good content on joost is sometimes still a bit challenging. If you are located in Germany you might want to have a look at this list of movies that are now available from Paramount Pictures. Old classics like Star Trek, “Once Upon a Time in the West”, an Eddy Murphy or Stephen King’s “Pet Cemetery”. Not bad – but let’s hope for some more …preferably not geo restricted.

Earlier this year I announced in “Building Debian packages in java” a new project called jdeb to build debian packages from java. The new version is available now.

Jdeb allows you to build debian packages cross platforms. This release includes the following new features:

• Support include/exclude filter for the different data sources (directory or tgz archive).
• Support for file attribute mappings. Be it a simple rename, adding or removing prefixes or even getting the mode and ownership from a text file.
• Support to generate (even signed!) debian changes files.
• Abstracted the processing so adding a maven implementation will be easy.
• Fixed a bug where temporary files did not get deleted.

I suggest to just have a quick look into the howto for more details. Although the syntax has changed a little this release is a drop in replacement for 0.1. Feedback is much welcome!

When you are on the road with a GPS device it usually has a tracking feature that records when you are exactly where. You can set waypoints at points of special interests explicitly with the device. On my Garmin I just have to press a button and put in the name. Unfortunately this can be quite disruptive and looks very geeky. But there is a simple solution: As the GPS tracks represent where you are at when, it is also possible to find out where you stopped (=didn’t move) for longer than 5 minutes for example. Great gpsbabel to the rescue you can easily extracts waypoints from your track like this:

gpsbabel -i gpx -f track.gpx -x track,pack,split=5m -x simplify,count=2 -x transform,wpt=trk,del -o kml -F pauses.kml

No more “wait a sec …I need to put in the name”.

I have admit that I wasn’t too happy with all aspects of the current UI of the Joost player. Finding content on the platform is still too hard. So I recently came across the latest Queens of the Stone video on Joost only “by accident”. But the good thing is – there is progress …as someone now revealed with a screencast on youtube. I am really looking forward to the upcoming improvements.