GoneWacko’s Blog

Work Placement in Finland

Fooled you! Completely disregarding what I may or may not have written the other day, I’ve decided to write about something not-entirely-technical anyway. I probably will until I figure out what I want and how I want it.

Anyway, I’ve been planning on going abroad for my work placement for quite some time. A good friend of mine went to Finland about 2 years ago I think it was, and he came home with such good stories that I’ve always wanted to go to Finland ever since. I’ve somehow always thought that Finland was a pretty cool country. The land of Metal, cold weather, and incomprehensible languages.

Anyhow, I recently started to do the things needed to get there for my work placement which will be from February until June. At the moment the plan is to go to a company called doRego (or some other variation of the capitalization of that word) which is a company in Salo, some 2 hours west-north-west of Helsinki. The aforementioned friend went there, too. The plan is also to go with a classmate and good friend (Roel).

Recently yet another friend of mine (Jan-Jaap) bought an XBOX 360 and we (Roel, Jan-Jaap and yours truly) have been enjoying a great many games like Assassin’s Creed, Halo 3, etc. So now I’m saving money to buy an XBOX 360 myself, which I think may come in handy in Finland if we ever get bored (which should not happen because there should be a lot of international students there to socialize with).

I’ve also been thinking of taking my PC along. Doing some quick calculations (two screens of 5 kg each, plus a case which I’ve estimated at around 15 (may have been a gross overestimation) would amount to a total shipping cost of 270 euros, with UPS). Although that does seem to be some sort of express delivery where it gets delivered the next day, so maybe it’s cheaper if I tell them to take as long as they want.

How do I make money for buying xboxes and paying shipping costs, you ask?
I’ve been working as a (Visual Basic 6.0) programmer, which is great fun and lucrative! I’ve just finished writing a printing system (which took ages to write because I tried 3 different methods and found out they all Failed Badly™) and now I’ve started to work on a way for the application I’m working on (Dutch website: Voetbaltrainingsuite.nl) to be internationalized. It’s a bit of a makeshift solution at the moment though.

I shall no doubt be posting more about (and possibly from) Finland in the coming months, because I’m quite excited about going there

Gallery Deleted

I deleted the gallery from my website, for two very good reasons:

• I wasn’t updating it because I don’t take a lot of pictures
• Lately my website’s been terribly slow. After complaining to orudge a bunch of times, it seemed that spambots spamming on my gallery were stressing MySQL too much. Oops!

It was also a terribly outdated version of the software, so that might’ve been a reason for it, too.

I don’t think it will be missed too much

A new direction

I’ve lately been thinking of going in a different direction with this blog.

Writing about what happens in my life is not really for me. Not necessarily because nothing ever happens, but just because I don’t really realize at the time that it makes for blogging material.
Instead, I think I’ll just blog about anything technology/computer related that I engage in, stumble upon, am excited about or feel like telling people about

While I realize that there’s bound to be a smaller audience for that than for the more generic topic that is my life, I’ve decided not to care for one very good reason:
Nobody actually reads my blog posts NOW, so I don’t have to worry about losing any readers ;). So if I’m going to write for no one but me, why not write about stuff that interests me?

Attempting to program

Warning: geeky entry coming up which is probably not even interesting to people who are going to know what the heck I’m talking about.

Boy do I hate it when this happens.

I’ve recently been in a mood where I wanted to do programming. This is remarkable, because there are plenty of games I still have to play, including Settlers 6 (which didn’t work before due to a bug in the SPTD drivers when used in combination with my on-board RAID controller (ICH7)) which I’m playing at the moment, The Witcher (good reviews) and Gears of War. Not to mention that the copy of Crysis which I pre-ordered some 3 months ago should arrive in a few days, and there’s also the new SimCity which is due this week, which many people predict will be a disappointment, but I’m not going to have an opinion on until I’ve played it.

Anyhow, I think this urge to write code comes from doing my current semester, which is called DDOA or “Develop a Distributed Object Oriented Application”. As the name suggests, it’s all about designing and writing applications that are written in object oriented languages (in this case Java) and which are distributed, meaning that they run on multiple machines at once, be it in a grid, cluster or even just multi-threaded applications.

I’ve really enjoyed this semester up to now, because it’s finally a semester on software design/architecture (which is one of the main reasons why I really wanted to study computer science: to learn how to write good programs) and it’s also a semester which finally covers some serious programming, the kind of programming which I’ve so far only done in my free time, as a hobby.

Now, I’ve been trying to write numerous applications in the last couple of days, such as a Wishlist application in which I can keep track of things I still want to buy. This program seemed like a fun exercise in C# as well as ADO.NET (more specifically, the MySQL wrapper for ADO.NET). Unfortunately, the class that was going to handle most of the database work didn’t work the way I wanted and I quickly gave up (or at least I decided to try again some other time).

I’m the owner of a G15 Gaming Keyboard which features a small 160×43 Monochrome LCD screen which can display a variety of applets, such as a Media Player applet which shows information about a variety of popular media players, a Clock applet which shows the current time (really!), a POP3 mail checker, etc. It’s a bit gimmicky, but I like it because it does certainly give me access to stuff like the current time or my media player without leaving my game. Logitech advertises the keyboard with promises that many games support the screen to show information such as ammo/health/energy, but really I only know of 5 popular games that support it. I did recently experience that TimeShift shows Health and Energy information on the screen, but since I don’t tend to look down at my keyboard when I’m playing a first person shooter, it wasn’t all that useful.

Click to Enlarge

However, it is of course possible to write your own applets for this LCD screen, using a(n) (somewhat poorly documented) SDK written in C++. Yesterday I felt like messing about with it a little bit, and the end result is shown to the right. Unfortunately, displaying an image is as simple as converting it to an XPM-like file (I actually made an XPM file and converted it to the desired format manually) and telling the API to display it, while deciding what to draw at runtime (i.e. text, progressbars, etc) is considerably harder (with the lowest level API available anyway).
I decided I wanted to write two things:

• A DLL for mIRC which allows me to display and/or say my currently playing song
• A DLL for mIRC that shows the latest couple of lines from the channel in the LCD screen

To add to (what would in the end appear to be) pain, I wanted to write these DLLs in C#. Writing an application for the LCD screen I knew was possible, because EveMon, a tool which keeps track of your Eve Online character even when you’re not logged in, also displays this information on the LCD screen.
I decided to do things the quick and dirty way by just ripping the LCD screen code from EveMon and using it myself. Now all I needed to do was write a DLL that would work with mIRC. Of course I quickly figured out that writing a DLL in .NET would not make the DLL compatible with mIRC, which expects it to be written in C++, C, or some other non-.NET language. A quick search on Google told me that I could still write a plugin for mIRC by using the /com (for COM) command instead of the /dll (you guessed what for) command.
Writing the DLL itself ended up being pretty easy. After about 30 minutes of fiddling around in mIRC, I also got the COM connection to open and some simple hello world message to return from the DLL. My LCD screen however stayed awkwardly devoid of any (testing) chat lines. Furthermore, unloading the DLL kept the DLL loaded anyway, and closing mIRC resulted in it crashing.

Today I decided to move all the LCD code into a standalone application, which gave me a better shot at debugging the LCD code. Turns out it’s complaining that the LCD SDK .NET wrapper DLL (which works fine in EveMon) is a ‘bad image’ which probably has not been compiled for .NET.
The genious that I am when it comes to the internals of a compiled program, I gave up and decided to do something else, because I usually come up with some new angles to look at the problem over the span of 2 or 3 days after a problem arises.

As for the currently-playing-displaying-dll-for-mIRC: This should be a lot easier to make, although I do have to figure out how to get the relevant data from Windows Media Player. Live Messenger uses a WMP plugin, but the applet for my keyboard does not use such a plugin and THAT works, so there’s bound to be some other way using API calls or some sort of exported file.

I wish I would just decide to program something and actually just do it without running into silly issues like these. Maybe I should just stick to writing Hello World, at least that never fails for me.