December 2003 - Posts
Ok, it's finished! :) Yesterday I blogged about my Christmas coding session resulting in an OpenGL 3D effect I named 'Bands' and today I've transfered it into a screensaver, complete with .Text / Weblogs.asp.net textures, to say 'Thank you' to Scott and the other people who keep this blogging site running, in a more 'geeky' fashion.
Sourcecode (C++) is of course available. See the readme inside the binary archive how to install it.
- Binary (.zip). Download (377KB)
- Sourcecode (.zip). Download (736KB, incl. textures and dlls). It's not that beautiful, and perhaps can be optimized here and there.
Update: Screenshot
On a day like today, 1st Christmas Day (we here in Holland have 2 Christmas days), and a day with no work (some people call it a 'day off' ;) ), the geek inside you gets a chance to eat away some hours with an obviously useless, but fun coding session.
Years ago, I wrote an OpenGL effect library, DemoGL, which lets you develop and execute OpenGL effects with more ease, execute them on layers via a script, play music with the effects, sync the effects with the music and what else you can come up with. It's open source C/C++ and I totally forgot about that library until today and I thought: "Why not try to do some good old demoscene effects? I was active in the underground demoscene (first Amiga, later PC) from 1988 till 1998 (demo effect coding, music), and it was all a little rusty, I remembered some stuff like matrices, vertices and meshes, but that was it. (I had to spend 20 minutes to get the sinus calculus right in radians ;))
One of the many great effects he made, the 'bands/line' effect in 'Dozen' was, in my opinion, JMagic's best. JMagic, aka, Jarno Heikkinen of the group Komplex, was and still is one of the best the demoscene has ever seen. So if I could come close to that effect he made years ago it would be great. The effect is so great because you ride on one band and look at another one which gives a great 3D feeling, flying through 3D space. Click here to download the Java demo 'Dozen' (1999).
The result is below. It's written in C/C++, running as a class on top of the DemoGL kernel, and I'm quite happy with it. It's not as great as JMagic's code, but hey, it's been a while ;). Because DemoGL can also run as a screensaver, I'll try to produce it as a screensaver tomorrow, perhaps with some weblogs.asp.net textures so Scott can distibute it as a promo-screensaver :)
To all the people who celebrate the holidays: happy holidays! :) To all the people who don't celebrate anything in this period of the year: also to you: happy holidays :)
Follow these easy steps. The first 4 steps you only have to do ONCE in your life. Step 5-7 you only have to do ONCE per project.
- Open a command prompt
- Type vsvars32.bat (enter) or navigate to the .NET bin dir
- Type: sn -k mykey.key (enter)
- Move mykey.key to a folder where it gets backupped daily, for example: c:\myfiles\keys\
- Open your code's solution in Visual Studio.NET
- Open the AssemblyInfo class in the editor
- For the attribute AssemblyKeyFile(), specify instead of the default "", the full path of your key, in our example this is "c:\myfiles\keys\mykey.key", so the attribute in full will be:
C#: [assembly: AssemblyKeyFile("c:\\myfiles\\keys\\mykey.key")]
VB.NET: <Assembly: AssemblyKeyFile("c:\myfiles\keys\mykey.key")>
- Compile your solution. After compilation, your assembly is signed with your strong key.
- To congratulate yourself with this big achievement, walk to the fridge and pop open a fresh Heineken.
*Pfew* I have to lay down now to take some rest after this long, thorough lecture. Sorry people, but you don't need a plugin which requires registration to do this easy stuff. If you can program software, you can sign your assembly. If not, what are you doing near that keyboard? ;)
The signed assembly can be freely distributed to your clients/customers. They can reference it in their .NET projects without having to worry about public keys, public tokens or other hard to understand material. The world is already very complex, let's not make the easy stuff look like it's very complex also.
Update: Thanks to 'Prima Donna' Robert Mclaws for pointing to a typo in the title.
Kereltje, zodra jij zo goed Nederlands lult als ik Engels, heb je recht van spreken.
All of a sudden, people start blogging about O/R mapping, thanks to Steve Eichert. Thanks Steve! :) There is however a funny thing going on in some of those blogs: they use the term ORM.
O/R mapping is something else than ORM. O/R mapping is Object-Relational mapping, ORM is Object Role Modelling. ORM is also sometimes called the successor of NIAM and has its own website at: http://www.orm.net, run by prof. T. A. Halpin, once the researcher who developed NIAM with prof. G. Nijssen and others.
Now, do they relate? Well... in an ideal world, you should be able to use an ORM model as input for the code to generate/configurate by the O/R mapper: then you have both your relational model (abstracted via the E/R model for example) and the classes targeting this relational model. Visio for Visual Studio Enterprise Architect contains an ORM tool, which lets you design your abstract relational model and eventually generate DDL from it (and / or an E/R model).
This as a FYI while you're reading the O/R mapping articles about the pro/con aspects of O/R mapping.
It seems some people think they're funny by posting comments under my name in other blogs, or flooding my blogs with crapcomments.
I'll censor myself and will remove the two blogs I have posted today about Microsoft, they apparently have made some people that much upset that they think they don't have to behave like an adult anymore.
Ah well... apparently the consequence of expression an opinion...
I blogged yesterday about my concerns related to weblogs.asp.net, Microsoft, its employees moving to this site and my blog on that same site. A lot of reactions were posted and some good arguments were given. I have to agree that when you have something to say about company X and its products, the best place to do that is where company X communicates to the world, and this site is one of those places. I have decided to stay for now, however Fabrice had some very good points: the image of this site is wrong; which was proven by a reaction of Andrew in the same thread. Brilliant :).
Fabrice worded it very good: it had the image of a true community site, however it more and more gets the image of a corporate Microsoft site. I have to agree with that. I hope in the (near) future, the image towards a true community site will return, however I fear that will not be the case, but time will tell...
Anyway, everybody who responded, thanks a lot :)
With the invasion of MS employees and with the amount of solely pro-Microsoft blogs very recently, I more and more feel less at home here, since I have the feeling it is not that appropriate to say something less pro-Microsoft, with all the Microsoft employees now moving to weblogs.asp.net. I'm considering moving my blog elsewhere because of this.
More Posts