I love to sit on the carpet and work with my laptop. A joy thats has increased 10fold since I moved over to Ubuntu. It is however an uncomfortable experience to which, I have long sought to solve. Aching back and neck seemed to be the only result of a long session of pottering around with my laptop. The solution is now here, the X-Rocker. I went into PC world hoping to find a Type A to Type A usb cable. I did not find one, irritated I wandered round the shop wondering how to solve my laptop heating problems when a curved leather seat caught my eye. I went over to check it out. It was an X-Rocker gaming chair. It immediately struck be that this might be the solution to my sitting-on-the-floor problems. I tried it out it felt even better. I looked at the price and hated it (the price) immediately. However I thought if PC world sold it at that price there it was bound to be cheaper online. Once I got home online I went and sure enough Argos was selling a discounted one for £54. I Immediately reserved it on line and went to pick it up.
Thank God I drove the X-Rocker box was huge and heavy, it was no joke lugging the damn box to my car. There was a stupid little girl and her mother who did not want to move out of my way as I approached them, sweating and struggling with my package. One 'Gangway coming through' and I swear if they had not moved I would not have been responsible for my actions. Idiots. Having goten over that unpleasantness I got home, unpacked and set up the contraption and proceeded to sit in it and work for 5 hours straight with no discomfort whatever. Best of all it has a wicked subwoofer and speakers each placed beside my head, os I jacked in from my laptop and proceeded to listed to Groove Salad in all its glory. I'm no gamer - I think I'm one of the only people to get a negative score at Halo - but this is one of the best thing to ever come out of the gaming support industry. To the originator of this marvelous idea, I doff my cap.
Yesterday I updated my Papervision3D SVN package and to my shock and dismay the Effects branch disappeared. I was so shocked that I went to bed and refused to take a look at the implications of the merge until this morning. No doubt a lot of improvement has gone into the new build but the loss of the Pixel and Pixel3d classes have hurt me a great deal. With out a shadow of a doubt they have been my favourite of all the Papervision classes and in truth on account of those classes I really wish the branches were never merged or totally merged. I personally have never used the Great White branch and there was so much stuff in the Effects branch that so much will be missed except there is a total integration. I'm still hoping that this will be the case.
Having said that and gotten over my initial shock there is a lot to be said for GreatWhite +. Most of the basic Papervision procedures remain the same but, the first change of note I discovered was with effect rendering. The BitmapEffectsLayer is now a subclass of the ViewportLayer which in turn replaces the RenderLayer.
Previous:
//CREATE THE BITMAP EFFECT LAYER PREVIOUSLY (FX BRANCH)
_bfx = new BitmapEffectLayer(800, 600, true, 0, BitmapClearMode.CLEAR_POST, true, false);
_bfx.addEffect(new BitmapLayerEffect(new BlurFilter(2, 2, 2), false));
_vport.addRenderLayer(_bfx);
Now:
//CREATE THE BITMAP EFFECT LAYER NOW
_bfxl = new BitmapEffectLayer(_vp, 500, 500);
_bfxl.addDisplayObject3D(_scene.getChildByName('part'));
_bfxl.addEffect(new BitmapLayerEffect(new BlurFilter(2, 2, 8)));
_vp.containerSprite.addLayer(_bfxl);
This gives a certain amount of granularity to the use of your various effect as you can add and remove from the BitmapEvectLayer display stack at will.
In my view when it comes to documenting Actionscript, nothing comes close to
NaturalDocs. Its a point and shoot procedure and words cannot express the admiration I have for the work Greg Valure has done on this amazing tool. I've tried a few other documentation tools and this one comes tops all the time. The most impressive feature of this documentation tool is the way it sets up the sub and super classes of the target class so you can trace its hierachy should you need to do so. The downside is that it is a command line tool by default and having being brought up on Windows I have never been one to enjoy command line tools. This malady is cured by the tool that a dear friend Richard Leggett had written for poor souls like myself in mind -
NaturalGUI. I have not been able to work it in Ubuntu but for Windows its brilliant. Still, the NaturalDocs command line is extremely easy to deploy so I have not felt the pinch.
You can find enough documentation on formating and syntax and all that in the very well documented NaturalDocs help. What in my view was lacking was a how to get started. I hope this little bijou I'm offering here will fill that gap.
Linux: The distro I use is Ubuntu 8.04 so its the process of starting NaturalDOcs in this distro I will be using to explain the Linux procedure. I'm a new emigree to Ubuntu so, for hardened users if I make descriptive errors I beg pardon.
- Download the NauralDocs zip archive and unzip to a folder you create called NaturalDocs in the /home/[user name] folder.
- Open your terminal and change directory (cd) to /home/[user name]/NaturalDocs
- chmod +x NaturalDocs (this is crucial, Ubuntu does not give write permissions by default so if you do not do this it will not work).
- Now point NaturalDocs at the folder you want to document. -i means input folder, -o means output, -p means project folder.
ayo@cyclone:~$ ./NaturalDocs -i /media/disk/Mortar/aYo/ -o HTML /media/disk/Mortar/aYo/docs -p /media/disk/Mortar/MLP/aYo/docsVoila, your documentation appears.
Windows: Windows follows the exact same procedure but, there is an added step in theinitial set up - PERL. You need to install PERL on your computer as NaturalDocs is a Perl script. You also do not need to chmod NaturalDocs in Windows. In the Windows environment, Richard Leggett's GUI comes into play beautifully. Unzip it into the NaturalDocs folder, run it, place the folder paths in the form fields and click the 'Generate' button. That's it, documentation created.
A couple of weeks ago I was hospitalized with a rather unpleasant facial injury. The deluge of negative news about the state of the NHS has been so inundating that in truth I was almost tempted to suffer in silence rather than go to hospital. I had no choice though the injury was too severe to 'stick my head of the sand' and hope it went away, so off to hospital I went. Off first to A&E at the Royal Free Hospital. I had to wait for 3 hours but, this was inevitable due to the number of other accident victims. When I finally did get seen the Doctors were pleasant, conversational and generally nice peaple. It was also helpful that my doctor was pretty. Having done the X-rays I was refered to the University College London Hoapital where I was admitted. I had surgery 2 days later and well that was that. Here too the people were very very nice. Professional, pleasant and caring in their own different ways. I like d my Doctors and the staff on the ward. The only downside was the fact that I could not get a wireless connection for my computer and what was on offer was well HHHHMMMMMNNN!!!.
All in all I doff my cap to all those in the NHS who have made it what it is. They are doing a sterling job and from my personal experience they should be commended. I however do not think they should pay the doctors any more though - their pay is cool now :). Well Done NHS people, very well done.
