Have been thinking about attempting to learn SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) for a wee while so what better way to spend a day off. It didn’t start well however
Here’s a typical example “Hello World” program in Visual Studio.
Look what happens when I attempt to include the SDL header. My main function becomes a member function and therefore won’t build.
Undefining main fixes the issue thanks to rodrigo at good ol’StackOverflow.
Service Host:Local System (Network Restricted) sitting on 100% Disk Usage; I’ve been plagued with this problem for weeks and I’ve slowly been trying to isolate the problem. I’ve tried editing my startup, shutting down my Anti-Virus service, and even disabling the Adobe Flash Player plugin in Google Chrome.
Tonight, thanks to Gelashvili at Ten Forums, my issue has completely gone. Gelashvili suggests going into your Windows 10 Settings, System, Notifications, and turning off “show me tips about Windows”. Being given Windows tips isn’t really something I’m particularly interested in so I gave it a try.
It worked for him, it worked for the individual that asked the question and it also worked for me too.
The problem here should stick out like a sore thumb and on this occasion I saw the cause of the red squiggly lines under the cout’s straight away. There’s a curly brace missing after my else statement (accidentally deleted).
So why am I writing this if it’s that simple? Because it’s caught me out before sometime ago and at the time I couldn’t see where the problem was. Scouring the web returned all sorts of suggestions including a lack of particular library includes (such as iostream, stdlib), or not using the std namespace which in some circumstances may do the trick.
However, often it’s the simple oblivious things that catch us out and it surprised me while researching this error for this post, how many examples of uploaded code with a brace missing there are that are being overlooked by the best of us.
I guess the rule of thumb is; check the little things.
Getting an Access Error randomly through your Receiver when attempting to access Pandora and it won’t go away? Or how about “We’re sorry, but we can’t find any more music to play on your station right now. Try switching stations” through your desktop browser?
Try creating a new Pandora account!
I’ve been plagued with this error at intermittent times over the past couple of years through my Yamaha RX-V675 receiver so this morning I had some time of my hands to troubleshoot the problem.
The web is full of suggestions to try and I think the best one came from a Yamaha support rep who suggested purchasing an Apple Airport Express in place of the wireless router one particular person was using in order to resolve the issue. Though apparently this resolved it for this person, I don’t think it is a fault with the equipment but more an issue with Pandora itself.
You will unfortunately have to re-do your created stations as well as your likes/dislikes but it should at least get you reconnected in the meantime.
So did it work for you too?
About a year ago, I started writing a little database program for the console (just a simple little thing to modify, add, and subtract items from a SQL-Lite database) and I wanted it to be colourful. However, the codes aren’t that much fun to type in so I came up with a crude implementation of something that could create a header file for me to handle exactly that.
It wasn’t pretty, and a year on with a little extra C++ knowledge under my belt I came up with this to replace it.
This creates a header file and also a nice output listing to print out.
Edit: I’ve since given it a third revision that outputs the codes to a console window rather than to an output file, which kind of made a bit more sense. I can copy/paste it to a future post if someone wants it.
// Program to output a definition header file for Windows Console colours
#include "stdafx.h"
#include
#include
#include
#include
using namespace std;
int main()
{
/* Output Header file */
ofstream outFile;
outFile.open("ConsoleColours.h");
outFile << "#ifndef ConsoleColoursH" << endl;
outFile << "#define ConsoleColoursH" << endl;
outFile << " " << endl;
/* Output Nice Listing */
ofstream niceList;
niceList.open("ConsoleColours-Nice.txt");
string listColours[16] = { "DARK_BLUE", "GREEN", "TEAL", "RED",
"PINK", "KHAKI", "WHITE", "GREY",
"BRIGHT_BLUE", "BRIGHT_GREEN", "BRIGHT_TEAL", "BRIGHT_RED",
"BRIGHT_PINK", "BRIGHT_YELLOW", "BRIGHT_WHITE", "BLACK" };
for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
{
for (int j = 0; j < 16; j++)
{
for (int k = 0; k < 16; k++)
{
// Output to console window
if (k % 16 == 0) cout << endl;
SetConsoleTextAttribute(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), i); cout << " " << i << " ";
// Output to header file
outFile << "#define " << listColours[j] << "_WITH_" << listColours[k] << "_BACKGROUND" " SetConsoleTextAttribute(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), " << i << ");" << endl;
// Create a nice title for each colour in our textfile
if (k % 16 == 0)
{
niceList << endl << listColours[j] << endl;
niceList << string(listColours[j].length(), '=') << endl;
}
// Output to nice listing
niceList << listColours[j] << "_WITH_" << listColours[k] << "_BACKGROUND" << endl;
i++;
if (i == 255) SetConsoleTextAttribute(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), 8);
}
}
}
outFile << " " << endl; outFile << "#endif" << endl; outFile.close();
// Reset Console to normal
cout << endl << endl;
SetConsoleTextAttribute(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), 7);
return 0;
}
I encountered an interesting and rather vague error message this evening within Outlook 2010. My Unread Mail search folder was shaded out and if I left clicked on it, it would produce a rather unhelpful message that “The operation had failed. Object could not be found”. Pretty vague eh. If you find this some thing yourself, here’s what I did to resolve the error and get my Search Folder back again.
I have Unread Mail as a Favourite so I deleted it.
I also deleted the Search Folder
Confirmed the deletion
Created a New Search Folder
Selected Unread mail as a Search Folder
Placed it back into my Favourites, sent a test email and wala!
I just love obscure Windows messages 🙂 Hope this helps someone
Just a tad disappointed. I was hoping that this blog post would have been a glorious annoucement that I was able to recover my old BBS from retirement and have it running (since taking it down some 18 years ago) through either UAE or WinUAE, but alas no.
After waiting almost a month for an Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI controller to arrive from the States, I was able to get the drive (A Micropolis 4110 1GB) running into Linux quite quickly. And given that Linux (in this case, Ubuntu 12.04LTS) is able to read AFFS volumes it was appearing that this just may work. I’m not entirely sure if it was the drive itself or a corrupted Rigid Disk Block, it was unfortunate that I was unable to get it mounted properly before it seemingly died through what I can only assume may have been excessive heat generation. The drive was extremely warm to touch after only 30 minutes or so of running and after that it produced no response at all. So as it is now, I may consider professional data recovery but I’m not sure it’s really worth the expense for what is actually just a nostalgia hit.
Never the less, I happened upon this photo a few months ago which was pretty much the impetus to encouraging me to revive the old board. It’s a photo of LightSpeed BBS from mid’95 during the board’s prime. Many many hours were spent here. Some heart ache at times but generally much enjoyment was had for both myself and the board’s callers.
At this stage LightSpeed BBS consisted of
Amiga A2000/040 @ 33mhz
16meg Ram
I/O Extender
1GB Micropolis SCSI Hard Drive
1GB Conner SCSI Hard Drive
2x 330meg Quantum SCSI Hard Drives
1x Double Speed SCSI Cd-Rom
2x Single Speed SCSI Cd-Rom
1 External Double Speed SCSI Cd-Rom drive (on loan from Amiga Christchurch Inc)
2x 28.8k SupraFaxModems
1x 14.4k SupraFaxModem
KTX SVGA 14″ monitor
Running Xenolink 1.98
This was networked with a
486 DX4-100
8meg Ram
540meg Hard Drive
Running Remote Access BBS
So fun times were the BBS days and it’s good to see a few locals still maintaining the old ways at a time when things were just a little bit different, fun and a little more exciting.
First Choice Core BBS @ 1stchoicecore.co.nz
and The Trashcan @ bbs.thenet.gen.nz:2323
Here are some links that I’ve found useful in my expedition to revive an Amiga drive without an Amiga machine.
Making a backup of an Amiga SCSI drive
Amiga Recovery Linux Application
Mount an AFFS drive within Ubuntu
Mount an AFFS Drive under Linux
** UPDATE: **
I gave in and sent the drive away to be checked over with the hope that perhaps the data could be recovered off it. I selected Digital Recovery in Hamilton, NZ for the task and they were mighty quick in diagnosing the fault and getting back to me.
Unfortunately, there was good news and bad news. The good news was they found the faults along with a suspected root cause, and they were able to repair it. Yay! But in order to repair it, we’d have to obtain an exact identical drive off eBay to pillage the necessary parts from. The trouble was, the cheapest we were able to find was going to set me back $180 which on it’s own isn’t that bad but factor in the data recovery cost plus what I’d already spent on the SCSI controller and the sum cost of this exercise was starting to climb to over $700NZD.
I got advice from friends, and also my partner Nikki and the answer was the same throughout. “You should be thinking about today’s tech, and not yesterdays tech” was a common theme.
So the drive has been returned and is sitting in a safe place until such time as something good happens. I’m sure I will return to this venture sometime in the future, but for the time being I’ll just have to wait and see.
This past Christmas, my partner Nikki thought it would be a good idea to gift me a GoPro Hero 4 for Christmas to give me an incentive to make time for mountain biking again. To cut a long story short, I had a minor wee downhill accident a year ago (just a couple of broken bones; nothing major) and it kind of knocked my confidence a wee bit so I’ve only been back on it a couple of times since 🙁
So it’s only taken me a little over a month to try this thing out and overall I’m pretty impressed. It’s easy to operate, picture quality is clear , it’s sharp, the attachments are all well thought out AND they fit without any hassles. But of course, there are plenty of reviews out there to discuss that sort thing, what I want to comment on are my experiences so far with vibration showing up in footage.
Nikki, to her credit, did her research and found that the GoPro Chesty is the mount to use for stable footage over rough terrain. But unfortunately it isn’t simply a case of throwing the camera on and getting stable footage as I discovered.
The first ride I had I didn’t put alot of emphasis in ensuring that the straps were too tight and as a result the footage bounced around ALOT. I also didn’t pay too much attention to where I positioned the camera either which was in that area of the torso between the pects and the abdominals.
So on the second ride, I made the straps a little tighter and also moved the positioning of the camera so it was directly over my pectorals where there was less flappy skin. This improved things a little further but the footage still bounced all over the place.
Third ride, I made an effort to really tighten the straps while keeping the camera positioned over my pectorals. This improved the footage alot but there was still some vibration but it was nowhere near as severe as the previous two rides.
Finally on my fourth ride earlier today, I made the straps as tight as I could so the chesty was rock solid, I also made my rear suspension a little harder (I usually like a them soft for downhill), and finally I let some air out of both tyres for a little extra cushioning. I usually climb at around 40psi so I dropped that to around 25-30psi. All of this produced the video that I’ve attached to this post. There is still some work to do but I feel I’m on the right track to getting it stabler now.
Just for interests sake, I tried a bit of post production on the video using both Adobe Premiere with the Warp Stabilizer plugin, and VirtualDub with the Deshaker plugin also. Both produced some impressive results but the appearance of stability was overshadowed by the illusion that bike speed was completely lost. So minus the couple of edits, this video is straight from the camera without post production.
Finally, there’s adjusting the video mode and this will take some trial and error on my part over the coming weeks. The above video was shot in 1080p@60fps and I’ve a suspicion that if I lower the resolution and up the fps a bit it may improve the illusion of stability even further.
Anyway, so far these are my findings.
Last night I discovered just how frustrating Linux can be and my night of frustration started with VMWare and by accidently pulling the power cable on my VM server box. This is what I was presented with once I restored the power
Cancelling would produce no result so I selected that I copied it; which was a bad move 🙂 You see, I’m of the school of thought that if you move something you’re pretty much supplying it with a new address.
Take this analogy, if you’re living at (say) #12 Smith Street and you move across the road to #11 Smith Street, in order for you to still receive your mail you’d have to update your address details. But let’s say you continue to live at #12 but you’ve taken a fancy to the hot chick living at #11 and seem to spend more time living there than at home. In this case, of course you wouldn’t redirect your mail as you’ve effectively copied your living arrangements to two seperate addresses.
This is where VMWare admin works a little differently and this post written by Simon Seagrave explains VMWare’s UUI’s beautifully.
So through my folly, I’d effectively altered the MAC addresses for both of my VM’s. So why is Linux getting the brunt of my frustration? Because I feel lead astray and it took me most of the night to figure it out.
Basically, my static network settings within the ifcfg-ens160 file were being over-ridden and a new IP address was being issued dynamically through DHCP. So I’d attempt to restart the network and it would return a RTNETLINK answers: File exists error.
I happened upon this post byMensaWater who suggested that I should try
ifdown ens160:1; ifdown ens160; ifup ens160
On it’s own this did nothing. No, in fact it did return
Device has MAC address 00:00:00:00:00 00:12:34:45:AB:EA, instead of configured 00:12:34:43:C0:BA. Ignoring,
According to this my MAC address had changed so I updated the ifcfg-ens160 file with the new MAC address and still no change.
Eventually I found that I had to stop, then disable NetworkManager with
systemctl stop NetworkManager
systemctl disable NetworkManager
At this point, MensaWaters advice worked a charm and my old static IP address was fully restored.
I don’t recall ever using NetworkManager and everywhere I look people suggest to not only disable it but in some cases to remove it altogether. So my question is, what is it doing there if it creates so much frustration?
Never the less, the VM’s are back up…..
For nearly 20 years, I’ve held onto the original SCSI hard drive that my old BBS used to reside on and for sometime I’ve contemplated the idea of attempting to restore the contents of that drive into another Amiga just for curiosities sake. I’ve often glanced at it and wondered whether or not it still works. So for a few years now, I’ve been searching for a boxed Amiga to return it to, however boxed Amiga’s have become somewhat of a collectors item in recent years, and it’s become somewhat futile. I found an Amiga A4000/040 with a Picasso card the other day for over $3500US! 🙁
Anyway, this past week my curiosity has gotten the best of me and this morning I’ve taken the first big step into attempting to restore the contents of the drive by purchasing an Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI PCI controller card off ebay. I had intended to put it in an old PC I had lying around which fired up ok but it appears to be generating a long BIOS beep code which is usually akin to a memory error. The trouble is, it doesn’t do it all the time though which is annoying. It’s making me wonder whether or not there’s a short somewhere perhaps. Later, I may have a closer look at that. But for the time being, I’ll wait for the card to arrive then I’ll go from there.