Entries Tagged 'Nerdy Stuff' ↓

This is just a quick post for anyone having difficulties getting Chrome to run on Windows 7 RC1. After installing Chrome, as soon as I tried to load a page it would either do nothing, or show me an “Aw Snap” page telling me something had gone wrong. As a result, the browser was completely useless. A quick search revealed that users can subscribe to one of three different Chrome channels. These channels are basically the three main builds of Chrome at a given time, which are: stable, beta, and dev. The quick solution to my problem was to switch over to the beta channel, which immediately fixed my problem. As proof, I’m currently writing this post using Chrome =D. Given that Windows 7 is still only at RC1, it’s not surprising that the stable build of Chrome doesn’t work with it (at least not for everyone).

As a side note, you should definitely check out Chrome Experiments to see some of the funky stuff people have done in browsers. The examples I’ve looked at also work in Firefox, so don’t worry if you don’t have Chrome installed.

After hearing a few people mention Windows 7 RC1 over the last week, my curiosity was piqued. I had heard and seen a bit about Windows 7 up until this point, however my busy schedule forced me to ignore the prospect of playing with it. I’m now glad to say that this post is being written with the aid of Windows 7 RC1. Not only that, but it is now the sole operating system on my main machine at home. That’s right folks, I blew Vista away yesterday without so much as a kiss goodbye and I haven’t regretted it for a second.

I don’t plan on doing a lengthy review or how-to now (or probably ever), I just wanted to share how easy it was to move to Windows 7 from Vista. First things first, you need to get yourself a copy of RC1. To do that, visit Microsoft’s download page and follow the links to download it. You’ll have to choose between the 32 and 64-bit options (I chose 64-bit) and you will also be asked to sign-in with a Hotmail, Messenger, Passport or Live account to proceed. Once you’ve jumped through the hoops, you’ll be given a product key and can start the download. At just over 3GB, you may be waiting a little while. Once that’s done, you’re ready to install!
Continue reading →

As part of a uni AI subject I’ve been playing around with implementing some basic path finding in OpenSim. Part of that involved moving objects around a region using the llMoveToTarget function. After some frustration, I’ve discovered that phantom objects do not appear to respond to this function (i.e. you can’t move them using this function). I’m not entirely sure what a phantom object is exactly, so this might be bleedingly obvious to others. Also, this may be incorrect as I haven’t really investigated it thoroughly. Anyways, if you’re trying to move something in OpenSim (or maybe Second Life) using llMoveToTarget and it doesn’t work, it might be worthwhile checking if the object is phantom.

On a personal note, I’m quite busy with uni at the moment, as well as courting (pun intended) my newfound sweetheart – squash (the sport, not the food). So don’t expect any major posts any time soon. If I do anything original with OpenSim (i.e. not implementing my lecturer’s code) I’ll hopefully get around to posting it here for you all to play with.

If you’ve seen my last post, you’re aware that I’ve been playing with OpenGL and GLUT for a uni subject. As I like to straddle the OS fence and use a mixture of Windows Vista x64, Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5, I like to have platform independent solutions to problems. The latest little issue I’ve come across regarding GLUT apps is that GLUT on the Mac has a different include. To include GLUT in a project for the mac, you must use the following:

#include <GLUT/glut.h>

and not:

#include <GL/glut.h>

In order to cut code that will compile successfully on either platform we can use optional includes with the #ifdef, #else and #endif preprocessor directives. Props to “kainjow” for providing this information in his/her forum post. Here’s how:

#ifdef __APPLE__
#include <GLUT/glut.h>
#else
#include <GL/glut.h>
#endif

All this does is say “if we’re running on an Apple machine, include GLUT/glut.h, otherwise include GL/glut.h. Now to actually learn OpenGL/GLUT…

I’ve recently had to install freeglut as part of a uni subject and ran across an issue due to the fact that I’m running Vista x64 and wanted to dynamically link freeglut against anything I develop during the semester. First of all, building freeglut (version 2.4.0) was problem free. I simply opened the “freeglut.dsw” file (in the root directory of the freeglut download) in Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005), agreed to convert the project files to a newer format, and then built the solution. An additional step I took, which may be completely unnecessary, was to change the build type from Debug to Release. Both build types built fine, but I used the release versions as I doubt I will be debugging freeglut. Also note that I compiled this as the default 32-bit, not 64-bit, as I’m building 32-bit GLUT apps for compatibility.

Once this was done, I followed the info in “README.win32″ (in the freeglut directory) and copied the files to the relevant directories. The specific directories I used for a Vista x64 system with VS2005 were as follows:

• copy “freeglut.h”, “freeglut_ext.h”, “freeglut_std.h”, and “glut.h” from freeglut-2.4.0\include\GL to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\Include\gl.
• copy “freeglut.lib” from freeglut-2.4.0\Release to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\Lib. Note that the correct destination should already contain “opengl32.lib”, “glu32.lib”, and “glaux.lib”
• Now here’s the part that caused me problems: copy “freeglut.dll” to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and NOT C:\Windows\System32 as you might expect, given that it’s a 32-bit library being used in 32-bit projects

Once the files are in place, you should be ready to use freeglut in your apps. To do so, simply include freeglut as follows:
(for some reason Wordpress hates this line in a code block…)
#include “GL/glut.h”

As you can see, we’re referencing “glut.h” and not “freeglut.h”. My guess is that this is done to maintain platform independence if your code was being built by a different incarnation of GLUT. For example I used this method to build and run the test app provided by my lecturer (unchanged), who uses the original GLUT.

***UPDATE 2009-02-27 ***
I copied the files I built on my Vista x64 machine to a 32-bit install of XP SP3 on my laptop and GLUT worked fine. The only difference to the above instructions (obviously aside from not building freeglut again) is to copy “freeglut.dll” to C:\Windows\System32. I’ve also put together a zip package of my build for anybody who wants to avoid building themselves.