Daniel’s Stuff

Somewhere where I can muse about the things that interest me

i48 1.1 is now available for download from the iTunes App Store

October 23rd, 2009 | Category: Cocoa, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPod Touch
Get it while you can

2 comments

I have just uploaded the next release of i48 for review

October 12th, 2009 | Category: Cocoa, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPod Touch
The latest version of i48 has been submitted review by Apple.

This new version adds support for running the emulation at full speed (although that has some interesting effects on usability).  I have also added theme support and included a theme based on Power48 provided by Fabrice Roux.  Finally the buttons now highlight when they are selected making it a bit easier to use the keyboard.
I was hoping to add sound support in this release, but have decided to submit what I have now and work on the sound support for the next release.
4 comments

i48 is now available on the iPhone App Store

September 10th, 2009 | Category: Cocoa, Mac OS X, Programming
Get it while it’s hot!

Available on the iPhone App Store

4 comments

BlogThing 2.0 has finally been released

August 28th, 2009 | Category: Cocoa, Mac OS X, Programming
After what seems like ages I have finally released BlogThing 2.0.  This new release is totally rewritten from scratch and provides some very nice new features.  The coolest one is the new video upload facility.  Just add a video file to the page and press the Post button.  BlogThing will encode the file and upload a custom Flash based video player.  It just works automagically :)
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New graphics for i48

August 10th, 2009 | Category: Cocoa, Mac OS X, Programming, iPhone, iPod Touch
The other day I received an email from Staffan Sevon containing some new graphics for the display of the application.  These look so much nicer.  Thanks Staffan!

36 comments

More progress on the HP48GX emulator for the iPhone

July 31st, 2009 | Category: Cocoa, Mac OS X, Programming, iPhone, iPod Touch
I had a bit more of a play with the emulator code tonight and fixed up a few little glitches.  I also changed the color of the emulation screen to look more like the real thing :)  Now off to bed!  It also looks like it is OK to distribute the ROM file as apparently HP released the ROMs to the public some time in 2000.  The github repository (http://github.com/dparnell/i48/tree/master) has been updated to include the ROM file.

5 comments

A HP48GX emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch

July 28th, 2009 | Category: Cocoa, Mac OS X, Programming, iPhone, iPod Touch
I have just released the source to a HP48GX emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
It’s a very rough port of x48 to the iPhone, but it works :)  There is the occasional screen glitch and I’m not too happy with the screen buffer code.  Something else that is a bit annoying is that it appears that compiling in Debug mode to run on the device does not work.  It looks like one of the case statements in the x48 emulation code is too big to be compiled for ARM under gcc.  I had a quick look at using the LLVM compiler but it didn’t seem to like it.
The code can be downloaded from http://github.com/dparnell/i48/tree/master 
Another thing to be aware of is that the code does not include a ROM, but they are fairly easy to come by with a bit of googling :)

1 comment

What I’ve been doing recently

July 26th, 2009 | Category: Web
Today I found out that an application I built for the iPhone has become available on the iTunes store.  It’s a simple little app to estimate electricity bills for a household.  Check it out on the iTunes store via the following link :) AGL Energy Efficiency
I’ve also been working on the Windows Live Mail compression code some more and have gotten some good results.  Below in an example of what I’m getting

X-Message-Delivery: Vj0xLjE7dXM9MDtsPTA7YT0wO0Q9MTtTQ0w9MA==

X-Message-Status: n:0

X-SID-PRA: Daniel Parnell <me@danie******pl <m********.com>-Status: n:0Info: JGTYoYF78jHVrAq/T4xfKLLpTvwPwE0t6g/vyq6tyzbqln5iNnXwcSMg41wQCSulCxd5N8UB57Lq6un/ug7i0YsGX30yo+pm

ReceLjEE7*d: from randymail-a4.g.dreamhostm>-S ([208.97.132.207]) by bay0-mc8-f11.bay00***.hot-a4. ([2*with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.2668);

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:06:38 -080


and this is what I should be getting.


X-Message-Delivery: Vj0xLjE7dXM9MDtsPTA7YT0wO0Q9MTtTQ0w9MA==

X-Message-Status: n:0

X-SID-PRA: Daniel Parnell <me@danielparnell.com>

X-Message-Info: JGTYoYF78jHVrAq/T4xfKLLpTvwPwE0t6g/vyq6tyzbqln5iNnXwcSMg41wQCSulCxd5N8UB57Lq6un/ug7i0YsGX30yo+pm

Received: from randymail-a4.g.dreamhost.com ([208.97.132.207]) by bay0-mc8-f11.bay0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.2668);

         Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:06:38 -0800


1 comment

I’ve been throttled

June 06th, 2009 | Category: Web

OH NO!  I’ve used up all of my download limit for the month and have been throttled down to 64kb/s.  It’s like being back on dialup again :(

localhost.localdomain-billion-month.png

Admittedly it is all my own fault.  As you can see from the chart above there was a period of sustained download earlier this month when I was downloading a very large torrent.

Ah well…  I just have to wait another 5 days for the next billing cycle to kick in to get my speed back to normal.

1 comment

FreeTDS and my new Mac Pro

March 08th, 2009 | Category: Mac OS X, Programming, Ruby, SQL Server
I’ve been having some “fun” with my new Mac Pro.  In order for me to be able to use it for my daily work I need to be able to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server instance from the Rails app I’m working on at my day job.  Normally this is just a simple matter of installing FreeTDS, Ruby-ODBC and the Ruby DBI and DBD packages.  When I did this, as soon as I tried to make a connection to the SQL Server instance my application would crash with a bus error!  After a bit of digging around with gdb I discovered that the application was crashing when FreeTDS was trying to deallocate a string using the standard C library memory function free.  The really weird thing is that the string was pointing to a valid string.  I dug a little further and found that if I changed the code that was allocating the string to use malloc and strcpy instead of strdup it worked!  If anybody out there knows why this might make a difference I’d really like to hear from them about it.

2 comments

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