scottmc.com

HaikuPorts

2008-06-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of months I've been busy working on ports for Haiku. There's a website setup to help coordinate porting efforts, currently setup at assembla.com, soon to move over to haiku-files.org. The site has the popular project management tool trac, along with a subversion repository to store patches. We are making steady progress on a bunch of different ports. If you have ever worked on porting things over to BeOS or Zeta, or would just like to try lending a hand, why not stop on by and sign up and join in the fun?

Haiku on an eMachines M6805 laptop

2007-08-31T11:27:00.000-07:00

Ok, so here's how my testing on my eMachines M6805 laptop with fresh Haiku builds is going so far. I will also be testing it soon with a Gateway MX7118, but not until SATA is working in Haiku, check back for those results soon.

Processor Mobile AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1800MHz 1MB L2 - Detected and works
Northbridge Via K8T800, Southbridge Via VT8235 - Detected and works
Memory: 1GB+256Mb SODIMMS work fine.

Hard Drive Hitachi TravelStar 5K80 60GB 5400RPM (Mine is upgraded to a TravelStar 100GB 7200RPM) - Detected and works fine
DVD Drive Lite-On DVD/CD+RW (untested for DVDs, and CD Burning)

Card Reader Neodio ND3260 8in1 Reader (untested but doubtful on this until USB mass storage is done)

Video ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Series - ATI RV350 NP - Detected and works (accelerated too)
Display Samsung LTN154X1 15.4" WXGA - just works

Ethernet Via Rhine II - Detected and works
Wireless Broadcom BCM94306 802.11g (no wireless in Haiku that I can see so far)
Modem Smart Link v.92 56K winmodem (untested, no need for modem with broadband...)

Audio Realtek ALC250 - Tested and works
Cardbus ENE CB1410 (untested)
Firewire Via VT6306 (Firewire is being worked on still)
Touchpad Synaptics - Tested and just works

So it's already better supported than it ever was on BeOS. The firewire did work on BeOS so I suspect that when they get firewire working in Haiku that will work on this model as well.

Haiku Testing

2007-08-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been testing the nightly builds of Haiku again. It's getting there. My old laptop (eMachines M6805 upgraded with 1GB memory and 100GB 7200rpm HDD) which didn't work right with BeOS due to driver issues is already mostly supported. Video, wired network, USB mouse all didn't work in BeOS but worked on first boot in Haiku. I finally managed to get BeOS Max installed on the old laptop and then used BeOS to put a bootable Haiku partition on it as well. Ran bootman to allow for booting into whichever OS I picked and it just worked. Ok not perfect yet. There's still work being done on Haiku, and if you try hard enough you can find lots of things that don't work yet in Haiku. But what they are looking for is bug reports for things that "haven't" already been reported. Checking the bug report list you'll see many bugs are being fixed daily now. And with the 8 Google Summer of Code students also hacking away we should see some more things working real soon now. Also in the works is SATA support which will then allow me to do testing on my newer laptop (A Gateway 7118MX). I am using it for testing as well but in vmware inside Ubunutu.

TrackMania Nations Rain On The Brain

2006-06-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest TrackMania Nations Video, this time a short track with 100+ cars on it.
Here's a direct link: http://home.comcast.net/~scottmccreary/RainOnTheBrain100.avi

TM-Exchange Nations is down

2006-05-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

While TM-Exchange Nations is down you can download my Nations tracks here.

Vertically Challenged

2006-05-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

I'm collecting replays from my newest trackmania track and I am going to make a video out of it, so far I have 10 replays but will be getting more. I'm aiming to have 20+ cars in it. Here's what it looks like so far.

Trackmania track design

2006-03-31T08:16:00.001-08:00

One thing rookie track makers seem to have a hard time doing is to match up the track pieces so they are smooth. I put together this screenshot to show what I mean. Notice the unsmooth transitions where the arrows are. Nadeo gives you the correct pieces to make these transitions smooth. Play around with the pieces and learn how they fit together to make a smoother track, and we'll all be much happier ;)

Click here to see my Trackmania Nations tracks. Play them in solo mode and post your WR replays, or just leave comments/awards for the ones you like best. Play these online on the "Air Time Dedicated Server". Have fun all.

yellowTAB and Haiku developers collaborate on Intel Graphics (&BeOS) Driver

2006-03-27T12:43:00.000-08:00

Code for the Intel Graphics driver has already been checked into Haiku's source tree and is even reported to work on BeOS R5. Supported at this point is the i865G, but more to come I'm sure.

read more | digg story

My Trackmania Nations Tracks

2006-02-27T12:42:00.000-08:00

I've now posted 17+ TrackMania Nations tracks up on TM-EXCHANGE. Head on over, download a few and play them in SOLO mode, save your best time REPLAYs and post them back to TM-EXCHANGE. Also be sure to leave comments on each letting me know what you liked or didn't like on each one. That way it'll give me ideas on what to put into future tracks. Be sure to award your favorite ones, so others will know which ones are the best ones to try out first.

Trackmania - Nations

2006-02-09T11:17:00.000-08:00

Well Nadeo has done it again. This time it's Trackmania - Nations. They are giving this one away for free. My guess is that they will be putting ads in the game on the billboards, so far I've only seen Nadeo and nVidia ads but I wouldn't be surprised to see more soon. I've already been busy playing online and making new tracks for this version. To see and play my tracks head over to my tracks page at tm-exchange. Download the tracks, play them in solo mode and post your fastest replays. Also be sure to reward the ones you liked best. Also you may see my server on-line listed as "Air Time".

Interview with Bernd Korz of yellowTab

2005-12-22T08:03:00.000-08:00

He talks about ZETA from it's BeOS days to where it is heading. He announces that they "have already sold about 100,000 ZETA Deluxe Editions as well as distributing over 600,000 live CD's this fall." He talks about the move to GCC4, multi-user, using more BSD parts and a complete implementation of posix.

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I am now a Ceritified LabVIEW Associate Developer

2005-12-19T14:27:00.000-08:00

Last week I took the National Instruments Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer's Exam and passed it. So now I am a Ceritified LabVIEW Associate Developer. Too bad there's not a graphical version of C or C++, text languages seem to be so much more difficult to debug.

Ozone generating air cleaners harm your CD and DVD drives as well

2005-12-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

A followup to the Pease Porridge story from September, there's a new report that the ozone generating air cleaners also harm DVD and CD players, basically anything that has exposed rubber in it.

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Firefox 1.5 now available for BeOS

2005-12-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

The BeOS porting team of the Mozilla project is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Firefox 1.5 release for BeOS-compatible systems. Get the BeOS theme too.

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Zeta 1.5 to add multi-user

2005-12-05T22:52:00.000-08:00

Zetanews shows a sneak peek at Zeta 1.5 Alpha. The much asked for Multi-user feature may finally come to the BeOS/Zeta world.

read more | digg story

Out of Money? Print some more!

2005-12-03T22:49:00.000-08:00

Monopoly money that is... Hasboro provides pdf documents of Monopoly money that you can print on a color printer.

read more | digg story

Abusive New York Camera Store Threatens Blogger

2005-11-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

"I will make sure you will never be able to place an order on the internet again." "I'm an attorney, I will sue you." "I'm going to call your local police and have two officers come over and arrest you." Just a few of the fun things I got to hear today from someone who said his name was Steve Phillips over at PriceRitePhoto.

read more | digg story

Lovehammers on iTunes

2005-11-11T07:43:00.000-08:00

The Lovehammers have added L'Strange to the iTunes music store. This is the second album they have available on there. The other, Murder on My Mind has been available for some time on iTunes. Both albums are great, L'Strange came out in 2002, MOMM in 2003, but they are just now getting noticed after Marty Casey came in second on RockStar:INXS, I'm glad that he didn't win, because now people will hear more about the Lovehammers. I have been listening to both albums for the last few weeks and can't say there's a song on them that I don't like. If you haven't heard of them, head on over and check 'em out. If you perfer CD, you can get them from Lovehammers.com

INXS with their new lead singer

2005-09-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

This past week on Rock Star, INXS picked their new lead singer, J.D. Fortune. On Sept 23, 2005 they played on two different US TV shows, The Ellen Show and the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Here's ed2k links to the videos and mp3 audio files. Check 'em out.

Pretty Vegas - INXS - The Ellen Show 9-23-2005.mpg
Pretty Vegas - INXS - The Ellen Show 9-23-2005.mp3
Pretty Vegas - INXS - Late Late Show with Graig Ferguson 9-23-2005.mpg
Pretty Vegas - INXS - Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson 9-23-2005.mp3

Sudoku

2005-09-09T07:52:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard of Sudoku here's some links. Here's a link to a New York Time article on Sudoku puzzles. This site posts Sudoku puzzles daily in pdf format so you can print them out to solve them. I stumbled upon sudoku a few weeks ago and have to admit I'm hooked. Try it out and let me know what you think. Wasn't someone working on a Sudoku program for BeOS?

Haiku booting from it's own partition into a GUI

2005-07-07T22:31:00.000-07:00

I copied the haiku.image file from one of the linked files under the responses to today's OSNEWS story today and mounted it in BeOS. I then made an empty BFS partition and copied all of the files from the mounted Haiku image into the BFS partition and then ran BOOTMAN. In bootman I added the new Haiku partition to my boot menu and rebooted. And there it was Haiku booting up as fast as BeOS ever did and opened up into the MiniTerminal. I haven't played around with it too much as it crashes easily (what do you expect pre-alpha?). You can run Tracker and then right click on the screen and create a new folder, at that point it locked up for me. Others have gotten it to do more. I tried to do the old PrintScreen to dump a screenshot file into my home folder but that caused it to lock up also. Clock program works as do a few other apps such as People. Still nice to see it booting up and running the familiar GUI. Shouldn't be too long before an alpha I'd think. The above screen capture was one that I found in the comments section as I wasn't able to get any myself. It's showing almost the same thing I was seeing in my limited testing. Nice work by the Haiku team so far. Keep up the great work guys. Also thanks to Philipp Schmid for posting the Haiku disk images, too bad all the news took down his blog, hopefully it comes back up.

The Charlie Brown hunt continues

2005-07-04T16:56:00.000-07:00

We're now up to 33 of the 55 Charlie Browns. Seems a few have moved and a few have been vandalized. One of the ones that had been stolen is back, but it was locked up inside a business that is closed until July 12th! So we can't see them all until after that date.

It's Your Town Charlie Brown

2005-07-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

Santa Rosa has 55 Charlie Browns on display all over town this summer. We started out on a tour to try to see them all. We managed to see less then 20 on day 1. Here's one that is located outside of the Redwood Ice Arena, it's Charlie as an Old Time U of Mich hockey player. I'll post more as we get around to seeing the rest of them.

Trackmania:Sunrise painting my car

2005-05-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

I finally figured out how to save trackmania car paint job, here's a screenshot of my new car. Seems at least in the demo that other players don't see my car on their screen with this paint job, hopefully it works in the full game. I'll probably pick up the full game after finals. If you've played any of my tracks be sure to head over to tm-exchange.com and post awards/comments/replays for your favorites.

2005-05-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

I recently found out about a really cool PC game, TrackMania:Sunrise. So far only the demo is available in the US but the demo is pretty cool. Full version is due out any day now. You can get the demo link at their web site, www.tmsunrise.com.
What makes the game so cool is that you can make your own tracks and race them online. I've been busy making tracks lately. Check them out here.
Have fun if you play them, and feel free to post comments on the tm-exchange site regarding each track. Feedback helps me make better tracks. Watch for Full Version tracks soon.