Steven Elliott's Website

I thought I'd publish some small OpenGL utitilies that I've written. Included in GLMisc is a utility called "sdl-events" that displays all SDL events. Another utility call "shapes" exercises various OpenGL APIs. Finally there is an odd program called "ellipses" that demonstrates that the perspective projection of a circle is an ellipse. You can download it here.

Two years ago I became curious what it would be like if bots in Nexuiz, my favorite FPS video game, were able to aim perfectly when armed with a "nex" (an instant hit weapon that is like a rail-gun or a rifle). Although this at first sounds like a masochistic experiment for the human player there are cases where it makes human/bot play more fun. Making bots aim perfectly is an odd but effective way of compensating for shortcomings in the bot's AI for some of the more complexed modes (CTF, etc.).

Overview

Although I've had an Android based phone for a while (the ADP1, the developer version of the T-Mobile G1) since I recently purchased what is now a Linux based laptop (Fedora 11 x86_64, to be exact) I'm now interested in tethering (network connectivity via the phone's USB data cable). Jump to the download section to download my scripts without reading this long blog post.

Recently I became curious about MDI files. In order to better understand MIDI files I found that TiMidity++ is helpful for playing and converting MIDI files. This site describes the layout of MIDI files.

I also came across an interesting utility called midicomp that converts MDI files to and from human readable text files.

In my previous blog post I mentioned that with JCols I explored evaluating user specified JavaScript expressions in Java with Rhino. In order to make JCols as fast as possible I recently experimented with evaluating user specified Java expressions that are compiled using Java 6's JavaCompiler (that's just the name of the interface, but that's what I'll refer to it as). I've concluded the following about the JavaCompiler:

Recently I've I experimented with embedding JavaScript in Java with Rhino. Previously I had written a Python utility that parses text files in an AWK like fashion by allowing an expression to be passed in on the command line. In Python writing such a utility is easy because of it's dynamic nature - a user provided expression can be bits of Python which are then eval'd on the fly. But I was curious if I could make it faster by rewriting it in a faster language such as Java.

I finally completed my port of my M12 Java applet to Android. Since I added some additional puzzle modes I decided to name it "Twelve Tile Puzzle". I created a small page for it where you can see a screenshot.

Recently I attempted to get sendmail to work between two machines in my internal test network. Since it's my own small network I tend to use short unqualified hostnames such as "grey" or "white". As you may know this presents certain challenges when working with sendmail since sendmail prefers FQDNs (fully qualified domain names). In this blog entry I'll talk about what those challenges are and what I think is the most straight forward way to get sendmail to work in such a network.

Recently I took one of Red Hat's certification exam which resulted in my becoming RHCT certified. Although there isn't much I can say about t the exam due to the non-disclosure agreement I signed what I can say, which you can find elsewhere, is that it's a challenging exam. Since time is limited it's important to distinguish between things that are important and things that aren't.

I'll probably try to upgrade to RHCE in April.