Published by breki on 26 Sep 2008
I’ll be upgrading my blog to the latest WordPress version this weekend, so there will probably be some glitches (the download site should work though). Sorry for any inconvenience.
UPDATE: the migration was easier than I expected - hopefully no hidden problems will appear later. If you encounter anything strange, please send me a note. Thanks!
Published by breki on 01 Aug 2008
I decided to take my time and study the literature on 3D rendering, especially on maths (vertices, matrices, transformations…), which I forgot all about since my student days. I can highly recommend the 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development book which (contrary to many math books for developers) covers not just mathematical equations and theory, but also tries to explain this in a way more familiar to developers.
I abandoned the approach of continuing working on the cannibalized code from Mini 3D Terrain Viewer simply because there were too many problems which I didn’t know how to solve easily. Anyway, I think the skipping over basic stuff like 3D maths and DirectX is not very wise - sooner or later the things you neglected come to haunt you.
I started posting current results of my effort on flickr - this will be a sort of a snapshot history of Kosmos WorldFlier from the day one, step by step. Not much to see yet - I managed to render all OSM ways as 3D lines, you can see the Isle of Wight there. This is just a temporary solution - road should be rendered as mashes, but that will come later. Right now I’m working on the camera navigation stuff.
I’m still using DirectX managed SDK for this. I decided to implement the inital version with this SDK simply because I already have some limited experience with it - I didn’t want to make this harder by introducing some other SDK which I haven’t worked with yet. Later, I’ll probably migrate the code to use some other library (there are several options: OpenTK, Irrlicht or something else).
Published by breki on 21 Feb 2008
UPDATE: I added migration steps for FileZilla client.
I installed my OS from scratch to a new disk after my old one crashed. Now I’m doing the reinstallation of various applications and migration of my user’s settings for them. I’ve collected a list of some applications and the procedure on how to migrate user settings (NOTE: I’m using Vista, so the paths to user profile are somewhat different from those on Windows XP).
Copy the contents of \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\ from the old location to the new one. This will copy all of your Firefox profiles, including plugins, preferences, even the last opened URLs.
Same here. Copy \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird from the old location to the new one and open the Thunderbird. You’ll get all of your e-mails, email accounts, filters etc. Congratulations on good products, Mozilla guys 
Copy the contents of \Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles from the old location to the new one. This will copy some your user’s settings and data (message history, for example), but I didn’t manage to migrate my Yahoo Messenger preferences.
The situation is similar to the Yahoo Messenger. By copying the contents of \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MSN Messenger you can only migrate some of your settings, not all of them.
You should copy the subfolder of the \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Skype folder which bares the name of your profile.
Copy the contents of the \Users\username\AppData\Local\FeedDemon\v1 directory. FeedDemon will still ask you to enter your account information the first time you start it, but after going through this wizard, all of your subscriptions, watches and view settings should be migrated.
Copy the contents of the \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent folder. This will include all of your settings and you will also be able to resume downloading of files from the last uTorrent session.
Copy the contents of the \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla folder to migrate your FileZilla settings (like the FTP site list).
Published by breki on 19 Feb 2008
I was planning to write yesterday about a new Kosmos version, but my home computer had other ideas. Basically, the system hard disk (IBM Hitachi 250 GB SATA, bought less than a year ago) started failing and Vista didn’t want to boot any more (or was booting veeery slowly). I tested the drive using the Drive Fitness Test and it reported "defective device" errors after running tests, so I guess the disk is going to the dogs.
Luckily I have my source code repositories backed up regularly to an external hard drive and I also started playing with Amazon S3 storage which I plan to use as a remote backup destination for SVN repositories. But what I didn’t do is to backup my system partition using an image backup software.
So before continuing my work on Kosmos, I have to reinstall the system, which will probably take a day or to of my spare time. But I hope this is my last OS reinstall for the foreseeable future, since I plan to use Acronis True Image to regularly backup the system drive. I read some good reviews of this software and hopefully it will satisfy my needs. Anyway, hard disk failures aren’t that rare, so I want to make my life a little bit easier when they do occur.