Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Camtasia Studio – Black Box Mouse Cursor on Playback of .camproj File

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Symptom:

When you double-click a .camproj file and play it in Camtasia Studio, the mouse cursor is a black box.

Resolution:

If your display settings are in 16-bit color mode, change them to 32-bit color.

Windows XP: Right-click the desktop and hit Properties, go to the Settings tab. Under “Color quality”, change the drop-down from “Medium (16 bit)” to “Highest (32 bit)”.
Windows 7: Right-click the desktop and hit Screen Resolution, then Advanced settings, and click the List All Modes button. Choose the one with the same resolution as your current screen resolution but with “True Color (32 bit)”.

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Backup Your Data! (introduction)

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Imagine you wake up tomorrow, sit at your computer, and Windows won’t boot because of a hard drive failure. What would your first thought be? Really think about it for a minute: what would you lose? Assuming, of course, that the hard drive is not recoverable. What kinds of family photos would be gone forever? How much work, how many school papers, how much progress would be irreversibly ripped from you?

“No,” you say, “I store all my documents on my flash drive.” Okay, but do you store them on your hard drive too? All of them? Current copies? Do you really save your document to both places as you work? And your photos are backed up there too? What if it wasn’t your hard drive that broke, but your flash drive: you plug in your flash drive and Windows doesn’t even budge. There’s just nothing. Then what would you lose?

These are both very real situations. Hard drives today generally spin at either 5,400 RPM (revolutions per minute) or 7,200. Simple math tell us that’s 90-120 revolutions per second. Furthermore, the technology is not so different from a record player. Think of a record spinning 90-120 rotations per second, with a “needle” hovering just nanometers above it, but if the needle touches the drive, anything it touches will likely be permanently damaged. There really is no room for error here, and it’s a miracle of modern science that hard drives are as reliable as they are.

Flash drives, on the other hand, have no moving parts; but they are just as susceptible to corruption, if not more so. Do a search for flash drive reviews, and pick any model of flash drive (even your own), and you are bound to see reviewer after reviewer complaining of their flash drive having broken and losing data. You could be next.

Have I scared you enough?

This is the introduction into 4 blog posts that I will be posting in the next few days. I will tell you exactly why I could lose my laptop and external drives, and I wouldn’t actually lose any of my precious data. Because a laptop can be replaced, and a flash drive can be replaced cheaply, but data is invaluable. You need to act now to protect your data, before it’s too late.

Update 4/17/2010: This turned out to be the introduction and the conclusion; I never wrote the rest of the articles. I have no idea why I just stopped, but I apologize to anyone who might read this and wonder where the others are.

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My Google Voice Calling Cards arrived!

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

googlevoicecallingcard Google Voice was holding a promotion where you could get 25 free calling cards. I thought I had missed it, but kept watch on my Google Voice page and suddenly the link appeared! I grabbed at the opportunity. That was only a few business days ago, and here they are, just arrived!

The cards can be printed with your Google number as well as your name and (optionally) your email address, mailing address, business, etc. I opted for my name, number, and school email. They are good quality cards, on good paper and bright colors. They’re not really blurry – that’s my cell phone camera at it’s finest. (I don’t currently own a working camera, but I need one!)

If you have a Google Voice account and didn’t hear of this offer, you may still be able to get in! Check your Google Voice page and look under your balance on the left bar. You can’t miss it, if it’s there for you. If not, the cards are from iPrint, so you may be able to order them there if you feel so inclined.

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JOGL Hello World

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Here is a basic JOGL application:
(more…)

Posted in Code Snippets/Tricks | 4 Comments »

Rubber Duck Debugging

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

(found here)

1) Beg, borrow, steal, buy, fabricate or otherwise obtain a rubber duck
(bathtub variety)
2) Place rubber duck on desk and inform it you are just going to go over some code with it, if that’s all right.
3) Explain to the duck what you code is supposed to do, and then go into detail and explain things line by line
4) At some point you will tell the duck what you are doing next and then realise that that is not in fact what you are actually doing. The duck will sit there serenely, happy in the knowledge that it has helped you on your way.

I am so going to get a rubber duck now…

-Ricky

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C++ – Sleeping

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

I am currently using SDL_Delay function in my program, which sleeps for the specified number of milliseconds. But seeing as I’m trying to get rid of SDL, I have to find another cross-platform solution for implementing sleep. So I have to write a replacement function. I’m still figuring out what to call it, but here’s the essentials of a cross-platform sleep.

First of all, do NOT just do a tight while loop. It may appear to pause for that much time, but if you watch the CPU usage for your program, a while-loop like that will use 100% CPU. That is quite unfriendly to people like me with laptops. Not to mention, a 100% utilized CPU can heat up pretty quickly; especially when on a processor like the Pentium 4 (yuck).

So Windows has this handy function inside the all-mighty <Windows.h> file, Sleep(). It takes one argument of how many milliseconds to sleep. This argument can be 0, in which case it yields to another thread for some small amount of time. Or, according to the MSDN documentation, “A value of zero causes the thread to relinquish the remainder of its time slice to any other thread of equal priority that is ready to run. If there are no other threads of equal priority ready to run, the function returns immediately, and the thread continues execution.”

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686298(VS.85).aspx

Linux does something pretty different. Their sleep function is inside the include file <unistd.h>, which apparently is a file that contains “standard symbolic constants and types.” The function is usleep, and it takes the parameter of how many microseconds to sleep. That’s right, microseconds. As in, thousandths of milliseconds. So, take the number of milliseconds you want, multiply it by 1000, and give it to this function and your Linux processor will sleep that many milliseconds.

http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/usleep.html

Macs, well, I don’t really know. Nor care. I don’t feel confident enough that I can contort to their differences enough to get my program running on their machines. Meh.

-Ricky

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