rubenwardy's blog

During the second year of university, I created a kernel for the ARMv7 instruction set. I went above and beyond what was required on this project, achieving a clean design and features such as a blocked process queue, piping, kill, and a simple filesystem. This was my favourite coursework so far. I found it very interesting to learn about and implement the things that we take for granted as programmers.

I tried to stick to POSIX as much as possible, and stuck to the Linux method of having everything as either a file or process. Because pipes and standard in/out were both “files”, I was able to implement both popen and piping of the output of a process to another process.

Shara and I exhibited on behalf of Minetest at Freenode #Live. Our stall had a computer where visitors could play Minetest. We talked about it and handed out leaflets.

If you’d like to support Minetest, then please get involved and consider donating:

• celeron55
• rubenwardy (me)

Whilst Maya claims to have Linux support, it only officially supports RedHat and CentOS Linux. It is, however, still possible to install it on Debian and Ubuntu based systems with some leg work.

For the last two years, I have been working on a very ambitious game. The game is a top-down sandbox with multiplayer support. I’m aiming towards a city-based game, where players can wander around a procedurally generated city. One of the main reasons I started creating this game is to learn about multiplayer networking at a low level - client-side prediction, server-side reconcilliation, cheat preventation, and reducing the visual effect of latency.

I had an issue where CMake was failing on a compiler test with the following error:

error: unrecognized option '-rdynamic'

The problem was that CMake caches settings such as compiler flags in CMakeCache.txt, so you need to clear the cache when changing the platform. Do this by deleting CMakeFiles and CMakeCache.txt

I created a very short C++ snippet to accumulate a series of Mats into a single Mat strip. It works like acc = acc + m - a new mat is added to the accumulator each time, then stored in the accumulator again.

Usecase: shells dropping in sync with firing, fake bullets, etc

You must use a particle emitter to create particles, however this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to create single particles on command. You can create a particle emitter which simply adds particles from a queue to the system

Simply get the SFGUI window size using GetAllocation, the sfml window size using getSize, then do this arithmetic:

auto window = sfg::Window::Create();
auto win_rect = window->GetAllocation();
sf::Vector2f size(win_rect.width, win_rect.height);
window->SetPosition(((sf::Vector2f)rwindow->getSize() - size) / 2.0f);

This tutorial will show you how to create a new MonoDevelop solution and project, and how to properly connect it to RimWorld. You’ll need to have an installation of Mono that supports .NET 3.5 - here is a tutorial on how to install it.

This tutorial will show you how to install Mono and Monodevelop in order to develop .NET 3.5 projects. This is useful when writing C# assembly mods for Unity engine based games, such as RimWorld, as they tend to require .NET 3.5.

Now that Github supports unlimited private repos in all plans, you might as well keep things all together (although definitely have backups elsewhere incase Github is DDOS’d again, dies or goes evil). Simply change “rubenwardy” to your username and “XXXX” to a personal access token with “repo” checked. Also make sure you have an SSH key for Github.

I use a dual monitor setup. For each monitor I have a panel, and each panel has a whisker menu. I found that the favourites section of each of these panels is not synchronised. To fix this, I wrote a simple script.

I recently successfully dual booted Ubuntu on an ASUS X555LA laptop, the X555LAB variety. This guide will work on most Ubuntu derivatives, I installed Xubuntu using these steps. The only things that are different between them are window managers and preinstalled software.

This article will show you how to verify a user’s identity by letting them associate their account with an external third party phpBB account. I used Python and Flask to achieve this, however any language and framework should work, and shouldn’t be too hard to port to.

I recently wrote and released a python module to allow fetching of profile data.

You can install it using pip:

pip install beautifulsoup4 phpbb-parser

Here’s how you import and use a profile:

import phpbb_parser as parser

username = "rubenwardy"
profile = parser.get_profile("https://forum.minetest.net", username)

if profile:
    signature = profile.signature.text
    location = profile.get("location") or "unknown"
    github = profile.get("github") or "none"

    print(username + " from " + location + " has github " + github)
    print("Signatue: " + signature.text)
else:
    print("Could not get profile!")

profile.signature is a beautifulsoup4 object.

Next: Linking a user account to an external phpBB forum.

To get more than 50% on our coursework, you had to submit extensions. Here are some of my favourite ones.

I was contacted by a client to create a system which calculates the workload for employees based on their assignment to tasks and appointments.

The system needs to solve two problems: Firstly, different staff members work different numbers of hours, which makes it hard to allocate tasks fairly and proportionally. Secondly, the client wanted to use the system to analyse past workloads and to anticipate future workload, in order to improve her system of work.

Here is a shell script specific for GNU/Linux based operating systems to use. On different operating systems the convert commands will be the same, but the for loop will be different due to a different batch file syntax.

rm /tmp/imageex -r
mkdir /tmp/imageex
for filename in *.png; do
    echo "Processing $filename"
    convert $filename -background White \
        label:$filename -gravity Center \
         -append -pointsize 14 \
        /tmp/imageex/$filename.png
done
echo "Exporting to PDF..."
convert /tmp/imageex/*.png output.pdf
echo "Done."

Hello 2015! Recently I have created an implementation of the 3D projection algorithm. It is just wireframe models. It works pretty well, except it doesn’t do frustum culling. You still see things that are behind you, but upside down.

The source code of this implementation is available under the WTFPL or CC0 licenses - you can choose which one you want to use. Use WASD to move, arrow keys to rotate, space to ascend and shift to descend.

Hi all! I’m back again for another post. This time I am going to show off a project I have had for quite a while - it is a cellular automaton which simulates the Lotka Volterra equations.