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jason's weblog, jason typing stuff

Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Tue, 11 Nov 2008

Physics Games
blog

A bunch of physics games have been coming out lately... this one is a lot of fun.

Wed, 05 Nov 2008

First iPhone App!
blog

It's up! My first iPhone application was just put up on the App Store: Toobz!.

It's a game based on the classic "Pipes" game where you need to create a system of "toobz" (pipes) before the water starts running and spills out.

I've put up another site, Off Center Software, where I'll put more updates.

Thu, 09 Oct 2008

iPhone SDK'ing
blog

Been a long time! Lots of fun stuff going on... let's dive right in:

I've been enjoying the iPhone SDK for a little while now. Still no apps on the App Store to show for it but that should change soon. Got one app (a game) that I'm polishing up (sounds, final graphics, a couple minor features), and I've started a couple of other apps, plus I have a ton of ideas.

Now that the Apple NDA has been lifted it's great to see a community starting up. It also makes it a lot easier to find answers to all the random questions I have while powering through the SDK. I've purchased both of the iPhone SDK books, as well, and they're pretty good reads so far.

VMWare came out with Fusion version 2.0 which is a rather nice upgrade. Adds support for multiple snapshots, as well as multiple monitors for the guest OS. I haven't tried that yet, either on my windows install or one of my many linux installs, but I'm sure I will soon enough. I'm still enjoying being on the Mac platform... it's a nice mix of command-line fun and a polished UI. I still can't tear myself away from emacs, of course, so I use that for just about everything text-related (such as this post).

I'm not, however, using emacs for my iPhone / Mac development... I'm using Apple's XCode IDE. It's pretty nice, I'm still getting used to it, but what made it a nice transition was their emacs-based key binding set. Not everything is there, of course, but at least basic page navigation as well as killing and yanking is there, so I feel comfortable enough.

In other news... I finally signed up for Facebook for some reason. It's been fun since Mystique is also on it, as well as my brother, some old co-workers, and folks from high school. I'm not addicted to it, but I do like reading about what old friends are up to.

That's about it for now... I'm hoping to fire this blog back up, so check back soon!

Thu, 17 Jul 2008

iPhone Apps
blog

A couple must-have iPhone applications:

AOL radio -- great selection of streaming music. I've only used it so far on wifi at home, I'm pretty sure it'll suck down the battery pretty quickly with 3g.

Texas Hold'em -- for $5 it's a fun little holdem game. Very impressive graphics, moves along at a nice pace.

Shazam -- listens to any song for ~12 seconds and can identify it. Provides links to iTunes if you want to buy. Nifty.

That's all so far... I've added a bunch of other apps but I've lost interest in most of them. So far I've only paid for the one (Hold'Em)... trying to stay away from paying for others... too easy to get sucked in.

Mon, 14 Jul 2008

iPhone
blog

Well, I couldn't take it anymore and bought one of the new 3G iPhones today. Got a 16gb white one... was going to get an 8gb black but I heard the black ones get pretty smudged up, plus the apple store only had white ones. So yes, I'm using the smudge thing as an excuse to get the 16gb version :) Glad I did, too, because I only have 5gb left after loading up music and videos. Got a few apps installed, too... I'll try to get some reviews of them up soon. I've been reading up on the SDK and I'm looking forward to writing an application. At some point I might break down and pay the $99 to become an official developer. That means I can put my app on the iTunes store and run the app on my iPhone instead of just the simulator. That's the excitement right now... if anyone is in the market for a samsung blackjack 2, let me know :-)

Tue, 03 Jun 2008

Fusion + Debian Lenny
blog

If you're having trouble installing vmware tools into Debian Lenny, read this post in the VMWare Community Forum. It got me up and running after a quite a frustrating time.

I think it actually works for any 2.6.24+ based kernel. In my case I was trying to get Lenny up and running. Debian is slowly but surely becoming my distro of choice...

Sat, 26 Apr 2008

github
blog

Check out github sometime... I just spent about 20 minutes just browsing various hosted git repositories, found some cool projects. It's like a social sourceforge... I'm not usually big on social applications, but I'll make an exception for this one. Based around git, it lets you explore different development projects, watch and easily fork them which allows you to easily contribute, too. Cool site. I'll have to put something up there sometime.

Sun, 30 Mar 2008

Alt-key Xterm
blog

I'm posting this so I can find it easier the next time I look for it (although I swear I did this same thing two yeras ago...) When your alt key isn't working as it should in an xterm, add the following to .Xdefaults:

XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true
XTerm*eightBitInput: false

Sat, 29 Mar 2008

FriendFeed
blog

I joined friendfeed.

Tue, 25 Mar 2008

More Mac Tips
blog

Some more things that I'm finally figuring out with the mac...

I love the new keyboard that comes with macs... it's a great laptop-style feel that makes typing very pleasant. One of the annoying things, though, is that it takes a few liberties with the keys. To be specific... there's no 'Insert' key on the keyboard at all. In place of it is a 'fn' key that allows you to use mac-specific bindings on the F-keys, such as volume adjustment, iTunes controls, etc...

I use the insert key a lot, though, because pairing it with 'shift' will do a 'paste' when I'm using X11. I missed that, so I finally got around to creating a .Xmodmap file (on my mac and my various linux VMs and boxes) that simply maps the F13 key to 'Insert':

keycode 113 = Insert

Speaking of X11 (guess what I've been messing with lately?), if you're trying to figure out why your middle mouse button doesn't work as paste, check your USB OverDrive settings because it defaults the middle (scroll-wheel, usually) click to 'AutoScroll' instead of a button click. Who uses auto-scroll?

Hmm... I guess that's it. I thought I had three but apparently not.

2008 : January (2) February (2) March (5) April (1) June (1) July (2) October (1) November (2)
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