Uncategorized – Page 5

My own website

For my own website I do not need SEO. Those who view it have come through searches or from my own online profiles. There’s absolutely no need for me to up views on my pages because I class this as a personal blog/diary and therefor I’m not wanting to advertise myself to the world or other outlets. Simple really.

My other website is for that and I’ve already got it covered.

Now back to some coding.

I have been busy actually

Saturday and Sunday I was faffing about with my Odroid U3 trying to get various API’s to play full screen videos on Linux but kept coming up against a brick wall because those API’s are for openGL and not openGL ES. Only Android would do that and I do not want to go down that route. So instead of buying the Odroid C2 which was my original plan I’ve ordered myself an Intel board instead. Can’t wait for it to turn up. The weekend dragged with all the testing and testing.

Tonight I decided to get a spreadsheet together. Being on the extremes of pessimism, the figures still look damn good. It’s given me a positive frame of mind to move on. I will be expanding on the spreadsheet a hell of a lot as this is the first set of figures I’ve started to work with. I plan on getting a full set of test data to start with to get the numbers down to the penny. I’ve still got to price up servers, etc.

Then I got another quick blast at blender. Two things I wanted to get working, alpha transparency for PNG images and playing a video clip in a texture. Yes, I can do them both. And boy, it’s looks good as a 3D rendered movie with transparent images and movie clips playing.

Fullscreen video playlist done

Using Linux and libvlc I’ve finally got what I was aiming for. A full screen video playlist player. And it was quite easy.

The steps to get here:

Monday: Play a media file. A few lines of code did this. And with the addition of one extra line of code made it full screen.
Play a playlist of videos full screen. This is where things went wrong. After one video had finished, the vlc player would quit fullscreen, flash the desktop and then play the next video in full screen. This was not acceptable.
Tuesday: Using the stock Linux libraries to go full screen. This took all of about 20 minutes from start to end. And again, in just a few lines of code. It was a chaotic night at home so I just finished up there.
Wednesday: Just chilled out and watched TV after work instead.
Thursday: I now needed to use the full screen window and attach the videos to it so that the desktop doesn’t appear. By just passing the window ID to the vlc media player, this was done.

Now all I need to work on the managing the playlists over the internet. And order myself and Odroid C2 with a few other gadgets. So far, this is going 100% perfectly.

By my reckoning, I should have a media player that boots up in less than 10 seconds and playing. How awesome…

The hefty part of the coding is about to start…

Having a wind down for the holiday away.

It’s Monday evening now and on Wednesday, my loved one and I are jetting off to Morroco for a break away and much deserved to get away from reality.

However, I’ve already setup a laptop that I’m taking with me for when I get heat stroke, or something else like boredom, for not only keeping in touch with family and friends (when we’re not busy lazying it), with a small ssd. My accounts are not being stored on it just in case but I have installed some essential IDE’s that I use.

When I get back, and as I’ve already setup, I’ve got a test home server running which I can monitor and use while I’m away. A few final touches to it tomorrow evening. With the wifi at the hotel, I’m going to knock up a quick android app to test it out with.

Apart from that, I’m pretty grumpy at the moment. Home is a tip and needs a hand-grenade throwing at it. Worrying about the next week while we’re away. Argh!!!

Anyway… Noisy all of a sudden here…

Java programming

After just over 3 years of programming in Java, I still haven’t sussed out how to actually open up a basic IDE and start a simple UI project from scratch.

This I know from installing Netbeans. Which I’ve used before to create a dedicated server so that client devices can receive images created using Java AWT libraries. That was easy, create a TCP listening thread, accept connections, return renderings of bitmaps in compressed PNG format. Easy.

I’ve also created (which was a UI app) a program that sniffs the UDP broadcast of the IPTV/Digital Signage server (which I wrote), and opens up a custom web interface from the server without knowing the IP address. That was easy with the help of a couple of references from the web. It turned out to be quite a small program in the end and hardly any effort in it.

Even after Android development, writing games and even using FFMpeg to write a media player using the NDK.

I simply just wanted to write (using the accumulated knowledge of Java) a simple multi window/dialog application on my laptop. Wow… It still amazes me how I got through all the previous software developing. Maybe on an evening, I’m just not that focused. But I’m not giving in.

Java may not have the power of C, but it does have a lot that can be used as I’ve mentioned above. I’m finding it simple to handle threading and AWT bitmaps, etc. All I need now is to be able to setup up a display in a window (GL or raster, whichever is the quickest to begin with) and I’ll be happy.

Qt is simple enough for both openGL and normal UI stuff. So now I want to do the same with Java. So far without the UI stuff, I can run anything, ie server side from Java, but UI stuff I’ll just have to persevere with.

I’ll get there. Nighttime coding was something I always used to do. Going to bed when I realised the sun was poking its head up in the morning.

If I can keep this up (future plans)

Many years ago I started building my online profile and populated my old website with lots of content. Unfortunately, all that has gone despite trying to get in touch with the hosting company. It was free hosting.

Now my hosting is paid for so that gives me something if times get dark and finances get short.

The boiler-plate code for a 3D online demo is almost complete but am I hell staying up past 11pm when I have to be up at 6am in the morning.

I have all next week off, so when I am not out on my motorbike getting lost around the country, which I can’t do much anyway until I get paid next, I’ll be at home building up some showcase examples. These I will plan on hosting using webGL. I’ve got a lot of ideas and I plan on getting a good few of them done next week.

My future depends on it now, because I haven’t got the pennies to fill up my tank.

Dev updates for May 2017

There’s actually a shed load of updates, but I doubt I’ll get them all done tonight.

I now have a Java server running which provides Java specific rendering using AWT and other java standard features.
DVB-S is easy.
Using FFMpeg as a general media player for both IPTV/UDP and file/network based streams, including pause and seek.
Finally got round to installing 4 OS’s on my main laptop. Windows 10 and 3 other Linux OS’s.
Manually re-installed a HP tablet with Android OS from scratch.
Erm… Blank…

Stuff to do:

Loads… I’ll remember them probably tomorrow.
Add more code to this website.

Home server is offline… for now

My home PC has been re-installed, dual booting with Linux and Windows 7. My plan is to keep the web server running whether I boot up in either OS.

I’m working on it.

Time to get personal…

With a long weekend coming up due to the Easter break and a lot of ideas in my head, I’ve decided to start some more experiments with some serious coding.

Various online profiles will be updated too.

Watch this space…

!false is funny because it's true

New laptop and Linux Mint dual boot

A few weeks ago I bought a laptop, a Dell Precision 4500, i7 2Ghz, 4Gb memory, Quadro 1800M and a 320Gb hard disk, pre-installed with Windows 7.

The first thing I did was to shrink the volume which gave me about 130Gb which I installed Linux Mint 18.3. The dual boot worked fine until I updated the nVidia drivers and lost the resolution of 1920×1080. This is after installing everything, all my programming stuff, 3D stuff, etc. I tried the workarounds online with no joy, I was losing performance.

Anyway, I had a 9.5mm draw replacement which I could remove the DVD drive and put in my SSD drive.

The first three installs of Linux and it freezing randomly, plus sussing out out why in the end the GRUB bootloader was on the wrong drive, I finally figured a way to get it up and running. Initially, after reading that on an SSD you don’t need a swap partition, the last install I went back to the swap partition with the install. And it is now working.

I’ve yet to update the nVidia drivers which I will do sometime soon.

At the moment, I can boot into Windows off the normal HD and Linux off my SSD. It runs sweet. Programming stuff is installed but not yet used. I need a long holiday to really get this beast going. The graphics on this laptop actually run better than my PC (i7 4790, nVidia GTX 730).

The only thing that slows this laptop down is the hard drive and Windows.

Maybe tomorrow I will actually bravely update the nVidia drivers for Linux Mint because I soon want to start experimenting with 3D graphics API’s for desktop and mobile again. And as usual I wish I had just a minute more time to focus on my personal projects.

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ARM assembler 32 bit with 64 bit variables

Although I won’t be using ARM CPU’s for my main project I started to think about my x86_64 random number generator I wrote in a previous blog post and also included in a page for adding assembler code to Eclipse Neon.

There is now 32 bit and 64 bit ARM CPU’s out there in the mobile world, but mostly they consist of 32 bit ARM’s. What I really am better off doing in that case is to use a C function and grab the disassembly and work from that.

Other uses for assembler on mobile devices can easily be upgraded using assembler code, such as image manipulation. Faster math routines, such as calculating 3D meshes and vertex and face normals. I won’t be studying much of ARM assembler because I’m working with portable x86_64 boards.

And, when I was doing 24/7 assembler on the Atari ST and the Amiga 1200, there was 0.01% need for 64 bit values then.

The only reason at the moment for needing 64 bit variables is for the random number generation so that cryptic code can be written. I’m not using ARM CPU’s so carry on with x86_64.

I was hoping to try out some other assembler stuff tonight, especially using Qt because I can access bitmap data directly. I’ll jump onto that tomorrow night instead. I’ve got the assembler bug again.

Eclipse Oxygen and NASM

Tonight I set myself a mission of getting any IDE to build assembler files alongside my C/C++ code.

Find it here: Eclipse Oxygen and NASM

I tried NetBeans at first but the IDE isn’t good at all, actually quite useless for setting up NASM. I spent about half an hour trying this out and eventually gave up. Apparently there are plugins out there, but I wasn’t going to try them out as they were not part of the NetBeans official plugins.

So I look into Eclipse and initially I was put off because there was nothing in the official plugins. A few searches later and I got it. It was already built in to the CDT plugin for eclipse. I only had to make a minor alteration to get it working.

Now I can have a C/C++ project that will also automatically compile and link my assembler source files.

Here’s me thinking I was going to be stuck over the weekend finding this out. Took an hour. What’s next to move on to? Oh yeah, my project. he he…

SSE SIMD and ARM NEON research

I started off wanting to know the CPU cycles and possible cache misses from SSE SIMD instructions, but was kind of mind blown at what SIMD can actually do. There’s also a hell of a lot that the best compilers cannot do with C or C++ code with SIMD stuff. An example is getting the sign bits from each value in a SIMD register in EAX, which is damn handy for some math.

The SSE SIMD stuff is only the base line because there’s now SSE4 I believe. (just checked and it is. behind times I am) Being able to multiple math operations on a single register has tickled my interest for a long time. Tonight I decided to put some proper research into it. Until I got sidetracked with ARM NEON.

Anyway, besides the point and before I go onto the ARM stuff. Over the next few nights at least, I’m going to be testing out more assembler programming. This time using SIMD instructions and possibly being able to use maybe a noise algorithm. Later on in time, not over the next few nights, I will look at using this experience for 3d matrix calcs.

But… Then I looked deeper into the ARM NEON…

What I found with the NEON is that it is kind of like a hyper-threaded architecture. The cpu will run 2 NEON instructions per cycle but during CPU down things (stalls, waits, etc). I need to get deeper to undertsand that but it does sound very much like the way the hyper-threading works on the intel core processors. Still good.

Another thing I did like about the ARM assembler language is it just just so awesome. In standard assembler, you load registers, multiply one register by 2/4/8, add them and the last instruction grabs the result. In ARM, you load the basic registers, and in one instruction you can offsets and bit manipulate to get the address and store the result. Crazy.

I’ll come back to ARM stuff later one. For now, I’ll be focusing on x86_64 stuff and all the SIMD stuff. Over the next few days I’ll run some test and hopefully post some test code. That is if I get something running.

The need to scrap code

Today I found the need to scrap over a weeks worth of coding to start again. These days it’s nothing to me to have to do that because I’ve faced issues with programming many times before. You only have to look at my Previous Projects (especially the procedural level generator) to understand that sometimes when something just isn’t right, you need to scrap it and start again. In the 80’s when I was learning, it was disheartening to have to give up. I was young then. Programming is a massive learning curve for anyone who takes the journey. And what I’ve learned is that sometimes it just doesn’t work. You can’t do anything to fix it. At that point, don’t dwell on it, just take what you need from what has already been done and move on.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve had to do that today. Everything was working great, apart from being a tad jumpy, it was working. Almost on to the next stage of the project. Then it would crash. This crash would happen within a certain time frame too, every time, and with the same error. After a few hours of continuous testing and fruitless research into the issue I decided I had to admit defeat. Fortunately though, because of a ‘thread pool’ class which I was using extremely heavily which was causing the problem, the rest of the code is sound and plays nice without bad behaviour. (so far)

So having to ditch, dump, throw away, code, happens… Sometime it’s damn painful…

This all reminds me of the ProcMap project.

It started with a random maze generator which worked great but anyone could do that and I wanted to have corridors and rooms. So came version 2 and 3 which each although the math didn’t work, the ideas where there. The maps didn’t turn out as they should even though they looked genuine. The last version, but not the one I actually wanted to finish on had all the corridors and rooms and sloping dungeons and everything. Including the ability to get coordinates to place other items, including rotations and offset. The math worked perfect in V4. Unfortunately I didn’t get started on V5 because it was going to be a gigantic project that was to create a pseudo random generated planet, complete with landscape, towns, cities, dungeons, life, etc. Yep a big project. I’ve still got a few pieces of paper with plans on upstairs somewhere I hope still.

Assembler PRNG (from Java to Asm)

So, I had a perfectly working PRNG in Java like this:

public class WLPRNG {
    
    long seed;
    
    public WLPRNG(long seed) { this.seed = seed; }
    
    public int nextInt() {
        long result = seed + 0x123defca;
        result = Long.rotateLeft(result, 19);
        result += 0xbead6789;
        result *= 0x1234567c;
        
        int temp = (int)result;
        
        result ^= 0x5ecdab73;
        result = Long.rotateLeft(result, 48);
        
        if (temp % 4 == 0) result *= 0x87650027;
        
        result += 13;
        seed = result;
        
        return (int)result;
    }

    public byte nextByte() {
        return (byte)nextInt();
    }
}

And I thought I’d test out the Assembler version like this:

; random number generator to be used in crypto transmission
; of sensitive data over the internet

; WLGfx 2017-Nov-19

        section .text

global  main

extern  printf

srand:  mov     [seed],rax                      ; set random seed
        ret

arand:  mov     rax,[seed]                      ; get seed
        mov     rbx,qword 0x023defca321acfed
        add     rax,rbx                         ; add 64 bit value
        rol     rax,19                          ; rotate bits
        mov     rbx,qword 0xbead6789
        add     rax,rbx                         ; another add
        imul    rax,qword 0x1234567c            ; a multiple this time
        mov     rbx,rax                         ; copy into rbx
        xor     rax,qword 0x5ecdab73            ; flip some bits
        rol     rax,48                          ; rotate bits again
        mov     rcx,rax                         ; copy to rcx
        and     rax,0x3                         ; mask and test with 0
        jnz     .notz                           ; 25% chance of other ops
        mov     rax,rbx
        add     rcx,rax
        mov     rbx,qword 0x87650027
        imul    rax,rbx
        jmp     .cont
.notz   mov     rax,rcx                         ; back into rax
.cont   mov     [seed],rax                      ; store into seed
        and     rax,0xff                        ; return byte value only
        ret

main:   mov     rax,9                           ; set seed
        call    srand

        mov     dword[lc],10                    ; set loop counter

.loop   call    arand                           ; get random byte

        push    rbp                             ; stack frame
        mov     rsi,rax                         ; random number
        mov     rdi,pf_msg                      ; format string
        xor     rax,rax                         ; 0
        call    printf                          ; call printf
        pop     rbp                             ; stack frame

        sub     dword[lc],1                     ; dec loop counter
        jnz     .loop
        
        ret

        section .data

seed    dq      0,0,0,0                         ; random seed value 64 bit
lc      dd      10                              ; loop counter

pf_msg  db      "Number: 0x%02x",10,0

Using the build script:

#!/bin/bash
nasm -f elf64 random.asm
gcc -o random random.o

Gives a sample output of:

 ~/dev/asm/tests $ ./buildrand.sh 
 ~/dev/asm/tests $ ./random 
Number: 0xe0
Number: 0x5b
Number: 0xca
Number: 0x7c
Number: 0xfc
Number: 0x2d
Number: 0x79
Number: 0xa5
Number: 0x62
Number: 0x7f

All I need to do now is to be able to link directly to C and C++ code. I’m currently reading up on threading in assembler, but it looks like the standard pthreads are just the same really.

There’s lot’s of potential for using assembler.

X86_64 printf 64 bit assembler test

So, I wanted to start playing about with assembler again. Mainly so I could use it for data encryption over the internet. Here’s a simple sample of printing 64 bit numbers as hex.

section .text
global  main

extern  printf

; use printf to print 64 bit hex string

_test:  push    rbp

        mov     rsi,0x1234567890abcdef
        mov     rdi,pf_msg
        xor     rax,rax
        call    printf

        pop     rbp
        
        ret

main:   call    _test
        
        mov     edx,len
        mov     ecx,msg
        mov     eax,4
        int     128
        
        ;mov     eax,1
        ;int     128
        
        xor     rax,rax
        ret

section .data

msg     db      "Hello world!",10
len     equ     $ - msg

; some testing stuff

pf_msg  db      "Register = %016llx", 10, 0

I set up a simple script to build the executable.

#!/bin/bash
nasm -f elf64 test.asm
gcc -o test test.o

And the output is just…

Register = 1234567890abcdef
Hello world!

The weekends plans

Yay! Friday finally came around and it’s the evening. I’m currently on a wind down, my body is aching and I’m mentally and physically zapped out. And that’s why I’m writing an update.

Over this last two weeks my website has had a few changes to it, such as https and a theme upgrade, oh and a few speedups which really did need to happen. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, there’s still a couple of minor changes that need doing, but they’re not important at the moment.

My big project I want to get back to work on over this weekend because I’ve kind of left it behind for a while. Most times when I get home from work, I just sit on my backside watching TV with my laptop. So to fix this problem, I transferred all my projects to my laptop. Win win. I already had the router set to divert a test port to this laptop anyway, so with that change in the sources, last night, everything was back up and running, 100% perfect. The mobile app has just two things to finish off, and the media manager will get a rewrite.

I have noticed that the WebGl demos only work on full screen now and not embedded in a frame since the https thingy update. If I get round to it, then I’ll look into it. Web stuff really ain’t my thing, hardcore programming is.

If I get bored over the weekend I might also create a new home hosted website using GWT or CopperLicht even. We’ll see.

Early night for me tonight because it’s been three nights on the trot of hitting the weights bench. I think the peas on my arms are growing.

Until next time.

WLGfx

This website

I’ve still got a few formatting issues with this theme which will be ironed out over time.

I’ve noticed two so far. One with images not stretching to 100% of the posts width. And the other with using the <pre> tags and the line spacing.

Apart from that, I’ll be re-organising the menus so they look a lot better and categories stuff.

I’ve added a new java page about thread pooling which I want to work on a C++ version of it over the next day or two for my personal project.

Catch y’all soon.

Not much of an update but here goes

Got many plans, and little time to get everything done. The story of my life. he he

Anyways… My journey with the ffmpeg API has now taken another turn. Now I’m travelling the realm of using the AVIOContext. This is because I need to temporarily store a UDP transport stream locally when a pause of playback is required. Before the weekend I was non the wiser of how to do this, but after a good think about it, sorted.

All I need to do is to join the multicast stream manually, grab the packets, buffer them up and when ffmpeg, via the AVIOContext requests data, just send it. Simple. One problem I’ve yet to face is that after a pause, I want to be able to seek through the saved stream. I’ll come to that.

As for my own stuff. I’m kind of halfheartedly putting my feet up. I really need to put my feet up properly actually but I’ll take what I can get.

WebGL interactive

Nothing to show yet because it would be quite dull, but I’ve got mouse movement and click interaction working in the 3D scene. Basically, if the mouse clicks an object (when it’s not occluded) it will do stuff. And when the mouse hovers over an object. Old school really, but for WebGL, this can demonstrate a lot.

And at this time of night, I’m goosed.

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