Last Ray of Hope

I started this month out with a bit of baking.

It initially started out as a craving for some Australian Crunch and despite the fact I don’t like it, I used coconut in the base mixture.

The coconut actually seems to give Australian Crunch that bizarre taste that makes me find it addictive, and while my version has not reached the standard of the one I use to get in Sixth Form, it is one step closer.

My previous attempt had the base of the cake stuck to the tray despite greasing it first, so this time I tried baking paper, which helped a lot.

Before I used cornflakes as well, this time however I decided to use Crunchy Nut cornflakes, which didn’t seem to make that much of a difference, I think the other flavors probably masked the taste, though you could occasionally taste honey.

Ingredients

3oz Sugar
3oz Coconut
2oz Cornflakes
5oz Plain flour
2tbsp drinking chocolate
6oz Margarine
For the topping:
8oz Icing sugar
2tbsp Drinking chocolate

Directions

- Melt the margarine in a saucepan.
- Mix all dry ingredients together in a bowl (it’s better if you slightly crush the cornflakes first)
- Add melted margarine and mix well
- Grease a 7.5 inch square baking tin
- Turn mixture into tin and press down firmly
- Bake in the center of a pre-heated oven (Gas Mark 5, 190C) for 20-25 minutes, then leave to cool.
- Mix the icing sugar and drinking chocolate with a few drops of water to make a thick iced topping
- When completely cold spread the topping evenly over the top and place in the fridge to set.
- When set cut into even squares.

I used a recipe I found on the Jamie Oliver forums this time. Since links on forums are unreliable, the recipe displayed above is the same one.

The cake was an overall success with friends at work, went through two jars of it in half a day.

On the next page is the Millionaires Shortbread.

I finally got around to zipping the Space Blast source up ready for download. And here it is, I haven’t run it since January 2005 when it was due, and I haven’t used Blitz Basic since then, so I don’t know if it can just be run, an old version of Blitz may be required.

The picture to the right is unrelated, I just wanted something to brighten up this short entry.

One thing I hate doing is writing classes that will output text, as well as handle special character sequences that get replaced by images. And while all this is happening, having it word wrap as well.

So I wrote a quick word wrap template class today that will do this. It doesn’t give line spacing yet, which I’m still unsure whether or not it should be this.

The way it works is when you create the word wrap object, you can pass to it’s constructor a value for the maximum width a line can be, this can be a floating point value, or an integer (it defaults to integer).

Then you call Parse() and give it a string, it will go through that string, checking the width of characters until the accumulated character widths are greater than the maximum width, or a new line is found. It will output this line of characters and move onto the next bit.

If it finds a word that is longer than maximum width, it will do one of two things. First if it is at the start of a newline, it will cut the word at the point it goes over. If it is already part way into a line, it will cause a new line and put the word on the next line.

I’ve included with this blog entry the header for the word wrap class, it comes as part of a test project in Xcode (it uses the Lorem Ipsum text), but the source and headers should work in another C++ IDE.

On the 11th of this month, my XBox360 finally stopped being able to work anymore. After checking the receipt I noticed it was still under warranty, so I went onto the XBox website and found the repair center, and initialised a repair.

A couple of hours later, they had already sent me a prepaid UPS label that I had to print out, and all I needed to do was arrange a pickup. So I arrange for a collection on the 15th (They don’t allow you to return it in the same box you bought it in, otherwise they don’t return it), and by the 16th it had already arrived in Frankfurt.

And then on the 17th, it was already on its way back to me. I reckon they’ve probably just replaced the console rather than replace the disc drive.

I’m glad I didn’t spend the extra money for the Game insurance, I’d rather pay Microsoft for an extended warrenty for the fast job they’ve done. Too bad I’m in work on Monday morning so I won’t be able to collect til Tuesday / Wednesday.

When animations are exported from Maya through COLLADA files, they come out in a variety of formats depending on how the animation was implemented, and what is being animated.

One format is the bezier curve, a curve made from four points. Two fo the points are the start and end position, and the other two are control points that describe how it should curve.

Since all three axis can be animated, I made it possible to make a 3-component vector bezier class using the bezier class I created, and just calculate the point coefficients once, passing them to the bezier class to get the position. This of course only works if the time length for curves are the same on all three axis.

I’ve made a sample, it is an Xcode project that uses GLUT to render a 2D bezier and a 3D bezier. The code should work with other IDEs. One thing I should warn is that this bezier class only works when the time step is constant between the control point and it’s respective point.

P0 (0, 0) … keypoint 0
P1 (2, 10) … keypoint 1
C0 (0.666667, 42.6212) … control point 0
C1 (1.33333, 10) … control point 1

T0 = (C0 – P0) -> (2, 42.6212)
T1 = (P1 – C1) -> (2, 0)

The above sample is from the COLLADA forum, as you can see the time step is 2 for both T0 and T1. The same post describes how to calculate the S0 if your time step is not constant.

One thing that has been annoying me about Xcode since I started using it is that it lacks the ability to highlight a block of code and indent/unindent code with tab/shift-tab.

However today I found that if you press command with [ or ] you can achieve this. I tried rebinding it to the more familiar tab key, but instead the code just got replaced with a tab.

Well its better than nothing. The image to the right also shows how to get that annoying additional tab removed whenever you added a bracket after declaring a class.

After using CodeWarrior for the past few months at work, I’ve also gotten use to my brackets being auto-closed for me so I’ve turned on that option as well.

I forgot Snow Leopard was released last week, must remember to goto the Cancom store on Monday and get myself a copy.