Finally! the Android version of Vogelstein 2D has been published to the Android Market place: https://market.android.com/details?id=dk.hrup.vogelstein.android  

The game has been downloaded over 3000 times, which is okay I guess.

I also made a gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyLdSlzgOJI

Oh! the game is free to play, with ads showing at the top! Enjoy!.

Vogelstein 2D vogelstein, android

I have just finished my masters at Aalborg University with a degree in Software Engineering. 

News

I forgot to change the SMTP server when moving my website to its new location. This means that I have been unable to receive e-mail from people, through this site. This is now fixed 

News

I have just released my first commercial game for Nokia phones.

I have dubbed the Game, Vogenstein 2D, as the game is set in WW2, has similar game play elements as Wolfenstein 3D and plays from birds view (Vogel = bird, stein = stone, Birdstone). 

I have released the game on Nokias Ovi store: http://store.ovi.com/content/67489 for a cheap price :-)

Current features include:

• 64x64 map support, just like Wolfenstein3D.
• Four enemies, a luger wielding soldier, a trained attack dog,
  an SS officer with an MP40 and a boss with two chainguns. 
• Pickups include: health, ammo, treasure, mp40 and chaingun. 

Mobile , Vogelstein 2D Wolfenstein, topdown, shooter, resistance, j2me, mobile, java, Vogelstein, 2D

I have relocated my server, it is now situated at my parents' house on a 30/30 Mbit fiber connection with much improved bandwidth and better stability. 

My own connections is a assymetrical DSL conection with 20 Mbit down and 2 Mbit up, so 30 Mbit should improve the speed of the site by ALOT!

Misc fiber, new location, server, 30/30, Mbit

I have just bought a ThinkPad W510 as I am in need of a laptop with discrete graphics, supporting CUDA, OpenCL and DirectCompute. My previous laptop, the HP 8530p, featured an ATI 3650 Radeon card which is sufficient for BrookGPU development, but not OpenCL or CUDA development.

Anyhow, the specs of my recent purchase are:

• Full HD (1920x1080) 15.6” 16/9 panel
• Quad Core i7 720QM – 1.6GHz (2.8GHz turbo)
• 4GB DDR3
• nVidia Quadro FX 880m supporting CUDA 1.2 and OpenCL 1.0 (1.1 should be comming)
• 320GB 7200 rpms (I have replaced this with my Momentus XT)
• 9 Cell battery (max 3½ hour battery life at 10/15 light setting and Wi-Fi on)

I am very happy with the laptop, the keyboard is phenomenal, the screen is 95% gamut and looks great (although I would have preferred a 16/10 instead of 16/9), the temperatures are around the 50-65c with very low fan noise (compared to my HP), and the build quality is excellent!

The only problems I have experienced are minor coil whine from the CPU and problems with resuming from sleep.

Coil Whine

Coil whine from the CPU can be 100% eliminated by disabling CPU power management in the BIOS with a 35% cost in battery life. However, one can instead disable “deep sleep” in Lenovo's power manager, which reduces the coil whine substantially and with only minor decrease in battery life (5-10% is my guess).

But!!! as of this writing, the coil whine has nearly disappeared and can in many circumstances not even be heard! I don’t know why my W510 has ceased “whining”, but it might be due to my over clocking attempt of the GPU (this is the only thing I can think of).

When utilizing Bluetooth, the coil whine can sometimes reappear, although I have yet to investigate this further.

Resume Troubles

Another annoying problem I’ve been experiencing is problems with resuming my laptop from sleep. 90% of times it works correctly, but sometimes the W510 won’t resume and it just blinks at 3-4s intervals, very strange. When this happens I have to do a hard reset and remove the optical disc drive. If I don’t remove the optical disc drive, resuming will fail next time I put the laptop to sleep; so it might be a problem with the UltraBay.

Anyway, I am a happy ThinkPad W510 owner!

News W510, Lenovo, ThinkPad, OpenCL, DirectCompute, CUDA, Coil Whine, CPU Whine

I recently bought a hybrid 7200rpms, 500GB(4GB SSD) Seagate Momentus XT hard drive to replace my old 7200rpms, 250GB Seagate Momentus. The XT version comes with a integrated 4GB SSD drive, which is used as a “buffer” between the mechanical storage and the SATA interface, meaning that commonly used files are placed on the faster SSD instead of the slower mechanical disk.

Before I replaced the old Momentus disk in my laptop, I used Visual Studio 2008’s compiler to tests the old disk’s performance when compiling one of SKOVs C# solutions. I did the same benchmark afterwards, on my new XT disk, and I did a “rebuild race” against my SKOV developer laptop. The results are as follow:

My Laptop(old disk) vs My Laptop(new disk):

1. 1:05 vs 0:44 speedup: 1.47
2. 1:02 vs 0:38 speedup: 1.71

SKOV Laptop vs My Laptop(new disk)

1. 1:03 vs 0:35 speedup: 1.80
2. 0:53 vs 0:38 speedup: 1.39
3. 0:55 vs 0:32 speedup: 1.71

Note: I did a clean before each rebuild.

The Seagate Momentus XT delivers a speedup of 39-80% which I think is pretty impressive. Thus, in the worst and best case, the XT decreased the build time by 28% and 44% respectively, which will surely help with my productivity.

If anyone have benchmarking figures when compiling using Visual Studio combined with a high performance SSD, let me know as I am interested in the potential gain of using SSDs.

Misc Seagate, Benchmark, Visual Studio, XT, Momentus, SSD, Solid State Disk, Performance, compile time

For the current project at SKOV, I was in need of a tooltip window that can show a lot of textual information.

Apart from this requirement, the tooltip should support a gradient background, have round borders, be semi transparent and cast a soft shadow. To achieve this, one must use alpha blending to "softly" blend the border, the shadow and the transparency to the underlying surface.

WinForms have by default support for alpha blending on a drawing surface, e.g. a Form, so drawing a semi transparent gradient tooltip that casts a soft shadow is no problem. However, blending the tooltip on top of another window, such as the desktop or an underlying Window is rather troublesome, as WinForms apparently has no direct support for this. Instead one must rely on native Win32 to achieve this, using layered windows which were introduced in Windows 2000, as described in this MSDN post: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997507.aspx.

I have implemented the stuff described in the MSDN post, and made a quick test application showing the effect. The tooltip is drawn as a rectangle with round corners with a 2 pixel border. A soft shadow is also drawn.

The procedure (simplified) is as follows:

1. Apply the WS_EX_LAYERED style to the Window, to make it a Layered Window.
2. Create a 32bit Argb bitmap which encompasses the whole Window including shadow.
3. Set the alpha value of the border and background colors to the desired opacity value.
4. Draw the shadow, background and border to to the bitmap.
5. Draw the content, e.g. text showing the mouse position.
6. Create a compatible device context (DC) and copy the bitmap to it.
7. Call UpdateLayeredWindow with the DC, blending mode, etc. as arguments.

I have included a demo project, with C# code, showing the tooltip in action.  Anyone is free to use the code as they see fit.

The demo project can be downloaded from here: APrettyTooltip 1.0.zip (43.11 kb)

Enjoy!

Programming in General WinForms, .NET, C#, Tooltip, Opacity, Transparent, Layered, Layered Window, Win32, Show

I was looking for a simple way to count the number of file downloads on my blog, and stumbled upon SimpleDownloadCounter written by Al Nyveld (http://www.nyveldt.com/blog). The extension simply counts the number of downloads per uploaded file. The download count is only shown when logged in.

The extension did not initially work for BlogEngine 1.6.1.0, but with a little tinkering I got it to work just fine. 

I have uploaded the fixed version here (revision 1.1), enjoy!

SimpleDownloadCounter.cs (5.15 kb)

Misc SimpleDownloadCounter, download, counter, Al Nyveld

My theme, dubbed “HRUP”, is now available for download.

The zip file contains the CSS file, the Master Page, etc. but I have also included a Photoshop file of my banner and the font used. You may edit the banner.psd file and produce a similar looking banner.

The theme comes with no license what so ever, so anyone is free to edit and redistribute as they see fit!

The theme can be downloaded from here: HRUP_Theme_1.0.zip (180.68 kb)

Enjoy!

Misc theme, HRUP, 1.0