Archive for December, 2010

yuki.scr – open-sourcing a 2-day project from 3 years ago

Friday, December 31st, 2010

A long time ago, on 4chan’s /w/, there was a thread #426444. Someone posted a gif wallpaper based on Nagato Yuki hacking a LAN game tournament to stop the other side cheating.

But what everyone really wanted was a screen-saver version… and I had one of those ‘I can do this!’ moments (does not happen very often). The basic plan was simple, write a screen-saver (in Windows these are just binary executables with .scr instead of .exe) that spawned terminal-looking windows, scrolled random crap down them for a while, then closed them a little later. After some fiddling about with timing, text-scroll-speed and max number of windows on screen at once, I had something that created a nicely disconcerting effect.

So less than 6 hours of VB6-hacking later (and while the thread was still active) I posted v0.01. It eventually reached v0.04, then stalled. For nearly 3 years the code has sat bit-rotting. The binary download has had averaged aprox 5 downloads a day since release (was in the 100s on initial release). About once a month I would get a request asking for the source but I never got round to posting it.

Until now.

Yes, the world can now real in the glory of my crappy VB6 code written in a time before I knew Java. Given I now run Ubuntu, I can not even ‘compile’ it any more. Chances of anyone else bothering to try basically round down to 0. But screwit, I got round to publishing it eventually.

I was just about to say that I don’t have a video to show you… but what do I know? A quick YouTube search and I find this:

Which is awesome as it nicely saves me the bother of trying to make my own video. ^^

WORLD, GO KNOCK YOURSELF OUT! While I go raid the drinks cupboard…

EDIT: Fixed download link: yuki.scr.00.04.036.zip

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Morrigan on Android

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

In an idle moment in a spot of vacation leading up to Christmas and while everyone else does battle with The Snow, I though I would knock up a prototype Android app to work with my media player Morrigan. A couple of days later (don’t worry, I did remember to sleep) I have a something that is working rather better than previously expected. Actually building this app was only 60% Android development. The other 40% was beating Morrigan’s HTTP interfaces into shape – a worthwhile exercise as they are looking much more robust now (though there is still more functionality to add). Screen shots below:


In order, the 5 screens are:
1) Home screen – server list. Use the + button to add new servers. Long-hold servers to get a delete option.
2) Server screen – lists the artefacts on that server. First it lists players (there is usually only one, but can have more) followed by media databases.
3) Player view – get to by clicking a player item on the server screen. Should be self-explanatory. The search button allows you to search the DB currently being played from.
4) Media list view – shows some details about a specific database and the results of the last query.
5) Clicking a media item brings up a prompt to either play the item or add it to the queue.

It is purely a remote-control at the moment, but hopefully soon it will also you to pull media files to the phone, manage them there, and sync meta-data back to the server again. My current object is to get the mobile interface usable to the point that a head-less Morrigan can be run without too much command-line-for-everything faf.

No download-links yet as everything is still changing on daily basis as I add new function. But if anyone does want to have a play, please let me know and I will be happy to hook you up with working builds… and a development environment if desired :).

Posted in lj-xp, morrigan | No Comments »