Some ConsoleWrapper changes
Have spent a bit of time working on ConsoleWrapper today:
- Fixed a major memory leak that was causing memory usage to climb indefinitely, until it caused ConsoleWrapper to crash. This was obviously a Bad Thing™. Memory usage now sits at a comfortable ~24MB on startup, and doesn’t increase significantly with use.
- Added a new built-in command (i.e. that doesn’t utilise CMD) for viewing images inline within ConsoleWrapper. Usage is VIEW IMAGENAME, where IMAGENAME is a valid image path. If the image is too large, it will automatically be resized to be visible within ConsoleWrapper. Here’s a screenshot with a couple of images displaying inline. Screenshot taken during animating from the top of the stream to the bottom, which is the cause of the funny-looking angle, and edge jaggies:
Click through to see full size. As an aside, looking at that less-than-savoury edge antialiasing, I’m kind of tempted to implement some AA. An easier way would be to just put a black border into the texture though. Maybe something for next update.
Also evident in this screenshot, is the new feature whereby strings are rendered as individual letters, each letter being a sprite. Unfortunately, this means kerning is lost, and the string renders with significant whitespace between each character. This is something I am working to fix, but seems to be related to .NET’s Graphics library overestimating font sizes when performing a MeasureString operation.
Using sprites has also seemed to result in sub-par performance (i.e. lower performance than the old method of using pre-rendered full string textures), and I’m not entirely sure why – it was meant to increase performance, if anything. This is especially noticeable when rendering large swathes of text, such as from a DIR command on a large directory. Definitely something else to work on improving and optimising.
Note that I haven’t put out a compiled release of this yet, but the latest source is available as always on SourceForge.
Update 27th April: Here is a video showing the latest changes (including a fix to kerning problems):
Monday, April 26th, 2010 | Posted in Console Wrapper | 2 Comments »
Non-neglect
Well, my last post somewhat inspired me to revisit the theme for the Money Mouth. I’ve now added another page, and added a bunch of JavaScript, such as for logging in, and when hovering over pools and pool options. Check it out!
Hopefully if I keep this up, I’ll be inspired to write some actual code…
Monday, April 19th, 2010 | Posted in Code, Intarwebs, Money Mouth | No Comments »
Neglect
So a while back I purchased the moneymouth.co.nz domain, with the idea of starting a new website project – and even got to the point of bashing up a quick theme for it… But then I promptly forgot about it and didn’t do any actual coding. I do recall looking into which platform to implement it in – tossing up between CakePHP and Django, but that was about it.
And now… Now I’m not sure if I’ll ever be bothered to do anything with it. If I haven’t started coding come the time when the domain expires, I might just let it go. I just didn’t get inspired enough to start implementation. I think I need a really fresh, engaging project to start on. Open to ideas.
Friday, April 16th, 2010 | Posted in Code, Intarwebs, Money Mouth | No Comments »
Rant on TelstraClear
I feel the need to document my frustrations with my ISP, and rant to noone in particular. My blog is a good place to do so. Here goes.
Thursday, April 15th, 2010 | Posted in Intarwebs | 2 Comments »
Sunsets
Are awesome.
Thursday, April 8th, 2010 | Posted in Life, Photographics | No Comments »
Tom is a 25 year-old software engineer currently based in Seattle, Washington. This is his personal blog, and views do not reflect those of his employer. Click