Also I’ve added external links in the airport info box to World Aero Data and AirNav (for U.S. airports).

A little bit of surprise, it ran with Wine latest development version, at least it’s gone thru all the splash screen, characters selection, until it gets to the actual game, crashed.

After turning on some debugging and tracing, followed by consulting on #winehq, I’ve learnt that this game hits one of the famous Wine and DirectX issue, multi-threaded Direct3D.

Still I’m a bit adventurous as usual, and did a bit of code reading and hacking in Wine, trying a few different quick-and-dirty approaches to get threads to use the same GLXContext, not that I’m an OpenGL guru.

After a few tries, I gave up. However I still kind of wanna be able to play this game under Linux. So I rethink the problem from a different approach, and did a even more dirty hack, so that only the main thread can do any GL calls. Any other threads will simply returns before trying. Yes, VERY UGLY indeed. So ugly that let’s not even talk about it anymore ;)

And guess what, that does the trick. It gets into the actual game. So apparently it’s creating a new thread only for the pre-game loading screen. So now instead of the loading animation screen, I simply get a black blank screen, and the game continues after that.

And just for fun, I’ve even created a character with the top Taiwanese model’s name :P

More screenshots here.

I have put together a video driver for MPlayer using the MatrixView screensaver from rss-glx.sf.net. This driver renders videos on the fly in Matrix code style view.

Find more about it at the MPlayer + Matrixview page.

Now we can all see what Neo sees in the dream world…

Ejs is a JavaScript implementation of a subset of APIs from Evas and Ecore - core libraries in E - Enlightenment window manager.

Along with that I’ve ported the Evas test app to JavaScript, ready to run inside your browser. There’s also an interactive playground where you could try out the API inside an interpreter-like environment.

Maybe one day this would become a full blown toolkit and utilities for fancy web development… we shall see…

Evas test running in the browser

At the moment you can either search for a navaid (airport, VOR, NDB, FIX) by its code/name, or you can have it showing you all navaids in the current map view.

All navaids data are from FlightGear, which uses X-Plane’s data. I have stored the data in a database, which FGMap talks to via AJAX.

There are a few things that i haven’t done yet. That includes proper ILS/OM/MM/IM/GS drawing, heliport, airway, etc. I might also add real time metar reports to airports later.

Anyway, feel free to play with it, and leave me some feedbacks.

Here are two screenshots of FGMap navaids in action.

Over KOAK - Metropolitan Oakland Intl

Over VHHH - Hong Kong Intl

At the same time I did some “sightseeing” around, and checking out one of my favorite buildings, currently the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101. Then I noticed the difference (pretty obvious) between the satellite images from GMap v1 and v2. The one from v1 is in fact newer than v2. The one in v2 is still being built!

GMap v1

GMap v2

And so I started off doing it. It’s heaps of fun, not to mention finding out all those bugs with IE. M$ is very kind, they always do things that make people laugh. This always gives me a chance to revise a lot with Javascript.

I also ended up writing my own routines for map overlays displaying plane markers and info, instead of using the GMAPI’s GMarker. A bit more flexible, and it does exactly what I want.

There is time when Javascript is useful, and there is time where it’s just overkill. IMHO, Javascript is useful for writing “web app”. Same as using Flash, or Java applet. But btw this does NOT mean every website should be bloody web app!!

And there you go, the FlightGear server online map. A couple of FlightGearers have been using it as a flying map and as a simple ATC radar. If it’s the right time you’ll see us flying!

I’ve got plans to add more features, like airports/navids lookup. And of course, improving the usability and UI is always on the plate. Comments are also welcomed…

Also thanks to everyone who has helped me with testing and giving suggestions to the page. (ampere, AJ, thorben, vivian, gorilla, Surge, johnh51, MasseR, etc)

- porting to gtk2/gkrellm2
- kernel 2.5 support
- different colors/species of fishes for in and out network traffic
- configurable interface for network traffic
- SMP ducks
- include/exclude nice time from CPU usage
- some bug fixes for memory/swap and network traffic
- APM…?
- clouds and birds…?
- transparent background/sky…?
- even more monitoring…?

Been playing around with Evas, a nice graphics library written by <Raster>. I wrote an XMMS plugin with it, just a little learning exercise. Here are two shots of it…

Went for go-kart recently and I won a trophy! Well I’m not going to tell you how I got it though. For those who know, you knew it already. :)

Bought a 2nd hand desk for 20 bucks from an auction. Now all I have to do is to get it home. And then I can do all my coding/hacking properly again.

Fixed some more bugs and added some more features and supports for Maggie’s newsgroup reader. I’m still not convinced though. One day I will rewrite the whole thing.