Cardare's Adventures On Earth

Getting pretty good at this now. Wish I knew how to customize...

notdoingvalentines — Sat, 11 May 2013 13:23:21 +0100

Getting pretty good at this now. Wish I knew how to customize the endpoints back when I was at the school, my artwork would be on every phone in the entire school. Worst thing about it is, it’s dead easy!

Only works for the Cisco SCCP firmware on the 7940 and 7960 phones. Other phones will load the image, but as they have higher resolutions (and in the case of the 7945, 7965 and especially the 7975 colour touchscreen device (and their video conferencing endpoints actually) it might appear a bit weird.

I did this in Cisco Unified Communications Manager 7, but I believe it’s the same in 8 and later. You can apply it to the entire enterprise by going in to Unified CallManager and hovering over “System”, then clicking “Enterprise Parameters”. Scroll down until you hit “Phone URL Parameters”, and in this section you will see two fields. The first being “URL Idle” and the second “URL Idle Time”. “Idle” is when an endpoint device has been left alone for a specific amount of time, as determined by the “URL Idle Time” field. In my configuration I put 2. In the URL Idle field, set it to a web service accessible by the voice VLAN, and point it to your phone idle/image XML file. Reset your endpoints, and you’re done. You can do this on an individual basis also by going in to the device settings for a single phone and changing the same fields.

The XML file mentioned is generated by a Cisco utility called “gif2cip” (use it on the command prompt, invoking it like: “gif2cip mygifimage.gif idle.xml”). Basically, create your 16-colour greyscale image in Adobe Photoshop or any other image editing program. The canvas size must be no more than 125x60 for the IP Phone 7940 and 7960 as the LCDs, although large, are ultra low resolution, unlike the 7975, 7965 Java phones, which are higher res, but I have none to test with so this is for the cheaper 7940 and 7960 devices. Once you’ve created your image, save as a GIF, use gif2cip to convert it to XML and then open the XML file in notepad. In this file, you can specify the softkey template to use when the phone is in “Idle” mode. My University uses it to allow quick calling of support numbers. I use it to call other phones on the network for ease of testing different functions as I learn how CUCM works (Planning to be CCVP certified eventually, along with CCNA cert). To give am example of what you can do, you can actually have the softkeys go to various functions of the phone, but I only use them to tell the phone to dial a specific number for each one, like so…

Within the context and below your line, set this:

   My7940
   Dial:9050
   1

   My7960
   Dial:9051
   2

   Operator
   Dial:2001
   3

   VoiceMail
   Dial:5000
   4

To quickly summarize, is used to tell the phone to set the name of the softkey. is used to tell the phone what to do when the softkey is pushed, in this case, dial the number given. is used to tell the device in which order it should present that specific item. The 7940 and 7960 have four softkeys, whereas the higher end 7975 devices have five. The cannot contain unicode characters. The 7940 and 7960 can only display the first 6 characters of the , where the 7975 can display 9 or so I believe (I don’t have one, but I am using the Cisco IP Communicator Softphone which behaves just like the 7975).

If this is useful, let me know. If you know of other cool tricks you can do with the XML file, be sure to comment. :)

Gooood grief. I’ve spent the last half hour browsing Tumblr’s “Fractale” tag. Glad to see I’m not...

notdoingvalentines — Tue, 07 May 2013 23:52:19 +0100

Gooood grief. I’ve spent the last half hour browsing Tumblr’s “Fractale” tag. Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks Nessa is freaking awesome and adorable in every freaking way.

cebalrai: Day 5: Favorite opening theme Fractale! I mean. Look...

notdoingvalentines — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:04:37 +0100

cebalrai:

Day 5: Favorite opening theme

Fractale!

I mean.

Look at this.

LOOK

AT

THIS

Yes. Perfection. I love it.

Silly things I used to do: Internet Radio Station Host

notdoingvalentines — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:16:37 +0100

This goes way back 7 or 8 years ago now, but something interesting happened on one of the communities I ran when where the words “Mod”, “Interview” and “unique” came up in the same sentence.

Admittedly, I did some web-work for a friend of mine at the time for their own Internet Radio Station and the idea came from this. Initial proposal was met with “THIS GON BE AWSOME LOL”, and so there I was configuring Windows Media Services on a Server 2003 box, Windows Media Encoder as the client, and a quick little web frontend where people could pick up the stream from Winamp, musikCube or whatever player they used, for a new Internet Radio Station called “PinkFloydYoshi Radio” from what I can remember (which was an old old alias).

I ran a couple of interviews of staff members for the community I was working with, which turned out to be hilarious and I enjoyed myself while doing it. Not something I could continue doing unfortunately due to time required to pull it off (Mostly technological and dependent on my own time available; all material was completely improvised during broadcast). In addition, as I was interested in it I decided to look up on what the deal is with some stations saying they were licensed. It was at this point I decided to ease up on it as there were plenty of things to stop me from doing the show, and because I wasn’t serious about doing it anyway I decided against continuing after a while.

It was a good experiment. It all happened before everyone started broadcasting their own things on Youtube, LiveStream or Broadcastify so I had no-one to take experience from. I’d never done it before, never knew how I’d be like when broadcasting in front of a group of people (I surprised myself, but I’m actually quite calm and get in to it quickly), learned a bunch of new buzzwords, and some of the details to make it licensed so I could, you know, broadcast music like every other radio station. I also learned that there is a lot of time that needs investing if you’re going to do it on your own. I found setting up the server to be ok, but it needed preparing, as did the encoder on the PC I would be using to do the broadcast on to make sure everything was loaded ready to go, and as people I interviewed had various packages for conferencing I had pretty much all the popular softwares installed, and I had accounts for them all. Everything was improvised on the spot based on what happened in the IRC channel so this was lesser load, but it’s arranging time to do it, across different timezones that also made things complicated.

Experiences gained afterward? Oddly enough, I was a host for a specific time slot for a friend of mine on his own internet radio station. No experience gained as much of it was basic filler while the original guy was ill, but I help my friends out.

Would I go back if I fancied the opportunity? Not live broadcasts, however I am interested in doing short podcasts or videos, but not currently sure on what content I’d do.

Photo

notdoingvalentines — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:43:32 +0100

Chibi Disney Eeyore by *princekido Saw this in my Tumblr...

notdoingvalentines — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:45:22 +0100

Chibi Disney Eeyore by *princekido

Saw this in my Tumblr timeline and thought it was sweet, but the person who uploaded it didn’t refer back to the original author and they disabled right-clicking, so I did some research and this is directly from the artists deviantArt page. :)

dA added the links to David Gilson’s profile above. :)

We’ve fallen out of love with the games console. Gaming...

notdoingvalentines — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:38:41 +0100

We’ve fallen out of love with the games console.

Gaming has been a big part of most of our lives now for over 10 years. Me? 25 years. I loved my NES, SNES and at the time I could be considered a raging Nintendo fanboy. I became platform neutral around 15 years ago (shows how old I am) when I started playing Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, Spyro The Dragon and Metal Gear Solid which were all not available on the Nintendo platform, but were all bloody brilliant.

At the time, a friend of mine explains to me that getting in to game development was about getting your idea on to your favourite console. That was ‘the dream’: Seeing your code or designs or storyline in use on the console you cherished the most, and he was right. When you bought a games console, you didn’t just bring a console home, you bought years of entertainment (and in the NES and SNES’ case, decades) around that single device. It was the harbinger of excitement and emotion, and we all lapped it up like a pack of thirsty kittens around a bowl of milk. For the developers and designers of your favourite worlds, it spurred inspiration and a desire to make ideas come to life on the big screen, but where did this inspiration come from?

If you played a Nintendo console, it’s possible you were inspired by the bright and colourful worlds of Mario or the fantastical and majestic Legend of Zelda, titles inseparable from Nintendo, and for good reason: Nintendo tailored their consoles around their titles, and this resulted in perfect harmony. Everything made sense. They also never released anything until they were happy that it was worthy of the Nintendo Seal of Quality, a scheme that is now sadly long gone.

Unfortunately today, the ‘dream’ of running your output on your favourite console is not something people factor in any more as something more curious has replaced it. It used to be called ‘homebrew’. You knew that if you took part in this scene, you invalidated your consoles warranty. It reduced (and to be honest quite rightly) the return and fix rights of consumers if they made their device do something it wasn’t designed to do. For 20% of the people who took part in homebrewing, it meant forcing your code to run on the console, and watching it crash and do weird things when errors existed, but for 80% of them it was a gateway to piracy or playing pirated games.

Today, however people demand this level of access to their consoles, and I blame Google for this. As Google’s Android operating system was pushed as “Open Source”, fanboys and apologists demanded access to the bootloaders of their mobile phones under the guise that “Android is open, I have the right to do this!”. They cried censorship at anyone who challenged this, especially the carriers who had services being stolen from them by people who owned Android devices. Internet tethering was an issue since day 1. If the carriers demanded it disabled unless you paid for the service, many people with Android devices felt ‘entitled’ to receive services they weren’t paying the right to use, and they ‘rooted’ their devices and added binaries that piped the phones internet access out the USB port or wifi. People got their contracts cancelled for breaching their terms, and deservedly so. Just like only being able to connect approved devices to corporate networks (if it wasn’t approved IT security would find you and beat you with a sledgehammer, and your device) I fail to see why people should be allowed to use other peoples networks in such a way and is unfair to the rest of us who pay the extra. The word for this is “entitlement”. Another word that is common among many successful indie game developers and open source obsessives (and I say this while wearing a Linux Foundation t-shirt) is “belief”.

I disagree with many beliefs more than I agree, but this is where I lose a lot of respect for many indies. 3 arguments for your delectation:

Argument 1: Games development should be free!
Maybe so, but Unity exists. UDK exists and all are free. What’s wrong with all these? Oh yeah, they run on Windows. A massive problem with enthusiasts of ‘open’ is that if it’s proprietary, it’s evil. This means Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft is evil for creating the experiences they have and fathered in to the games industry some of the most amazing talent, all names many people will recognise like Hideo Kojima, Tim Schaffer, Shigeru Miyamoto. All evil, because they work for organisations who create their experiences around proprietary technology. The argument for games development being free was never an issue in the days of these amazingly talented people. Free versions of IDEs or the design tools never existed back then but it didn’t stop them getting in and doing amazing things, so this argument is pointless. If this really bothers you, get an Ouya and enjoy building games that won’t captivate audiences like a good Zelda title (read: all of them).

Argument 2: Developers should take Linux seriously!
My argument for Linux has already been made: It’s the definitive server (until LDAP is mentioned), but a lousy desktop OS. How much money do you spend building a Linux game to build it around all the possible configurations, versions and distributions of every single possible library, package and distro? On Windows, you don’t have to consider this unless you’re going between Windows versions or you’re relying on frameworks that aren’t a core part of the Windows OS. This is why: It’s cheaper. Want another excuse? Not only is it cheaper, but it’s cheaper to build a game for an OS that has such a massive portion of market share than it is to build a Linux version of a game for only a very tiny share of people. Doesn’t stop that tiny share of users being very very vocal though. Don’t get me wrong: I love Linux. It’s an incredibly powerful OS and is perfect in my eyes for two things: Serving users and dealing with big data. If you go to a web site, chances are it’s a Linux box serving you the page.

Argument 3: Multiplatform is the way it should be done!
If you speak to enough of these ‘open evangelists’, the meaning of their use of multiplatform changes to ‘every platform; except any Microsoft or Apple platform’. If you’re speaking to a particularly militant open evangelist, it’s ‘Every open platform. If it’s proprietary fuck ‘em’. These are the Ouya fanboys, the ones who recently went all Donkey Kong on The Verge when they did an admittedly early review of the Ouya and gave it 3.5 out of 10, possibly the worst score they’ve ever given a piece of hardware, but to stay on topic I’ve had this argument before. My argument is that as a developer you should focus on the tools you are most comfortable with, and not keep changing them. You only become a great developer by sticking to your tools. If you want to settle with simply being ‘good’ then OK but when a developer looks at your experience in a job interview, they’ll bring this up as a problem topic.

Notch (Minecraft) makes some interesting arguments. Many of which I don’t agree with, but a recent one where he was quoted made me think “Maybe he’s not totally crazy”: “just make games for yourself”. This is actually how it used to be as I mentioned right at the beginning, getting in to games was about seeing your ideas run on your dream console. Today however it’s about money. This is why Battlefield and Call of Duty exist (also known as churn-churn-churn), they are cash cows and don’t take the player in to consideration. They don’t create them because they have a dream, they most certainly don’t create them because they want to. The only reason an immersive experience gets in to these games is because there are creative individuals who have ideas. Unfortunately, these creative individuals are non-creative people (managers with pointy noses and a ‘demanding ethos’) who order someone else who has the talents to do this to go crazy with the “immersion” and “innovate”. Innovate all you want, but innovation isn’t what makes a successful game. Sometimes, innovation can get right in the way of you enjoying a title as evidenced sadly by Zelda: Skyward Sword where I found myself constantly fighting with the controls to do basic things in a game with a story and visuals that gave me the impression that this was going to be the best Zelda game ever. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

To finish up, gaming today is in a sad state of affairs. From SimCity 5’s always-online mode that the next XBox is also having according to rumour, to the Ouya, an Android powered games console. Ouya, is possibly the most toxic as it allows game developers that create cheap throwaway experiences to infect a part of the industry that is desperate to keep players playing their machines and games, not because they make one hell of a killing (not true, see next:) but because they create game experiences that last 150+ hours, with massive stories, beautiful graphics and fantastic environments and an experience that will live with you for many years to come. It takes a lot of people to put games like this together, and a lot more to make and support the consoles they run on. It also takes a hell of a lot of time, and with this generation having come 8 years late (this console generation is 4 normal generations in the making) it also means workload to create experiences that challenge these next generation platforms is higher than ever before, meaning many developers will be asking if it’s worth creating these massive games, or if they will have an easier life in developing on mobile platforms and Ouya. Due to many studios closing, there is already a massive talent drain. Many of those people exit the industry altogether, many end up developing 69p games on iOS or Android.

It’s a massive shame. I feel like I’m watching the industry turn itself inside-out, and I’ve got a lot of really fond memories.

Spyro: Not Again by ~Lifefantasyx Oh the memories. This stage...

notdoingvalentines — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 23:55:08 +0100

Spyro: Not Again by ~Lifefantasyx

Oh the memories. This stage took me so to do. This is also a pretty awesome drawing, don’t see enough of classic Spyro, especially Sheila.

"You shut the fuck up! Right now! Relationships are of equal standing! I don’t give a fuck if you..."

notdoingvalentines — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:08:59 +0100

“You shut the fuck up! Right now! Relationships are of equal standing! I don’t give a fuck if you think you’re the man of the family just because you have a dick. Fuck you! She works just as hard. And she has a nice dress.”

- Cry (via cryaoticquotes)

Photo

notdoingvalentines — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:00:33 +0100

Wow. That was well hidden, and here I was thinking it was the...

notdoingvalentines — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 17:16:13 +0000

Wow. That was well hidden, and here I was thinking it was the damn firewall. Blasted appliance manufacturers.

Photo

notdoingvalentines — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:46:35 +0000

theaoidoragon: I’ve been playing Corpse party and I just found...

notdoingvalentines — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 19:48:55 +0000

theaoidoragon:

I’ve been playing Corpse party and I just found this…

memoriesoffear: Manga for Everyone: Ms. Yui’s ChildrenVol. 2:...

notdoingvalentines — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:34:00 +0000

memoriesoffear:

Manga for Everyone: Ms. Yui’s Children
Vol. 2: By Alba

Aww, they are an adorable brother and sister, haha.

Finally decided to upgrade my old Astaro Security Gateway at...

notdoingvalentines — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:50:02 +0000

Finally decided to upgrade my old Astaro Security Gateway at home. Astaro was bought out by Sophos between the last time I upgraded and now, and it still has the old Astaro look and feel: Sleek, Fast and full of features, hence it’s new name “Sophos UTM” or Unified Threat Management. It’s all the security solutions you could possibly imagine rolled in to one package, including VPN and now endpoint Anti-Virus. While I don’t get the ability to customize my website block messages and logos any more in this version, those minor features are supplanted by brilliant features provided by the Endpoint Protection, which allows you to install Sophos Anti-Virus on clients, and have it managed by the UTM, a feature not previously available with Astaro. Coupled with the fact it’s now a Sophos product, and knowing Sophos’ history I hold a great degree of trust in it and I don’t believe Astaro, if it had to be bought out, could have been acquired by a better organisation. Also, they’re keeping Home-Use licences I think!

Office Refurb Progress

notdoingvalentines — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:39:00 +0000

garrynewman:

Someone asked to see how the office was getting on. So here you go!

This is what it looked like when we first got it.

Here’s what it looked like about a month later.

And then a couple of months later

And right about now..

We are now ready for fresh souls.

Here’s our little coffee making area

And my office..

We’re getting started on the downstairs now. This is how it looked.

I don’t have any pictures of how it looks right now. I’ll save that for the next post :)

Looks like an awesome place to work. Somewhere I’d be willing to do overtime in quite happily!

Getting there, slowly.

notdoingvalentines — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 22:39:56 +0000

Getting there, slowly.

"Driven by a passion for what we do and those we serve: No one is left behind. We are Fractalcast..."

notdoingvalentines — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 20:25:38 +0000

“Driven by a passion for what we do and those we serve: No one is left behind. We are Fractalcast Networks.”

- Lee Ward on the Fractalcast Networks in-development website footer, on every page. Unlike some services, we won’t leave our customers or those developing on our services behind as we grow, and we’ll introduce a new kind of customer in to the fold: Academic researchers, Universities and Colleges. We will never lock out developers using our data unless their app or process negatively impacts our service or services, and we will always aim to work with developers to enable them to create new experiences for our users.

Essay: Picking up a skill that isn’t a problemExploring...

notdoingvalentines — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:49:41 +0000

Essay: Picking up a skill that isn’t a problem
Exploring organic, creative and programmatic thinking

My girlfriend is a pretty good artist. She’s been working to improve her skills for most of her life, a little like how I’ve devoted massive swathes of my free and work time to running IT services. Her skillset during the time she’s been in college and University has skyrocketed and she just gets better and better. I envy her skills because back when I was a child, alongside wanting to be an electrician, I wanted to learn to draw too but it was never primary, and so I never spent the time to pick it up, and didn’t appreciate things that may have been fundamental in getting me in to a position where I could actually do it. Even during my art lessons, I wondered most of the time “Is any of this even relevant?”.

After having an interesting conversation with a psychologist when I was working at the school (I was preparing a powerpoint for her to present in front of a class of students) where we both agreed that people discover solutions to problems in different ways. The thought process, that is, the way we arrive at a solution to a problem. While the psychologist I was talking to would think about a problem in a completely different way to her husband (an IT manager) they both arrived at the same conclusion. The length of time used to reach that conclusion however depends upon the problem they are trying to solve. The IT enginers thought process, for example, is referred to as “programmatic thinking”, where one considers the solution to a problem to be that of several steps until you reach the goal. Unfortunately for me, this isn’t effective where art is concerned.

The ‘programmatic thinker’ demands results following reaching a successful conclusion. Steps must exist in order to reach the solution. If there are no steps, and the design of which you intend on working with is dynamic then something that is moderately easy for one person (lets say, an ‘organic’ thought process), is incredibly difficult for the programmatic thinker (me).

This means that while my ability to problem-solve and remember information (even completely useless information) is incredibly strong, I can’t deal with something that can’t be classified as a problem.

This is where that Kanga above comes in. Because I see many things as problems, when I attempt to draw I try to approach it as though it’s a problem that needs to be solved. The nature of how I deal with the problem involves documenting it mentally so I can remember how I dealt with a particular problem, I basically create a step-by-step in my head which I hope I can memorize and re-play at a later point. That is to say that if I can’t replay something, I give up. Things have happened where I work on one drawing, comes out really nice, but then try to do it again later on a different medium (or digitally) and I can’t pull it off again, get frustrated, give up with the intention to come back later and give myself the excuse of “just can’t get in the zone”.

This is by human design, and is set at birth. This is essentially why some kids pick up sport and others take more pleasure in cooking. Others can sketch out mentally a design they want to draw in their head and mirror it on to a medium of some sort, but can’t deal with complex or disruptive environments or situations and panic, give up easily or get angry.

This basically means that in attempting to draw, I’m trying to tackle something my thought process cannot easily deal with. I can visualize a character in any pose I want, but I can’t decide how specific features should look, like how the eyes should look if I want the character to appear as though they’re looking at the viewer, or how I make a character smile when they have a long nose where the mouth is along the bottom? Are the legs anatomically correct? Is the spine curving naturally? Is the curve in the tail actually possible for such a creature? Additionally these are all things I should be playing in my head before I start to ensure I’m not constantly rubbing stuff out. When shading where should my light source (or sources) be, and how does this affect how parts are shaded or brightened?

The questions above aren’t problems, but instead they’re questions that cannot be answered with a yes or a no, but rather a do or check.

Does the above mean I can never draw? No. Although I believe a thought process is set at birth based on my own personal research, I still believe it’s possible for anyone to do anything, but for some it will come naturally, and for others they’ll find it mentally taxing. Unfortunately when you find a task in particular mentally taxing, this can lead to wondering if this task is really for you or you struggle on or develop your own mindset to work within your way of thinking, heck, you might even manage to convince yourself that maybe you don’t want to do something after hitting an obstacle and can’t find a way around (referred to as ‘cognitive dissonance’, ie creating a belief system to justify the opposite of what you wanted to do due to an obstacle, the end result being giving up).

So, how do I tackle this? From what I gather, if I want to learn to draw it’s going to involve time to discover ways to do things myself so I can mentally document the reason why something is done, and then learn to repeat the task.

If I manage to successfully repeat a task, I must then change a variable to then discover how the shape changes in a 2D world, and compensate accordingly, etc…

This means that in order to become better (The image is a direct reference of an already existing image and was done to learn how to use the pentool in photoshop properly and because I wanted a new wallpaper) this is something I need to keep doing, repeatedly.

Sorry this is such a long one. I guess excessive writing comes under programmatic thinking!

voodooblue: FC sketch for Karpour

notdoingvalentines — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:55:06 +0000

voodooblue:

FC sketch for Karpour