N900 software rendering

Some time ago I wrote a software renderer and presented the video on N73 running it. Then I ported it to N900, updated the model and lighting, but never actually published the video of it in action. Well, here it is:

I think the low FPS values (around 12) were the reason it was not published. It is due to the amount of triangles the new model consists of. The old Caesar's one was much simpler and thus rendered faster. With proper low-poly model the above animation would run with at least 30 FPS without any problems.

Fun side note. The software renderer on N900 was actually faster than running the hardware accelerated version. Well, hardware and/or drivers sucked greatly on that phone.

CRT-like rendering on LCD monitors followup

Apparently some folks on some strange forum-like site have been wondering how the CRT effect works. Next time you should write a comment to the entry instead of relying on me watching site traffic analysis.

Anyway. I have prepared a stripped down version of the code and it should be simple enough for anybody competent to replicate the effect in his own code. As the ReadMe file says, the shaders are not optimized in any way whatsoever. Some of them are written in a blatantly bad way. But it's a good starting point for anyone interested.

Windows binary: http://team.pld-linux.org/~wolf/CRT%20demo.7z. You will probably need MSVC 2012 redistributable package.
Source code: http://team.pld-linux.org/~wolf/CRT%20demo%20src.7z

CRT-like rendering on LCD monitors

The advances of technologly in the past few years have given us quite a nice improvement in the quality of images displayed by our monitors. Thanks to RAMDACs that don't suck, LCD monitors, digital video interfaces, then LCD monitors that don't suck we're now able to display sharp visuals of unprecedented quality, at rather big resolutions too.

But there is a problem. Some types of content looked great in the past, but there is something missing when it's viewed nowadays. There are people who may not even know how it's supposed to be, due to the old technology becoming obsolete. Text mode looks different. When you want to use 8x8 font it ends up looking either blurred or super blocky. Use modern TTF fonts and you get nice curved shapes, antialiasing, etc., but it looks just wrong. It's not how it should be anymore. Another good example are 8-bit emulators. What has happened? These games used to look good, but now they are ugly in their perfectness!

Well, some things need to look bad to look good. Thanks to programmable GPUs we can now re-introduce all these bad things that were plaguing us in the CRT days, so that we can be happy once more. Let me show some pictures, each split in half. The left side is post-processed and the right side is the original content.

Some notes:

1. The effect is dynamic and looks better when it's watched live.
2. This is not an emulator, these are just screenshots of 8-bit games. I am using the post-processing for other purposes.
3. This is based on what I thought would look good, not on any comparison to a real CRT, or analysis of errors happening in the VRAM -> analog -> CRT path.

UTF-8 support added to dftpd

Thomas Brushington has send me patches adding UTF-8 support to Symbian builds of dftpd. In case someone might want to use such functionality, he also provided a new build.

http://team.pld-linux.org/~wolf/dftpd-utf8.SIS

(note that I have not checked if it actually works).

Dumb FTP Server now on N900

Dump FTP Server is now available on the N900. It uses QT 4.6, which currently is only available in extras-devel, so beware.

Download location: http://team.pld-linux.org/~wolf/dftpd_0.1.3_armel.deb. Hopefully will be in extras soon.
Source repository: http://gitorious.org/dftpd

Changelog (0.1.2):
- Workaround for Firefox handling of PASV command.
- Maemo port.
- If binding to port 21 fails (for example as a result of lack of root priviliges), the server will try to listen on port 2121.

Changelog (0.1.3):
- Passive mode should now be working. Because of the used workaround only WIFI connections are supported.
- Bigger icon in application manager.
- Upload speed should now be at par with download speed.

Impossible?

UAC considered harmful

I have switched from XP to Windows 7 on my work machine recently. Everything was working fine until this has happened:
A quick research revealed the following (source):

Before a 32-bit process is created, the following attributes are checked to determine whether it is an installer:

• The file name includes keywords such as "install," "setup," or "update."

This is confirmed by changing the file name of the offending exe:
The executable of course is not an installer of any kind and does not require any extra privileges. It just reads two files and creates a third one. Furthermore, it's a third-party application and I can't just change its file name without breaking things for everyone else. There seems to be some kind of white list of trusted applications, but nobody other than Microsoft can modify it.

Without the ability to take that application out of UAC "protection" the only viable thing to do is to turn the UAC off. Great work! I feel more secure already.