Ramblings - 2010/04

It seems there are a lot of work to do for the Speed Dreams project members, as there is so low activity on the project in the moment. There are about a dozen bugs to fix until we can release 1.4.0 but I don't really find one that I can fix, most of them involve graphics knowledge I lack for sure.

So for the moment I spend my spare time doing tracks: St Petersburg, Knockhill and 2 30's-era tracks (secret secret!). I'm also preparing my robot to be included in the next version and to clean up code a bit before starting this year's TRB championships.
I've some new ideas for Speed Dreams like displaying 'pit' on the leaderboard if the driver is currently in the pits, better name handling on the scrolling leaderboard and some minor fixes etc

It is cold outside and winter sleep is so sweet :)

10 years gone

I haven't been able to boot into my good ol' Win2K lately - I've used it only for running the invoicing software for at least 4 years now. But invoices cannot wait too much, so I had to do something about it.

The partition/opsys was listed nicely in the Grub2 menu but when choosing it I met with an ugly message:

error: invalid signature

Nothing more. Not too long, right? :)

Of course I tried googling it and have found quite some references, but most of them were pointing to this forum thread of Ubuntu Forums. I've read that thoroughly and tried every tip included there, but without any luck. So I decided to install a new(er) Windows (ugghhhh) and the invoicing software.

First I saved the MBR with

dd if=/dev/sda of=/mbr.bin -bs=512 -count=1

then installed WinXP easily, then I restored the MBR using 'dd' again (read in more detail here). All that was left was issuing

grub-update

and I was ready.

Windows 2000 - we have spent 10 years together, farewell thee...

Ramblings - 2010/01

Speed Dreams: Well our beta is out and we have reached over 11.000 downloads until now. I am quite happy with that. Eckhard re-surfaced and improved a lot of graphics, on the other hand both Andrew and Wolf-Dieter has disappeared a bit, but they have advised it beforehand.

Holiday season made the project life a bit hectic but I suspect we will be back on path soon in January. Release is due very soon as you can see it in release roadmap.

BTW I've added a lot of stuff to the wiki, then Eckhard deleted the main page by mistake so it had to be rebuilt... todo: backup regularly... :)

I've used the lazy days for some re-organization of my own project directories & files, and again was amazed how easy it is to merge separate Git repositories into one. Also found this blog for useful hints.