Gaura Venetian Plaster is a start up company based in Brisbane who recently inquired about a website. Within three weeks, http://gvpdesigns.com.au/ was developed. The work involved slight design modifications and heavy editing of existing WordPress code. A flash banner was also developed. The whole theme and design was collaberated with Bhakti Candrika.
I’ll continue working with Gaura Venetian Plaster to maintain their website with the direction they wish to take it.
Just finished the first iteration of Quality Assurance contract work for Sura Systems. The work involved testing new additions to the software suite, reporting any errors using Mantis Bug Tracker and communicating with developers until the issues were resolved. The new additions to the Mental Health First Aid website were made live last week!
It seems this will be an on going thing, and will expand into learning new sklls. Test cases and other gooey PHP goodness. Nomnomnom.
It’s been almost a year since I started this blog, although there’s not much content a lot has been happening! Really need to update the CV/Resume.
I’m in the process of improving a few things, and migrating to a new server, which is expected to happen within the next 20 days.
I’ve made it easier to register and log in to the site, and added some other secret mystic treats. Going to post some stuff about work I’ve been doing now…
For around three years I had a PSP which was much loved. It played many kinds of music and movies on demand, and housed thousands of games. However as time went on and with the lack of care I had for the device, it eventually went ‘passed its used by’. The headphone jack ended up damaged and music became a chore to get a ‘clean’ sound, then the case started to crack in certain places. Inspired to repair it, I bought another case and replacement headphone jack, however, the case was really cheap and it just made things worse.
In a rage I bought another music player, and the PSP sat and collected dust for weeks. Scratching my head to think of what to do with it, I had the idea to turn it into a third computer monitor, you know, for log output stuff and things like that! Turns out it was more successful then I thought. It’s actually really simple to do this, but probably hasn’t been done with the bare minimum and treated solely as a permanent third screen.
The PSP was totally stripped down to the motherboard, headphone/wireless/card board and the screen. Surprisingly it still all worked fine! Custom software was installed onto the device so it’d boot straight into the pspdisplay software on startup, and with some tricky software on the computer to talk to it through USB, I’m sure it will come in handy! There are some annoying things though, like pressing X when it starts up (not an issue though if it’s left on) and having a USB cable and power cable attached, but I hope to create one USB cable to feed it power and data at the sametime!. When or if I do that, I’ll write a little how to here.
I had an email about the Hospital of Horrors game asking many questions. Since I wanted to release the source for this game after it was done Uni wise, I figured I should get around to it now!
Before you get too excited, here are some things to remember.
To see what it’s all about, you’ll need the following. The addons are included in the package, but if you wanted to know more you can follow the links:
I think the game will open in the Lite version of Game Maker (non paid version) so you can check out the codez (which I really don’t care what you do with), but you wont be able to compile it.
Hospital of Horrors was developed for a University final project. I did the programming and worked with Bettina Walsh, who created all the lovely art work! After 12 weeks of development, the game has reached a playable BETA stage. For now, development will be on hold to focus on another things, but there will be a finished version later down the track. We have some YouTube videos, check them out! If anyone would like to download the Desktop version, they can do so here. Please keep in mind it’s not a finished product and there are a few things which need improvement, but the basic mechanic of it is there.
If anyone was interested, the game was developed in Game Maker, since it’s great for sticking together a simple game, and also for prototyping ideas! If anyone is wanting to explore Game Design to create their own ideas, I’d highly recommend this program! It’s a great introduction to basic programming knowledge and design iteration.
From here I’m going to develop my skills further into ActionScript while learning PHP/MySQL so I can create Flash based games and have knowledge on how to build appropriate web sites suited to hold them. But really I don’t think it’d be long before I get into some serious stuff. ;o Anyone want to model some 3D for me? :3
Recently I had an email from someone asking about the Game Maker Text to Speech DLL, apparently it will be used in some educational software in the U.K. Awesome I think! However I haven’t touched this since 2003. After some quick research there appears to be already some other extensions to Game Maker which allow this functionality, but some rely on nasty methods such as calling vb scripts. So with some inspiration I’ve created a package that will allow the DLL to run with Game Maker 8 using the “Extension” feature. To get it to work on my computer I just had to install the Microsoft SAPI 4 (The newest version is 5 though).
The extension, containing an example and (some partially updated) documentation can be downloaded here! Please provide some feedback if you can. 
GMTTSExtension.zip (547kb for GM8)
Original DLL (180kb for GM5)
Bellow is ripped straight from the old readme.htm, the links should still work.
Note: If you have Windows Me or 2000 you should already have a speech engine installed. You can however add more engines if you want. Windows XP also has a speech engine, but it’s not compatible with the DLL, so you’ll need to download another engine. Windows XP users also need to install Microsoft SAPI 4 (825KB).
Microsoft Text-to-Speech Engines
Microsoft Engine 4.0 (7.3MB)
L&H TruVoice Text-to-Speech Engines
American English (0.99MB) voices
British English (2.54MB)
Dutch(2.58MB)
French(2.24MB)
German(2.18MB)
Italian(1.97MB)
Japanese(3.00MB)
Korean(3.03MB)
Portuguese(2.39MB)
Russian(2.85MB)
Spanish(2.36MB)
Recently there has being a rather large movement of people towards spreading the information about what I think should be known to everyone who has an internet connection in Australia. If nothing is done, the Australian Government will implement a nation wide internet filter. With the “save the children” ploy and being targeted at the ignorant masses, this can have a devastating effect on the quality of the Internet in Australia and freedom of information available to people. This filter not only has shown to be ineffective in trials, it will also slow down the internet by around 70%. The “black list” wont be available to the public, and there is no known reason or why a web site can make it to the list, other then the fact it is not deemed suitable for Australian viewing. There was a black list leaked which contains several harmless sites including a Brisbane dentist and a school canteen along with several youtube videos.
We are staging a city protest tomorrow, at 10AM outside the Casino! Please come along and check it out and bring your friends! Spread the word. There will also be another protest in March.
This really isn’t a step in the right direction for any freedom of information/speech! So take a stand, and help spread the word. If nothing is done, within two years this filter will take place without any vote or consent from the Australian people. Bellow is a video from the website containing information about “Project Freeweb”.
Project Freeweb – For the Freedom of the Internet from Anon VonAnon on Vimeo.
The last entry I’ll write about in my web privacy effort is worth mentioning I think, Suicide Machine provides facility to totally obliterate your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn (never used that one) accounts by killing all your virtual friends and eventually, yourself. So if you are serious about removing your internet identity and starting fresh, then this is certainly the way! I enjoyed the humor elements to it too!
So I have my tweets destroyed, Facebook deleted (well, after two weeks of not logging in, everything will be removed) and the MySpace totally gone. Once the Facebook two week grade period is over, I’ll make another one, but just for the purpose for people to contact me and redirect to this site. So from now on! Sensible tweets and facebooking, kthx sirs.
