Looky here, who wants a giant network accessible harddrive which won't let you share the 26 most common filetypes. Honestly, why would anyone buy a piece of hardware which is unbelievably crippled and completely unsuitable for the purpose it's being advertised for. And more importantly, why would someone design such a horrible piece of hardware?

On a similar, but more sinister note, if america thinks you might be guilty of a crime, then they feel they can just kidnap you. The mentality of guilty until proven innocent really is showing through here. I wonder what would happen if i kidnapped an american citizen and brought them to ireland because i suspected them of a crime. I'm sure America wouldn't view that too kindly.

My christmas exams (worth 35% of my degree) are getting closer and closer. Pretty much every day starting from last saturday has turned into a 10:30am->7:30pm study-a-thon. I'm trying to learn in the space of a 10 days what i should've been learning over the last 12 weeks. It's mostly working.

As a result, i've become a minor insomniac. Tis only 2pm, i've only been trying to sleep for 3 hours now. This describes it pretty well:

In two short days i'll be flying out to madrid for the mono summit. Woohoo! Turns out i'm missing my last 3 days of term, in which i should be getting two tutorials and our first problem sheet for a particular subject. So, not the best time to be fecking off to a foreign country.... ah well!

Also, if that F-Spot guy is about the place who was asking me about upgrading F-Spot to use the latest libgphoto2-sharp, give me a shout via email and let's organise something before i head over. Otherwise, just try and find me between wednesday evening and friday evening.

p.s. if i fail any exams because of this, i'm holding Aaron responsible, he tempted me over with a Chicken Pag! So no new MTP code for banshee if i fail ;)

I heard some great news earlier in the week and just got around to checking it out. There's another C# implementation of the BitTorrent protocol being developed! Good stuff! They've been working on it for about a year, and have "the core of the beast" pretty much complete. Thats great stuff! Considering i thought i was the only person with a C# based bittorrent implementation, i thought it'd be great to have a chat with them, see how they solved different issues etc.

So, about 15 mins ago, i loaded up that link and decided to download their alpha client, just to see how it works etc. Thats when i became seriously pissed off.

Without even having run the 'alpha client' i realised that the seedpeer codebase was actually MonoTorrent*. Yes, these guys had the cheek to take my code and pretend it was theirs. They tried to pass off about 18 months of my development time as their development time, without so much as giving me credit or mentioning that they were, in fact, lying when they said "we have almost finished coding the core of the beast". The worst thing is, they weren't even smart enough to do it properly.

So, for anyone out there who has actually used SeedPeer, or has a blog who've blogged about it, please try to make it known that seedpeer == MonoTorrent, except that they don't even use all the features i have available. For example, here's there 'TODO' list:

• MultiTracker
• Torrent Creation
• Custom DHT (faster)
• Rss Feeds
• Integrated Search Function (with commenting)
• Custom Peer Exchange
• Fast Resume
• Global/Per torrent Settings
• Download Priority
• more...

Here's a list of the features that are already in monotorrent that are in their TODO list:

• MultiTracker
• Torrent Creatio
• Rss Feeds
• Fast Resume
• Global/Per torrent Settings
• Download Priority
• more...

I suppose this is what you expect by making the code public. People will use it (which is what i want), but then they'll try to pass it off as their own (which is just plain wrong). So, if anyone wants to email the seedpeer people, their contact form is here, so feel free to let them know you know ;) Also, if you want a nice GUI for monotorrent, check out www.monotorrent.com :)

* Yes, i am 100% sure of this. I haven't used reflector to verify, but i'm 100% sure that at least 95% of the code is a direct copy/paste from monotorrent. It might even be 100%. If someone is bored, they can use reflector (or whatever) so they can see i'm not lying. No better proof than looking yourself.

Also, if the seedpeer guys do read this, using an obfusticator won't prevent me from recognising my own code. I can think of a dozen ways offhand to check if a client is my client without having to see the code. It's ridiculously easy.

EDIT: For those of you who know these things, The middle paragraph of the MIT/X11 license states:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Does that mean if they distribute a binary, they have to include that license header in some form or other?

I decided to install the English dictionary in firefox today so I could get proper spelling corrections when writing emails and whatnot. So I fired up Firefox and browsed my way over to here to grab the English dictionary.

So it turns out that 'American English' is actually 'English' whereas 'British English' is what i wanted. Now, considering 'English' originated in Britain, why the hell do americans insist on referring to 'American English' as 'English' and referrring to English proper as 'British English'. British English is 'English'. You're the one's who created your own seperate spelling and dialect.

It's the equivalent of referring to 'Canadian French' as 'French' and referring to French proper as 'France French'. C'mon guys, you didn't invent it, stop trying to make it sound like ye did!

On other news, my macbook is in for repair for an unknown amount of time after it just stopped booting up. So i'll be MIA until it gets back to me. I'm still contactable by email should anyone need to.

So, i'm looking for a bit of help. It's not a particularly hard task, it's just it'll take me a while and i need to go do some study. Basically, i need a method which parses XML-like data and adds the element name and the element contents to a Dictionary. It is fairly trivial, but i don't like the idea of having to think through all the string mangling required ;) First person to get me a method which works gets 10 brownie points.

You need to be able to handle something like this:
http://monoport.com/5078 (sorry for pasting there, but blogger borks on the XML tags)

Thing is, this is, technically speaking, invalid XML. The tag should be escaped, and the '&' in ObjectFileName should also be escaped. Unfortunately, i can't rely on the source of this XML being fixed any time soon, so i need to be able to hand parse the XML. I've outlined a procedure at the end which should be able to handle most of the mess that will be thrown at it. The only thing i'll add is that the manual parser doesn't have to cope with every eventuality. If something goes wrong (for example an artist called themselves which breaks the parsing) then don't worry, just abort. This is a last ditch effort to parse. It should succeed 99% of the time if you follow the procedure below.

Here's some psuedo code:
while(currentIndex < nexttag =" string.IndexOf('<'," elementname =" string.SubString(nextTag,">', currentPosition); // read the element name

currentPosition += the number of characters i've just 'parsed'.
string data = string.SubString(currentPosition, string.IndexOf("'); // The contents are between currentPosition and the end tag.
currentPosition += data.Length;
currentPosition += length of closing tag;

if(nextCharacter != '<') AbortParse(); // If the next character is not '<', then something has gone wrong, so give up. myDictionary.Add(elementName, contents);

When i read the news about gcc supporting CIL a few days ago, the very first thought to cross my mind wasn't "Wow, that's really cool", it was "Wow, i wonder how many people are going to start shouting to not use GCC anymore because it's 'contaminated' with microsoft code and you'll get sued if you try use it for anything".

So should i take it as a good sign that there's no uproar? Have people realised that implementing an open specification cannot get you sued? You never know, it might have happened. Still, it's an amazing achievement. I can't say it's something i'm ever likely to use, but it does have some nice possibilities.

With the mono summit coming up soon, I'm hoping to be able to spare the time from college to head over for at least 2-3 days of it. It'll be interesting to get together with a bunch of people for some hacking or some talking or whatever's going on.

So, if anyone's out there who's interested in talking about/hacking on (or redesigning ;) ) any of the projects i've been working on, or projects similar to them:

MonoTorrent: My pet bittorrent library project
Lunar Eclipse: The xaml designer for silverlight
libgphoto-sharp: The csharp binding for libgphoto - for MTP based media devices
Banshee MTP support: using the above binding

do give me a shout and i'll see what can be arranged. I'm already looking forward to getting some hacking in on F-Spot over the week to port it to the new libgphoto-sharp bindings. Should be fun!

For anyone else who's kinda undecided about going, ah sure gwon! Tis a bit of craic ;)

So over the last few weeks i've been working on improving the C# binding for libgphoto2.. Thankfully, the backend C wrapper was in fairly good shape with thanks to the guy who originally developed it, and trickv, who became the maintainer of it and is the guy responsible for implementing MTP support in banshee.

For me looking at the code as a newcomer to the libgphoto-sharp 'team', the first thing i realised was that the c# api was a direct copy/paste of the C api. There was no proper frontend which simplified the use of the libghoto2 library. For example, to get a list of connected devices and then connect to a specific one required detailed knowledge of the libgphoto2 API and over 100 lines of code and also required you to be very careful about disposing of objects correctly.

So, my first task in getting full MTP support in banshee was to write up a new API for libgphoto2-sharp which hid all that nastiness from the end-user. The new API is, i suppose, 80% complete. Quite a few of the methods in the API are blocking, and so asynchronous equivalents will have to be added. One of the more immediate benefits is that detecting and connecting to a camera takes 3 lines of code now ;)

So, if anyone out there wants to use the new simpler API (fspot and banshee devs, i'm talking to you) you can check the code out with this command:

svn co http://gphoto.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gphoto/trunk/bindings/libgphoto2-sharp gphoto

The binding should be considered API unstable until (probably) the release of libgphoto3.x.

As both a cyclist and a humanitarian, i think i'm fully qualified to say: Women with babies should not be allowed out in public.

"What are you on about" i hear you ask. Well, the reason is simple. Whenever a woman sees a baby, they instantly become hypnotised by it's hideous features and are reduced to mumbling cryptic phrases such as "Goochie goochie goo" and "Who's a big boy then?" to said baby. Unfortunately, this distracts them from real-world issues such as how to cross the road safely.

I was cycling to college yesterday, as i've done for the last 3 years (i cycled to secondary school for the 6 years before that and primary school for 3 years before that). All was going well, i was a mere 2 minutes from my house and was just preparing to take a left turn (in ireland we drive on the left-hand side of the road) when all of a sudden, a woman with a baby decided to cross the road in front of me whilest talking to her baby. So there i was, travelling at approximately 25 miles an hour with a baby in a pram being pushed by an idiot a mere 15-20 metres in front of me.

I jammed on the brakes, the back tire locked, the wheel skidded on the wet ground and i went flying. Whilest i got away with some scrapes and bruises, my MP3 player wasn't quite so lucky. I only got music from the left earpiece. I was pissed! So, as an electronic engineer, i tried to fix it. A quick google got me instructions on cracking open the case, so i did.

Initial inspection made it look like very minor damage:


However as i gently poked it, more and more bits started coming off:


Finally, by the end of it, the entire lefthand side was toasted and the top bit was also completely broken off. I was none to happy:


So, my task now is to find something to wedge along the side of the earphone jack which will hold the metally bits in place. Everything works fine at the moment, but unless i support those metally bits, they will bend back out of position through use. Worst case scenario, it's a 30 gig portable harddrive which can play films on any tv via TV-Out. Still pretty useful.

I don't care how i get one, but i need one of these!

Clicky Linky.

It looks so, so, so nice! I just wish public free wireless was as prevalent in ireland as it is in the US.

Have no fears my American friends, your President has your best interests at heart. Check out this interview where he reveals where that 50 billion in defense money is going:

I also care about the issues!

[quote]Sun Microsystems Demands University Study Retraction

The University of Washington, apparently hoping to capitalize on the recent hype around their controversial study on Baby Einstein™-style videos, followed up yesterday with another, similar study. In the new study, researchers found that Java programmers understand an average of seven fewer Computer Science concepts per hour spent with Java each day compared to similar programmers using other languages. Sun calls the study "seriously flawed", citing the fact that you can combine the names of Gang of Four Design Patterns to form new Computer Science concepts that all Java programmers understand, such as the ObserverFactoryBridge, the BridgeFactoryObserver, and the well-known FactoryObserverBridgeChainOfCommandSingletonProxy, beloved of Java programmers everywhere. Java experts at Sun say they're not sure how many combinations there are of the twenty-three pattern names, but there are "definitely a lot of them."
[/quote]

It's true. Java programmers do have a tendency to not be familiar with the new programming paradigms that Web 2.0 bring out daily. So, in an effort to do my bit to help these poor developers, i decided to calculate exactly how many combinations of the 23 pattern names there are. After spending hours with a pen and paper doing lots of complex multiplication, differentiation, division and.... addition, i came up with this answer:

There are 7 possible combinations of the 23 names.

So for all you java people out there, there's not much to remember. You can thank me later, a pint will do.

So the summer is finally at an end. I've returned back to Ireland from what was probably the best summer I've had in a while. I got to work on something useful, with some cool people, on a project that is single handedly going to destroy all of linux (if you believe the people in groklaw).

When i arrived over to Boston just over 3 months ago, the team were in the middle of their 21 day hackathon to get a working demonstration of Silverlight working on linux. So, i was tasked with the job of creating a visual designer for silverlight. Of course, the first thing i did was panic. I knew nothing of silverlight, nothing of xaml and had 12 weeks to produce something useful.

So, 12 weeks after i started, i managed to produce something ;)

Basic features: Video
All your standard features are there. You can select items, resize, rotate, move, alter properties through the property pane on the right. You can undo and redo (most things are undo/redo-able).

Animation Recording: Video
The basics are there for recording animations. Not everything can be animated as of yet. The supporting infrastructure is all there. Its just currently it can only animate properties which take doubles as their value.

You can do cool stuff like record several keyframes, then move them around to make the time longer, or shorter, or you can completely rearrange the keyframes so things happen in a different order. You can also seek along the storyboard and see the positions of the elements at different times in the animation. It's not quite up to the standard in Blend, but it's usable ;)

Sample Animation: Video
This is an animation which was created entirely using Lunar Eclipse. Everything you see was done through the IDE. The xaml was then copied and pasted into a textfile and the only modification it needed was to alter the xaml so that the storyboard started as soon as the canvas was loaded. Other than that, the xaml used was all auto-generated in the designer.

So, the overall goal of this designer is to have a good base which can be integrated into MonoDevelop in the (hopefully near) future. As the designer is going to be written in Silverlight, it should be relatively easy to stick a web-based frontend on it and use it through a web-browser. How cool would it be to be able to create little animations all through a browser!

There is still a tonne of work which needs to be done, the next part of which is to make the XAML a little less verbose and the animations able to animate more than just doubles. After that, who knows! There's a bunch of stuff not done, a bunch of things which probably need updating or extending and a bunch of testing to be done.

So all in all, it was fun this summer. At the start, nearly every time i updated the moonlight codebase from the repository, either it broke my code or i found new bugs. Nearly every time i reported a bug, it was fixed within 30 minutes. Thats what life is like on the bleeding edge. I have to say, toshok was amazing, i definitely owe him a pint. I wouldn't be surprised if every time i wrote the word "bug" in irc, he shuddered. He was usually the guy who ended up fixing my problems.

For the rest of the people in the office in Cambridge (Miguel, Jeff, Aaron, Garett, Guy (if i spelled that right) and whoever else i've forgotten), it's been great! If you're ever around Ireland, gimme a shout. I know the best place for sushi ;) If not, sure i may see ye at the Mono Summit. Who knows.

The only question i have after the summer is: If he can't swing from a web, what can he do?!

Tis that time of the month again! MonoTorrent 0.13 has been tagged in SVN, so tis time to update again. As per usual, there's a long list of changes. The biggest of which has been the commit of the latest version of the piece picker. It's a big step up efficiency-wise as compared to the older piece picking algorithm. While the core algorithms are essentially the same, they've been refined and honed into a sleek beast of a class ;) Here's a partial list of changes, but the piece picker change is the biggest reason to update sooner rather than later.

[Improvements]
If a peer sends data too slowly, its piece requests are reassigned to another peer
Smarter piece picker - Allows multiple peers to download the blocks from the same piece.
- Has significantly less overhead than with the old piece picker code
- Significantly faster endgame mode with the new code
Optimised Socket.BeginRead to need approximately 15% less calls to BeginRead.
Optimised the loading of fast resume data.
It is possible to safely call .Stop() on a torrent while it is hashing.


[Bugfixes]
Peers sending a HaveAll are correctly marked as seeders
Fixed bug which resulted in crashes under MS.NET with encryption code
Fixed potential issues with ConnectionListener race conditions
Stale fast-resume data is deleted so it isn't reloaded by accident


[Features]
Added a 'Complete' bool to TorrentManager
Exposed the PeerEncryption stuff so it is possible to tell what encryption method a connection is using
Marked EngineSettings and TorrentSettings as Serializable
It is now possible to create .torrents in a non-blocking way using the async BeginCreate method. The operation is also cancellable.
All eventargs now contain a reference to the TorrentManager that fired the event.

Work has been progressing steadily on Lunar Eclipse, although not quite as fast as i'd hoped for. At the moment, my big challenge is coping with resizing while shapes are rotated. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that easy to deal with. I've attached a video which demonstrates the issue. Check it out here: http://primates.ximian.com/~amcgovern/sample.avi

When a shape is in it's normal rotation (i.e. angle is zero), the change in Y coordinate in the mouse can be directly related to a change in height of the shape, and a change in X coordinate in the mouse can be directly related to a change in width, so everything resizes nicely.

However, when the shape is rotated by 90 degrees, a change in the X coordinate now relates to the height, and a change in Y is the width. At other angles, a change in 'height' is contributed to by both the X coordinate and Y coordinate change in the mouse.

The problem is that i don't know how best to handle this. The main issues are the following:
1) The amount of resizing to do should be based on the how far the mouse moves in the 'right' direction. i.e. if you move the mouse perpendicular to the side of the shape, the side should expand to follow the mouse
2) When resizing, the shapes shouldn't float around. As you can see towards the end, when i resize the rotated shape, it physically moves around the canvas.

So, if anyone has any advice on how to tackle these issues without tonnes of helper code, that'd be amazing. Currently, things are looking like they could get fairly messy trying to get this to work.

If anyone wants to check out the code, it's available at: http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/lunareclips

While i knew that creationism had found a home in america, i did't realise they had dedicated museums for it. Still, it's nice to know that the traditional values of common sense, reason and logic are being held up, like a bright torch, to lead us on into the future. I'd hate to think stupid things like scientific evidence could get in the way of a proper education as to how things happened way back when.

Since my last blogpost several things have been happening in MonoTorrent. Firstly, i finally managed to track down what was probably the most elusive bug to date.

Here's an abridged version of the events.

I had been getting reports on and off of strange crashes in the BigInteger class. These crashes appeared to be memory corruption problems of some sort. Needless to say, i immediately suspected that the reporter either had faulty ram or a highly overclocked system or even a corrupt .NET framework install. However, after getting him to run Memtest and a few other tests, i had to rule that out as a cause. However, as i couldn't reproduce, and he couldn't reproduce, there wasn't much i could do.

Time passed, several weeks i think and i was getting him to log every access to the class for me. Two other people had reported the same bug, so i knew something was definitely up. The only thing is, i couldn't reproduce it, no matter what i tried! I was hammering the code with dozens of new connections a second and getting no crash.

I had been in touch with Sebastien Pouliot who was doing his best to help me with tracking down the bug. Eventually i got fairly pissed off about the whole thing and decided it was time to solve this once and for all. I had already wasted hours trying to reproduce this at this stage, so if i didn't get it fixed this time, i was just going to completely disable the encryption code and thus "fix" the issue.

I logged into the windows machine i had in work, coded up a quick testcase which hammered the BigInteger class with random calculations. This didn't break after a fairly lengthy time running. Then i added 10 threads performing the calculation, as this was a 4 processor machine, so this way i could check more numbers at a time and so (hopefully) get a crash sooner.

BANG! I had reproduced.

I then spent the next hour or so (wasting some of both miguels and sebastians time) in finally tracking it down to a compiler bug in gmcs. The conditions for reproducing the bug were fairly strict, which is why i never managed to reproduce it myself.

1) You must be running under MS.NET 2.0 (meaning you have to be on windows)
2) You must be running a multi-processor machine
3) There must be more than 1 thread running a BigInteger.ModPow calculation simultaneously.
4) It has to be Wednesday ;)

The quick fix was to just compile the big integer code using the microsoft compiler. The only thing i'll say is i pity the person who has to track down the bug in the compiler, it's unlikely to be easy.

MonoTorrent 0.12.1 has been tagged in svn. I'd recommend anyone running MonoTorrent under MS.NET to update to this revision as soon as possible. There is an issue in the Mono.Security lib whereby you'd get strange exceptions in MS.NET if more than one calculation of BigInteger.ModPow() was being run simultaneously.

I've just tagged monotorrent 0.12 in SVN, so anyone using the library in their application is *highly* advised to use this new release. It contains several very important changes which affect library performance in a major way. Check the forum for a changelog of the important stuff ;)