Hard drive headache

It's been a while since i last blogged, mainly because nothing major has happened. I didnt expect this much coursework so early on in the semester, although i guess it will be like this as its my third year.

I bought a new hard drive as i only had 1 in my pc. I like having my data/documents on a seperate drive from the OS's, i also keep backups on an external drive every so often. I got round to installing the new drive, but i'm feeling and hearing a quiet humming/vibration that phases in and out. Even though its so quiet its very quickly giving me a headache, i've got a returns number for it, hopefully a new one wont be faulty, it is a major hassle.

Also i saw that microsoft is giving away free copies of its software (such as visual studio 2008 professional) for free to students. My university wasn't on the list but after contacting them i've managed to be verified. This does seem like a great and positive thing for them to do.
I was downloading VS from them last night and as they supply a download manager which allows you to stop downloading and continue later, i turned it off and went to bed. I tried continuing this morning, and i got an error that the file couldn't be found and that the download is cancelled! Thats over 1.5GB of download (of 3.3GB total) wasted. I need to download it all again!

Virtual File System

Over the last few days i've started working on the virtual file system for OGE. The virtual file system allows access to files independant of where they come from, such as a compressed file or remotely on a server. The users code only ever interacts with Archive's, File's and DataStream's.

In the current version of OGE (in our CVS) the file system and resource management code were together. The naming was long winded and felt hard to maintain. This has changed in the new version. The two implementations that will come with OGE (normal files and compressed files (using zlib)) will be seperated as well to help keep the code cleaner and easier to maintain.

Once OGE has plugin management, it will be possible to register new types through plugins. This should be made easier with POCO too, as it has shared library classes and other utilities, such as a ClassLoader (inspired from Java).

Java habits

Work on OGE's core and utilities is progressing slowly but steadily. I'm currently working on a group of utility classes (Map, List and possibly Queue and Stack). For each of these, there will be a thread-safe and non thread-safe version. These probably won't be used directly in the core or the systems but are provided for faster prototyping or for users that aren't as familiar with multithreaded programming.

Over the past semester at university i've been using Java alot and didn't get alot of time to program in C++. I'm now finding various Java habits are affecting my programming. An example, i keep writing the visibility of member functions and variables with the declarations, like "public int a;" which is invalid C++ code. Another habit is writing boolean instead of bool, which is the opposite of the problem i had when starting to program in Java after using C++ alot. This is very fustrating...

Finished Exams

At last i've finished my exams for this semester! I can finally get on with OGE.. or can i?

The Orange Box arrived today just after i got home, i've only played a bit of Portal, i like it, although i got to test chamber 10, got in the elevator at the end, and then it says cheats set to 1, and returned to the main menu and displayed the options window. i loaded it again, but it keeps doing the same thing. i'm currently waiting for my account to be registered on the steam forum, ugh.

It's not the best start really. I will start half life 2 soon, although i've already played quite a bit of it (i own it), but i stopped playing a long time ago when my PC died and i lost everything. So i've got to go through it all again to get the last part of the game and the two following episodes.

I think unreal tournament 3 is next on my list...

Edit:
I found a post where someone had the same problem, the solution was to restart your pc. i did and it's now fine. yay!

A little update

Before i went to bed last night, i uninstalled everything that visual studio express installed, and installed just the C++ part (i couldnt be bothered to wait for the other languages). It seems MC.exe is in the SDK now, i have no idea why it didn't install the first time. So POCO now builds fine.

I'm writing simple scripts to automate the tedious tasks of copying all of the dependencies OGE needs into the dependencies folder. There will also be scripts to make SDKs much easier too. This should mean that we can keep the latest prebuilt dependencies up to date on sourceforge, as well as uploading new SDKs.

POCO and VC++ 2008

i've been working on the new structure for OGE over the last few days. I think it will be an improvement from the old one. I took some time to get POCO built and to see if it can be used to replace boost. So far i haven't been able to build it. I get an error that mc is not a valid command. mc.exe is a windows message compiler that comes with the SDK, but when i looked for it, it wasn't there. Installing the win32 tools from the microsoft website contained mc.exe, i have no idea why it hasn't been installed with 2008 express.

I'm going to copy the mc.exe over to the other SDK, hopefully it will work.

It's a shame problems like these arise, they waste a lot of time trying to solve them. Thanks to members of POCO project for their help.