Posted on 29-07-2007 | By: Jérémie Laval
Category : Circ, General
Exhausted : This week has been extremely tiring though very enjoyable. Indeed starting from last Saturday it has been an almost completely week of party for different reason (birthdays, occasions …). Enough to say that going to bed each night at 4:30am isn’t very good for the body 
(moreover with the different sort of drink taken).
Happy : I still managed to get some work done on Circ in form of several plugins which are sometimes useful, sometimes frivolous. I plan to write a post explaining how I made these plugins and a general tutorial on how to build Circ from git directly in order to stay ore up to date with these kind of changes (the plugins have already been in git main branch for some days now). NB: I didn’t forget Mono.Xna and I hope to be able to finish up my stuff in the coming weeks
Eager : Starting next wednesday I will start my summer job for the next month at GE (General Electric). I still don’t know exactly what type of work I will do but even if I don’t expect to work on computer-related subject every day I hope I will still be able to use my skill in computer science during this one month period at work.
Posted on 19-07-2007 | By: Jérémie Laval
Category : C#, Circ
I made some interesting changes to Circ recently (where interesting = user visible).
First of all I redesigned a bit the internal working of Circ even if I want to port the entire presentation layer to a event-driven model like the actual model so this is a work in progress. Well the main advantage of the current core changes is that I fixed the wrong behaviour of Circ when someone is hl’ing you. Indeed, on precedent versions, the hl notification disappeared when you reopened the window even if you weren’t on the good channel tab, now this is fixed.
Together with that change I made a specific widget for notebook tab (greatly inspired from Stetic code) which show hl with an icon appearing in the tab, this widget also have a close button to easily part channel (though some people complained it’s not very usable so I will allow the user to disable this close button using the configuration file later).
I added preliminary work for some keybinding : you can type Super (Windows key) + Left/Right arrows to switch between channels and Ctrl + Super (Windows key) + Left/Right arrows to switch between opened servers. The problem is that I use a big hack to avoid too much key repetition as I haven’t found how to limit key repeat in Gdk (if someone has any input on that) so the behaviour may be a little jerky 
.
Apart from that I fixed a lot of little things like quit message, configuration file autocreation etc… so normally this release should work out-of-the-box if you run it for the first time. I also bundled Nini for those who hadn’t it in their package manager (which mean that the only external lib dependency now is Gtk#).
Visit the project page to download the new release (dubbed Circ-alpha2), as usual binary and source packages are furnished (but there is a bug in the autotool files which apparently comes from MD so I recommend the binary version).
To finish here is a little screenie to show you the new visual look :
PS: Work on Mono.Xna’s Audio part is going well, my WaveBankReader is now playing PongXna sounds but to finish this properly I still need to find how to retrieve important wave informations such as frequency and bit per channel, but thanks to Alan’s input I’m on the right way (thanks Alan 
).
Posted on 15-07-2007 | By: Jérémie Laval
Category : General
I was in Ireland all this past week touring the North part (both Ulster and Eire) and I must admit it was exhausting (we were forced to get up at 6h45 each morning whereas we went to bed at something like 1am each evening ) .
I really love this country (it’s already my fifth time there) and this trip hasn’t changed that : the weather was still horrible, Irish folks were still very warm in comparison, the landscape was breathtaking and finally veritable Guinness has never tasted so good (combined with the pubs ambiance of course) .
The only problem we have encountered was the mess at Dublin Airport. The main carousel for Air France was broken and thus the luggage were blocked on their way to the plane. Due to the delay (and the crowd that was waiting because of that) we would have missed the correspondence but thanks to our number (something around 30 people) the second plane waited for us (nonetheless, it was a great run inside Paris CDG ).
Anyway I expect normal flow of work to be back in a day or two 
.
Posted on 02-07-2007 | By: Jérémie Laval
Category : C#, Mono.Xna
Hey, some news from the front. For the past few days (in fact since my last post) I started to decipher the internal file formats used by XACT and thus XNA.
So far I have tracked my progress, together with some informations about the format, here : http://code.google.com/p/monoxna/wiki/XnaFrameworkAudio.
With what I currently have, I also managed to write a little tool which show some informations about sound bank and their associated wave bank. The code is really ugly ATM but ultimately I will base my implementation for Mono.Xna on it (with the associated cleanup and refractoring of course ). Because a screenie is better than any word, here it is :
I also mailed a guy from the XNA team asking some questions about the format. From what I have seen on forums they aren’t very inclined to give away these informations so let’s see how it ends
.
NP: Out in the Fields, Sonata Arctica
