Great run today and a couple of milestones for me. All of the rides so far have had a pretty long stop in the middle, usually to read the papers and stuff some Maccy Dees down my gob. Today there was only a minor stop at the Tesco Metro on the way back to pick up some bread and milk and all McDonalds got from me was a grunted expletive as I cycled past. Also good is I extended out the distance I’m cycling with new route:
This one is 6.8 miles and as is true of any route in Southampton has its fair share of hills on which makes for a nice mix of coasting and huffing and puffing. I felt really good after and it’s amazing to look back on only just over a week ago Mousehole Lane had me pushing my bike up it on foot while coughing out a lung. Now it’s really easy 
My aim now is to try and get to 10 miles in the next fortnight or so. To help chart that goal I’m probably going to get a cycling computer this weekend.
Any suggestions what would be a good one?
I’m quite happy with this. The goal was to cycle every day I could and gently push up how far I went each time. I skipped one day last week, not by choice but because I had to be on a train at 7:15am and didn’t want to arrive at THE VERY IMPORTANT MEETING with all my clothes have gone through the rinse cycle of excessive sweating. For the steel calved seasoned biyclist who’re reading this my pride in the distances I’ve been travelling will certainly elicit a bit of a guffaw. I started going to the local Tescos with a round trip of around 2 miles. No sniggering now, the hill there is pretty steep. Next step up was the Subway in Portswood, total cycling 4 miles. This morning I’ve stepped up to the McDonalds in Swaythling which now takes me up to 5 miles. It’s a hard 5 miles as I’m not exactly fit but each day it’s getting better.
The steep Mousehole Lane isn’t scary any more. The SLOW sign that once looked constraining from the car still comes off as highly sarcastic but I can now get to the top without roadside huffing and puffing which is good. The astute reader will have clocked that my destinations aren’t as healthy as the ride itself (Subway, Maccy Dees) but I’m primarily up for this for a bit of aerobic exercise rather than weight loss. Anyway without stopping at Subway I wouldn’t have seen this LIAR:
Sitting a couple of tables away it was impossible to ignore her load phone conversation which started “Hiya! Yeah I’m in Oxford!”. We weren’t in Oxford, we were in Portswood, 65 miles from Oxford. Then: “yeah, well I got up early this morning and went to Hedge End to get the bus. But I was too early for the buses so I walked to Oxford. Yeah! I know. It is a long way, nice walk though”. Man, if you’re going to do some lying doing it very loudly in public seems an odd choice to me, especially if you’re going to choose such poor quality lies as that. Say you’ve got super powers or you just found out your dad is really Mr T. Lying about walking to Oxford just seems to display a shocking poverty of aspiration.
I am constantly surprised by how I am still easily impressed by technology and have such a ludicrously polly annaish view of it.
So it’s giving me a bit of a schoolboy thrill to make this post via the iPhone Wordpess application. And that i just downloaded it via 3g on nuneaton station platform. And posting this from a cab. It’s quite nice being so easily amused, you spend a lot of time with a big grin on your face. That is all 
Hoorah! Picked up the bike this morning and here it is:
The little beauty. From the shop in Shirley I managed the 3.7m ride home in 27 mins which isn’t bad for the first time. Just before home there’s a rather nasty hill and it beat me and I had to huff and puff on the pavement for a short time before getting back into it. Hopefully the raodside huffing and puffing should decrease as I get a bit more used to cycling again.
Modern bikes are ace. I used to have a fairly fancy Peugeuot racer in my teens which at the time was a nifty and expensive bike. These days it’d be a pretty hefty clunker. Switch gear changing is a lot easier than the really imprecise levers in the olden days. Pretty pleased with it all in all
Well I will from Monday. Yesterday I visited The Hub Works, the cycle shop in Shirley where Suze got her last bike. I’d been really impressed with the service she’d got, her previous bike had been stolen the insurers had issued a check for a fixed amount that was already made out to The Hub Works.
In this sort of situation there’s no incentive for the shop to cut any sort of deal, you’re a captive customer who can’t spend their cash any where else. Despite that the guy we dealt with, who turned out to be the manager, really went the extra mile to give Suzey the best deal he could by shaving a decent % of a bunch of accessories. He lost some money short term but it was the first place I went to to get a bike and yesterday go this little beauty:
It’s a Trek 75fx. I had a quite go round the block on it and despite the 20 years that’s passed since last having a go it all came back to me like er… riding a bike. They’re adding the rack and lights I picked up and I should be able to get it sometime Monday.
EDIT : Ooops: Posted this on the wrong blog Should have been on Gamedev blog
Managed to get to grips with the getting my code signed and runnable on production iPhone. It’s a bit of a pallaver to be honest and I don’t really want to go into any detail for fear of breaking any NDAs. However the good news is that it does work, the bad news is GR+++ runs incredibly slowly.
It’s shouldn’t take long to sort out, I’m confident the main code is plenty fast enough; the unofficial SDK version proves that’s the case.
The likely culprit is the OpenGL code that downloads the game screen into a texture. I had a problem similar to this on the mac version a long while ago. I’d created the texture in GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT_5_6_5 format, the same format that the game itself runs in and this went really slow. The reason was that the HW itself doesn’t seem to support this format natively and the driver itself was doing a very inefficient conversion to RGBA. The solution was changing the texture to RGBA8 and doing my own rather nippier conversion from 565. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case this time as well. Gareth mentioned he’d seen someone on a messageboard say they’d had problems with something similar. It’ll be that or the sound I’m sure.
In other news a chap on the yakyak forum has written a really nice looking iPhone game called Rolando, you can see it here. It’s a nice OpenGL based title that uses tilt a lot and has a bit of a LocoRoco aesthetic going on. The web page has an ace little animation showing the game working and I asked him how he’d recorded this and he pointed me in the direction of Screenium by Synium. This little app allows you to make a video of an area of the macs screen which in turn means you can run your game in the iPhone simulator and grab the output of that. Neato. I did a quick (and in much needed of improvement) test here.
It’s been a pretty good few days for random apps on the mac. I can recommend having a look at these:
Viscosity: a great OpenVPN front end for the mac that replaces TunnelBlick which was okay but a bit flakey at times. Even though it’s only in beta Vicosiy has been rock solid the last few days.
Cornerstone: A very slick looking SVN front end. I quite like using SVN from the command line but this is quite nice. Would be handy for artists innit
