Mathew’s blog

For the DustBot project here at the University I needed a test framework for C++. I found CPPUnit what looked like what I was looking for but it took me almost a day to figure out how to use it. The example in the CPPUnit Cookbook shows everything you need to now but there was no complete ready to use example. What I wanted was just an easy example ready to use. I found on Wikipedia (CPPUnit) a simple example but this was not complete there was the TestRunner missing.

I wrote a short example/tutorial with a few comments how to setup a test framework for your C++ application. You will find the tutorial here and the example code here.

Yesterday I found finally time to start playing Mario Galaxy and all I can say is WOHAAAAAAAAAA. Nintendo did a great job on this game. The control is very easy even if you have to walk on the walls and your stand on very small planets where you get around very quickly.

I only got about 6 stars yet but I could already fly around as Bee Mario. I am very excited to see what more brilliant ideas they have come up with.

I haven’t talked about my project yet. As a short introduction Yaom has the goal to be a media center that satisfies my personal needs of a media center. I tried other open source media centers before. Every one has it good points and they are quite major sometimes. I tried to improve them but some time they just did not fit for what i wanted. So I decided to do it my self.
The main goal is to have every functionality as a plugin, that if a plugin can’t do what you want it should be easy to replace it.

At the moment I have a kernel with a configuration backend working, both will be used by the plugins. The rest of the functionality shold be implemented in the plugins not should not be fixed in the application.

Today I just got the file loader for the audio backend working. It now loads the files and stores the meta information of the audio files with the help of kaa.metadata into the data base. For the database access I use the object-relational mapper Storm from Canonical. It is quiet easy to use so far.

I just finished today a chines dinner scene for a gift card. I removed the invitation text from the chines fan. I kinda like the result, if I would have more time I would try to improve the spring roles and I would tweak the materials of the spring roles and the dumplings a bit to get a more realistic feeling. But it has to be finished now and I’m satisfied with the result.

It took me about 3 evening to create the scene. I used materials from the Blender Open Material Repository. The dishes use the whitemarble material with changes in the scaling of the marble structure. The wood materials are from the Blender Material Database. The Teapot I got from the Blender Model Repository. All other objects I created by my self.

I just set up the blog on the enterprise lab. I will write about my projects here.