It's Easter time!

And you all know what that means!



Ok, so I should have used a bigger pan to cook them in... they do look a bit, um, squished together...

Doesn't change the taste, though!

Here they are with a glaze added - just some melted jam (used plum, because we had some in the fridge) brushed over the top.



Personally, I think I prefer a bit more spice in my hot cross buns. Maybe next batch I'll use 4 or 5 teaspoons of mixed spice, instead of only 3...

Oh, and the taste?

Absolutely freakin' delicious!

Had to resist the temptation to eat the whole lot in one go, still warm from the oven...

Adventures in GUI programming

So, I've been dabbling with a little Qt programming.

I wanted to develop a program that would let me do an easy search & replace for objects in ArmA2 map files. Naturally, while I could potentially write a CLI program, it would be much easier for me (& others who might use it) to have a GUI interface. As I thought writing a windows app would be in the too hard basket, I decided to try out the Qt GUI toolkit.

Not only that, but I installed the NetBeans IDE to do the programming in. The old DevCPP that I've been using for years is still very good (and I've written quite a few CLI C/C++ programs with it), but NetBeans promised to make Qt programming a lot easier.

Shame it didn't make installing all the required software & packages easier... I was rather disappointed, upon downloading the tools I needed, to see that I was promised an almost single-click installation experience - except on Windows.

This is a problem, because ArmA2 is a Windows-only game, so naturally I wanted to do the development in Windows. Not that it really matters all that much where I edit the map files from, but being able to fire up some of the official Windows-only editing tools to check stuff is pretty important.

Needless to say, I did eventually get everything working. I even got the proverbial "Hello World" application to compile & run.

Then I upgraded Qt from version 4.5 to 4.6, and broke everything again. :-(

Took me several hours to fix that problem, which probably says more about my lack of computing knowledge than anything else!

So, I started to code up my app. Quickly figured out how to use the Qt Creator to lay out the application window, with various buttons, checkboxes, and the like. Even figured out how to assign signals & slots to those things that needed them.

I had a moment of feeling pretty chuffed when I got the "exit" button to close the application. :-D

Now I've got the file dialogs working. You can select the input file, and the output file name. It'll even pay attention to those little "read only" & "allow overwrite" checkboxes I put in there.

Then it was time to do the hard part - actually read in the map file.

Well, with the Qt Reference Guide open on the second monitor, it wasn't all that hard. Except for the bit where I couldn't get it to read a float - it kept giving me doubles... turns out that was a compound problem. I was using the reference docs for Qt 4.5, not 4.6, and there's a change between those versions that means a QDataStream defaults to reading double-precision floats, not single.

Fixed that, and had another moment of feeling rather chuffed when I read in the file header (containing 7 or 8 different variables of five different types), wrote it out again to the output file, and compared the two in a hex-editor and found they were byte-for-byte identical for the header. :-)

As I said to the missus earlier - that's 72 bytes down, only 90 million to go! :-D

Holy freakin' COW!

There's this chemical.

Dioxygen diflouride.
(No, not dihydrogen monoxide)

O2F2.

Some chemists write it as FOOF - and for good reason!

This stuff explodes when you mix it with other chemicals - and that's way down at -180ºC! I'd hate to see what happens when you try to do anything with it closer to, I don't know, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen?

Apparently it just can't be warmed to room temperature without Bad Things (tm) happening...

One example reaction: 4O2F2 + H2S -> SF6 + 2HF + 4O2 + 5920kJ/kg of energy

On an energy basis, a kilo of this mix would be as productive as, say, 1.3kg of TNT. Yes, the stuff that goes bang.

Nasty stuff...

via via

Engineering FTW!

Here's some of the most impressive engineering I've seen in a while. This is why we need engineers - either that, or a hell of a lot of very poorly paid manual labour (thus china's rise).

Why you shouldn't play with microwave ovens...

A new toy!

Went to Dick Smith today & bought a Logitech Harmony One universal remote.

The most surprising thing about that was that Dick Smith actually had one of the cheapest prices in Oz for it... for those who don't already know, Dickie Schmidt's been moving away from it's electronics/hobby store roots, and heading more down the white-box Harvey Norman / Good Guys / Retravision style path. Most of their stores even had a clearance recently where they offloaded all the hobbyist electronics stuff for low prices. Such retail strategy doesn't normally lend to low pricing, but a few online searches revealed there were only a few online stores where I could have got the remote cheaper, and most of them didn't have any stock. Plus I wouldn't have been able to bring it home today. :-D

Have only partially programmed it. It'll allow us to watch TV & play DVDs (turning on the TV, AV receiver, and DVD player and selecting the operational modes as approriate) so far, but I still need to configure it correctly to allow us to run the PVR (a chinese cheapie that nevertheless works quite well) and the WDTV. Also have to get a DVD player for the TV in the front room, so I can move the WDTV into the loungeroom.

Now that I've finally finished (no, really!) the speakers, we've got things somewhat re-arranged... those of you who have been here before wouldn't recognise the place! If nothing else, we've finally gotten rid of that old cane furniture we never did like. :-)

Another baking update

Here's my efforts for the Christmas bake-off at work the other day.

I wasn't too upset with the results, considering (a) I've never made cinnamon & fruit scrolls before, and (b) I didn't actually use a recipe...

Tip for younger players: while freshly-ground cinnamon has an absolutely amazing aroma, and tastes bloody fantastic too, it takes a metric crapload of time to grind cinnamon by hand in a mortar&pestle... get yourself a spice grinder (or a really clean coffee grinder set to "espresso" mode")

I confess, though - I did get some advice from an older brother. He spent a year or two working in a bakery before starting his apprenticeship, has been a chef now for about, oh, twenty years or so...