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Archives for June, 2010

Oxford

June 20th, 2010

I went to Oxford today. I haven’t been since I was 18 when I had an interview there. Remember it being quite terrifying – was much nicer today! Oxford has several good museums: the History of Science museum was particularly good. I liked the temporary exhibit they have at the moment containing a poetic homage by Alain de Botton to the hobby of pylon spotting (among other things).

Photos!

My first WordPress plugin

June 15th, 2010

I’ve written a WordPress plugin to generate a browser for all the NextGEN Gallery albums that you have. You can see it in action on my photos page.

To install you must be using the NGG plugin (obviously) and then just place ngg-album-browse.php in your wp-content/plugins folder. Activate it, then you can use the following shortcode to insert it in a page or post (without the spaces):

[ albumbrowser ]

You can also display albums in a random order:

[ albumbrowser order="random" ]

Things in Maidenhead

June 13th, 2010

Contrary to popular opinion, there are several interesting things in Maidenhead. And here I have made some pictures of them!

This is the Brunel bridge which has been featured on this blog several times previously. The arches are incredibly wide and flat: such an awesome bit of engineering. Soon to be upgraded when the west coast mainline is CrossRail-ified, with overhead gantries and extra strengthening for super fast trains.

This tree has somehow managed to grow incredibly straight but in the wrong direction.

Here we return to the subject of bridges, but also of goose. This bridge is normally referred to as the Maidenhead bridge and carries traffic along the A4 from Slough. The bridges really are the best thing about Maidenhead…

I really like this derelict terrace near the football ground. I think it’s imminently to be demolished redeveloped into trendy flats, which is a pity as they would look much better renovated and left as houses.

That’s all for today. I will post more things as soon as I find them!

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TrainGame 0.2.1 released

June 6th, 2010

TrainGame 0.2.1 is now available! This version is functionally identical to 0.2 but the scenery and track rendering code has been almost completely rewritten to improve performance. You should see an increase in frame rate of around 2x with a low-end integrated graphics card (e.g. Intel GMA) or 3-4x with a GPU which performs hardware vertex processing. The downside is that a lot more memory is consumed, both system and GPU. However, the overall memory usage is still fairly low so I’ll implement a caching system when this becomes a problem.

A crash when saving a map in the editor has also been fixed.

Download the source code here: TrainGame-0.2.1.tar.gz

See the TrainGame page for instructions on compiling and playing.