Blue Fish Logic goes live

Well, we've finally done it! The company we setup "Blue Fish Logic" way back in December last year has finally gone live. Having spent the first 6 months of this year developing frameworks for producing 2D and 3D games for the mobile market, I decided that it was far too much work for a one person and I couldn't afford to employ anybody, so we decided to go down the more practical and simpler route by developing smaller applications for Pocket PCs...I've currently got a few ideas for more enterprise level apps, but let's walk before we fall (or whatever the saying is)!.

At the moment the company consists of me and Sarah. I do the techie stuff and Sarah does everything else (including marketing). We have lots of ideas so should keep us very busy for a few months.

The new website is up and running, still lots to do to it and is currently only offering 1 product. I plan to add the facility to purchase direct from our website as the resellers we are currently using take a massive 40%...this is going to be a priority task :) I'm also in the process of upgrading the site to a business level plan as it it currently a home user plan and is too slow.

www.BlueFishLogic.com

Nothing much to say!!!

As I've failed my "at least 1 entry a week" target, I thought I'd just talk about...stuff!!!

The weekend just gone was fairly busy. It was my birthday on Saturday...yippee, hoorah, ooooh my back...I'd better sit down! We had a nice meal out at lunchtime once we'd found somewhere that was open (around Annecy is a fantastic place to live but everywhere shuts up for the winter....don't the locals ever eat out!!!!!). Anyway, we ended up in The Imperial Hotel which is probably the poshest looking hotel for miles, very grand, white and over looking the lake. Nice meal, no chips though, but we'll probably have our christmas day meal there.

Saturday evening, we went to a dinner and dance at The Palace Hotel, probably the second grandest looking hotel for miles, very grand, white and over looking the lake. A good time was had by all with many a bad head the next morning.

On Sunday we went and got the entire family kitted out with ski gear. 5 sets of skis, 5 pairs of boots, 5 pairs of battons and a couple of helmets for the kids. All second hand of course ('cause we'll probably only do it once :) ). The whole lot came to less than 350 euros which if you've ever looked at the prices of ski stuff...is a real bargain. And next year (if we want) we can take it all back to the same place and they will try to sell it on our behalf...a bit like a thrift shop.

(Phil Cole, if you're reading this...are you on the UK X Factor (as Ben) or have you got a twin brother????)

Just to liven up the entry, I've attached a video from a company called "Blame Society Films". I think they are really funny...check out the rest of their stuff.

Congratulations to Me!

What can I say, I'm almost speechless.

Today my "Dan the Proclaimer" video has reached 100 views. With YouTube receiving just 30 million video views a day, I cannot believe it only took 25 days to get 100 viewings!

My next big milestone is 1 million views and based on my calculations I will only have to wait 685 years!

Damn Funny

I watch a lot of stuff on YouTube and most of it is a waste of bandwidth, yeah OK, and possible so is Dan The Proclaimer (see earlier post), but tonight I came across this one which is hilarious (WARNING: Very strong language).

Ascent of La Tournette

Last week my brother-in-law Mike came to stay. Both being keen hill/mountain walkers, we decided we would do La Tournette. This mountain is the highest peak in the region and reaches 2351 metres at its peak. It took 3 hours to walk up and apart from it being a constant ascent it wasn't too difficult. Nearer the summit there is some scrambling over rocks, but chains have been secured to the rock faces to help you. Once you get to the top the views are amazing, Mont Blanc was stunning, particularly as we had almost perfect weather without a cloud in the sky.

At the bottom

Refuge (in case weather gets bad)

Me and Mike about halfway

At the top

Mont Blanc from La Tournette

Am I mad or just not sane!!!!!

Recently I got a new stills camera (early birthday and christmas present). This camera also has a pretty good quality video camera and like, I' sure, most camera techie people know, there is really only one way to test this sort of thing...enjoy...

Retour des Alpages

Yesterday was the Retour des Alpages, which according the Babelfish translates to "Return of the Mountain pastures". Basically, every year on the second Saturday of October, all the animals are brought down from the mountains and are paraded through Annecy old town.

The whole day is dedicated to this event with the entire old town being converted into a huge fair whereby people are demonstrating and selling a variety of things.

We had a really nice day out and I'd definitely recommend it if you are in the area at this time of year.

Tech Stuff: svchost.exe and Windows Update

Yesterday, my machine received the usual monthly batch of windows updates. They appeared to install and everything seemed OK.

This morning, however, was a different story. When windows had booted and had finished loading all the services a message appeared saying svchost has tried to access some dodgy memory. Clicking OK to this message prevented any further programs from running and so the only way to get out was to do a hard reset (switch the machine off).

Booting into safe mode I was able to access the internet and do some searching. I restricted the search to the last week which yielded dozens of other people who were getting the same problem...and the common scenario was that it happened after windows update.

For future reference, if you ever get a similar problem then this link details the steps that I followed to fix the corrupted automatic windows update options. After doing this, everything was back to normal.

Competition Time : Spot the Difference

After many months of dealing with the bureaucrats in France, we have now reached a major milestone in our integration into the French system. Our car is now officially French registered and we can now finally get some insurance!!!

Sarah did a magnificent job sorting all the paper work out and taking the car to the various garages, etc (I would have helped if I understood the lingo....honest). But the process wasn't without its set-backs...

The first thing to do was fill out all the paperwork, which actually wasn't too bad.

Next before the process could start, we had to get a letter of conformity from Honda UK. It took about eight calls before they finally admitted they were rubbish and in the end they couriered a copy over. It took about two and a half months to get the letter (from the first phone call to actually receiving it)!

As the letter took so long to come we thought we'd just stick with UK insurance and not bother changing the car plates, but I'd already told UK that the car was now exported and so any English insurance would not be valid. We therefore had to persevere with the French route.

The next stage was to get a control technique (MOT). A major problem here was that we had UK lights which were currently blinding the oncoming traffic (still not sure I understand what the problem is with this!), so we would have to change the lights. A quote from the local Honda garage came in at 900 Euros (including 50 Euros labour). What a ripoff, it would be easier to just sell the car in England. But, then a friend suggested we tried using some headlight adjusters that tourists use when driving abroad. These consisted of stickers that you stick on your headlights to adjust the beam. We didn't know if we would get through the control technique with these, but it was worth a go. We got some sent over from England, I stuck them on, Sarah took it for the test and Hoorah (ginger beers all round) it passed, although he did say we would have to change the lights by the next test in two years time.

The final stage in the process was to take all the various pieces of paper to the local government offices, pay the 350 Euro fee and they then issue you a new registration document (a bit like the log book). Sarah then took the car to the local KwikFit type garage where they made up the new plate.

With a French registered car, Sarah was then able to sort out some insurance which cost about the same as in England.

Private Lessons

Yesterday I had my first french lesson. I know I've been in France since last October, but the problem with learning a new language is that you learn it based on its grammar. There, however, is the problem! I wasn't taught grammar at school (as it wasn't that sort of school!!!!) and so trying to understand French grammar and relate it to English grammar...well you can understand my predicament.So, for the last 6 months or so I have been trying to learn about the different elements of grammar (if that's how you would describe it) so that I have a better understanding of how to construct grammatically correct French sentences.

My French as it stands today is still pretty pants. I know lots of words, particulary nouns such as Dog, Tree and Car. Conversation wise, just saying nouns doesn't sound too intelligent, so hopefully after a few (thousand) lessons I should be able to understand French speakers and then I'll know when is a good time to say my nouns!!!!!

DanDiggins.co.uk Goes Live

After months of being representing by a list of folders, DanDiggins.co.uk has officially gone live today.

This is the first phase of my site which is a collection of some of the assignments and the Masters Project that I did on my Computer Animation MSc degree at Bournemouth University.

Wedding Anniversary

Today is our 10th Wedding Anniversary...Wow.

Ahhhh...Bewdeeful

Those years seem to have flown past.

Some of the things that have happened in those 10 years (in no particular order)...

• Had 2 jobs.


• Had 3 children.


• Moved house 4 times.


• Had loads of cars.


• Had identity stolen by some crook/knob'ead.


• Did an MSc at Bournemouth University.


• Left the country!


• Lost a large portion of my hair!
  

Tonight we are going out for a meal (without children). It's been years since we went out just as a couple so am really looking forward to it. The children will be looked after by a deaf French lady who cannot speak English so should be interesting for all!!!

Swim in Lac Annecy

Well after nearly 9 months of pressure from my French neighbours, I finally took the plunge (pun intended) and went for a swim in the lake.

Everytime I spoke with my neighbours, they could not believe I had not been in the lake. Everybody who lives around the lake also spends a big part of their life in the lake too...apparently! So after a really sweaty day gardening I decided I'd go and do it.

To say the water was cold was an understatement...I waded in (without wincing as there were loads of people around) and just dived in. The cold literally took my breath away, I couldn't even swim, all I could do was float around. I did manage to sort of breast crawl/half drown my way about 30 metres from the shore where I found the water was quite warm. The warmness didn't last though as there were pockets of freezing water drifting through...so I make a quick dash for the shore and exited (still trying to look sort of cool) to the warmth of my towel.

Back to School

Yesterday I spent the day at Emily and Sophie's school! Not to study, but to try and salvage as many working computers from a pile of old second-hand (scrapped) machines. With a new school year starting and with new admissions the sharing rate for the machines was 2-3 pupils so they were needing more computers. With the school being very small and privately funded thay used old business cast-offs for their hardware.

There were 28 machines to go through, ranging from old Pentiums to Pentium IIIs and had all sorts of Operating Systems installed (Win 95, Win 98, Win NT, Win 2000 and Linux). As most of the machines being used at the school were still Win 98, that is what we decided we would stick with, however, most machines had win 2000 on and the password was unknown so I am going to have to attempt to wipe win2000 and install win98 (I took a machine home to give it a go). Looking in the newsgroups it doesn't sound like its an easy job...but I always like a challenge.

By the end of the day I had 5 working machines that were networked and ready to go, which was lucky as one of their current machines packed up while I was there so I swapped it for one of the salvaged ones.

Hopefully if I can de-install win2000 and get win98 working, they should get at least another 6 working machines.

It was interesting being at the school all day, I sat in the headmasters classroom where the older children are taught. It sounded like a fun class (didn't understand anything as they were talking Franch). During the breaktimes I saw Emily playing , which was nice.

Tech Stuff : Dodgy Memory Leaks

Having spent over a week trying to find a memory leak in an app I am developing for Windows Mobile I finally found it today.

The app I have developed is a Today screen plugin. It works happily with no problems for around 8-10 hours and then suddenly it stops displaying and the device starts struggling to do anything else until it is reset...definite symptoms of a memory leak.

OK, so down to finding the leak. Fortunately I had made a desktop test application for testing today plugs so it should be fairly easy to track it down..so I thought. I ran my test app and monitored its memory with performance monitor, but everything appeared fine...no leaks!!!!

I checked every line of code to make sure there were no potential problems...I didn't see any.

After a few days of trying one thing after another I was starting to suspect that perhaps one of the system DLLs on the device may be corrupted and was leaking memory...but I figured this couldn't be the problem as all other apps seemed to behave OK.

I downloaded a trial version of Rational Purify which detects memory leaks...but this didn't find any!

Last night I had a breakthrough whereby I reset the mobile device and then attached to the process via Visual Studio 2005. I could then break into the code whenever I wanted to see what was going on. I left it running overnight and this morning, sure enough the app was not displaying again. I then stepped through my code and found out that the line that was erroring was a RegOpenKeyEx call. This call was returning with an out of memory error!

I realised that the memory error was a bit misleading as what it was actually telling me was that there were no more handles available...somewhere in my code I was not closing a handle, and sure enough I found one place where I was doing this. I fixed the code and now no memory leak!!!

So the moral of the story is don't assume memory leaks can occur just because of malloc, realloc and new, but also the system has a limited number (although big) number of handles and therefore all handles should be released (especially if you are polling files and/or the registry as in my case).

Mountain Trek

A few weekends ago I trekked up the mountain behind our house. It's certainly not on the scale of Mount Everest but it was still a challenge at 1200 metres and the days temperature was around 30 degrees centigrade. I've included some snaps from my mobile phone to show you the stunning views.

Annecy.....

South Shore of Lake Annecy.....

Veyrier du Lac.....

Mont Blanc in the distance.....

Début d'école pour mes enfants

Today is a special day, particular for Emily and Sophie, as today they start school. It is going to be very exciting for them both as they will be 2 little English girls amongst a class of French children. Everyone has told us that they will learn French just like that, I think Emily knows a lot more than she thinks she does (as she is constantly teaching me).

The start of the day was fairly easy, I awoke before the alarm and the girls got up straight away as then were very excited. They got dressed, had breakfast and got ready to go. We all piled into the car and took them to Emily's school. There were lots of children and parents there and we had a chat with the headmaster (who wants me to help test 28 secondhand computers that the school has just received). I went back to the car as Sophie and Poppy were still in the car.

A few minutes later, Sarah and Emily came back to the car. Apparently Emily and Sophie do not start until the afternoon as only the older children start in the morning. I couldn't believe after all the military operations to make sure they get to school on time at 8:30am, they don't actually have to start until 1:30pm! A big disappointment for the girls, but at least Emily gets to go to the shops to spend her tooth mouse/fairy money!

The girls finally went to school at 1:30. We took Sophie into her classroom which was full of lots of small French children. Sarah spoke to the teacher who explained some stuff to us...I just smiled and nodded as I hadn't a clue what she was saying. We then left Sophie sitting with some girls at a table who were drawing.

At 4:45 Sophie and Emily came home from their first day at school. The were both really happy and had big smiles. Emily said she wanted to go to school forever, so I think its safe to say she did really enjoy it. Apparently in the car on the way home, they were all asking their angels to make sure I get a job so they can stay at this school, so no pressure on me :)

I've finally done it!

Well having spent the last few months reading other peoples blogs, I have finally got around to creating one for myself. Not sure what I'm gonna put on it yet...but here's my first real blog...

Having spent the last year working for myself ( on my own (at home (in isolation ( in the basement ( although I have my own toilet) ) ) ) ) I have decided that it sucks. I need people interaction and I need to get out a bit more...so I've decided to try and find a proper job. Not totally sure what I want to do yet, but it has to be creative, graphical and pay loadsadosh :). It would also be nice to use some of the skills I learn't on my Masters Degree in Computer Animation that I did last year at Bournemouth University (UK).

Having moved to France last year, I can honestly say my language skills are poor. I get absolutely zero interaction with the locals, all our friends are English and the French friends that I do know, who are married to English speakers, speak English perfectly so they don't waste their time with me.

An example of how bad my French is, was yesterday when I spotted a small boy in our garden climbing our hedge. I couldn't even go out and tell him to "F Off before I get the dogs out" so I just stood and stared at him. The silence and and stance worked and he soon disappeared (after retrieving his ball).

I finally received the boxset of the "Comic Strip presents" yesterday (39 episodes) and the next episode is screaming out to be watched. If you haven't heard of or seen any of the Comic Strip stuff, then you are missing some classic cutting edge comedy from the 80's...try to catch "Bads News", "More Bad News" and "Fistful of Travellers Cheques" Heeeeeeelarious.

Fin.