ricardo cabello* feed*

How-to unlock your Vodafone UK mobile phone

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:42:00 +0000

I had to unlock my Sony Ericsson v630i recently because I needed to use a Spanish SIM and I didn't want to carry (care about) another phone.

On the net there are a lot of weird services where you send your IMEI and they give you the code to unblock it (NUC) for �60 or so. Same price they will charge on the streets.

Well, in the end, after googling a bit it was much more easier than that, and for free.

Just email them asking for your NUC code and they will give it to you the same day. This was the answer:

Good afternoon Ricardo,

Thanks for asking about the NUC for your pone.

I will assist you with the procedure ahead.

The NUC for your phone is ****************.

The procedure is given below:

1. Remove the Vodafone SIM from the handset. Replace the battery and switch on.
2. Move the jog dial left then press the * key twice and then move the jog dial left
3. Network appears on screen
4. Then select YES.
5. NCK will appear - key in NUC and Yes, phone should then be unlocked

...

Counldn't be easier. Seems like new vodafone uk contract phones are delievered open nowadays, so asking for the unlock code shouldn't be hard nowadays.

escena.org DVD #1 / 2008 released (with sources)

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:03:00 +0000

This is something that kept me a little bit busy these past days.

Had to do some organising (specially for the Data track) and all the menu design + cover. Luckily, sole was there to do the rest :) The end result is quite good I think.

This is how the DVD menu looks like:

I even did some ascii art for the thing ;P

        ________ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ _______
       /    ___/     __/     __/    ___/      /       /    
    __/    __//__     /     /_/    __//       /   /   /__     
   / /_______/_______/_______/_______/__\____/___/___/  / .
  /      ________ _______ _______                      / .
 . /    /       /       /   ____/  // DVD #1 / 2008     /
. /____/   /   /   /   /   /   /_______________________/
      /_______/____\___\______/   v1.1

So, feel free to download the DVD, burn it, print the covers and show it to all your friends ;) Here is the .torrent you need.

And for all those that always want the sources to be released, even if it may sound weird for a DVD, yeah, we've released the sources, but you'll need to read the making of first in order to understand how it works.

New Neave.com

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:06:00 +0000

Mr. Paul Neave has a new showcase site, very well crafted and has a lot of new (and cool) stuff.

You... must... visit! ;)

http://www.neave.com/

Speaking @ Pixel Attack (Valencia, Spain)

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:47:00 +0000

At least once a year I go out of my cave, admire the sun rays and, while I'm at it, I give a speech in some random location. Last year was at LFPUG.

This year will be at PIXEL ATTACK, where I'll be doing the usual, detailing a bit on projects I've been working on, showing some tricks here and there, and also showing some bits on the works.

http://www.pixelattack.org/

I'll see you there! :)

That's enough.

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:26:00 +0000

I keep getting distracted. I need to focus.

If in the future, you ask yourself what were the drops... somehow, these has been (I know, very random):

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=708_1212766386

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/01 /the_elevator_pitch_fwa_the_def.html

http://d3fest.org/

Zomb will be proud I think :P

Roxik's The Eco Zoo

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:13:00 +0000

It's another oh-so-good project by the master. Kudos Roxik!

Reminds me to 1997's PC Demo: Eden / Bomb! which featured an amazing 3D world created by Made.

Woh!! Just realised that Zappy released the sources of this beauty o/

FlexBuilder3 + Eclipse + Ubuntu = More AS3 Tests

Wed, 21 May 2008 14:08:00 +0000

So, finally found a decent setup for developing AS3 with Ubuntu, Flex Builder 3. It's not as good as FDT3, but it's enough to keep going.

Here are some stuff I've been working on since setting everything up... expodoob performance test (I'll give some detail about this project soon), bump test 1, bump test 2.

Many thanks to Thierry Nicola for pointing me on the right direction with his post.

Inspire08 demo log, day 36

Mon, 19 May 2008 01:04:00 +0000

Status:
-8 days left until Inspire08
Back to the system code

Well, so, here it's a preview with some text on the top finally. I guess I have align left and center at least. Need to sort out the Font class so the Font it's only the definition of the chars and a class Text is the one that draws and that can load different Fonts.. tho I just need one, but you know, scalability.

Hope it doesn't lose sync (I'm back to the currentTimeMillis method):
http://ricardocabello.com/projects/inspire08/11/

Inspire08 demo log, day 35

Sun, 18 May 2008 01:17:00 +0000

Status:
-7 days left until Inspire08
Back to the system code

I didn't have much time this week to work on this. But today I managed to do some work. Mainly on the font, and a font system which is now, more or less, ready. This is an R.

charData = new float[][]{{ -1, -1, -1, 1 },{ -1, 1, 1, 1 },{ 1, 1, 0, 0 },{ 0, 0, 1, -1 }};

Yes.. it took a bit to define all of them by hand... And this is how the Font system works so far:

Font.position.x = 1.85f;
Font.position.y = -0.1f;
Font.colour = new Colour(1,1,1);
Font.scale = 0.07f;
Font.writeSentence("ORBIT . XPLSV 2008");

Still need to add width, align and stuff like that.

Temps R�el - Breakpoint 08

Wed, 14 May 2008 23:55:00 +0000

Really good report/documentary.
Taken from demoscene.tv

Diverter

Tue, 13 May 2008 22:54:00 +0000

Hehe, that's interesting... for first time somebody used one of my tunes instead of me being the one that is using somebody else tune :D

Inspire08 demo log, day 30

Tue, 13 May 2008 08:20:00 +0000

Status:
-2 days left until Inspire08
Back to the system code

... Ok, porting this to LWJGL ended up being a waste of time. The main porting was very quick, like, in 30min I had it done and working. Doing the applet version took more time, about 4 hours or so. And in the end there were some weird bugs with the timer, and after all the time spent trying to understand how to do the Applet version is the last thing I wanted to see. So, back to JOGL.

I also spent more time again on getting the position of the tune. I managed to get something this time. SourceDataLine.getFramePosition() return the amount of samples played, but they numbers aren't as smooth as a normal Timer, like the same number may repeat 5 times, which means that the animation is jumping. I had to do a crap fix for that:

public static long getPosition()
{
	/*
	 * For some reason the SourceDataLine.getFramePosition()
	 * doesn't give back smooth sequence of numbers, here it's
	 * a crap fix for it.
	 */
	
	if (lastSampleInfo != tune.getPosition())
	{
		lastSampleInfo = tune.getPosition();
		lastTimerInfo = System.currentTimeMillis();
	}
	
	return lastSampleInfo + (System.currentTimeMillis() - lastTimerInfo);
}

Am I the only one that thinks that it's weird that I have to do this? Still, it kind of works, but sometimes jumps back a tiny bit, I may come back to this code in a few days to try other things, but at least it uses the audio timer (somehow).

I was now starting doing the font system, it will take a bit still as I need to find the best/most dynamic approach.

I felt that closing the previews was a bad idea, so as soon as I have some text on top of the screen working I'll put a new version online so you can see where the thing is going.

Inspire08 demo log, day 29

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:22:00 +0000

Status:
-1 days left until Inspire08
Back to the system code

As now I have more time (lol) to finish this, I'm now taking a look to lwgl as an alternative for jogl. On Friday I was amazed of how easy was to have something compatible for main OS and browser and I wondered why no other sceners used it for avoiding shit time compiling stuff. Then I realised that there were more people on the scene doing demos with Java, at least Pandur did. So I mailed him and after a couple of mails he explained he used lwgl instead. After spending almost all the evening today I still don't know what are the benefits on using jogl or lwjgl, but I think, after testing it a bit, and specially after having been answered nicely all my questions by the people on #LWJGL I think I'll use this one instead. Also the applets seem to be a bit more robust than Jogl ones. Don't take me seriously here, I have no idea what I'm talking about ;) It's just what I feel is the best.

I did some more tweaks on the font, so tomorrow I'll try quickly port the code (shouldn't be too hard) to lwgl and create the font in 3D and.

Inspire08 demo log, day 27 and 28

Sun, 11 May 2008 01:12:00 +0000

Status:
-1(0) days left until Inspire08
Content, sync

So, yeah... unfortunately I didn't make it in the end. Well, as 50% of the prods that sceners work on anyway. However, the good thing is that yesterday night I started to have something going on which was very interesting visually and could develop very well. I don't think I'll put more WIP versions available now until I finish it, it has nothing to do with what I showed before and if I showed it it would spoil some effects :P But if you really want to see how it is going, let me know and I'll send you the .zip

Anyway... I'll keep working on it daily and keep logging it until I finish, it doesn't go at all with D/// topic, which is a shame, I don't know if I should change the name/purpose of the demo at this point. Maybe I should and do the next one, for Euskal (which btw, I got the tickets already :D) with the appropriate topic and leave this one as the experimental/test one. Yeah, that makes sense.

Anyway, yesterday night I implemented some Triangle/Vertex/Vect3D classes to the "engine", and today I managed to do very lightweight Tweener-like library/wrapper. It uses Robert Penner Tween equations, which, if you have used some before, you can't live without anymore. This is how the implementation looks like:

triangle.v1.position.x = Tween.process(t, d, triangleDest.v1.position.x, triangleOrig.v1.position.x, Tween.EXPO_EASEIN);

(I got the Java port of the libraries from here).

As I seem to be a bit stuck on how to evolve the effect on the demo (although I have 3/4 of the demo with content already), I guess it's a good time to start thinking about the font. I haven't had a chance to see how to load images yet, but I think I won't do that in the end for this one. So, I will be doing the definition of the font with lines. First I'm designing the font with inkscape:

Doing that was about 5min job. I'll spend a bit of time tweaking the font now tho and then I'll go character by character reproducing it with GL_LINES in a nice class :) While doing the font I tested it on top of a screenshot of the demo, and it more or less fits by now. Man it's starting to look like a global war game or something :D

Well.. tomorrow more.

PS: Some of the prods released at Inspire are already on pouet! Check them out!

Inspire08 demo log, day 26 (part 2)

Thu, 08 May 2008 23:10:00 +0000

Status:
0(1) days left until Inspire08
Executable demo

Well, after sleeping about 10 hours in 3 days, I better sleep a bit more today as I think tomorrow (friday) will be a kind of party coding day/night (sponsored by red bull). Now that I think about it... it may be the first time I actually do coding when doing partycoding :P

The demo system now works everywhere: Windows / MacOS / Linux...

http://ricardocabello.com/projects/inspire08/08/demo.zip

So, tomorrow... content content content, and I guess I won't do the log so there is a bit of surprise for the competition (hopefully).