Journal: November 2008

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Hello Arrochar
8/11/08 (Link to this entry)

I've made some progress over the past couple of weeks on my final-year project. I can now render some recognisably real-life terrain based on the Ordnance Survey's digital terrain elevation model and overlay an OS map over it. It works surprisingly well, and performance isn't anything like as bad as I thought it was going to be (although my laptop's crappy integrated graphics do fail fairly badly at it).

If you've done any walking around Arrochar then you should hopefully be able to recognise the area in the picture above. The Cobbler is off to the left of the picture, with Beinn Narnain and A' Chrois near the middle. It looks a lot more impressive when you're navigating around the terrain rather than in a static image, so I'll have to look into creating some videos once I've got it working better.

I've been geeking it up fairly majorly recently. In addition to programming, I've slowly managed over the past week to beat the latest version of Ubuntu Linux into submission. It's now just about usable as the primary OS on my laptop, barring a couple of irritating issues. First up is the crappiness of the ATI graphics driver (it fails in a fairly epic fashion at OpenGL) - not good when I'm doing lots of stuff with 3D just now. The other problem is the kernel's tendency to take around half a minute at boot just to mount the root filesystem (making a resume from hibernation as slow as a cold boot would normally be, and a cold boot as slow as a sloth trapped in a pool of treacle). At least it hibernates now, which is an improvement on the last version!

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