Apple customer service

I've had my iphone just under a year now and other than it's lack of Linux support, I've been very happy with it.

This morning I notice that the battery was almost completely flat, so I plugged it into the charger. This is were the trouble started. For some reason the phone just went black and no amount of poking it would get it to turn back on. I tried all the suggested things on the web to do with resetting it, restoring it using i
iTunes, connecting to mains chargers. Nothing worked!

So I though I'd ring apple customer support, this was a pleasant change from customer support form other companies. I pretty much got strait though to a human and she took me though most the steps I'd already found of the web. She then emailed some stuff to try as well as confirming that my phone was still within it's 1 year hardware warranty.

The last thing she suggested was to arrange an appointment with the local apple store to have someone look at it. So since the phone was still not responding, this is what I did. You can arrange the appointment via the apple website, choose the time and leave a message. After that it was just a matter of poping down to the local apple store.

Once in the apple store, someone store me on time and took a look at the phone. They confirmed what I suspected and said the phone was faulty. Next they poped out the back of the shop and got me a new one. They activated it their and then so that I could use it and people could call me! The only thing left to do was go home, plug it into iTunes and restore my old phones backup onto the new one. This was pretty easy and worked without a hitch.

I have to say the whole experince was very present and quite surprising. I've had other broken phones in the past and it's usually been a lot more painful. Usally I've been without a phone for days. I can't think of any other phone that I could have got replaced the same day it broken. Thank you apple!

NWN2Library first release

I've just made public the first release NWN2Library. This is a beta release (0.1 beta 1), so still a work in progress as I work towards the non beta version. I've upload to the release files to the website today, which can be found here.

This version has support for reading from TLK and 2DA files. This should work pretty well has the Neversummer web admin tool has been using this code for quite a while. Their is also a parser for the Bioware Neverwinter Nights 2 custom GUI xml files (Minor gripe, though I say XML, they are not really XML) . This probably the area that will see most work before the final 0.1 release.

NWN2Library & NWN2GUI

I've been working on two new open source projects in the last couple of weeks. Here is a quick intro to both of them.

NWN2Library

The first of these is a Java library, called NWN2Library. The idea behind this is to provide a Java library that is used to access the resources of the game Neverwinter Nigths 2. It's still in development and I've not yet made a release of the library. However development is happening in a public SVN server now. Details of the project can be found here.

So currently has has the following features:

• Can parse and read the strings from TLK files.
• Can parse and read the database files 2DA.
• Can parse the XML GUI files and produce a object tree of it's GUI components.

The XML GUI parser still needs some work but it's mostly done. Once thats finished I'll be making a initial release of the library.

NWN2GUI

The second project I'm on now very far a long yet, but its getting closer. This is a GUI application which is used to render NWN2 XML GUI files. The idea is you can make a change to a GUI, click a button and have it displayed with the changes. This is been developed as it's a real pain at the moment developing custom GUI's for Neversummer 5. The following screen shows how far the application has come so far:


As you can see from the screenshot, it's got quite a way to go yet. The XML GUI render has quite a few missing components and errors in existing ones. Also the main still needs quite a bit of work. I'm hoping to setup a google code project for it soon and develop the code in a public SVN server.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Custom Store GUI

I've create a Custom store GUI for the persistence world Neversummer 5. The main reason for creating it, is so items can and their costs can be pulled from a database. First step is to make it look like the stock Neverwinter Nights 2 stores. Later on we can improve on them.

One of the things I've been having trouble with, is the dragging of an item from a players inventory to the store window to sell the item. Well with the hope of people in #nwn2cr I've finally got this working. I though I'd post about it as this kind of information is very hard to find.

My main mistake was trying to retrieve the event of a item been dropped on store GUI. This is actually done from the inventory screen.

Their are two events that were confusing me. OnMouseDrop and OnMouseDropReceived. So in a drag operation between two dialogs (in my case the inventory and the store) their is a source and destination of the drag operation. The source will fire the event OnMouseDrop, and the destination will fire OnMouseDropReceived.

I've not been able to figure out how to capture the dragged object details using OnMouseDropReceived, but OnMouseDrop works very well. I used the two following calls to capture the objects ID and send to to the store sell script:

OnMouseDrop0=UIObject_Misc_ExtractData("self:","objectid",0,local:3) OnMouseDrop1=UIObject_Misc_ExecuteServerScript("gui_store_sell",local:3)

Their is another bit of magic that was also need. The above will fire for any event, so you need to know that the item is been dragged to the store. I added the following calls to the store window:

OnMouseEnter=UIObject_Misc_ExecuteServerScript("gui_store_mouse","ENTER")
OnMouseLeave=UIObject_Misc_ExecuteServerScript("gui_store_mouse","LEAVE")

The script gui_store_mouse sets a variable on the player when the mouse pointer enters the store window and deletes it when the mouse pointer leaves. Now the gui_store_sell script can check the variable before selling the item.

I was hoping to use a combination of OnMouseDrop on the inventory dialog and OnMouseDropReceived on the store dialog, but it seems that OnMouseDropReceived is fired before OnMouseDrop.

Hope this helps another scripter/modder :-)

Neversummer Blog's

This is mostly a test blog entry to see if I can get it to appear on the new neversummer blog planet I'm setting up. The idea is developers can blog about the various projects they are working on within neversummer.

Dell Studio 1535, FGLRX and RandR 1.2

I've had a little time to play around with the new RandR 1.2 support in ATI/AMD fglrx graphics drivers and I'm liking what I see. Make the laptop run with dual external monitors or the in-built panel is now really easy. It's a massive improvement over the ati-config approach I was using before.

Here are the commands I used to make the my Dell Studio 1535 run with dual external monitors:

xrandr --output LCD --off
xrandr --output CRT1 --right-of DFP_EXTTMDS --auto --output DFP_EXTTMDS --auto

These commands will now make it run with the laptop panel:

xrandr --output CRT1 --off
xrandr --output LCD --auto --output CRT1 --off --output DFP_EXTTMDS --off

Now I just need a nice way of attaching these commands to the screen setup button on the laptop :-)

ATI Drivers get Xrandr 1.2

I've just upgraded my laptop to OpenSUSE 11.2 and whislt I was at it, I pulled in the latest ati fglrx driver and wireless drivers. For some reason the display driver put up a bit of a fight, I think the problem was left over of older versions of the driver.

Once I'd removed the old ones, the new driver installed and work without a problem. The laptop panel came up with my desktop. I took my laptop to the study and plugged into into the two external monitors (LCD and a CRT). Now things started to not work again. It would only use the built in panel. So i tried to use the "aticonfig" tool to fix the issues and I got a error message about aticonfig not working when randr 1.2 was active!!

This is great news, it means we now have proper randr in the ATI comerical drivers (if I've not made a mistake and load the free drivers :-) ). So I can now configure the mointor setup using standard randr tools. Also Xrandr is much easier to work with than aticonfig. I suspect it should be possible to write a script and attach it to the monitor key on the laptop.

I'll post again when I've had time to play with this a little more