Almasch

After a long time of running my handheld Palm TX and experimenting with it now is time for a bit cleanup and reorganization.

So I spend some time to improve the connection between the mobile device and my workstation or notebook. And now its time to backup all stored data from the handheld device and start with cleanup.

After that work I hope to be able to sync all data which are important to me with as little as effort from workstation to handheld device as possible. So far it is a bit more work that I like to do for every sync…

This evening I have got some time to play a bit with the java binding to irrlicht called jirr. I like java and I like the results I have seen.

After the first experiences using jirr it is really worth to get a deeper impression of it. I am really sure I will write soon more about it.

For testing it by yourself have a look at the Jirr Project of Stefan Dingfelder at sourceforge. Also check the Forum of Irrlicht. There is a category for jirr, too.

Everybody who was involved in planing and executing a project will read this book and got in mind that everything there is described is true and happened once before in a own project or in project you have heard of. So every chapter brings a little (or bigger) smile on the readers face.

For everybody who never had been attended to a project it is a good lecture before doing all the mistakes are done. Its very interesting to see that in the last centuries so many progress took place in information technology but the same mistakes are made in every generation of developers. Its no matter of operation systems or programming languages. The problem is eveytime the human who tries to handle it and fall into the same pit as many fall before.

When projects become more complex the message of the book is even more important then 25years ago. Today even relative small projects tend to be big enough that a single person is not able to do it alone. So one of the advises from the book Communicate in as many way as possible is one good example how to prevent problems. No technical device can replace the communication between humans only help to make it easier. If somebody do not want to communicate all technology we have is useless…

A good abstract can be found on Wikipedia about the content of the book together with information how to get it. Some information of the Author Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. can be found on his homepage.

For building the irrlicht engine on Kubuntu you need first download the source package from http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/downloads.html and unpack it.

Enter the source/Irrlicht folder inside the new irrlicht folder and start compilation with make.

If you run into trouble with error messages it is because of missing dependencies. Install following packages from the kubuntu repository:

• libgl1-mesa-dev
• libglu1-mesa-dev
• libXxf86vm-dev

and try again. Now everything should compile fine.

In the examples directory are some directories with examples and corresponding Makefiles. After executing make you will find the results in bin/Linux

If the Linker complains “cannot find -lXext” remove the -lXext in the Makefile from the compile command. Its not nessesary.