Stevens Programming Site Blog

Well it’s been an interesting time at work, lots to learn and lots more to learn after the training is over.  Taking calls to support the Post Office home phone and broadband products is interesting and sometimes hard.  On one hand I want to help the customers, on the other hand I can’t help due to access restrictions (I’m still waiting for some system username and passwords) or because there’s nothing I can do in this case.  Some calls are fun to take mind you.

The reason for this post is to start to document something I’ve been working on for a while – the unified console – and while it’s not taking the same shape as I originally wanted it to, it’s starting to work the way it should.  I’ve currently got the Unicode working in it (using UTF-8 for the Unicode glyphs) and it’s working in the 16 colour tile mode at the moment.  I’ve started to code up a proper image to font format utility, but getting my head around FreeImage is not happening as fast as I would like due to my working hours, and lack of material to read on the PC at work (no internet access).  I’ll post a couple of screen shots later on as well as some docs on how it should work in a homebrew application.

I’ve not forgot about the Pablo series of articles, it’s just I’ve had other things on my mind lately and Pablo got dropped a couple of places in my to do list.

And I’m knackered…

Training for a new job is tiring, taking in all the information about the products that I will be supporting (it’s a help desk role I’m in).  I’m looking forward to the next few days since I will be trained in the art of being a Post Office representative – and as one American said in #dsdev “Don’t go postal on us now”

Well it’s here, it’s the year we make contact, according to Arthur C. Clarke.  So far all I’ve made contact with is the ceiling with a paint brush…

I’m still unemployed and looking for work is starting to get me down, I mean how many times can you search for work to find no jobs that you can do before you want to kill yourself?  I’m not quite there yet, but not far from it.

On a brighter note I did some work on a new console system for the DS, but instead of using the ByteMap Font files that I used in the graphical console, I started from scratch and created my own font file format that supports Unicode fonts, and got a basic version working using the 16 colour tile mode, I’ve got a couple of tests to write but it’s working as long as you are aware of the limitations of the tile mode.

My main New Years resolution this year is to attempt to keep this blog updated more often than I have in the past – hopefully it will work this time…