Comments for Toni Westbrook dot Com

Comment on How to Move the COS (esxconsole.vmdk) in VMware ESX 4 (vSphere) by Toni

Toni — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 03:33:45 +0000

Glad I could help - and thanks for the info about #9 - when I performed my move, I actually changed all the values at the same time, which is why I never noticed that ESX automatically updates the rest of the values after changing /boot/cosvdmk. Very cool, one less step!

Comment on How to Move the COS (esxconsole.vmdk) in VMware ESX 4 (vSphere) by Francesco Rana

Francesco Rana — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:11:52 +0000

Well it went straight and smooth like you wrote. I actually run a couple of ESX/ESXi on Dell PowerConnect 2900 servers (in cluster mode with HA) and all went fine. Point number 9 was not to be performed as the ESX host modified all the COS entries making them point to the right partition.
Also I forced a manual reboot instead of changing ESX host status to “maintenance mode”, as I wanted to test the HA configuration as well.
Just to say that you made my work so much easier and want to thank you for this post.

Keep Up the good work!

Comment on Creating a Blackberry GPS Tracker by Wagas Sonkar

Wagas Sonkar — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:55:29 +0000

Hello Toni

Thanks for your kind consideration. Yeah its giving me “No Source Code Found” only.
No other error till time. Could you please guide me with it.

Thanks
Wagas

Comment on Creating a Blackberry Game - Part 3 by Scott

Scott — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 04:09:17 +0000

Yes, these help greatly. Thanks for the suggestions, and for posting the tutorial!

-Scott

Comment on Creating a Blackberry Game - Part 3 by Toni

Toni — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:55:56 +0000

Hi Brian - Sorry for the long delayed response, I’ve been away from the blog for too long. You can use the code above for using the keyboard for everything and leave the trackball out completely. Using the switch statement on line 237, you can pretty much process any incoming keypress. So you would move the code from the navigationMovement function to the keychar one.

Scott - usually it should happen the other way around, running very slowly on the emulator but quickly on the actual device. Slowdowns can happen in a few places - it’s important to look at:

1. How many threads you’re trying to run simultaneously. Threads are great for multitasking, but if you try to multitask past the ability of the processor, performance is going to suffer. You’ll either need to get fancy with when your threads are running, or move things out of threads into serial loops.

2. Check all your threads/loops for exactly how much code is being executed. If you’re trying to do more in a loop than is supported by your framerate, then everything is going to appear sluggish. The goal is to have processing done before the next frame starts.

3. Calls to the java mediaplayer take a while to buffer and start playing. If you notice the slow downs when a sound is being played, you have to do your best to start playing a sound when it won’t interrupt animation. This is a tricky dance.

4. Memory intensive functions - especially in loops (see #2) - make sure you’re not reloading bitmap data every frame, or something like that. This is another juggling act, depending on the Blackberry model you have, you don’t have a ton of memory to play with, so you have to choose between preloading as much as you can to make performance acceptable, but not loading so much that you exhaust your memory (which also causes performance issues).

Hope those help a bit to get you started.

Comment on Creating a Blackberry Game - Part 2 by Toni

Toni — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:36:14 +0000

Joe - you’ve probably long since figured it out / moved on, but it sounds like something being called from “trackwheelClick” isn’t being instantiated before being used - are you use you’ve included all the necessary “new” statements on objects before referencing them?

Jay - Thanks for the kudos! Again, I’ve been lax about updating the blog, so you’ve probably figured things out by now, but “sublayout” is a standard method within the Manager class. It defines where fields appear within that layout manager. It’s automatically called when a screen containing it refreshes. When we create a custom layout manager, we override this method to control where we want fields to appear in a special, custom way. Then we add this custom layout manager to the screen (e.g. line 197, line 221), and from then on it will get called automatically. The preferredHeight and width functions work in the same way.

Comment on Creating a Blackberry Game - Part 6 by Toni

Toni — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:26:11 +0000

Thanks for the kudos Timon! Glad I could help a bit.

Comment on Creating a Blackberry GPS Tracker by Toni

Toni — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:22:42 +0000

Hey Wagas - what is the exact error? Does it say “No Source Code Found”? Does it say anything else? I haven’t run into that error before, let me know if there’s any other info.

Comment on A Quick Kudos to Blender by Toni

Toni — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:13:14 +0000

Thanks David! Glad I could help - I know reading other people’s posts helped me a lot. I will be releasing my next game fairly soon (next 2-3 months - the majority of it’s done, I just need to do the level design). There are definitely some new ideas and strategies I used for developing that game, so I will probably post a few to the blog. Thanks again!

Comment on Creating a Blackberry Game - Part 1 by Toni

Toni — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:04:35 +0000

Mads, Dale - you’ve probably long since found it, but all the developer tools can be found here:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/

And thanks for the kudos guys!