Cygon’s Blog

On Saturday, after a good break of about 10 days, I finally took the 10 km route I had been planning all the time.

It took me 1:36 at an average heart rate of 154 (maxing out to 184 bpm). Seems my heart rate is still getting lower all the time. I was hoping my muscles would catch up and I could enjoy pushing myself through the track at 170 - 190 bpm (call it masochistic, but I like the feeling :p).

Well, judging by my watch I got rid in excess of 1887 kcals, with the EPOC effect surely kicking that way below 2 mcal, if not 3 (yay!)

There’s still some way to go to get back to 10 km / 1 hour. Actually, I have to run 50% faster. Don’t think that’ll be doable with reasonable effort unless I get rid of some excess weight :/

Yet another one! FreeImage is a popular library among game programmers that can load a wealth of image file formats (.bmp, .dds, .exr, .gif, .ico, .jpg, .mng, .pcx, .png, .tga, .tif). It’s also free and Open Source, so there’s nothing stopping me from attempting an x64 build of it

FreeImage internally uses OpenEXR, the IJG reference JPEG implementation, libmng, libpng, OpenJPEG (supported JPEG 2000) and LibTIFF. All of these libraries are available as source packages as well. I’ve updated all these libraries to their latest available version.

Source Patches

Here are some patches containing the changes I had to apply to FreeImage in order to make it compile to x64 cleanly:

Download: Patch fixing all x64 issues for OpenJPEG 1.3
Download: FreeImage 3.1.0 patch fixing all x64 issues

Visual C++ 2008 Binaries

You can find precompiled, optimized binaries for Visual C++ 2008 in my Subversion repository:

https://devel.nuclex.org/external/svn/freeimage/tags/3.1.0-r1

The binaries have been compiled with Visual C++ 2008, all contained libraries targeting the Multithreaded DLL runtime, so you’ll need the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime (x86, x64) to use them. If you have Visual C++ 2008 installed, you already have the runtime.

Demo Application

If you just want to see whether this truly works, here’s a quick command-line image loader (loads .bmp, .dds, .exr, .gif, .ico, .jpg, .mng, .pcx, .png, .tga, .tif) in both x86 and x64 incarnations. The x64 version only works if you’re running Windows XP x64 or Windows Vista x64, of course:

Download: FreeImage x64 demo application
Requires the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime [x86, x64] to work!

If you haven’t heard of it before, Audiere is a well designed multi-platform audio library. It incorporates Dumb (for mod playback), FLAC (lossless audio playback), libogg/libvorbis (ogg vorbis playback), Speex (special speech compression) and supports some formats on its own (including .mp3 and .wav of course). And the best part yet: it’s free and open source.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with native x64 applications. My experiences have been very positive so far: Basically any library that provides its source code could be compiled to x64 binaries with very few changes.

Source Patches

Audiere was no different. There was some assembly in FLAC 1.2.1 and libvorbis 1.2.0 that I had to patch, a small WinAPI pointer issue in Audiere and some more minor things. Here are the patches containing my changes:

Download: Patch for libvorbis 1.2.0 fixing all x64 issues
Download: Patch for FLAC 1.2.1 fixing all x64 issues
Download: Audiere 1.9.4 fixes and x64 patch

Visual C++ 2008 Binaries

You can find precompiled, optimized binaries for Visual C++ 2008 in my Subversion repository:

https://devel.nuclex.org/external/svn/audiere/tags/1.9.4-r1

The binaries have been compiled with Visual C++ 2008, all contained libraries targeting the Multithreaded DLL runtime, so you’ll need the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime (x86, x64) to use them. If you have Visual C++ 2008 installed, you already have the runtime.

Demo Application

If you just want to see whether this truly works, here’s a quick command-line audio player (plays .wav, .mp3, .ogg, .flac and .mod) in both x86 and x64 incarnations. The x64 version only works if you’re running Windows XP x64 or Windows Vista x64, of course:

Download: Audiere x64 demo application
Requires the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime [x86, x64] to work!

Enjoy!

I felt like I was having a cold on Saturday and Sunday morning, but after feeling quite good in the evening, I spontaneously decided to try a longer route this time. The old routes are getting boring, so I planned out a new 10 km route.

I figured my way through the forest hill in the north just fine, but then, well, sort of chose the wrong path upon entering the second forest stage. There was not an inch of even surface plus logs littered all over the path. I slightly twisted my left ankle two times but it didn’t swell, so I assumed it was alright.

After noticing the path didn’t even take me remotely to where I wanted, I cut short downhill through the forest. I ended up near a stone pit. When I had paved my way down to the road, I had to backtrack quite a bit to return to where my planned route would have led me.

The rest of the track went pretty well, except maybe that at the final bend, which would orient me back towards home, I still felt pretty fresh and thus went off in the opposite direction, leaving my planned route again. I ended up running a good part of another route before finally heading home.

I can’t plot the exact path I took at the places where I left the route, but from what I can piece together, I jogged for about 13 km. That took me xx:xx:xx at an average heart rate of xxx bpm (maximum at xxx bpm).

Looking forward to repeating this run without choosing the wrong path and without twisting my ankle

I’ve got a Thrustmaster Dual Analog 3, that’s a plain and simple USB gamepad without any fancy vibration, orientation sensor or anything. I’m mainly using it to control my WinAmp when I’m listening to music.

Whenever I start an Unreal Engine 3 game, for example Gears of War, Blacksite: Area 51, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty or, just right now, Turok, I can enjoy the intro, and, as soon as the action starts, my character is spinning to the left. Permanently.

This goes on until I disconnect my gamepad, which is quite inconvenient since I have it attached to the back of my PC so that the cable is long enough to use it when listening to music while lying on my bed.

So, as always, I have to end the game, download the latest Thrustmaster driver, fiddle with the settings, start the game again, watch the introduction a second time, and am still spinning to the left.

I fiddle some more with the settings, restart the game yet again, watch the introduction sequence yet another time and finally, I can play.

This sure is an evil gamepad I have.

Still felt a bit drained today (gardening work…) and decided to jog the shorter 8.6 km version of my running track once more.

Took me 1:16 with an average pulse of 159 bpm and maxing to 186 bpm.

Had some issues with my watch (a Polar AXN-700), it kept jumping to 50-70 bpm during the run. The batteries are quite fresh, so maybe there’s a contact problem in the sender unit.

Didn’t even go all out today and yet I’ve beaten my previous attempt’s time.

There’s a medium sized uphill part in the first third of the route that I had been doing rather slowly up until now. Last weekend’s gardening work had given me sore muscles (at least after I topped it off with another jogging round the next day :p), but now that it has subsided, I can really notice a difference. Did aforementioned uphill section at full speed and my legs felt as if I was still going on even terrain. Only my breath sped up like crazy.

This route currently has a length of 8.6 km. There’s a small extension I can add at the eastern side of the track that makes it 10.1 km. I think next time I run this route, I’m going to do exactly that. The only thing left then is to go for the 1 h / 10 km pace and I should be back at my intended condition level!

Today’s time is 1:11:56, average heart rate at 164 bpm (as I said, I was on an easy run, not originally intending to beat my record :-]) and a maximum of 186 bpm. My watch says I wasted 1557 kcal.

Hey, 1:11:56 total time, 53:56 in target zone (129 - 169 bpm) and 17:56 above target zone. Does 56 have any meaning?