Spent this afternoon looking into parsing the LAG file format quickly in Java, the idea is to formally specify LAG grammar using ANTLR. I’ve got part of the grammar finished and it’s starting to output AST graphs like the one in this post so it’s looking hopeful and will save a lot of coding work later.

My application to upgrade my BCS membership from Student to Professional Member was accepted today so I am now a full member of the “leading body for those working in IT”…

On another note, I’m still working on the CAF+LAG player program. For those of you who haven’t fallen asleep after the double-barrelled  use of acronyms… …a CAF describes the data for a lesson and a LAG tells the computer how to display it… sort of. At the moment I’m working on turning a basic .lag file (like this one) into an XML representation (like this) for easy manipulation in the rest of the program.

I’m currently working through the examples on this page to make sure that I’m covering the syntax and grammer properly.

You can get the latest issue of the free Blender magazine, BlenderArt #20, from their website here. This issue’s topic is “Make It, Bake It, Fake It”

I’m working on a Java CAF + LAG viewer at the moment, and just getting back into programming in Java using Eclipse after a short break programming in python and visual basic.

Entertainer 0.3 was released yesterday, here’s a link to the announcement.

You can get the latest issue of the free Blender magazine, BlenderArt #19, from their website here.

This issue’s topic is Rigging and Constraints!

Check this link out

I did a presentation today at Warwick University titled “Open Source Development on the Entertainer Media Center”.

It went well and there were plenty of questions about the project afterwards. The presentation was created in OpenOffice and you can download the file here .

I had to get a nice template for a presentation I’m creating.

Here’s a couple of links to OpenOffice.org Impress templates that I found.

http://www.presentationhelper.co.uk/free-open-office-impress-templates-91.htm

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/SunTemplatepack_1

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/oxygenoffice-english-templates

If you know of any other free template links for OOffice, please comment.

I recently contacted Audible.com’s helpdesk to see if they had updated their status on linux compatibility. They hadn’t (i.e. still no support), so I asked the following question:

“Are there any plans to add support for Linux in the future?”

The reply was interesting…

“There aren’t much talks in supporting Linux in the near future and we don’t have much information regarding when it will become available. We will be making a full transistion next year to Amazon.com’s operating systems so anything is possible.”

Hmm, Audible are going to use Amazon’s operating systems. This could be good news if this means that they’ll be going down the mp3 route that Amazon have been using for their music section. Not only would that make Audible’s collection Linux compatible but iit would also open up the number of mp3 players that could play their audiobooks.