I’ll mostly be doing be doing behind closed door presentations as part of my work at NaturalMotion but I’m hoping to get time to at least check out the floor and 1 or 2 seminars.

Hobsie

Hopefully these instructions will help people in the future.

For Mac OSX SnowLeopard 10.6.6

1. First of all you’re going to need MacPorts. This’ll allow you to grab Unix style x11 based opensource software for OSx. You can grab the latest version from here. (I used version 1.9.2 for Snow Leopard)

2. Once MacPorts is installed you can use that to grab LuaRocks. LuaRocks is a repository of lua plugins known as Rocks that can be downloaded and installed from the terminal. To install LuaRocks using MacPorts open a terminal window and type:

> sudo port install lua luarocks

This will prompt you for your user/admin password and install LuaRocks.

3. Once LuaRocks has been installed you can then use it to download and install Luadoc – but wait, Luadoc is dependant on 2 other libraries that you can install first. LuaFileSystem and LuaLogging. To install all three use LuaRocks from a terminal window by typing the following in order (wait for each command to complete before running the next one):

> sudo luarocks install luafilesystem

> sudo luarocks install lualogging

> sudo luarocks install luadoc

You may not need the sudo depending on how your permissions are setup.

4. Now that Luadoc is installed we can run it on any .lua files that the correct style of comments. See the introduction page for details on this. However, after doing all these steps I had a problem attempting to run the Luadoc script. Turns out the script is placed in a hidden folder that you can get access to by opening a finder window and using “Go > Go To Folder” from the context menu and typing:

> ~/.luarocks/bin

This will take you to the location of the script. Apparently you are meant to be able to invoke this script by calling luadoc.lua in the command line but I was never able to. Instead I simply open a terminal window and cd into the folder I want to create Luadoc documentation for and then drag the luadoc bash command directly onto the terminal followed by *.lua This ends up looking a little bit like this in my terminal window:

> /Users/<username>/.luarocks/bin/luadoc *.lua

And hey presto you get out a nice set of html pages for your .lua source.

I think what I am going to do for my friend’s projects is make a little shell command file that will automate this process for me on a double click.

Hobsie

Edit: It turns out that sometimes LuaRocks does not rock and fails to find the correct package. You can resolve this by using the search function in LuaRocks.

> sudo luarocks search packageName

For those of you who aren’t aware, or generally don’t know about these things, the Korean Peninsula was divided into two states shortly after World War 2 (It had been under Japanese control for some time before). As with Germany post World War 2, we divided the country with the South side under Alliance control and the north under Soviet. A few short years after Kim Il-Sung was designated by the Soviet Union as the Premier for North Korea he marched on south to reclaim all of Korea.

To cut a long story short that war ended with a stalemate after countries such as the US and the UK, amongst many others, came to the aid of the south and China’s aid of the North. Both states are still technically at war to this day with no peace treaty being signed.

While South Korea enjoys a health economy and now plays a sizeable roll in the world economy (think LG,  Samsung, Kia Motors etc) the North have been very xenophobic and a quick look around the internet for news articles usually brings up something about their populous starving and generally being oppressed. In the last decade or so the North’s leader, Kim Jong-Il (son of premier Kim Il-Sung) has become ill (no pun intended) and things look like they could be unstable.

With that in mind I decided I should go visit it while it still exists!

So I got on a tour bus and head to the DMZ (The border between the two states) where I got chatting to a bloke from Liverpool called Graham Hughes. As it turns out he was actually travelling to every country on the planet, one at a time, without flying or driving or even staying at hotels! At this stage he had visited 169 countries (out of 200 so I am told) and North Korea was to be his biggest challenge yet. While travelling he was also taking video and still images for a documentary of the whole experience (that had taken him over 70 weeks at this point) for National Geographic. As he was travelling alone he would on occasion get whoever he met along to way to be his camera man

Anyway, you can find out more about Graham and his epic journey at www.theodysseyexpedition.com or if you want to catch a glimpse of me being a pleb just over the border in UN controlled territory you can see that in the first video here.

Hobsie

Here it is! Bit empty at the moment but I’ll work on filling it up with general crap and i’ll be sure to put anything remotely interesting I come across on the blog.

Hobsie