njcrawford.com

Embroidery Reader 1.4.0 released

Nathan — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:23:29 +0000

I’ve released version 1.4.0 of Embroidery Reader which fixes a crash on Windows 7.
The crash was caused by saving the settings file in the installation folder which is a no-no on Windows 7. I suspect that the crash could occur on Windows Vista, but I’ve never seen it happen.
This version also includes a number of changes under the hood, so to speak, but the majority of them won’t be visible unless you look at the code. Please report any bugs using the contact form.

Visit the Embroidery Reader page to get the update.

I would like to say thanks to Bob Spradlin for sending me a detailed bug report so that I could find and fix this issue.

Old Embroidery Reader update history

Nathan — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 04:52:15 +0000

Trying to clean up the Embroidery Reader page a bit here… so I’m moving the previous version history stuff to posts. I suppose I could just remove it but I’m a pack rat.

Changes from 1.3.0-1.3.1:

Fixed color number 15 – was lilac, it’s now brown/brass. Thanks to Ryan Lovett and Robert Heel for reporting this one.

Changes from 1.2.2-1.3.0:

Changed code to use PEC section instead of PES data. It seems to be able to read all file types now. A big thanks goes to Michel Veerman for his help on this one.

Added an option in the settings to ‘filter’ stitches based on length. Some designs look much better with it, others end up missing parts.

Probably lots of small fixes, but I can’t think of them right now.

Changes from 1.2.1-1.2.2:

This version fixes a crash caused by saving empty values in the settings file. It is otherwise the same as the previous version. (1.2.1)

Changes from older versions:

Basic support for printing designs. Thanks to majorsnazz for the suggestion.

Ability to copy design images to the clipboard, so you can paste the image into any image editor.

A number of cosmetic bugfixes.

A simple icon. (I got tired of the default one)

Growing a KVM raw hard drive image file

Nathan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:41:36 +0000

I’m posting this as a reminder to myself the next time I need to make a raw KVM hard drive image bigger.

This worked for me – it may not for you. Make sure you have a backup of the image file before starting. I believe this will only work for raw type images… using it on qcow2, vmdk or any other type will probably cause a corrupted file. You have been warned…

You’ll need to know how big you want the final image to be in bytes. This command will grow the file to the size you want without actually allocating the full size.

dd if=/dev/zero of=file-to-grow.img bs=1 seek=(number of bytes - 1) count=1
Update, this command is more concise and does the same thing:
dd of=file-to-grow.img bs=1 seek=(number of bytes) count=0

You can also use shorthand values like 20G or 512M or 2T for number of bytes. Mind your abbreviations – dd sees G as 1024*1024*1024, but sees GB as 1000*1000*1000.

The file will then be allocated as the VM writes to it. You can check the allocated size of a file with ls -lsh. (the first column is the allocated size)
Note that this command does not expand the partition(s) or file system(s) on the hard drive image – you’ll need to use another tool like Gparted (available on the Ubuntu live CD) for this task.
You may need to use sudo in front of the command, depending on your setup.

Embroidery Reader gets a mention from Linus Torvalds

Nathan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:26:56 +0000

I guess I’m not the only one out there helping a loved one with an embroidery machine. According to Linus’ blog, his wife Tove received a Brother embroidery machine for Christmas and they went through the same thing I did trying to find decent software, or at least documentation, for PES files.
While Linus didn’t say he used it directly, he did gave a mention of Embroidery Reader and a link to my site. Sweet!

Bugsim bugfix 0.6.1

Nathan — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:03:36 +0000

Bugsim had a bug (go figure!) that caused it to show errors when lots of bugs were on the field at once. I’ve uploaded a new version that fixes this.

Thanks go to John Bobay for reporting this bug. I think he was the first person to play long enough to find it.

Visit the Bugsim page to download it.

New Program: Bugsim

Nathan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:11:34 +0000

Bugsim is a very simple resource gathering game with bugs that gather fruit from trees.

For those who have been testing it already, this version removes the separate windows and merges them into one and adds an image for the medium size bin.

Download it from the Bugsim page and then tell me what you think on the Contact page.

Back on my normal server

Nathan — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:58:23 +0000

I’m back on my normal server again. I had complete data loss and my backups weren’t as thorough as they should have been so I had to rebuild my configuration.

Moral of this story: if in doubt, back it up.

Recovering from scratch

Nathan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:50:28 +0000

My web server was one of the 4,000 or so servers affected by the Vaserv HyperVM hack that started Sunday (June 7th), and my site has been down since then. I had a complete backup of all my web content that was made a couple hours before the outage started, so I’ve been able to restore pretty much everything. Many others were not so lucky… just another reason to make sure you have a backup system in place.

My site may be slow until my regular server comes back online, because the backup host I’m using isn’t very fast.

New program: Copy File Path

Nathan — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:13:54 +0000

Have you ever had to collect links to files all over your hard drive or a company network? Copy File Path sits in your ‘Send To’ menu waiting to help by copying the full path of a file into your Windows clipboard, ready to paste into a spreadsheet or document. Visit http://www.njcrawford.com/copy-file-path/ to download and try it out.

A new look for njcrawford.com

Nathan — Thu, 21 May 2009 02:59:49 +0000

Now sporting WordPress for the home page. Woohoo!

Next step: make the rest of the site look nice too.