Sneak Peek Inside Kea Campus' Amiga Corner

It's been a few weeks since the Kea Campus launch. There's still a lot of work to do, but some additional content has been added. This includes the first actual content to the Amiga corner (beyond forum discussions).

Here's a peek at what the campus home looks like right now:



Learn more by clicking here.

@all

Kea Campus' Amiga Corner has just received its first how-to content: How to get an AmigaOS cross-compiler up and running on your machine quickly (see below).**

It'll be public over here in about a week.

Or, you can watch it now by joining the campus (link), and support creation of more Amiga content (and software) in the process. Just say you're an Amiga user when you post in the welcome thread, so I know you're one of us.

Click here to join the campus.





** This will be followed up with more videos in future...

... and the cross-compiler video is now public. Here's the direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS04tv_Bnjw.

Hans

@Hans
Thank you so much for making that video and for sharing my work. I am glad people find my work useful and I can contribute to this community.

@walkero

You're welcome. Thanks for creating the Docker containers. They make getting a cross-compiler up and running so much easier.

Hans

I made a huge mistake when launching the Kea Campus: I was so focused on the "learn to code" side, that I forgot to explain why the Kea Campus' Amiga Corner exists.

No, it's NOT just an add-on, or some kind of mere token. It's there for a specific mission. A mission that I hope you'll support, because help is needed to make it a success. More support means that more is possible.

Click here to learn more.




Hans

P.S. I'm working on the next cross-compiler video right now. It should be in the campus' Amiga Corner before the end of the week...
EDIT: Looks like it's probably going to be posted early next week. Workload is a bit heavy.

The next cross-compiler video is now public (campus members got so see it a week ago). This one is on setting up VS Code for AmigaOS development using the cross-compiler.

Hans

The next video in the cross-compiler series is now public. It shows you how to quickly and efficiently get your files from the cross-compiler machine over to an Amiga for testing.

Click here to watch it.




20-40% Off ZitaFTP Server

Since it involves ZitaFTP Server, I'm offering 20-40% off ZitaFTP Server until Oct. 12 2024.

To get 20% off, use the following coupon code at checkout: AMIGACODER20

To get 40% off, join the Kea Campus. If you join as a Creator or Elite member, then you also get a fully downloadable template for everything you've seen in this video, and more.

Click here to get ZitaFTP Server.

Hans

I'm done with the cross-compiler videos (for now). Here's the first video of a new series on GUI programming with MUI.

Click here to watch.




TRIGGER WARNING: This one might upset a few people.

Hans

@all

I just finished my AmiWest presentation, talking about the Kea Campus' Amiga Corner, and the VirtioGPU drivers.

While it was fun, not many at the show had heard of the Kea Campus' Amiga. So I clearly need to do a better job of promoting it. Any suggestions on getting the word out beyond posting here?

Either way, click here for more info




Hans

@Hans

Quote:

I have already seen your presentation about VitioGPU from AmiWest on YouTube. I would have liked to see more action of the driver under AmigaOs4.1 and its possibilities.

As my English is very limited does the driver already support 3D acceleration?

Maybe you could write a bit more about it here also when this driver will be available for the public, as far as I know they have been working on it for almost 2 years.

I am currently waiting for my X5000, but of course I still have a fully working Qemu/Peg2 on my MacStudio waiting to be able to use 32bit displays.

@Maijestro

Quote:

As mentioned in my talk, it's 2D only at this stage.

Quote:
It's been just over a year. There is no "they," just me. A-EON is in charge of deciding when it'll be released.

Hans


P.S., I mentioned VirtioGPU once; the rest of my post was about the Kea Campus' Amiga Corner. It's looking increasingly that the Amiga community isn't interested in seeing better resources for developers (e.g., this). It takes minimum 2-3 days to create one tutorial/video (provided no deeper R&D work is required). I'm going to keep going for now, but if the # of subscribers fails to grow to a more sustainable level, then I'll have to put it aside and move on to something else.

@HansQuote:
I think the problem you are facing is due to the size of our community which is really small at the moment to say the least. And in this small community you are addressing an even smaller part of it: the developers.
I did not watch the above YouTube link but it seems to me that the subjects you are covering are simple ones, i.e. those for ones wanting to become a developers. To my opinion the developers we currently have on AmigaOS are already experienced developers, most of them doing so for a living, so subjects like 'how to ftp to an Amiga' is not really what interest them. In my opinion what we currently miss is the knowledge of how inner things work and how to use them as this is really different than other platforms.
Do not get me wrong : your content is great to try to widen the developer number. But to have more developers à platform needs users, to have users you need to address either the need for exclusive appealing games (not just ports of old games) or modern power applications for daily use (such applications are hard to develop and require experienced developers not junior ones).

Now on the form, my personal preference for development information is written content not video. I think video is useful to see how to do a manual action (like playing the guitar, repair this or that in the home, etc.) not for intellectual activities written information is better. For example your book about Warp3D Nova was great (I have bought it), but I also understand that if doing videos takes time, writing a book takes even more.

Finally, to answer your question, to promote your initiative you need to have free content that is useful but not covering everything to make one want to buy the advanced version. See how it works for those videos about guitar playing (yea I am playing the guitar ;) you can watch a free video about how to train pentatonic scale but if you want the tabs or the deeper explanations you either need to buy another video or register to the author's site giving access to tons of content. This can also work with written content not only for video.

I hope this will give you ideas and also strength to go on with your initiative.

@abalaban

Quote:

Man that drives me mad the amount of times I sit there just trying to remember or write down the tabs. You can't subscribe to everyone's Patreon who has a video about guitar on YT, you'd be broke in no time.

But for Hans, isn't that what the campus does? Gives access to the source that goes along with the videos and also some additional content. Not masses yet, but hopefully it will get there.

For me, I'm not advanced at Amiga coding, but I am more generally, so I'm in the camp of not needing to see content on cross-compiling with visual studio or docker or FTPing files (though I did watch that to see if I got any tips). I haven't got round to it yet but I will watch the ones on endianness since that was my request and I've also bought one or two of the books.

@Hans - just a general comment. Your site is really slow to respond. All pages are not very quick. I realise that you are over the "other" side of the world to those of us in the US and Europe and this is why. Obviously you know the figures for where the majority of your subscribers are geographically. Just mentioning it since it does put me off spending too long browsing the forum etc. Obviously if nobody mentions it then you may never know.

@abalaban

Thanks for the suggestions. IMHO, experienced Amiga developers don't need my help in how to write Amiga software.

While the direct beneficiaries of my work are aspiring Amiga developers, end-users benefit in the long run. I was hoping that more people would see that, and support the effort. There simply aren't enough aspiring Amiga programmers at present, to make this effort sustainable. Changing this is one of the Amiga corner's goals...

I normally do add a text summary for the videos on my website.

@MartinW

Quote:
What kind of page loading times are you getting?

That's an ongoing frustration. I've upgraded the hosting twice now (at increased cost). Every time it seems to temporarily boost performance, and then slow back down.

Right now it's running on a 4 core server in the USA, which should be more than adequate for the level of traffic that I have, provided that no miscreants are trying to hack or DDOS it. The site blocks multiple password hacking attempts per day, so there's definitely some of that going on.

I'm already using caching/optimization plugins and a CDN. Plus, it's running on a reputable host (Cloudflare). When I test it (normally round when Europeans and Americans are asleep), the front-end speed is usually not too bad.

Upgrading the site to PHP 8.x should help. Alas, half of my website uses an older version of Silverstripe which isn't compatible, and I have some code that prevents me from upgrading.

I've been looking into migrating everything to WordPress so that I can move forward. There is no straightforward way to do this, so it's likely going to take quite a bit of work. I'd pay someone else to do it if I could afford it.

Hans

@Hans that's all pretty interesting and clearly shows it's not the geographical issue that I assumed it was! Don't stress over it, I'll investigate my end. It's actually not too bad this morning. About 5 seconds per page? I think it's a lookup thing, it's not like the content loads slowly like days of old via modem, it just has a good think about it before it starts to load.

@MartinW

I've tentatively enabled a website user cache feature to try to speed things up. It might have undesired side effects, though. So, please tell me if you see something not working (e.g., forum threads not updating properly).

EDIT: I had to disable it again. Pages don't update properly to things like forum content, and I end up having to list all campus pages as non-cacheable.

EDIT2: One interesting observation, is that it's the PHP code that's taking so long, and NOT database queries. I was told that database queries tend to be the bottleneck, but that's clearly not true.

Hans

@Hans

this is so sad...I would really like to sit through your videos and learn, but there's just no time.

have a mere 3 days off between two weeks were I can do nothing just doesn't cut it...maybe when I finished my work-life towards life...

@all

I finally have the first actual MUI tutorial published on the blog (the previous video ended up being a rant).

We're keeping things very simple just a basic "Hello world" window. Yes, it's very basic, but it's the very first step. Just like flashing an LED is the very first step when programming a new embedded CPU.**

Click here to watch/read.




Hans


** Oh the joys of seeing that LED flashing for the very first time. It's doing the exact thing you programmed it to.

@Hans
Thanks, for me it is very interesting!