Older blog entries for Boris (starting at number 104)

So I woke up at 4am with hiccups. Then I got them again at 7:30am. Now to see if I get them at 11am.

I had a skin biopsy a couple of days ago, and got a few other skin problems sorted out. Now I need to wait on the results.

One last thing I've found is that writing Windows code in either Visual C or Borland Builder is a total pain. Borlands implimentation is somewhat better than Microsoft.

It looks we lost 2 contactors today (1 compatibility engineer, 1 tech-writer). That leaves just 2 (including me). Add that to 2 engineers that were let go, and our department is in pretty bad shape. Still a load of Microsoft people, a couple of Novell people, and a few unix people. Compatibility has been stripped of almost all Microsoft people. It's not good, and it's not pretty.

Bleh. I've got a real bad case of "problems existing between keyboard and chair" this week. My brain feels like it's shut down and decided to go on holiday without me.

I got a great example of the argument for open source:

I've been working with SCO Unixware. One of the cards I have to test has a broken driver. (It's a uniprocessor compiled driver, and I'm working on a multiprocessor system.) These drivers are closed source; the offending company won't fix the driver because they say there is not enough demand for these cards. They won't release the source to us so that we can fix it ourselves.

If this was an open-source driver I'd have a working driver ages ago. Probably all it needs is to be recompiled in a SMP environment.

Hmmm Found a Branston Pickle recipe.

Time to warn my wife that I'll be making something that she cannot stand, but that I miss quite a bit. What is it about America and Branston Pickle? If I'd realised that it was so hard to get over here, I'd have shipped a box or three...

I found out why my fonts were trashed. My default printer was a generic text only, so Word would only give me the fixed fonts. Oops. Well what do you expect from a Linux guy forced into a Windows 2K world....

Anyone know of a good palm programming book? Most of the ones I've looked at always seem to be lacking something.

Also to my amazement I just discovered that Starfleet wasn't animated (it was puppets). Somewhere over the years my brain had animated the series. Amazing the things the human brain does when you've not seen something in 20 years.

New firmware fixes make the new Intel platforms much more stable on Linux. I can run a server at 100% loading for 48 hours without the server breaking. I've not yet crashed a kernel, but every couple of months a driver will die under the load. Usually the very flaky DAC960 driver, but then the Mylex solution to the problem of the DAC960 driver killing processes was to suggest that we use a minimum of 512mb of ram. They won't fix thier buffer overruns. I just hope that Linux dosen't end up going down the long slippery Microsoft road of suggesting hardware upgrades to fix a software problem.

Of course now that the winter is over I appear to be getting a cold. Bleh.

...so then my fonts got trashed and all my documents began to look really wierd.

Started looking at the possibility of porting BCPL to the palm pilot for no good reason. (Actually I just don't want to learn 68000 assembler and this is a way to cheat)

Grr. IE keeps hiding the bookmarks I use all the time, and doesn't get rid of the ones I look at once a month or so.

Got myself some SD boots. Better than having to remember to put in the anti-static heel straps.

*Sigh* It's a monday

<rant><foaming_at_mouth>
Microsoft Outlooks rules system really sucks. It misses about half the messages I want to automatically move to other folders. It's really, really, really bad. I can't figure out why anyone would want to use it, apart from being forced to by bad management decisions. I think if Microsoft ever innovated anything, it was innovating the ability to pass off half written, untested, broken, insecure software, as a robust, secure, enterprise package and charge several different ways for it. As a thing for send and recieving email it works pretty well, but scratch the surface and 90% of the features don't work fully.
</foaming_at_mouth></rant>

Also I still have a problem with trying to fax my timesheet to my SSN.

I just had the most wonderful sandwich today. I really did. My wife is the greatest cook in the world. I feel like singing a song about the sandwich - it was that good.

Ok, So I upgraded to Microsoft C++ 6.0, because I was just getting some really wierd compiler bugs. Three compilers in 10 days is not a good sign.

My compression algorithm takes a 5mb file down to 3mb. Not too bad, but it's a bit dirty. I'm dropping a byte here and there, but I can fix that. It's a pain doing it in C though. I could do it quicker and faster in other compilers (and I may yet do). The math exposes several weaknesses in the C language that other langauages are stronger in, and I really can't see the point in sweating over writing functions that are already available elsewhere. I can spend that time doing more constructive stuff.

As a proof of concept though it's pretty good. One wierd thing is that it will be a piece of cheesecake to decompress using C, but next to impossible to use C to compress the thing. I know I can do more compression with it, but I need to be able to decompress very fast and on the fly to, so I may lock down the algorithm I have now. Time to tidy up and debug.