Older blog entries for blm (starting at number 3)

16 Jun 2002 (updated 16 Jun 2002 at 04:05 UTC) »
Cg

Nymia: I only recently found out about Cg. It seems to be an effort to take some complexity away from the graphics developers in an effort to make things easier. I am all for making life easier but is this approach like taking pointers away from languages since so many people beleive that Programmers don't know how to program safely when dealing with raw memory locations through pointers. I personally hate it when people forget to learn how to do things right and rely on others to take away all the complexity for them.

Alas I am not a graphics programmer so it may well be out of the realm of stuff I should talk about. Also I have no wish to start any heated discussions. I myself have be known to take thee path of using interpreted perl over writing a small C module.

I note also that you say

Now, if they can setup something for non-windows platform, that would definitely get things moving.

I read somewhere that the Cg language came out of a partnership between nvidia and microsoft and a subset will be included with DirectX 9. However, there was an indication that there is a superset for use with OpenGL and useful on other platforms like MacOS. Lets hope that it is available for the FreeBSD's and Linux's of the world. Certification

Alas when I post a diary it still says I am an observer even though two people have certified me as an apprentice. It must be a funky trust metric thing..

OK so I rewrote the pipe reader to ignore end of file marker and just keep reading. The stability of squid (writing to the pipe) and my reader seems much, much better I also use nohup(1) but most of the time it seems unnecessary.

I had a go at daemonizing the reader in the process of getting it more stable but none of the statements after the fork got executed. I can't understand why my test program worked but this one didn't. The fork() seemed to work ok.

Anyway I have left that to move onto more pressing matter: Performance. The system is a proxy which tracks downloads making people pay per megabyte. When they run out of credit they can't download. As a sideline the system does censorship[1] of www content. Now the problem is that when losts of people start browsing the web the load avg goes to ~20 and everything slows to a crawl. The Mysql daemon chews lots of CPU. So I am working on caching the information and making sure that the tables are designed properly with proper indexes and keys.

Can someone please certify me :-) I am slightly more then an observer but just less then an apprentice

[1] I know, I know. You hate censorship. So do I! But I have a legal responsiblity to sheild minors using my system from that which is deemed socially acceptable as best as possible.

29 May 2002 (updated 29 May 2002 at 06:49 UTC) »

I am working on this GPL program for a client and am having difficulties.

I think I am right in my conclusion that programs started with the ampersand are started in the background but still tied to the controlling tty so if my ssh connection dies so does the program. When I don't want this I have to create a daemon.

I am trying to create a program to read from a named pipe created using

mknod pipename p
that blocks till there is data to come through from the "writer" process. The "writer" keeps restarting killing my "reader" process. So I guess I have to poll ? I don't know..

I really need that book on UNIX System Programming that was written by W. Richard Stevens (I think....)(God rest his soul)

More research needed....

First Post! :-)

Sorry! that is so old but I couldn't resist. I am new around here.

Just an observer looking to become more involved. (I think it should be lurker ;-) )

By the way....

Did anyone notice that the link to HTML in the page where you edit a diary entry leads to a 404?

How is it that a journeyer can certify another journeyer as a Master? Also how is it that the recipient has quite a few prior Journeyer certs but is now a master? I am just curious.

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