Older blog entries for gnutizen (starting at number 1)

I just released another gnutizen alpha version - 0.06. Yay. I had the coding done and thought I was going to release it but then autotools (autoconf/automake) started barfing on me. So then I had to slug through autotools stuff until I had it ready for dist. It was a pain, but I learned some stuff about autotools and some shortcuts that will make my life easier henceforth so it had a bright side. Aside from the autoconf and automake manuals, there's a book online that is somewhat helpful regarding this.

Anyway, I'm happy that I finished the release. Now I have to decide what to do next. Probably something from my TODO file. There are three things to do next - allow multiple threaded connections instead of one at a time, put caught pongs in an array so I don't write duplicates, and begin work to allow downloading. The beginning of the downloading work will be putting caught queryhits in an array, so in some ways it will be similar to the pong catching. Cool. I'm happy I released 0.06!

Compaq has a program where you can get a free shell account on a bunch of Compaq machines running Linux, FreeBSD and so forth. Sunday night I logged onto a few machines to see if the latest alpha of Gnutizen compiled and ran. I then went back to development and added some #include statements, and changed some stuff around. Monday morning I try to log on - bam , locked out. The second time this happened, I guess some op thought I was up to something. I shot them off a mail explaining what I was doing.

I perused the Gnutella forums. They talked about various stuff, the Savannah versus SourceForge question which I had just heard about (SourceForge's backend is propietary while Savannah's is open). Some Germans are developing a Gnutella server/client called GPU which can do distributed calculations. One of the cool things is the people running it not only do calculations but can send their own out. I had tried it before but it crashed, not only the program but my system. I replied with that and he said he'd fixed a lot of the socket problems up with the latest version. I downloaded the new one and tried it out, it worked OK and I replied he should put some number threory functions. He replied some were already in there, and that anyone could write a module for it. The program is in Delphi Pascal, but he said modules didn't have to be written in Pascal, they could be in other languages like C. I also wrote a post discussing cross-compatibility, and the need to be able to compile on different platforms, specifically that one needed access, or feedback from those who had access to platforms, in order for programs to be cross-compatible as I bemoaned that Compaq locked my account

Well Compaq unlocked the accounts and I tried the compile out. FreeBSD seems to have the same problem with a send() that OpenBSD has. The send() doesn't respond with an error, but dies on a SIGPIPE. The same send() works in a previous version. In fact the same send() works in the current version some percentage of the time. I'm going to try and isolate the error. There's been enough re-writing, and once I get the BSD error knocked out, enough automagic cross-compatibility as well as the program running without major errors to do a new alpha release. I guess I can do that right after I knock out this send() error.