Recent blog entries for idcmp

I've spent the better part of the week running a Linux box through various stress tests where seeing a sustained load avg of 150.00 isn't uncommon. It's interesting how a system responds under stress and how poking around in /proc can make some serious changes to the characteristics of the perfomance.

If someone thinks that they'd be interested in hearing about this, let me know.

As a favour for my friend at Canux, I wrote a review of Heavy Gear II from Loki (and Activision). It includes some screenshots, the high-quality orginals of which will be availabe here (big PNG images, slow transfers) for a while (sssh.. it's a secret).

The snow is long gone now and I've cleaned off the dust on my inlines.

I've been playing lately with different libraries. Either some neurons which were previously unavailable in my brain began firing, or the documentation for libxml (aka gnome-xml) got a whole lot better.

I've managed to write my own xml reading and writing apps and amazingly enough have a good understanding of what is actually going on.

I was asked for the first time in my life last week if I had any experience working with glib. I didn't, and I had only briefly glanced at the sparse documentation which was available back then.

Once again I was impressed at how well the documentation has come along. Heck, I was suprised that it had a main event loop handler in it. This library is definately one I will consider in future projects.

I was finally frustrated enough the other day by popt (some versions having static libs, some versions not), that I went to go see what it was. Initially I was disappointed at the man page which said it was Yet Another Library to "parse command line options".

Then I read the man page.

The API seems to be very clean and easy to use. Automatic --usage generation is a great feature, and what really took me was option aliases.

If you're on a RPM powered system, try this:

echo >>~/.popt "rpm alias --foo --queryformat='%-10{SIZE} %{NAME}\n' -qa"

Now issue a rpm --foo | more ... I think that feature speaks for itself, but good like finding apps that use the library.

That's all for me. Well, that and it snowed today. Welcome to Canada.

Those of us in Canada have long hated having to buy stuff from the US. Not because we hate the US, but because we hate having to play all the guessing games involved with customs and exchange rates, and shipping and what not.

A good friend of mine has had a site called Canux! up for the longest while. It was a terribly ugly MiniVend site, but the service was great, and the prices were Canadian! *gasp*

He recently revamped the site and it seems like he'll be offering more things as time goes on. It's all Linux stuff (mostly Loki games).

This was a terribly shameless promotion for his site.

My life is going well, I haven't had nearly enough time to hack on the things I like hacking on though. I think that's generally the story of everyone's life.

Well, I'm for sale.

That creeking noise I've been hearing at work for the past month or so now has a glug-glug type noise going with it.

I've had a fair bit of fun, but you can only make so many mistakes as a startup company before you annoy too many people. I won't go into details since it's not really nice to do so.

On another note, I'm running my P150 at home as just an xterminal to a gnome session running on the firewall box. This works remarkably well. I'm using ESD to do audio, and other than not having a volume control has been flawless.