Older blog entries for mrcsparker (starting at number 54)

I am helping a consultant debug a program he grabbed off of the internet. It is released under the GPL and seems to be really great. So I open up the code and notice... hmm... all of the copyright information has been removed frm the application. He is putting it back in, but it is a crappy thing to do. The guy knew better and I don't understand why you would remove copyright information - aside from being unethical, he is a consultant and not being paid to develop an original piece of code. He is being paid to do a job.

Sheesh, someone does all the work for you - the least you could do is give that person some credit.

Developing software on HP-UX is akin to entering a timewarp and going back about 5 years. While everything is stable (which is great) much of the documentation and support seems to be from 1999/2000. It is like people were really passionate about getting as much information out about HP-UX during a short timeframe and just went away...

HP-UX

I spent the last week trying to get PHP and Apache to compile on HP-UX with all sorts of modules enabled that I need. I think that I will have a few patches to submit to get things like Sybase drivers (freetds), and PHP 5b1 to cleanly compile without errors.

I have been spreading myself really thin lately, and I have neglected some OSS projects I was contributing to. I feel really bad about this, and - once I get a few more PHP and C/C++ programs running nicely on HP-UX for work - I plan on getting back to OSS development. I also want to go back and try to get GNOME to run on HP-UX.

You know you spend too much time working...
...when a vim package for HP-UX 11 makes you excited. Then again, I have been having to struggle with HP's own vi for the last few months because I couldn't get vim to compile with gcc. vim is great, vi is fucking evil.

Hello World

It is Friday - lighten up!!! Picked up the new Tomahawk (Mike Patton's project) and it is great. Great. Makes me want to join a band and play music again. So much insane energy.

XD2

Ximian GNOME is great. Those guys did a fantastic job at polishing an already very good GNOME. I also switched from Gentoo to Red Hat while I miss being able to customize everything having something that works without too much effort is nice also.

Daughter

It is my daughter's bithday this weekend. Turning 4. What a great 4 years it has been. I think that the parents out there will understand this, but, my life pretty much started when I had a child - it was as though I woke up. Everything in life seemed more real, more lucid. Like my daughter, I have grown quite a bit in four years. Anyways (this is a tech site, so I will leave the personal stuff to a minimum), she made me a really cool gift for father's day and I am just happy as can be. Have a great weekend.

Listening to Psychostick.

Scrapped the GNOME/vfs webserver project about halfway through. It was fun to write, but not really practical and the world does not need yet another web server - especially with the overhead of the GNOME libraries. I learned alot of new APIs, though.

So I have decided to just hack out a game. Two years ago I wrote a 2D topdown game engine but I couldn't find any artists to help work on actually getting a game implemented. I am going to go back to the project and actually finish it. There are enough resources out there to pull from that I think I can throw together a top-down 2D Grand Theft Auto/Quake style game with my SDL-based engine. The original goal was to make a game that played like Quake, except that it was top-down - much like Loaded. Since it would be 2D you could play insanely large multiplayer games and have huge deathmatches with enormous levels.

I am really anticipating the new Ximian release. From the screenshots is looks absolutely beautiful and functional. This means that I will be wiping Gentoo from my harddrive and installing Red Hat 9 (I have a RHN subscription that I can use from work so I can just use that). gentoo keeps crashing on my Thinkpad and dmesg and my log files don't report anything that I can send in a bug report.

Also have been hacking a bit lately on some outside-of-work projects. Wrote a frontend to nmap in gtkmm (can be found on my site), a php-xwindows extension that I have yet to release, and a pretty cool GNOME/gnet/vfs webserver that works a whole lot like KDE's kpf. gnet documentation leaves a whole lot to be desired, but it feels wrong to write the server with portable libs like GNOME and use Unix sockets (which is what I might just end up doing anyways).

libglademm/GNOMEmm/Gtkmm

Just whipped together a project with gtkmm/libglademm that is not only fully-featured but runs under 300 lines of code. 300 lines of code.

I had read all of the crap spewed about these libraries, but just really gave them a chance and they are clean. If you know C++ and you use the STL (you do, don't you?) you should be able to pick up the libraries in no time. Now I just wish that they shipped by default on more systems.

Just spent a few hours writing two php extensions. One is a libgtop extension which is pretty boring but useful, and the other was fun but useless - I wrote a php xwindows extension. It doesn't do much more than bring up a window and a few other things - which is a whole lot of XWindow code for so little action. I modeled it as much after the XWindow libs as I could. Still have more work to do, though. I am going out of town for a few days so I will finish it and release it when I get back.