Older blog entries for mrcsparker (starting at number 55)

I have one remaining server that has is running Windows NT and I just discovered the beauty of the cygwin tools. I had read how great they were, but had never used them. I ported 1 1/2 applications today to Unix. ssh'ing into an NT box and and being able to run vim and gcc right on the box is just too cool.
The Unix administrator left on Friday so I am the temporary Unix guy around here. He was a great guy, but a bit of a cowboy - all of his work was done as root so some of the boxes are really screwed up when it comes to file permissions. In order to do ANYTHING on some boxes you have to be root. Going to try to clean this up - and cross my fingers that the next Unix admin they hire has his/her shit together. If they hire the guy I chose things should be okay.
Anyways - going back to school. I figured that this is a good time to get a masters and even go all the way to doctorate. Would be pretty fucking cool to be a doctor. I could be one of those dickheads who insists that people call him "doctor" like some of the assholes around work.
And I am working on a usb Linux kernel driver for 2.6. So much has changed since 2.4 development I am only going to support 2.6. Got a problem with that?

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.

8 Jul 2003 (updated 8 Jul 2003 at 00:06 UTC) »

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.

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