Recent blog entries for strath

Working on my website, learning php/mysql/xml/xlst seems like some very neat stuff. Actually met someone at my work (a local grocery store) who knows what "linux" is, which is a rare find around here.

Recently installed gentoo on my main desktop system (Athlon XP 1600, ATI Radeon 8500, 512 DDR PC2100, 60gb 7200 maxtor and sblive!) and I like it ALOT. I was previously running debian, but gentoo has tons of up to the minute software, and compiling it at -O3 is a good advantage. Still running debian on my laptop (PII 366, 192 ram, 20 gig harddrive, 13.3 inch screen with several bad pixels) only because I didn't have the heart to sit through the gentoo bootstrap process on a 366 (It took crazy long on my desktop, couldnt imagine a processor over 4x slower).

If anyone out there knows how to get 3d acceleration (or get X to load with the glx module loaded) with a 8500 radeon please let me know. This thing is so much slower than my geforce 2 under linux, I would definitely not recommend buying any ATI products until they properly support their cards under linux.

End transmission.

Due to required college classes I have gotten very friendly with both java and VB. They are not as bad as I thought for rapid development, but I am still a C guy at heart.

Working on several misc learning experiments.. and playing warcraft3 beta (hoping transgaming gets it working under winex)

Recently took on working on the linux progress patch. The original homepage is still at lpp.freelord.org and my version is at strath.org
Currently using java for college, but it is definitely not my cup of coffee so to speak. It seems like the syntax is so C/C++ like, but restricting you from things that I am not used to being restricted from. Not to mention the GUI performance is horrible.

I really do not believe in all of these new languages. Because by simplification you must sacrifice the ability to change aspects.
If I create a window in GTK or Windows, there are several properties I must specify traits to tell the computer how to draw it. If you make a generic CreateWindow() that takes no properties, you benefit from a more standardized look, but loose alot of functionality. Granted, we can take this function and just overload it, making it more user friendly. That seems to be a happy medium. And certainly C/C++ is up to this task, so why use a new language to do it?

Thursday Morning Pondering where to go next. Looks like I am going to brush up on my C++, as for large projects, as KDE has shown us, it is much more efficient and maintainable than just standard C. I am scrapping my efforts to learn GTK. May investigate QT, but not this week. Doing some heavy studying for directx programming right now.. may also look into libSDL. -Strath