Having A Blast

Posted on Tuesday 13th of March 2012 12:53:00 PM

Random notes on the installation of Linux - if using a rotated screen, and can get an Xterm from the live-CD/installer, then you can use xrandr --output VGA1 --rotate leftto not hurt my head + neck - except when it boots or in the BIOS.If it complains about a missing bits/..

The Game Has Changed

Posted on Wednesday 1st of February 2012 03:12:00 PM

LLVM is described as "a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies". While true, this description is insufficient:It is modular, insofar as one can pick and choose from the collection of technologies present within LLVM at a given moment in time. Either from a stable r..

Hanger 18

Posted on Sunday 14th of August 2011 12:43:00 PM

Back to early 90's - XCOM aka UFO returns (via an open-source remake). Happily, nearly trivial to build on OSX.Grab the source. Github has a nice OSX client, and the webpages have a wee button to spawn the OSX client and make the git clone process painless.Get a packaging system for install ..

Terminal Illusions

Posted on Tuesday 9th of August 2011 01:11:00 PM

Flocking makes for a nice screen-saver - see here for a nice JS demo, and this pseudocode for a nice, dirt simple explanation. Managing so many objects interacting in space, even 2D, calls for some spatial data structures. The approach of buckets in 1D, and sorting + binary searching in the ..

Not Ready Yet

Posted on Tuesday 28th of June 2011 12:22:00 AM

ConstCPP - C++ with optional mutable state aka const by default.This blog posting ui is nearly unusable on iPhone - been a while since I found a site with this sort of issue.

Sleepless Nights

Posted on Thursday 17th of February 2011 11:16:00 AM

To quote a colleague I want gdb to die in a fire. If thats possible.A sentiment I can only agree with, to be honest. However, it remains in its spread of variably buggy obsolete forms embedded within the development tool chains of too much of the world to avoid. Some notes on living in the land o..

Left Unfinished

Posted on Monday 31st of January 2011 12:36:00 PM

Can build a simple and useful unit test system in python exploiting first class functions, dynamic checks on the names of functions, and a naming convention.See codepad.org for coloured src and a sample run, or github for a "gist" with highlighted source.### Begin unit test codedef test_function1..

Lore Of The Arcane

Posted on Tuesday 25th of January 2011 12:56:00 PM

Compilation of Offload C++ code for the Cell BE processor and the Linux OS entirely within a Linux environment is complicated by the fact that the Offload C++ compiler ("offloadcpp") is a Windows executable. This compiler compiles programs to run on the Cell processor by first compiling Offload C..

What Comes Around

Posted on Wednesday 29th of December 2010 03:53:00 PM

Lichess is a cool online chess site. Although, it is not, as it claims, open source: it places non-commercial use restrictions on the code, for example, failing the open source definition.Its easy to write simple web applications quickly with Webpy. Can parse C99 with open source parser (pyc..

Cloning Technology

Posted on Wednesday 17th of November 2010 01:52:00 AM

Concurrent Programming with Revisions and Isolation Types from Microsoft Research (here) is an approach to concurrent programming looking extremely similar to Sieve C++ (described here, here and here) developed at Codeplay.How to setup virtual box shared folders to acces..

Crashing Around You

Posted on Sunday 7th of November 2010 12:32:00 PM

One who seeks knowledge learns something new every day.One who seeks the Tao unlearns something new every day.Less and less remains until you arrive at non-action.When you arrive at non-action,nothing will be left undone.The above is a commit message: I wish it had been informative, not pretentio..

Ain't It Fun

Posted on Wednesday 27th of October 2010 12:42:00 AM

Teaching modern C++, as opposed to warmed up C in Modern C++.Scripting user interfaces with images in Sikuli. Interesting, if inherently brittle.Isometric in browser game development in JS and HTML5 canvas,Pyparsing - some or all of the power of Parsec without the brain hurt of Haskell. MARS..

Mirror Mirror

Posted on Saturday 20th of February 2010 02:52:00 PM

Embedding a Flash MP3 player in web pages is nifty. Yahoo also. Tips on the use of mercurial. Free web hosting on bit-bucket, via hg. Some actual content on the web. SQL in your web browser.

Enjoy The Silence

Posted on Tuesday 9th of February 2010 11:50:00 PM

Folklore about computers. Guess they've been around long enough.OSX continues to surprise with little command line tools that wrap the features of the underlying frameworks e.g. sips - scriptable image processing system. Useful in combination with pdftk.Online PDF and MP3 of language learning co..

Starting Over

Posted on Sunday 31st of January 2010 07:51:00 AM

The site quirksmode.org has a great overview of JavaScript best practices. Makes dealing with cookies pretty painless and easy.Always good to get more usable icons. Python has built in templates, good for a start before bothering with a full blown template engine...

A Cry From The Crypt

Posted on Wednesday 30th of December 2009 03:13:00 PM

Breaking into a running python program using pdb and Unix signals.2d vectors in Python.Learning Swedish. More learning Swedish, with online mp3 files. Mercurial hosting on bitbucket.Cool tutorial on 2D games.OpenGL Red book online. Basic introduction to vectors.Computer generated imagery.Open sou..

Next In Line

Posted on Friday 9th of October 2009 12:32:00 PM

The stdbuf program is now in GNU coreutils. Trying to handle buffered stdout in programs controlled via pipes is awkward.

Forget To Remember

Posted on Friday 21st of August 2009 02:16:00 PM

A stylish introduction to the novelties of HTML5.General collection of programming related 'stuff' - docforge looks interesting.The Django framework in Python is quite nice, but needs, like all dynamic languages, a good way to debug for typos. The scratch module looks to be the simplest possible ..

The Unforgiving Blade

Posted on Wednesday 12th of August 2009 02:55:00 AM

Cell Linux development is oft discussed on the cbe-oss-dev list.Jeremy Kerr writes Cell Linux code for IBM.IBM hosts the developerworks Cell Broadband Engine resource centre.The Cell Performance forum has interesting articles.The CorePy system can program SPUs.A blog on Cell Programming.How to se..

Timelessness

Posted on Sunday 2nd of August 2009 06:41:00 AM

Shoes - ruby in a box, with a simple to use UI library. Nice enough, but bundling its own version of ruby makes it awkward to integrate 3rd party libraries wanting a different minor version of Ruby. It has an excellent, and amusing, set of documentation.Compilers for one language targeting anothe..

The Ides Of March

Posted on Friday 27th of March 2009 05:31:00 AM

A brief return to document layout and typesetting; Squeezing whitespace and wrong figure numbers, the use of bibtex, again,the caption package, measuring performance improvement, the listings package, a WikiBook on LaTeX and a collection of LaTeX conference tips.A paper from 1987 describing Spher..

Crash Test

Posted on Tuesday 24th of March 2009 01:31:00 PM

Automated testcase reduction is way cool. Lithium is a very nice python tool for that, easy enough to modify (to for example, attempt to not reduce only in chunks that are powers of two in size)Hand in hand with automated testcase reduction is automated testcase generation. There is a little GNU ..

Look For The Truth

Posted on Monday 16th of March 2009 02:14:00 AM

Terry Pratchett defines why I read SF & Fantasy.Just when C++ seems understandable, some new examples of what can be done show up, and present interesting bafflement.How to program securely in C/C++, avoiding integer overflow via templated operator overloads and allowing testing of objects in..

Welcome Home (Sanitarium)

Posted on Monday 2nd of March 2009 12:12:00 PM

The shape of code. Interesting. A book giving a cultural commentary on the C language. The C language is relatively small - the commentary comes to 1600 pages - if he wrote it for C++, then would it ever end?Microsoft have, as expected, a proprietary name mangling scheme for symbols output from t..

The Line Begins To Blur

Posted on Friday 20th of February 2009 12:07:00 PM

The 7zip tool has a command line program to go along with the GUI integrated into Windows explorer. This is well documented here.High performance fractal viewer written in Java - beautiful images, and good performance. Seems scalar loops in Java get good performance, and you can write a portable ..