So, it seems that something (I’m not sure what, I haven’t really investigated at the moment) has broken with my desktop as it now refuses to boot. Fortunately I have my Eee, which I already know works perfectly fine for things like web and IM. This left me wondering; how useful would it be for development.
So, as I’ve recently done a bit more work on Choob I decided to have a look at getting a development environment for this, using Eclipse, set up. This wasn’t exactly easy, given the limited set of packages available by default for the version of Xandros on the Eee, but I’d already worked around this following some instructions on the internet elsewhere - enabling me to install subversion.
The next challenge was finding enough space to install both Eclipse and the JDK in, as preferably these would both want to be on the local machine rather than any additional storage. In the end I opted to (rather than uninstall something like Open Office) move some of the contents of /usr/share (for things I rarely use) onto my SD card and just link to them. Hack-tastic.
So, I was set, all that remained was to use Eclipse. As the Eee is quite low-specced, I had anticipated plentiful performance problems, however I was pleasantly surprised. Start up time is a couple of minutes, which is quite standard, and once going it runs quite well. Occasionally some actions (usually where a amount of building is required) will take a while, but on the whole it’s perfectly usable - provided I’ve got the external monitor and keyboard plugged in. I’ve yet to try it on the Eee’s standard setup, but I suspect it’s not particularly great, although I’m sure I’ll end up doing this at some point soon.
Tags: eclipse, eee
So, recently I was playing around with building a server for a Half Life 2 modification using Valve’s instructions on their wiki. The instructions all seem quite simple, you take the VC++ project file, a makefile that you customise slightly with some locations of things certain libraries (like the xerces ones) and then some libraries from the official Linux dedicated server.
All sensible enough so far, until you find out that the only way to get the libraries that it needs from the server is to download the whole server and install that using their application for this (which takes two passes at the same command to do that for some reason). This pulls about 780MB of stuff down onto the machine, including all of the HL2MP maps, textures, models and sounds (apparently it needs some of these in case you want to run a pure server without people having their own custom sounds and whatnot). All in all the libraries that I wanted were no more than 35MB of this, so it was a little bit frustrating.
You then get to the build process, which first compiles a util (vcpm) to read the vc++ project file and use that to make a makefile for the mod itself. This is all well and good and all done in one fell swoop with a simple ‘make’. Unfortunately if, for some reason, you want to do a clean build of the mod - ‘make clean’ won’t help you. That just cleans up vcpm, leaving the server objects there waiting for you to do it manually.
The whole compile process was also very slow, although that could be my machine (it is 4-5 years old now) and produces one hell of a binary. I’m pretty sure that this is down to it linking statically with a lot of libraries, including some of the c/c++ ones, although I have yet to verify this or follow the guide on the wiki that suggests you can cut 5MB off the binary with some magic. Perhaps in future builds I’ll look at getting that done, but for now I’m just happy that it compiled.
Having done this with gcc-4.1 (4.2 just plain doesn’t work, but then isn’t claimed to on the wiki) I found that crashes occured for other people, hardly good. So I dug out gcc-3.4 and had a bash with that, only to find that errors were soon the scourge of my life again, some of them seemingly in the Valve code - great. Fortunately a bit of digging around in the documentation turns out that it’s a known thing where gcc-3.4 won’t inline functions unless you give it a -O option. This fixed it was clean sailing and I had a nice compiled version.
Unfortunately this version also segfaulted, so it was off to the debug build and to see what was going on with it. This proved rather useless, as the engine produces a stack trace without any symbols (even after the mod is compiled with them) so I’ll need to have a rummage around what’s going on at some stage, probably something to do with my system configuration compared to that of the server. Nothing is ever simple eh?
Tags: compilation, debug, gcc, half life 2, linux, segfault, server, Valve
As part of my job I’m required to get outage alerts when something breaks, in case I can be of use in helping fix it. These are sent out via SMS, and I recently had the option of either getting them to my normal mobile phone or ordering a company Blackberry. Given the intrusive nature of them, I opted for the Blackberry so as to keep them separate from my personal life, despite the obvious attachment to the office at all times.
Of course, with the Blackberry comes more than just another device to receive text messages on, as I can now use it to keep up on my work e-mails when not in the office/at my PC. This I’ve found to be a bit of a double edged sword. On one hand I can read the important messages on my way into the office on the train in the morning, allowing me to hit the ground running when I do actually get to my desk. On the other hand, however, is the bit where the Blackberry gets its “Crackberry” nickname - it’s addictive; the little blinking light telling me that there’s another message for me to read.
Still, I’ve had it for just under two weeks now, and it’s proven useful with keeping on top of work stuff and also having other useful features. As I’ve got the 8800 it has GPS, and combined with Google Maps this can be quite useful for finding places and getting directions when you’re not too sure where you’re going. I’m not going to bother going into the features of the phone, as I’m sure this has been done to death elsewhere on the internet; Google Maps is just one thing that I find myself using occaisionally.
All in all though, as far as devices go it’s pretty good. I’m just having to be careful to stop it slowly taking over most of my life as it starts to weld itself permanently to my hip.
Tags: blackberry, email, mobile communications