Once again, I have been bitten by bad RAM modules, this time in the Dell Optiplex GX270 machine I use at work. Memtest-86 was able to diagnose the problem after I spent almost a month wondering why programs randomly crashed on me and trying out all sorts of software updates.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2004-10-08
GCJX
Tom has been having great sucesses with GCJX lately. He announced his intentions to start a branch on gcc.gnu.org to continue with its development. He also wanted to take suggestions for an alternative name for this project. The straightforward one in the grand hacker tradition of recursive acronyms would perhaps be "GING" for "GING Is Not GCJ" or maybe "GRAG" for "GCJ Rewritten As GRAG". Or perhaps "JAC4J" for "Just Another Compiler For Java", though that one almost looks like it has come from a marketroid.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2004-09-30
Doom 3 on Windows 98
The load at work has finally eased a bit and I can now actually get home in time! ~phew~
So I decide to try out a few game demos ("Doom 3", "Far Cry" and "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time") and finish the full version of "Uru" that had been abandoned when the mad rush to finish the project at work started.
While Far Cry and PoPSoT are gorgeous games, Doom 3 just refused to run on the Windows 98 that I have. Specifically, it needed "GlobalMemoryStatusEx" from kernel32.dll, which is available only in Windows 2000 and XP. Now I am not going to buy Windows 2000 or XP just to play the demo of a game.
Of course others have also faced the same issue but alarmingly people have just been editing the doom3.exe binary to zero out the "Ex" of "GlobalMemorysStatusEx" in the import table to match another function that is available on Windows 98. It seems to work for them, but is wrong because the former method returns a BOOL while the latter does not and the former takes in a struct of a different size altogether!
So using MinGW I wrote a simple dummy DLL named "mykrnl32.dll" which provided an implementation of GlobalMemoryStatusEx using GlobalMemoryStatus from the real kernel32.dll and forwarded all other calls to the real kernel32.dll. The forwarding bit was done by using "export forwarding" support in Windows Portable Executable files. (Interestingly, export forwarding is supported by MinGW's dllwrap tool but not by its "gcc -shared".) I then changed "kernel32.dll" in the import table of the doom3.exe binary to "mykrnl32.dll".
This got me past that particular failure, but I had to do a couple of more tweaks (none related to Windows 98 per se) to get it running. Suffice it to say that I did manage to get it running well enough in the end! So Doom 3 can run on Windows 98 (and perhaps 95 and ME), but doesn't because of some sloppy coding on iD's part - hey even libiberty in GCC knows how to do it right!
However, the game itself was a terrible letdown - it is so dark throughout the game and while the characters look detailed, their klunky contours are quite distracting! Far Cry is much better looks wise (but with terrible controls) as well as for playability (those enemies with their A.I.!) and PoPSoT is far more polished than either of these.
In any case, I enjoyed this little bit of hacking.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
So I decide to try out a few game demos ("Doom 3", "Far Cry" and "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time") and finish the full version of "Uru" that had been abandoned when the mad rush to finish the project at work started.
While Far Cry and PoPSoT are gorgeous games, Doom 3 just refused to run on the Windows 98 that I have. Specifically, it needed "GlobalMemoryStatusEx" from kernel32.dll, which is available only in Windows 2000 and XP. Now I am not going to buy Windows 2000 or XP just to play the demo of a game.
Of course others have also faced the same issue but alarmingly people have just been editing the doom3.exe binary to zero out the "Ex" of "GlobalMemorysStatusEx" in the import table to match another function that is available on Windows 98. It seems to work for them, but is wrong because the former method returns a BOOL while the latter does not and the former takes in a struct of a different size altogether!
So using MinGW I wrote a simple dummy DLL named "mykrnl32.dll" which provided an implementation of GlobalMemoryStatusEx using GlobalMemoryStatus from the real kernel32.dll and forwarded all other calls to the real kernel32.dll. The forwarding bit was done by using "export forwarding" support in Windows Portable Executable files. (Interestingly, export forwarding is supported by MinGW's dllwrap tool but not by its "gcc -shared".) I then changed "kernel32.dll" in the import table of the doom3.exe binary to "mykrnl32.dll".
This got me past that particular failure, but I had to do a couple of more tweaks (none related to Windows 98 per se) to get it running. Suffice it to say that I did manage to get it running well enough in the end! So Doom 3 can run on Windows 98 (and perhaps 95 and ME), but doesn't because of some sloppy coding on iD's part - hey even libiberty in GCC knows how to do it right!
However, the game itself was a terrible letdown - it is so dark throughout the game and while the characters look detailed, their klunky contours are quite distracting! Far Cry is much better looks wise (but with terrible controls) as well as for playability (those enemies with their A.I.!) and PoPSoT is far more polished than either of these.
In any case, I enjoyed this little bit of hacking.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2004-09-10
GCC 4.0
So the next version of GCC will be numbered "4.0.0" after all! I was hoping this would happen and could never quite understand why some people were so against bumping the major version number.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2004-09-06
GCC and Stack Slot Coalescing
RTH does it again - GCC now has stack slot coalescing! This feature is especially important for the kernel developers.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2004-09-03
GCC
The pressure at work to meet the project deadline is not letting me spend any time on GCC hacking. :-(
A quick perusal of the lists show that some very exciting things are happening with GCC and with GCJ. GCC will soon be entering Stage 3 and a lot of people are working hard to get their stuff in before that. Jan Hubicka seems to be on a mission to reduce the memory taken up by GCC after the tree-ssa merge. Sebastian Pop has actually implemented loop interchanging for code that ought to have been written properly in the first place - I am happy that GCC is becoming smarter but sad that this would let sloppy code go unpunished.
Tom and Andrew are back at hacking furiously at the BC-ABI for GCJ while Michael has finally liberated GCJ from the clutches of a hacked automake. Bryce seems have taken on the role of the GCJ PR man while triaging (and fixing) a lot of GCJ bugs.
I can't wait to get back...
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
A quick perusal of the lists show that some very exciting things are happening with GCC and with GCJ. GCC will soon be entering Stage 3 and a lot of people are working hard to get their stuff in before that. Jan Hubicka seems to be on a mission to reduce the memory taken up by GCC after the tree-ssa merge. Sebastian Pop has actually implemented loop interchanging for code that ought to have been written properly in the first place - I am happy that GCC is becoming smarter but sad that this would let sloppy code go unpunished.
Tom and Andrew are back at hacking furiously at the BC-ABI for GCJ while Michael has finally liberated GCJ from the clutches of a hacked automake. Bryce seems have taken on the role of the GCJ PR man while triaging (and fixing) a lot of GCJ bugs.
I can't wait to get back...
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2004-08-09
UPS Woes
My UPS by APC was out of action and at a service centre this weekend - it switched off while I was working on my computer and then started emitting these highly irritating beeps that I couldn't quite do much about (it being 11PM in the night). To add insult to injury, the service centre guys apparently kept it under observation for two days and did not find any problems with it whatsoever!
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
"Effective C++"
I read this book by Scott Meyers this weekend and grew even less fond of C++! I mean, it's almost as if this language goes out of its way to ensure that you end up with several "gotchas" to worry about in addition to what you set out to code in the first place!
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2004-08-04
"Keeping Programming Fun"
I came across an Ask Slashdot question that touches upon something that has really been bothering me lately - as a professional programmer, how can you keep programming fun enough to dabble in your favourite Free or Open-Source or personal project after work at home?
Many a time, I am just too mentally tired to do any useful programming work at home on weekdays and I would like to keep the weekends free for other non-programming activities (reading books, socialising with friends, watching movies, etc.). So where is the time for a poor hacker to work on his favourite projects?
Some of the possibilities:
The comments in the Slashdot article linked above provide some more options, but there is nothing that really helped me.
How do you cope up with it?
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
Many a time, I am just too mentally tired to do any useful programming work at home on weekdays and I would like to keep the weekends free for other non-programming activities (reading books, socialising with friends, watching movies, etc.). So where is the time for a poor hacker to work on his favourite projects?
Some of the possibilities:
- Work for a company that will actually pay you for your work on your favourite project. Not everyone can be so lucky and sometimes there are other factors (location preference, desired minimum salary, etc.) which make this impossible. In addition, I have this weird problem where a thing becomes totally uninteresting to me and a chore the moment I am asked or expected to work on it by someone else. :-(
- Work for a company where the day job is not so taxing (usually) on your creative juices, yet pays you well enough to bring food to your table and to pay for your loans (mortgages). In Bangalore, this is a possibility. ;-)
Switch professions - get a job that does not involve programming. The problem with this, apart from the need to be educationally qualified to do such a job, is the danger of the job getting too boring or too interesting - the former can be disastrous while the latter saps into your creative juices just the way a programming job does.- Forget about personal projects for a while, concentrate on your job, wait for the Peter Principle to take effect and get promoted into management - you will then have more money as well as a job that does not involve coding. Personally, this will profoundly depress me, killing all the enthusiasm I have.
The comments in the Slashdot article linked above provide some more options, but there is nothing that really helped me.
How do you cope up with it?
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
