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Date: 14/4/2006 | I've just spent most of the night checking out the codebase and building Lgi, LgiIde and i.File on linux. The xml project files are still very platform dependant so I'm making version for Linux and Cygwin and their associated Makefiles for the upcoming Lgi release. I'm also fixing various things that broke in the latest round of changes I'm doing for Scribe v1.89 test2. My aim is to do the next release of Scribe on Win32 and Linux at the same time. There are a bunch of Linux builds that need doing for other apps, i.Ftp, i.Hex and so on.
Currently I have Fedora 4 on my machine. And after booting between Windows and Fedora several times tonight it does highlight just how slow Linux's GUI is and also the boot/shutdown times. I guess you get what you pay for. All the classic Linux pain was still there. I had to learn how to use Yum... yet another annoying command line package utility (however it did, surprisingly, do what I asked of it). I couldn't play xvid movies out of the box. Mounting my windows drives was still all command line voodoo instead of some nice GUI tool. Ntfs drivers weren't installed by default. And the screen was shifted 16px off the right edge of the LCD. *sigh* Linux still sucks. I'm glad I have a Mac now. It makes me happy. I will however make some small token attempt to intergrate with Gnome for font settings and mime->application lookup. No promises though. (The current Lgi codebase looks for KDE settings) |
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| Dump Server | |
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Date: 13/4/2006 | When you write client/server network software like an email client it's inevitable that some user, somewhere, is going to try and connect to a server that your app doesn't work with. And so it's normal to include logging in your app to capture the conversation between the client and server to a file. Scribe has an option to dump all the bytes to a log file in hex format, e.g.:
Read = 18 00000000 2B 4F 4B 20 48 65 6C 6C 6F 20 74 68 65 72 65 2E +OK Hello there. 00000010 0D 0A .. Write = 11 00000000 55 53 45 52 20 74 65 73 74 0D 0A USER test.. Read = 24 00000000 2B 4F 4B 20 50 61 73 73 77 6F 72 64 20 72 65 71 +OK Password req 00000010 75 69 72 65 64 2E 0D 0A uired... Write = 11 00000000 50 41 53 53 20 74 65 73 74 0D 0A PASS test.. Read = 16 00000000 2B 4F 4B 20 6C 6F 67 67 65 64 20 69 6E 2E 0D 0A +OK logged in... Write = 6 00000000 53 54 41 54 0D 0A STAT.. Read = 18 00000000 2B 4F 4B 20 39 33 32 20 32 35 30 34 39 31 31 39 +OK 932 25049119 00000010 0D 0A .. Write = 6 00000000 55 49 44 4C 0D 0A UIDL.. Read = 1024 00000000 2B 4F 4B 0D 0A 31 20 55 49 44 39 36 30 34 2D 31 +OK..1 UID9604-1 00000010 30 36 37 36 31 30 34 33 35 0D 0A 32 20 55 49 44 067610435..2 UID 00000020 39 36 30 36 2D 31 30 36 37 36 31 30 34 33 35 0D 9606-1067610435. 00000030 0A 33 20 55 49 44 39 36 31 30 2D 31 30 36 37 36 .3 UID9610-10676 00000040 31 30 34 33 35 0D 0A 34 20 55 49 44 39 36 31 31 10435..4 UID9611 ...etc etc Thats nice by itself but it really only lets you look at the data. What would be really nice is to actually be able to run your software locally under debug mode with something that made the same responses as the server in the field. So thats what "DumpServer" does, it reads in the log file and pretends to be the server in the log file, sending all the bytes under each read to the client. And it has a nice GUI as well: 
Now I can fire up Scribe and get it to interact with the "server" just like the user does and hopefully find the point where things go off the rails in my own code. How cool is that? |
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| Review: Belkin KVM (F1DL102U) | |||
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Date: 10/4/2006 |
Thats where the good news stops I'm afraid. Because the unit's actual job of switching between 2 computers is well lacking in a number of fundamental ways. First and foremost is the "blinking lights" problem that comes in a couple of different flavours. First version is that BOTH active lights come on at "half strength" and the KVM refuses to switch to the PC, well it does switch, just for a second and then switches back to the Mac. This usually happens when the Mac is on and selected by the KVM, and the PC boots in the other channel but it's not limited to that scenario. The other flavour is just delightful, the KVM can't decide which computer is active so it switches from one to the other every second. Back and forth endlessly switching. Both machines are on and functioning normally but the KVM just keeps switching as fast as it can. For either of these maladies the only solution is to unplug it from the computers to power cycle it and then plug it back in again. As it gets power off the USB ports, you only need to plug the USB plug on each computer. And this is happening a few times a week, so it's not some rare hardware glitch that I can ignore. Then there is the issue of screen detection that I talked about in a previous entry where it seems that when Windows can't detect what monitor is attached, i.e. when the KVM is switched to the other computer, it decides to pick a refresh rate out of thin air. Which generally causes the average LCD to give an "Input Out Of Range" type error. Sometimes windows even chooses a different screen resolution as well. Now one would think, even assume, that Windows would be able to "Just Use The Friggin Display Options I Set(TM)" but that would be far too easy and would put whole swathes of MSCE's out of work so thus it was decreed that Windows should suck and not use the right settings. However that might not be the fault of the KVM, I expect that smarter KVM engineers would be able to come up with a solution to the windows problem. Belkin should find some of these smarter engineers and employ them. If you find yourself in this ugly sitution I heartily suggest using the RefreshForce to reign in Window's taste for trying new refresh rates. So all in all, not much to recommend it. I'd try anything else first, and only get this unit if all else fails. | ||
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| sms.ac Scam | |
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Date: 4/4/2006 | If you ever get an invite from sms.ac delete it immediately. You really don't want to get sucked in the vortex of spam that sms.ac creates. The main problem with sms.ac is that they can send you premium SMS messages that cost you money to receive, and you can get these SMS messages without ever signing up with them (e.g.). sms.ac can also spam all you IM buddies inviting them to join merely by giving them your IM user id (e.g.).
Not only does sms.ac run an incredibly dishonest spam business but they also threaten you with legal action if you expose their true nature. So here I am exposing their true nature :D |
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| Site Traffic Spike | |
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Date: 1/4/2006 | Traffic was up 22% this month over the previous busiest month. But it wasn't only just popular with regular visitors, but it was popular with the bots as well. With robots now accounting for over half of all hits on this site. Maybe in 10 years time no-one will read memecode except millions of automated software. |
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| Memory Leak Removal | |
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Date: 1/4/2006 | With the code I talked about in the previous blog entry I've been able to start removing lots of memory leaks from Scribe. I've added the leak check dumping that I talked about. It's so easy to use I'm just amazed and it's so low impact on the software during use. It was inspired somewhat by valgrind's leak check tool, but this is (much?) better in that it's runtime impact is much lower than valgrind. Of course valgrind has memcheck, which I can't compete with.
However there is some work ahead, because to clear the app of leaks you have to exercise the code over and over to get coverage, i.e. all of the paths through the code getting executed. But now that the tools are so good, I'll leave it running for the next few weeks and get the codebase nice and tight with memory. I also want to reduce the block count, as lots of small blocks of memory are inefficent, in that each block has a number of bytes in overhead and takes time to allocate and free. And beyond that it also slows application shutdown because if the app is swapped out to disk and you shut it down, lots of small memory blocks take much longer to free than a few large blocks. Each block has to be read/written to free it, and if it has to be loaded from virtual memory first it takes longer. Yeah? The number one offender in the billions of tiny blocks of memory is the XML parser. So that'll get some string pooling options like the hash table. |
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