PlayControl Software

At least from my perspective, there has been a surprising amount of work and effort put into the (upcoming) maintenance release of SDL 1.2.14 for the Mac. Many of the changes have been focused on modifying the Mac code base to support Snow Leopard, particularly 64-bit. As I understand it, Ryan Gordon has spent the time cleaning up the codebase with help from user patch submissions in the SDL Bugzilla to modernize the codebase. (Thank you to all of you that have submitted patches.)

Meanwhile, I have been focusing on modernizing the Xcode projects, Xcode application templates, doing testing, updating documentation, and working on the official binary distribution.

So there are some fairly substantial behind the scenes changes Mac…

Ugh. C++ always finds another way to irk me.

I finally upgraded one of my systems to Snow Leopard and am trying out all the new compilers (gcc 4.2, llvm/gcc, clang). In addition, Apple sent me back a bug report telling me they fixed a problem with OpenAL buffer unqueuing returning the wrong buffer id, and wanted me to test it in Snow Leopard.

Being OpenAL, I could have submitted a plain C example, but I wanted to use some standard data structures so Apple couldn't accuse my code of being buggy. I wanted a GUI too to help trigger the problem, so I obviously used Cocoa/Obj-C to build the UI. But from past experience, I knew the Core Audio team likes C++ and I really wanted them to fix my bug, so I decided to use STL data structures instead…

One of the things I miss from the days just before the great Linux/Bitkeeper schizm is the Bitkeeper GUI front-end tools. Obviously, since the great fallout, I have moved away from Bitkeeper and have been alternating between Git and Mercurial as I get the chance. But to this day, I still miss the GUI tools Bitkeeper provided. They were written in Tk and damn ugly, but the overall design was pretty good and integrated well with my workflows at the time.

I remember struggling to get better Mac support for the Bitkeeper tools way back then as they required X11. Once upon a time, there was a way you could redirect Bitkeeper to use an Aqua/Tk so you at least didn't have to go through X11 (which had even less integration on those older Mac OS X…

A while ago, I did a back-to-back comparison of Git and Mercurial on how to create aggregate projects containing unrelated repositories. For Git, I used the submodule option. For Mercurial, I used the Forest Extension. Since then, Mercurial (1.3) has rolled out a new experimental feature called subrepositories (subrepos). This new experimental feature seems slated to replace the Forest extension as an official core feature.

I was curious how the procedure for the new subrepos differed from forests, so I have revisited the earlier example I did using LuaDoc, and repeated it using subrepos.

The original Mercurial repositories for the underlying subrepos are in the same place from the Forest example, so all that is unchanged. So we just need…

I setup a triple-boot Mac/Windows/Linux system about 6 months ago with which partitions I shared with virtualization. Unfortunately, I sat on this document too long without finishing it and have forgotten what I did to make it work. At this point, I'm just going to push out my notes as I have them now and hope it still may be helpful to somebody out there. My particular setup is a bit more uncommon which is why I feel I should push this document out there.

Unlike a traditional triple-boot system, I pushed the envelope a bit further. In addition to having native bootable partitions for each OS, I also made each runnable through virtualization. In my case, I used VMWare Fusion. I also tried Parallels Desktop, but didn't have any success.

…

Cross-platform copy & paste support comes up once in a blue moon on the SDL mailing list.

Sam Lantinga (the main author of SDL) implemented a demo piece called SDL_scrap some years ago. Several years ago, I tried the code and decided to modify it because it didn't meet my needs.

First, it completely lacked a native Mac OS X implementation, so I implemented that.

Second, Sam's demo relied on inventing custom types for clipboards so it was useless for sharing data between other applications that didn't use SDL_scrap. For example, if I wanted to copy/paste text with Notepad.exe or an image with MS Paint , this was impossible because SDL_Scrap didn't leverage native known types in the underlying clipboard implementations.

So I implemented…

To my shock, the next iteration of Debian was released and it hasn't been an eternity. For those who don't use Debian, releases in the past have taken very long amounts of time. It is usually the butt of jokes along with Windows (Vista) release cycle times.

I actually put off upgrading to Etch until only a little over a year ago expecting I would still have at least several more years before Lenny.

My experience I am about to convey is actually two separate experiences, a brand new computer and fresh install, and an upgrade on an old computer.

The Story of the New Computer (New install on Mac Pro)

I was entrusted with a new Mac Pro to do some development work on. The work was for a cross-platform project, so I needed Mac OS X, Windows,…

(The following is an open letter I posted to the OpenAL community asking for support to convince Apple this problem is indeed a bug in their implementation and to accept my patch.)

The Bug:

There is a bug in the current Mac OS X implementation concerning the ALC_ENUMERATION_EXT.

The current implementation fails to do two things:

1) It fails to return a list of devices as intended by the ALC_ENUMERATION_EXT, even though the implementation claims to support the extension.

2) It fails to support opening of specific devices that would be named in this list.

As my Xmas gift to the community, I have implemented these deficiencies and made my changes publicly available. My wish is that these will be included into the main Mac OS X distribution as I…

This is a follow up to the article I wrote on Aggressive Savings Techniques using Balanced Funds (for intermediate term). I am not going to do a quantitative analysis right now. I want to wait for the year to end to see where things end up.

But yikes! When I wrote the article, I didn't believe we would enter into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. (Don't interpret that line as this crisis is just as bad as the Great Depression. Some people I've talked to make that allusion when they hear this and that is plain wrong. While the current crisis is very bad, it is nowhere as bad as the Great Depression. Perhaps the phrase, 'Only the Great Depression has been worse in the past 80 years' would be more clear.)

So here are…

(Update 2009/09/04: I added a new entry on Mercurial Subrepos which is slated to replace Forests.Link here)

In my last entry, we created a Git Superproject for LuaDoc and its dependencies. For comparison, let's repeat the example using the Mercurial Forest Extension.

Because the Forest is still an unofficial extension, you may need to configure/install things for your Mercurial installation. My example below assumes you have a working Forest extension installed. The following link contains instructions and a tutorial I based this example on.

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ForestExtension

The first step is to create the regular individual Mercurial repositories for each subproject. They can be found here:

Mercurial…

I've been working with the LuaObjCBridge (by Tom McClean) and LuaCore (by Gus Mueller). I've encountered some bugs, limitations, and things that needed improvement. As I'm already forgetting what changes I've made, I decided I better document them and push them back out for the public to test and improve. Because my changes may potentially break compatibility (not necessarily a bad thing though because some things just didn't work correctly in the original code base), I've pushed my changes into a separate repository.

Meanwhile, I've been using a lot of these changes to test ideas for the next generation LuaObjCBridge which will use BridgeSupport and likely libffi. If you are interested in contributing, please don't hesitate to contact me.

…

Southwest Airlines has a little application called Ding! which offers special limited time (hours) fares. I have relatives that love this program. But, maybe predictably, this blog entry has nothing to do with the concept of the application itself.

It turns out that the application has an annoying bug where the programmers left in code that prints debugging statements (via NSLog?) to the system log on Mac OS X (Leopard).

The big problem is that the application prints a huge number of messages. Coupled with the fact that users run this application non-stop to get the most benefit from it, this floods the system log and forces quicker log rotation, removing the chances to find important events in the system log.

While dealing with Apple on…

I know most of the world is still trying to grok distributed SCM while it is something that I have simply come to expect. I probably should write up something about Git and Mercurial to help bridge the gap between my mindset and where most people probably (currently) are, as this writing will show my complete acceptance of the distributed model. But that article will have to wait as I am actually trying to grok how to use these tools in more advanced ways.

So today, I've decided I need to string together separate, generally unrelated projects as dependencies of a project I'm working on. As an example of what I'm talking about, I have a project that depends on the Sparkle Update Framework for Mac OS X and also Lua. It would be nice to…

So gigabit ethernet is finally ubiquitous enough that I (unintentionally) have two machines that both have it. My existing ethernet switch still works, but don't have enough ports on it so I sometimes end up having to unplug stuff and switch cables which is inconvenient.

I've been hesitant to invest in a new switch. My existing switch which is a 10/100 Netgear blue box switch originally gave me problems. About a year after my original purchase, the switch started malfunctioning and then stopped working. It was still under warranty, so Netgear replaced it, but I remember they were very slow about it (3 weeks?). Meanwhile, I was without a switch and ended up buying a temporary switch (a Linksys) to hold me over while waiting for Netgear to…