r-wos.org

every machine is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough

  • Scope Creep

    So, after some weeks trying to implement my programming language, the immediate goals went down quite a bit. The top priority used to be “make something really cool”. But the thing got too complex for some quick hacking after work. I needed about an hour just to remember what I was doing last time, and…

  • Linux Filename Fails

    So, we had some kind of long and gruel flame war at work today. Which was (unintentionally!) started by me asking if it’s now possible with Windows 7 to name a folder “aux”. Turns out it isn’t. However, war was on. And that’s not a pretty thing to watch between die-hard Linux users and Windows…

  • Screenshot Monday 0

    It’s Monday, and – in order to keep me motivated and on track on my little graphics programming project – I hereby declare this day to screenshot day. I don’t have much to show yet, though. The last few development hours mainly went into graphic effects. In the usual minimal-effort-maximal-impact style of doing things I…

  • The Joy Of Debugging

    I tested everything. I ran through every line thrice to make sure it was right. I hooked up gdb. I looked at wikis, example implementations, the reference documentation. I googled. And yet I couldn’t seem to get alpha blended blitting to work. I have two (or more) surfaces (SDL terminology, think “screen buffer”) and want…

  • Where’s My XOR?

    Apparently the kids today don’t do XOR any more. My natural approach on graphically drawing things to the screen would be XORing some Bitmap with the screen. Then another XOR on the same position would “delete” that. After that I would XOR the Bitmap again, on a new position. Which – tada – results in…

  • More Cowbell!

    These guys are crazy. I just watched the great 2008 JAOO talk by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel. Well, it’s less a talk and more a programming language rock concert. Or something like that. It features a Shakespeare play calculating powers of two, pictures printing “hello world”, XKCD comics, an APL Song by Richard M.…

  • Graphics Programming

    I’m programming now for 6 years or so and I’ve never written a game. A game that works, I should say. I have written my share of pongs and pacmans, but none of them were really playable. I have always lost interest when the complicated things (like moving the ball without flicker) were done. Carving…

  • :q! your IDEs – use vi

    The 80s called – they want their editor wars back. So here it is: The participants have changed, however. I use vi myself, but I do consider every Emacs user a brother-in-arms. The picture may be different, if you’re doing low-level systems programming, but in the unholy world of web-development the line is somewhere else.…

  • Plan 9 Is Dead. Long Live Plan 9!

    Now, that is great news: a community-driven fork of Bell Labs’ Plan 9 Operating System. Finally, someone taking actions to bring the most modern operating system of our day back to live. If you are new to Plan 9: don’t let the screenshots fool you. They might look like any other late-80s system – but…

  • You Can’t Escape The String Escape

    I’ve just written this: for n in `seq \`expr $i – 1\“; do # word name list eval echo “\”\t\t\\\”\$fn_word$n\\\”,\”” >> fn.c done And then I woke up. You can exit(1) any time you like, but you can never leave…

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