Stumbled upon this guide today for how to create better patches when the project in question is using bzr (such as MMS :)).
Month: July 2007
It’s all the little things
Having been coding in c# for some time now, what is really nice about the language compared to c++ is the foreach statement. The syntax is really natural and easy to read:
foreach (string s in strings)
Compare this to the standard c++ notation:
for (vector::const_iterator i = strings.begin(),
iend = strings.end(); i != iend; ++i)
So I decided there must be something easier and vague remembered that boost had something for this. And low and behold they had. So now instead of writing that horrible for line, one can just write:
foreach (const string& s, strings)
It’s not quite as nice as i c# since one can’t have a pair on the leftside of the comma, so one needs to be using typedefs to fix that. And one must also remember the & as to not create unneeded copies of the string.
And the best part is that it’s written as a bunch of templates and macro’s so one can just include a header and of it goes. Doesn’t even have to change the Makefile 🙂
I’ve converted the whole MMS 1.1.0 code base to the new syntax and it’s really so much easier to read. Especially because I tend to use better names for the loop variable than i 🙂
CXFE 0.9.2 released
A long time ago, Rett D. Walters created a console frontend for Xine so that we could use that in MMS. I’ve since the last release created quite a few patches for it, and because Rett wasn’t actively maintaining it anymore I decided to roll all my patches into a new release:
Welcome to the 21th century
I received a letter today from my insurance company about a service where one can access account information using their web site. What I noticed was, in the letter, they specifically mentioned that the site was only open from 7am to 10pm. Why would such a web site ever be closed? If they need to run some maintenance they can always just schedule it. Sometimes I wonder if some people didn’t realize that we are now in the 21th century?
Today I decided to change nic in my server because the onboard NIC wasn’t working properly. And so again I hit the problem that udev can assigns a NIC a different ethX name than what the kernel is printing in dmesg. So one modprobes the module and gets the following output:
e100: Intel(R) PRO/100 Network Driver, 3.5.17-k2-NAPI
e100: Copyright(c) 1999-2006 Intel Corporation
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:07.0[A] -> Link [LNKB] -> GSI 10 (level, low) -> IRQ 10
e100: eth1: e100_probe: addr 0xdcfff000, irq 10, MAC addr 00:A0:C9:E6:3E:75
Tries to start the NIC using /etc/init.d/net.eth1 start only to find that the device is not found! Luckily I had this problem before so I knew that I needed to clean up the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. I seriously doubt that this “feature” of remembering the ethernet binding of old NICs brings more “joy” that headaches.