Older blog entries for warner (starting at number 1)

Turns out EGD has a bug in the way it uses select (when reading from a pipe for which the other process has shut down, sometimes you get both readability and exception status on that fd), which caused it to slowly drop all entropy sources. It only seems to happen on Solaris 8 and one release of Irix. There's a test egd.pl on ftp.lothar.com/linux/ if you want to try it out.

Watched Psycho and The Trouble With Harry tonight. Old films rock. And then proceeded to burn about 3 hours with Final Fantasy VII. Really, I don't get into RPGs at all. This is just a brief infatuation and I'm sure it will pass soon. Just as soon as I finish the blasted game... :)

Spent more time hacking on an EZUSB widget for an LED sign I'm trying to set up at work. It kept flaking out for no apparent reason, and I'm inclined to blame sdcc. Managed to crash linux -pre5, some kind of descriptor bug (in the external USB device) triggered an interrupt lockup. I'll have to see if I can reproduce it and find a way to throw it at the more knowledgeable USB stack folks.

And in the "projects to do" file: I was looking at both FreeAmp and XMMS, thinking that FreeAmp looks much nicer (and doesn't trigger the trident 100% CPU bug in the latest kernels), but XMMS works much better and has far more flexible plugins, and has a wonderful remote interface (for which I'm planning an emacs mode, muhaha). The code in both makes my skin crawl (some projects seem destined to be primarilly influenced by Windows code, dunno why). But I was thinking about how to make XMMS look prettier, and it got me thinking that we could use libskin.a, something to combine XML, PNG, buttons, images, libart, gdk-pixbuf, all kinds of goodness to make it easier to customize apps that don't require a lot of standardized widgets (menus and lists would be hard). This is basically how the FreeAmp skins work except without as much flexibility and a serious windows bent (.bmp everywhere). Anyway, something to play with next weekend if I can just manage to lose that damn FF7 CD..

visited here enough I decided I should stay..

I like the meta-discussions that have been taking place here. They've resonated nicely with some chats I've had at work on the overall Software process and how to herd developers into doing the Right thing instead of the short-term expedient thing. Evil thoughts like rigging the compiler to produce random errors when they do things I want to discourage (e.g. large variables on the stack), so as to build up this culture of fear that keeps them in line without silly stuff like code reviews or coding guidelines.

Of course, then I realize that would be evil, and I back out my changes. But I can always dream.. :)

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