... while writing software.

Over the years I have keep a set of functions that moved from one project to the next. These where small functions that served the sole process of retaining my own sanity. After feeling the need to use these functions in two of my free software projects, I decided to encapsulate them in a small library called sanity.

Minecraft sux! Ok, actually the game rocks, the problem is the software. I mean it crashes regularly often and is darn slow. Look at it, there are max a couple of hundred polygons on screen and my atom + ion platform can't play it. As comparison, that platform scored an average frame rate of 50 on the Half-Life 2: The Last Cost benchmark. It definitely does not help that it is written in java...

While researching different solutions for networking games, I stumbled over Gaffer on Games's UDP networking tutorial. Amongst other, it describes a really simple approach to connection handling and reliability. The basic idea of connection handling is that a connection is established as long as packets flow. This is a refreshing simple idea, when comparing to your standard three way handshake. He simplifies reliability by acknowledging every packet with a special field on the packets returning and let's the application decide what to do. The appeal in this solution is the simplicity. But he fails to address some core issues that I want my networking system spdr to solve for me.

I have been looking for a suitable project management software for my hobby projects about as long as I have hobby projects. I have tried out a lot of different solutions and none really gelled, until now.

It seems that my needs have a certain disconnect from most software. The reason being that most project management software focuses on planing and work completion tracking. I tried software that addressed different methodologies. Notable ones are dotProject, that adheres to the classical project management approach, to AgileTrack, that tries to bring tooling to XP or Scrum projects.

I was sitting in the train this morning and did not know what to do. I started to type random ideas into the text buffer and suddenly I had quite some interesting results. So I thought I just might share them.

Hmm... What shall I write about?

Lately I have so little motivation when I am home. Even though I come up with ideas at work, I am almost incompetent to implement them back home. As a result sdpr has not changed since the week end.

This site recently took a new turn technologically wise. I migrated it to Jekyll for my CMS and this is the epic tale of how this came to be.

A long long time ago in on a website far far away I read the post Google App Engine for indie developers on the Wolfire blog. This post made me start to think about cloud based hosting for my website; especially since I am hopping that my hobby work on games will start to turn around.

Now let's pretend you have a class called Screen and a few classes that are derived from a class called Widget. Each have a method called draw that takes a class Canvas as reference. It is the task to draw the screen and each widget onto the canvas. The basic algorithm is stupidly simple, do some setup for the screen and call draw with the canvas for each widget.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine that came from a, what I would call, Microsoft indoctrination camp. He tried to persuade me of the benefits of .Net. As a matter of fact, I am programming C# for a living since a good while, but I just can't see the advantage. The conversation was unfortunately cut short and I was unable to really bring my points across. So I decided to take the time and write them down in as much detail as possible.

pkg-config is a really neat tool that makes life so easy on GNU/Linux systems. If you ever needed to write a configure script, now there is a (almost standard) way to check for dependencies. Oh the joy! Until you move to MinGW and MSys on Windows. You will find out that there is no binary from the guys at MinGW. You will also find out that to build pkg-config, you need glib, which needs pkg-config to configure some dependencies. There are mailing lists full of epic tales of people trying to build pkg-config from source. You just want to use pkg-config. It is bad enough that you need to build you software, you should not need to build other peoples software! The good news, getting pkg-config with minimal fuss is possible. Let me show you how.

What is really nice, the people at Gtk+ have all the libraries precompiled in separate zip archives. Head over to http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html. You will need the glib run-time, the gettext-runtime run-time and obviously pkg-config tool and dev. No less no more. Unzip each folder to your root of your MSys installation.

That's it.

Ever used Gimp or any other tool that uses gettext for localization on Windows and the language does not turn out as it should?

I have that quite often. The thing is that my main system (Window 7 ) has the locale setting to German, since I have many contact points that need to conform to that, especially the default currency being Euros. Nevertheless my interface language is English.