I’ve been playing with Linux this week. The last time I played with Linux was back when it fitted on 15 floppy disks; I think I still have the 15 floppy disks in Dad’s office somewhere. It’s come a long way but I can’t help thinking that, much like Windows, it still has a long way to go…
Bear in mind I’m writing this from the point of view of someone who knows enough to get by and do some development work on the platform fairly quickly but not someone who knows, or wants to know, all the nitty gritty.
One of my clients has asked me to do some investigative work for them in relation to Linux running on a Vortex86-6071LV (a PC/104 format PC which is 386 PC on a board that’s around 6" x 4" x 1/2").
Should be fun.
The machine in question is actually a VOX-064-TS thin frame PC with a touch screen which is pretty cool. The ‘disk’ is a 32mb solid state device and it’s kinda weird to see this tiny PC boot up via the usual AMI BIOS screens and then into Linux in around 10 seconds from this super fast disk (I want solid state disks for my dev box!
I’ve been using SharpReader as my RSS reader for ages. I downloaded a version of it way back when I first got into blog reading and stuck with it because it worked, to a fashion. I ignored the bloaty .Netness of it and the fact that sometimes it disapeared from my task tray yet was still running, and that sometimes it ran really slowly, and that the way it presented new postings was a bit crap…
My project house-keeping yesterday ended up with a rather strange discovery. I have some test log files that contain Unicode characters and are stored on disk as UTF-16 with the correct 2 byte ‘byte order mark’ (BOM) header of 0xFF 0xFE. When I discovered that I needed to save some test logs as Unicode I hacked together some code that dealt with the UTF-16 BOM and did the right thing. Yesterday’s mammoth CVS checkin and test was obviously the first time that I’d checked these files out of CVS and run my tests.
As anyone who has downloaded any of my code from here, or my company site or CodeProject will know, I have a particular way of doing things. The code I write tends to follow a particular style and as such assumes particular dependencies. The approach that I tend to take when I’m making stuff available on the web is that if you want to use the code I’m giving away, then you need to adjust your code in whatever ways you need to be able to consume what I provide.
I’ve had a busy few weeks. I’m waiting for a client to come back to me about a quote for some work and whilst I’m waiting I’m putting together a prototype for a product that I’m interested in producing. The prototype has been going well but since I know I have a limited amount of time to work on the system I’ve been working to a very tight deadline. Still, at least it’s of my own making and at least there’s a reason for it.
I’ve spent much of this week moving from a hand crafted prototype to a code generated version of the same code. The code is all repetitive boiler plate, sort of like the stuff that MIDL generates for you. The code generated version is considerably better code and has evolved faster than the hand written code because I was free to adapt and improve the code at the “single entity” level whereas when I was prototyping the code all improvements needed to be made to all of the entities involved.
Christopher Baus bemoans the problem of getting all the libs that he wants to use linked in statically on Linux. Chris wants an executable that will run on lots of different systems with the least amount of pain for all concerned and to do this he’s linking as much as he can statically so that he has a known set of functionality available.
I know this will sound like heresy, but that’s pretty much my approach on Windows and it has been for a long time.
It’s been a busy week. We got back from Verbier on Saturday and I’d hurt my knee, so I was sad, and limping and slow. I then had a mass of things to do to finish all of my client obligations by today. I collected up some blog postings that I was going to reply to, when I got a moment, and now I have a moment I find that one of them has vanished…
Today was my last day with one of my current clients. In the end the hand over went well, but then I did start the process off a long time ago….
Back in September I lamented how hand overs can sometimes become hand offs when the people that you’re trying to hand over to don’t put in the work required to take on the work you’re giving them. The blog posting worked ;) and the managers at the client site (who read my blog) set about dealing with the issue.
