June « 2006 « Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Goddam XCode…

Saturday, June 24th, 2006

I’ve been trying to compile some things for x86 OS X. Specifically I’m trying to make XinePlayer a universal application since I think it nicely contains everything that is likely to bite me in the bum (architecture dependant capabilities, heavy process optimisation, old-school Linux source base, autoconf, etc) and indeed my posterior has a number of bite marks upon it.

One gem is the fact that the XCode packaged version of gas is ancient and doesn’t support .balign which nicely screws some of the inline assembly in xine. It also barfs on some of the MMX stuff in ffmpeg but I’ve managed to back-port some stuff from ffmpeg’s HEAD.

Aside from that I’ve been bitten by some actual bugs (confirmed by finding the entries in the GCC bug tracker) and the general crapness of the linker. Also add in the fact that the OS X dynamic libraries include a notion of the path they expect to find themselves in and we find that my build system for PPC XinePlayer was already full of twisty little shell scripts calling otool.

Oh well, I enjoy the challenge :).

Posted in Hacking, OS X, Rants | No Comments »

Obvious meme

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

From megamole…

If there is at least one person on your friends list with whom you would like to engage in a hot, sweaty, 4-hour long sexual encounter which, in terms of voracity, would sound like someone banging two steer carcasses together while stirring a 50 gallon bowl of macaroni and cheese over a public address system…

…post this sentence in your journal.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

OMG! Childhood gone!

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

I’ve just been watching Andy Peters on TV. How did I not notice how gay he was when I was a kid?

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Web hosting question

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

At work we’re looking at moving our web-hosting. Currently we’re still with the people the VCs set us up with (1-2-3-reg, eugh) and we’d like a hosting company that

Has a really basic Just-Serve-Pages-Uploaded-Via-FTP option for $TINY per month and managed in a compentant fashion;
Has a smooth upgrade path to something a little fatter (with CGI, PHP, MySQL, etc) for when our site grows;
Also has a smooth upgrade from that to a tiered set of virtual/dedicated servers for when our website actually becomes decidedly dynamic.

Now I have no idea about web hosting so I’m asking you lot. Bear in mind that, initially, it will have to be management friendly so a nice pretty website with stock photographs of smiling ethnic minorities and some obscenely small price for 20K/month traffic to static HTML would probably be best but with the option of upgrading the clu as we go along.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Whose ICE was in Anyhow? II

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

Tonight from 11pm at the ADC ICE will be presenting Whose ICE was it Anyhow? II an evening of exciting high-energy improvised sketches and games. Do come, it’ll be great :). Poster behind cut.

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Posted in Improv | No Comments »

Look ma! I’m hard!

Sunday, June 11th, 2006

This morning I spent mostly handing out posters for Whose ICE was it Anyhow? II and flyering everywhere in the known Universe within staggering distance of the ADC. This afternoon I played at being a moody Matrix-esque character for some publicity for one of our Michaelmas shows. Lookie how hard I look :). I think this image should be the poster for some gritty late 90s drug-based drama set in Glasgow…

Click to enlarge

For any that care the exciting photo effect was done by stitching together two piccies in the GIMP (one with the gun in focus, one with me), thesholding, fiddling and finally running it through the excellent potrace.

Posted in Graphics, Improv, Life, Uncategorized | No Comments »

More rants

Saturday, June 10th, 2006

Here is a good ‘getting it off my chest’ post listing 20 things I hate (in no particular order). Beware these are all rants against the world not people I know personally so don’t assume I’m talking about you in any of these. In addition I know I’ve probably done about 50% of the things I’m ranting about myself :).

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Why?

Saturday, June 10th, 2006

Football fans, why?

I can understand why some people might enjoy watching or even playing football. Fine, everyone is different and everyone has different tastes. What I can’t understand is the herd mentaility which states it is fine to revel in the delusional (and let us not pretend otherwise) belief that England might win. Similarly why it is somehow OK to run around in groups hollering like animals when it is about football? Why is it acceptable to expose and indeed encourage your kids to join in with people running around, shouting and singing bawdy songs? Why is it deemed desireable to behave like an idiot in public when 22 people might kick a sphere in the near future? Why?

Football ‘fandom’ is a total mystery to me. As is the ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentaility. Most of us have no relation to the England team (or in fact any national team) beyond the fact there is a slightly stronger correlation between the nations of our birth and those of the players. Why do they care?

Still, on the up side, the Carlton’s lounge bar is a football-free zone this summer. God bless the Carlton.

Update: The BBC Breakfast News just had a bit on some churches offering ‘grief counselling’ should England lose a game. One paragraph is not sufficient to explore all of my problems with this…

Posted in Life, Rants, Social | No Comments »

I will kill them. I will kill them all.

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

The very first thing I will do when I become emperor of the Universe is to remove BoGS not only from the face of the Earth but also from the entirety of history. I will then cast all those souls who no longer exist into the deepest pit of my hell and make them send two forms in triplicate applying to take one step forward before requesting they get someone random to sign a document mandating they take two steps back.

Grrr…

Posted in Academic, Rants, Wibbles, Writing | No Comments »