More x64 adventures

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

Since my earlier troubles, things have progressed rather nicely. I managed to install Visual Studio 2003 on the x64 machine, and a 64 bit compiler that came with the Platform SDK. I could have compiled my first 64 bit executable today, but I need to find out if any of the libraries I use are ported. I’ll need boost, libxml2, iconv, lua and luabind. Yeah, fat chance.

OpenOffice is still being difficult. Writer is the only part I can make work, and it doesn’t seem to be the dual-coreness of the machine that’s the problem – setting affinity to only one CPU made no difference.

Something positive: Miranda IM works nicely (as a 32 bit app), there is a 64 bit Java VM and 64 bit Python from ActiveState.

What this platform really needs though is a few machines in the Sourceforge compile farm and 64 bit MinGW.

64 bit windows adventures

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

As Kjetil put it, my new PC at work puts me way ahead of the curve. I got a AMD 64 bit Dual-Core machine, with 2 GB of RAM and 2×250 GB RAID-0. I figured XP Professional 64 bit would be the right OS to run.

There is not a lot of software availabel for 64 bit Windows. Luckily, it runs 32 bit legacy applications nicely, so it’s okay to mix and match. Still, there’s some trouble.

The first problem came after I installed Thunderbird. I installed the official 32 bit release, because the 64 bit releases struck me as pretty experimental. When I fired it up, it almost immediately reported “connection timed out connecting to server” on my IMAP account. Turns out, there’s a known bug in Thunderbird with dual core machines: The timing code uses the QueryPerformanceCounter() fucntion. It can be fixed by assigning a processor affinity to the program, so it only runs on one of the two cores. You can do this either manually from the taskmanager, or once and for all using a progam called imagecfg.exe (goolge for it if you need it).

The next issue was more serious: There are no 64 bit versions of TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN. The reason that’s serious is that they are explorer shell extensions, and to extend the 64 bit Windows Explorer, your program has to be a 64 bit application. There’s a 32 bit version of Explorer for those cases, but I was hoping to avoid that kind of switching around. I mean, I’ll have the 64 bit Explorer open by default, so CVS will be cumbersome. Let’s hope they get on the case soon.

The third issue is compilers. We use VS2003 to make Anarchy Onlie, and while we’re not switching AO to 64 bit, I really want to be able to compile my own 64 bit apps. There’s no 64 bit compiler with VS2003, though (I hear that VS2005 has one), so I’m not sure where to get one from. Intel has one, but I’ve found it cumbersome to use. Which reminds me, I have to look into 64 bit cygwin. I guess that’s not ready yet.

But man, this thing is nice.

[ media | Briskeby-Joe Dallesandro ]

On the road again

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

After almost two weeks of procrastinating and taking the train, I’ve finally gotten around to putting the studded tires on my bike. It’s perfect weather for cycling, really – it hasn’t rained or snowed in days, the temperatures are comfortable two to five degrees below, and the air is fairly dry. If only it wasn’t so damn dark.

[ media | Debussy – Douze Etudes pour piano ]

The Comic Quiz!

~ Enno ~ 1 Comment

following up on the hugely popular computer game quizes I made some months ago, I bring you… the comic quiz. How many of these strips do you recognize?

The list is mostly compiled on the basis of what I read every day. Yes, that’s a lot. No, that’s not even all of it. Click on the image above to get to the quiz. And let’s hear which strips you thought should have been included!

[ media | Stan Getz & Luis Bonfa – O Morro Nao Tem Vez ]

Windows 98 is sh%t.

~ Enno ~ 2 Comments

Last friday I got reports that on Windows 98, my new patches for the longest journey don’t load their savegames. Somehow, the game didn’t seem to find them. I had one player send me his saves, and verified that they were healthy, so it was definitely the loading.

I found the bug this morning: Windows 98 doesn’t like doubel backslashes in a filename. So if I write C:\TLJ\\Save1, that won’t work, because it’s not the same as C:\TLJ\Save1, and although all later versions of windows seem to just collapse multiple backslashes if they aren’t at the beginning of a pathname, Win98 doesn’t. So yes, I’m guilty of adding that bug, and I feel slightly stupid for that, but not too stupid.

The interesting part about this was that it was nigh impossible to find a Windows 98 machine in the house. Noone has that stuff anymore, and frankly, I’d feel bad about connecting it to the network. So I installed MS Virtual PC, and in the Virtual PC I installed Windows 98. And in that Windows 98 I installed the longest journey for testing, and then Visual Studio and everything else I needed for debugging.

And I did all that through remote desktop, because I was sitting at home. Everything worked like a charm. That virtual machine stuff is pure magic every time I play with it, and so is remote desktop. Fun!

[ media | Corpse Bride Soundtrack – Victor’s Piano Solo ]

Small cosmetic changes

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I made some cosmetic changes to the site. Most importantly, I hae a working blogroll now (see the “Blinkenlights” section on the right). Much better than the hand-kept linklist I had before, and easier to update, too.

[ media | A-Ha-Halfway Through The Tour ]

When your sister says you’re fat, you better believe h

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

When I visited Anke in Budapest, she said one thing that really got under my skin: “Enno, you’re getting fat”. There’s nobody like a sister that tells you the painful truth she sees. I love her for that. And it’s not like I didn’t know it already. I was dragging few too many kilos with me on the bike, up the mountains, everywhere. 5 kilos extra feels like a lot of weight when I climb, and compensating for it with strength or technique seems like such a waste.

So early in September, I started taking the gym more serious. I went more often, and in October even switched from my half hour of running to the hour-long cycling sessions. And it makes a difference. Being the geek I am, I have of course logged it painstakingly. And gnuplot is my friend:

My initial goal was to get to 74 kilos for Christmas. It looks like I’m going to miss that goal, but not by much. And more importantly, my system works. I am losing weight, not too fast, and I am neither starving myself, nor am I totally knackered from the exercise. In fact, I feel much fitter now than I did before I started this. I still want to get down to my ideal weight (which would be around 72-73 kg), which is what I weighed 5 years ago when I first moved to Norway. That extra weight is what you get from deadlines, overtime food and an office job, and I know I got hit less hard than some others.

I exercise 3 times a week at the moment, for between one and two hours after work. The gym is just around the corner, and while it isn’t the cheapest one, it’s nice, bright and friendly. I love to go there, and that helps a lot. When the alternative is working or going home, exercising most of the time seems more appealing, and that helps a lot.

And now that I’ve dared go out and share intimate details like my weight, I’ll probably talk about my whole “getting in shape” project more in future posts. Wish me luck with this.

[ media | A-Ha – Celice ]

How much fun at work is healthy?

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

You know you’re working in a job you really love when you never look at the watch because you’re waiting for 4 o’clock so you can leave.

Actually, in the almost 5 years of my current job, it’s happened to me once that I can remember of. It was fairly recently, and that day I stayed until after 5 anyway because I found something cool to do.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s always just fun and games, and I’m not the kind of person that says “Thank god it’s monday”. Some mornings, staying in bed seems more inviting than going to work. And occasionally, I find myself having to do things that are boring. Looking for someone else’s bug in a piece of convoluteed, hard to track code. Most of the time though, the reason I don’t like doing what I do at that moment is that I’ve got half a dozen ideas for what I’d rather be working on.

There was a time when I couldn’t wait to get to work, and couldn’t make myself leave in the evenings. And more often than not, I’d be working on weekends. It’s definitely healthy that I got over that, but sometimes I miss those days. But today I can actually have several good things, and work is still one of them. Geocaching, working out, firends, movies and climbing are others.