Last year I bought a new PC, and because I didn’t know which graphics card to get at the time, I decided to do a little self-experimentation and see what life is like with integrated graphics. After all, more and more people buy cheap laptops these days, and integrated graphics are getting better all the time. I bought an Intel G33 board which has a GMA 3100 (no X) chipset. The specs say it can do DirectX 9.0b, and Shader Model 2.0. Enough for quite a lot of games, but not for the latest and greatest. Continue reading
x64
Eclipse + CDT + MinGW + XP x64
I’ve previously complained about the lack of decent free IDEs for developing C++, and since it’s been a while, I gave Eclipse another shot. The good news: CDT 4 no longer crashes every 5 minutes, it has much better project structure, and I think I can work with this. The bad news: It took ages to get everything up and running with MinGW.
The following is an attempt to remember what the problems were.
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Quad Power!
I caved in and bought a new PC. The thing that really strikes me is how long it takes to set up a new PC with Windows compared to Ubuntu. In any modern Linux distribution, I just insert the CD, select the software I want from a huge list and let it do the magic while I do something else. And in an hour, everything’s done.
Meanwhile’ I’m in the middle of day two of my Windows installation. Windows itself is a hassle to install: Missing RAID drivers mean I have to bake a new ISO image and can’t use the regular install CD. Which starts by finding a PC with a CD burner, finding the drivers on the net (because Intel only included 32 bit drivers, hooray), finding a floppy drive in the basement because the drivers are distributed as an executable that formats a floppy (oh, how convenient is that?), building the CD, blabla…
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x64 with the Platform SDK: The Horror!
If you still have Visual Studio 2003, the only way to build 64 bit applications for Windows seems to be the Platform SDK. This, however, is downward compatible with Visual Studio 6. And most of us probably remember what that means: The STL in there is shite. It’s an implementation from back in 1995. A lot of projects simply don’t support it and recommend you use STLport instead.
OMG, should I really have to install that thing again?
More x64 adventures
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.
Miranda and ICQ avatars
I had the damndest time figuring out why my ICQ avatar was not showing up for other people. Since it isn’t obvious, I’ll post it here, someone else might find it useful:
- make sure your avatar image is less than 4 KB.
- make sure it is no bigger than 64×64 pixels.
ICQ seems to take both these restrictions serious, and Miranda doesn’t give a hoot. Less than 4 KB means that JPEG is most likely the format you’ll want to use unless you have a simple drawing for an avatar.
Speaking of Miranda: I tried out some other messengers lately, and they all fall short on one of my basic requirements:
- Full keyboard control (open contacts, open message, select contact all without mouse)
- Avatar support
- Clean look (Win2K classic, preferably)
- Support for Jabber, ICQ and MSN
- Compact, no-nonsense contact list
Neither Trillian nor Gaim were satisfactory. Gaim isn’t so bad, but I hate their UI controls, and the contact list needs to much space per entry. Trillian completely lacks keyboard controls, has no support for Gaim and I didn’t think I’d have to include “searchable history” in my list of requirements, but the fact that it hasn’t got one taught me to expect nothing and everything. Of course, if I chose to pay, I’d get the latter two, but still no keyboard shortcuts.