Microbits

UPDATED

After a few seg-faults, I realized that eAccelerator isn’t thread safe (I was running it under a thread safe server)… It is thread safe… I just wasn’t loading it in thread safe mode (see the manual for details). Whoops.

After getting somewhat annoyed with the slowness of my blog, and having nothing better to do, I decided to setup eAccelerator. I’m pretty sure I tried setting it up a long time ago, but for some reason, didn’t finish.

Following the path of logic, I went to the eAccelerator website in search of the appropriate files. Their Windows section directed me to SiteBuddy, which had a nice collection of binaries for various PHP versions. After determining my PHP version (5.2.9-2), I tried the closest match (5.2.9), and was greeted by the following error in the Windows event log:

Unable to start eAccelerator module in Unknown on line 0.

My initial reaction to the error: what the ****… (UPDATE: See this post for more details) After a quick Google search, I found that PHP modules must be built for the EXACT PHP version you plan to use them on.

Since I have just about every Microsoft C++ compiler, I figured compiling a new eAccellerator module for my version of PHP would be simple. I downloaded the archived PHP files I needed (now I understand why they keep archives), switched to the release configuration, and pressed build.
Read more…

After playing around with the client and server, here are my thoughts.

Server

Setup is pretty simple for any Linux admin. May pose problems for inexperienced admins.

The latest update (beta2), required a manual SQL diff and subsequent manual insert to enable the new permissions. I’m guessing they’ll fix this in future releases.

Client

The client UI has been completely redesigned. The default sound notifications are kind of annoying. I switched to the TTS sound pack and turned 90% of them off.

General

It seems like the  “clan server” option has been removed in favor of “subscribing” to channels. Basically, users aren’t visible unless you are subscribed to the channel they are in, or are in the channel. There’s a button and several menu options to subscribe to all channels.

The permission system is one of the most powerful I’ve seen; however, the documentation isn’t as complete as I’d like.

As 2009 starts to wrap up, here’s my list of the best open source software that I’ve used:

Amusingly, I didn’t use an ad blocker until a few months ago. Now, I enjoy viewing sites without half a million ads cluttering up my screen.

Ad blockers like ABP (Ad Block Plus) scan web pages for ads, and remove them. As simple as they are, ad blockers are incredible.

I installed ABP when I was trying to print an article from a coding website. There were so many ads on their main and print views of the article that printing it would have barely been worth the effort. I remembered that a friend of mine had talked about ABP, so I looked it up and installed it. After enabling it and returning to the website, the ads were gone, and I could actually print the article.

ABP also lets you block new ads that it doesn’t already detect with a few simple clicks. Some websites use JavaScript to display ads, and if ABP can’t block them, NoScript can.

Web masters should realize that intrusive ads will just cause more and more people to start using ad blockers, and start being reasonable.

It certainly doesn’t look like vaporware anymore. Over the past few months, it’s looked less and less like vaporware (with more frequent status updates, screenshots, etc), and more like an actual product that will get released.

The open beta was announced (for Dec 19, 2009). I have a feeling this is going to go one of three ways:

• Worst case – Full of bugs, completely unusable
• Possible case – Performance / quality issues, a reasonable number of minor bugs, interface issues
• Best case – Polished through the private Alpha tests, only a few minor bugs remain

If the development team pulls off what’s been discussed for the past year, it will blow Ventrilo completely out of the water.

I’ve used many different programming languages, each with their own set of benefits and flaws. C++ was the first one I learned, and every class that I’ve taken has used it (with the exception of two language classes).

Before we discuss the pros and cons of  C++, here’s a factoid: C++ is based on C, which was written in 1972 (approximately 37 years ago) at Bell Labs for use with the UNIX operating system.
Read more…

I was writing some complicated inherited classes in C++, and made a few amusing mistakes, which resulted in some strange errors.

Firstly, the concept of method hiding is when you declare a method with the same name of a method that exists in a parent class. This doesn’t override the method (unless it was marked as virtual), but any calls to that method will go to the method defined in the child class. This can lead to really strange results if you were expecting a method override, but forgot to put virtual in the parent class, as I did.

class Parent
{
   public:
        void foo();
};

class Child
{
    public:
        void foo();
};

Now mistakes like this are obvious in small classes, but in large classes, while on six hours sleep, they can be harder to pinpoint.

The other mistake was when I didn’t realize I already had a protected method, we’ll call it bar, declared in the parent class. I then defined a private method called bar in the child class, in which I was trying to call the parent class. Guess what? Infinite recursion.

Lesson of the day? Don’t code while tired. It doesn’t work very well.

While you don’t see them every day, bitwise operations are important. Everything at the hardware level is represented in binary (base 2, 1 and 0). Bitwise operations allow programmers to operate directly on the bits used by variables. This is very useful with enums, since you can have one variable be multiple values.

To understand how one enum variable can be multiple values, you need to understand the bitwise AND and OR operations.

An OR operation compares two sets of bits. If either bit is 1, the result is 1, else, result is 0. In the below example, set 1 is the value of enum option 1, and set 2 is the value of enum option 2.
Read more…

If you have several old PCs lying around, you could turn them into a grid, a single computer that uses all their resources together.

I haven’t found a good use for a grid personally, but I found a nice piece software to setup a SSI (Single System Image, basically means one OS running on multiple machines) grid, and a nice tutorial.

If I had a grid running MySQL, the 35 million row DB table I use would probably search pretty fast.

In other news, Panda3D (a game engine, usable from C++ or Python) looks like it has excellent documentation, something that a lot of engines are lacking. I’m also wondering if I should buy a Mac now that Snow Leopard is out (that’s when I said I’d buy one)… I wonder if I’d really use the Mac applications…