Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Read mail, admin pieces. Pleased to see Neelie Kroes make some (apparently) rather sensible statements about the evils of proprietary software. Now if we can only ask governments to encourage / prefer Open-(Source) or Free Software - we can not only reduce our tax burden, and government effectiveness, but have a winning strategy (unlike the 'open standards' game, at which large entrenched monopolies are only too adept at playing).
Knocked up some screenshots of repsnapper, with package repo for openSUSE: repsnapper. I really need to get all the avr toolchain (and the like) inherited into and available from there, along with the arduino tools and ArtOfIllusion; and an openSUSE / Studio bootable image. Repsnapper looks like this:
Sadly missing some /dev/ttyUSB0 detection (though Rick is working on it).
Interesting to do some more C++ programming, and see what fltk is like (not my personal choice, but what was there). What did I learn:
- It seems the single file, containing GUI and code, that can be compiled into .cxx & .h files by a head-less binary is quite a nice model; why ? because you still have a self-contained binary that doesn't drag XML files with it (across platforms), and it is easy: fluid -c UI.fl is pretty simple to add to a Makefile. We should have done this years ago with glade 1: it would be have been pretty trivial.
- C++ is not a panacea; it's still easy to mess up memory allocation, cut and paste code, and produce a foul mess that is hard to unwind. A great example would be fltk's sexy void Fl_Widget::label (const char *a); - used to set the label on a widget. As a thing of beauty it stores the raw const pointer value. But - as a bonus there is extra code and lifting for a Fl_Widget::copy_label (const char *a); that does the sane thing. Don't assume other toolkits share good taste in copying conventions.
- sprintf the C++ way is unutterably lame; at least - as I understand it (perhaps that is the problem). Full of enthusiasm for the C++ way, I wrote this sort of thing using std::stringstream oss;:
  oss << "You are " << setw(2) << years << " years " << months << " months old\n";
  which is all pretty and everything (and notably only a single line). Sadly it turns into five function calls plus frame setup, plus exception unwind tables. Contrast with the standard 'va_args' approach in fprintf - a single function call, and some frame setup. I can only imagine what this does to your code size when you have hundreds of debugging statements around the place doing cunning stuff of the form:
  dbg << "data is: " << a << ", " << b << ", " << c << "\n";
  etc. I guess you have to compile them out. A more discerning va_arg version (in C++) could still do nice, powerful object printing (perhaps) but with less of a footprint. Then again, I guess C++'s hidden pointer adjustment makes var arg functions something of a pain static_cast<> wise.
- Mary Rogers over for dinner in the evening - lovely to spend some time with her again.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2010-06-14: Monday.