All in all, I’m finding Visual 2008 superverbose, superboring and superslow to work with. I don’t know if I had just idolised VC6 but I don’t remember it being so cumbersome. For example, the autocompletion or “intellisense” thing doesn’t show me useful stuff most of the time… it usually shows me a list of low level Windows constants that I obviously don’t care about, instead of showing me classes from my project. Also, the keys for triggering autocompletion are super odd (ALT + right arrow) instead of the usual CTRL+Space. I haven’t found the option for automatically adding matching braces, so I have to do it manually. The options and general semantics are annoyingly microsoftive (e.g. “Solutions” actually means “a generated binary”), editing project properties is annoyingly slow, and etc, etc. Even the XCode configuration panels look nice compared to this!

What is also possible is that I have got accostumed to Makefiles and the whole idea of going through a series of tabs and trees and options and blablah just looks silly at this point. We’ll see if I end up liking it at the end…

End of the mini-rant and back to the demo: I got a new version where a simple representation of the left/right buffers is painted on each frame. That’s the most advanced graphical stuff I’ve done to date in this project, hehe. The sound is quite saturated in comparison with the output I get in Renoise for the same song. It’s probably due to the fact that in my code I’m not doing any clipping in the output of SorolletVoice and am adding all together in the mixer, but Renoise is probably clipping each voice internally when it gets the output of each VSTi instance. So I’ll add that tomorrow… otherwise as soon as more than one instrument is playing at a relatively loud volume, hardly anything can be distinguished!

So it was a “very interesting” Saturday evening+night: the computer doing its stuff, while I cursed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs indistinctly. You can’t appreciate enough how fast the Ubuntu installation is, until you have to reinstall Mac OS or Windows again. How can they be that DAMN SLOW?!

Anyway, I managed to install Visual Studio and all that. I have even installed cygwin so that I can keep using a decent command line and git. I have set up a remote repository on a server, so that I can share the changes between computers too. Not that I think I’m going to touch much code in the Linux computer, but it’s good to have that. Just in case the laptop data gets corrupted or something :)

I have fixed the couple of bugs I had from Friday –nothing too serious, just some errors not being checked– and the “demo” is working as expected: the song is loaded, a simple triangle is shown in the screen while the song is playing and when it finishes, the demo exists. However there’s a bit of cracks and distortions here and there… I might probably have broken something in the SorolletVoice class while fixing something else, so what I’m going to do is to compile the VSTi for Windows, and compose the song using Renoise on Windows. After all, it’s all the same format at the end… and that way I can make sure that what I heard in Renoise is more or less the same than in the demo!

And the final paragraph is dedicated to Iq: the size of the simplest program that uses my player (the one which does a WAV dump) is 86kb, Release. When kkrunchified, it goes down to approximately 31kb. But my demo is using SDL… and that simple program doesn’t even open a window or output any sound anywhere, so I tried to load your 64k framework in Visual Studio 2008 –with the hope of using it as a base instead of using SDL– but it systematically refused to compile :-( There are errors in some structs from the events file, but I can’t quite get why, because they look perfectly fine to me. Maybe you’re using VS2005?

Today I decided to do something different. And I thought: Okay, I’ll try and sort out this compiling for windows issue, so that I can focus on the rest of more important things without having to worry about it any more.

And guess what…? I think I managed to do it :-)

Roughly, these are the steps I followed, just in case someone else wants to compile for windows with opengl and sdl support, using [ubuntu] linux:

• install mingw (I did it with Synaptic Package Manager so that I didn’t have to go through the ./configure and ./make hell)
• get the dev libraries from sdl for windows/mingw –this file– or check their downloads page
• uncompress the file and locate the bin, include and lib folders within, and…
  • copy bin/SDL.dll to the folder where your win32 .exe will go — so that the exe can pick and load the dll when executing
  • copy the include and lib folders to a folder in your project’s src folder — or anywhere you’ve got access to! For example: project/src/libs/sdl/
• now in your main.cpp, include SDL’s header files like this:
  #include <SDL/SDL.h>
#include <SDL/SDL_opengl.h>
• And the makefile could be something like this too:
  WINDOWS_SDL = ./libs/sdl/windows

windows:
        i586-mingw32msvc-g++ -I$(WINDOWS_SDL)/include -L$(WINDOWS_SDL) \
main.cpp $(WINDOWS_SDL)/libSDL.dll.a -o ../test.exe\
 -lmingw32 -lSDLmain -lSDL -mwindows -lopengl32 -Wl,-R.

(ugly hard line returns added by me so that you can see all parameters in one go).

This assumes you are invoking make from the src folder. The output will go to the parent folder. But well, the most important things that need to be highlighted are the bunch of switches you need to include in order to get the program to link:

-I$(WINDOWS_SDL)/include — this tells the compiler where to look for additional header files. This way it can find <SDL/SDL.h> and you do not need to modify the file or add #define’s when building for linux.

-L$(WINDOWS_SDL) — pretty much the same but tells the compiler to look for static libraries in the WINDOWS_SDL folder too

$(WINDOWS_SDL)/libSDL.dll.a — links the library into our binary!

-lmingw32 -lSDLmain -lSDL -mwindows -lopengl32 -Wl,-R. — these are magic – remove any of them and the linker will complain about missing symbols ;)

I still have to test this in a real windows machine; so far I have just tried with Wine. The output is a little jerky and a bit slower than the native (64 bit) counterpart, but I guess this will do much better than compiling in Virtual Box and testing with Wine :D

I’ll try to upload a test .exe when I test it on a real windows box myself, so that you can test it and see if it works in your computer (if you want, of course!). It’s ages since I compiled anything for win, and I truly wonder whether it will work with Vista/7… my last demo for Windows was done in 2005 and XP was in full glory back then :P

On iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone development ethics

I was happily chatting with Mr.doob and exposing him my views about the state of affairs regarding development for iPhone. From day one, I have disliked the absolutism that Apple have decided to impose in their platform (note the emphasis), but I had just recently read a post by Marco Arment that had completely convinced me of not doing any iPhone development at all. So, in short, an iPhone developers are surrounded by NDA’s and have not the certainty of going to earn a single dollar at any point, since they are totally subject to Apple’s arbitrary will. I personally have seen people asking questions about OpenGL-ES in Apple’s OpenGL list, only to be immediately told to shut up because they were under an NDA and couldn’t discuss anything iPhone in public.

It seems to me like Apple has forgotten the message from 1984. But anyway, there I was exposing why it didn’t seem ethical to contribute to Apple’s model of development and distribution, just to find out that Mr. doob had already updated his iPod to the famous iPhone OS 3.0 – famous because it allows you to… copy and paste? Uh, right.

So what do people think? Would you code stuff for iPhone only because it’s a cool device? (like Marco justifies in the follow up post), or do iPhone devs do it just because they have the hope of making an indecent amount of money at the end? Also, do you think it’s acceptable to sign up NDA’s and all that even if you’re not guaranteed that an awesome sum of money will end up in your bank account?

Spam induced constipation

Has anybody seen the new trend in spam messages? The title warns you of what will happen if you don’t pay attention to them:

Open it or get constipation!

I must confess I opened it, wondering whether the new star product wasn’t meant to improve male dysfunctions but to get everybody visiting the loo more often. I was wrong, it was just the usual random crap from China.

Ready? Steady… Unite!

Opera is a strange company for me. I don’t completely like their desktop browser, but I really like the mobile version. This week they released something interesting and, for once, original, in the browsers’ field: Opera Unite.

I don’t think I’m going to use it in the near future, but I quite liked the way they integrate several useful features that in my opinion, should be basic in any computer already. Particularly, the file sharing service is ace. Although I wonder if they have thought much about the security implications. I’m already foreseeing a javascript exploit that runs only when you’re logged in My Opera and shares all your files without you knowing it.

I also wonder why are they assuming that people are going to share things they shouldn’t be sharing, when reading the Note: Please respect artists. Only share content if you have the right to do so. recommendation which shows up in several of their services. And if they are assuming so, how do they plan to fight back when they get sued by the RIAA for providing a way for people to illegally distribute protected content.

Microsoft, on being a lonely nerd who tries to impose his rules to his could-be friends

Microsoft launched an IE8 campaign in Australia with the most possible tacky and distasteful design ever and with several buzzwords as well, such as twitter, followers, clues and whatnot.

It didn’t look good aesthetically speaking, but once you passed it through the W3C validator, it had 20 errors and 19 warnings yesterday, whereas today it exhibits an incredible amount of 48 errors and 20 warnings. It seems errors are multiplying! I would expect exactly the opposite, but you know, it’s Microsoft!

They have also updated the text. Yesterday, it made explicit mention to my old actual browser (Firefox), exhorting me to ditch it and replace it with shiny IE8, “best ever MS’s Browser”. But today it’s a bit more austere and they have toned down their words, and also reduced the number of required steps. Compare the first version (which you can see here):

We’ve buried $10,000 somewhere on the internet and if you’re the first one to find it, you get to keep it.

But you’ll never find it using old Firefox. (So get rid of it, or get lost.)

If you want a serious shot at the ten grand, upgrade your browser to Windows Internet Explorer 8 now. Then follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter for daily clues that point you to the buried loot.

1. Ditch the web browser you’re using. If you try to find the $10,000 with Firefox, you’ll get nowhere
2. Download Microsoft’s best ever browser, Internet Explorer 8. It’s the only browser capable of cracking all the clues.
3. Follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter for the daily clues. Clues will be released at random times from Friday 19th June.
4. Use the clues and your brilliance to deduce where the $10,000 is hidden

with the current one:

Want a shot at scoring ten grand?

We’ve buried $10,000 somewhere on the internet and the first one to find it, gets to keep it.

Those who have Internet Explorer 8 can follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter and www.tengrandisburiedhere.com for daily clues that point you to the buried loot.

1. Follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter for the daily clues. Clues will be released at random times from Friday 19th June.
2. Use the clues and your brilliance to deduce where the $10,000 is hidden

So not only are they presumptuous but they are implicitly saying they, as usual, don’t give a f*** about standards, since the clues can only be “cracked” using IE. Which sounds like: we are using some new proprietary stuff that no other browser can make sense of.

Nothing new or surprising.

PyGTK

I wanted to make a little interface for an application I’m working in and for some strange reason, I thought of giving a go to PyGTK, since the widgets are nice enough* and it uses Python (as you could deduct from the name), which makes things very easy and fast to program.

In a question of a couple of hours, I had my little front-end up and running, thanks to the tutorial and a little bit of experimentation, helped by the nice documentation.

I haven’t polished things enough yet for posting the code, but will probably do it next week. I can meanwhile recommend PyGTK if you want to do some GUI programming without damaging your brain.

* They are nice enough when used under a GNOME desktop, at least. I guess if they are used in a Windows or Mac OS port they might look a bit odd, but honestly, I don’t care much about those systems at this point :-P

Proprietary software on a school

I happened to find the school I attended had upgraded their website and now they were being a little more modern and open about their processes. They were so open, that they spoke about the details of the IT system they had installed recently. When I read them, I was dismayed. They had chosen Windows 2003 server, for a machine to act as DHCP and DNS server, Active Directory and Samba. That was an amazing opportunity to use Linux! And it’s not like our local government hasn’t spent a single euro promoting Linux in Valencian schools. To make it even worse, they had installed Windows XP in all the other computers that hadn’t it installed yet.

I remember when I was there, virus were a rampant recurrent issue, and there were only a few optional computing lessons after school. Maybe a total of 30 kids could have accessed the computers at the end of the week. But nowadays, with computing being a mandatory subject, Windows and the computers being connected to the Net? It just sounds irresponsible, apart from expensive, on the short and long term (i.e. maintenance). I don’t know exactly how licenses work (these pages aren’t helpful either) but we could assume something like $999 + 20 x $100 = approximately $3000 which they could have spent in improving the equipment, for example.

I’m not going to tell you which school it was, I’ll let you try to find it, if you feel like doing it. And you don’t need any special browser for cracking the clues though ;)

My copy of XP is registered; I payed for it simply to avoid getting all those annoying warnings and various disgusting issues one can run into when using a pirated version of XP.

But still I get this idiotic update from time to time:

The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be non-genuine, the tool will help you obtain a licensed copy of Windows.

Do they mean that this already genuine copy is going to turn into non genuine, just like that? Ta-daaaaaaaaaa! today I’m genuine, tomorrow I’m not? surprise! And that’s why they need to check every month? Didn’t they check the first time I entered my serial number?

Most probably they fear someone buying a license and then installing it in several other computers, but this way of fighting their fear is stupid. Just leave alone the nice chaps that installed and registered this weapon of mass destruction and go annoy people who haven’t completed your verification process or however it is called at this time.

Whenever someone asks me why I don’t want to use Windows again unless it’s caged on a (virtual) box, I’m so going to refer them to this!