Blog Comment
I've never been inclined to have blog with a commenting system. In many ways, I think that such a system encourages silly and meaningless comments. When people want to comment on something they see here, they send me an eMail. I've gotten some very good comments over the time this thing has existed, including one just last week:

Subject: Hi, your blog is amazing....

Hi , was taking a break from writing a lab report on IC opamp fabrication, and googled onto your blog. Thought I'd drop you an email coz i was totally impressd by it. I'm doing an engineering degree, electronics. You've definitely given me loads to think about.

Good luck in future.

Joe

That message about encouraging Joe really ended up encouraging me.

Casserole Entry
It's been an interesting week. Work felt productive. I got a new LCD screen, which makes me enjoy it a whole lot more. Additionally, a new batch of rack equipment came in, and setting that up always excites me.

I spent some time this week getting my new Celestia/GTK to work under Windows. I tried at first creating a Visual Studio project, but gave up after about two hours of messing around adding library paths and so on. The interface is not intuitive, the options are well-hidden, though the help system is quite thorough. The debugger is also handier than I anticipated.

Switching to the command-line and writing a NMAKEfile for my new section of the tree took far less time and did everything I wanted. A few minutes in the handy debugger caught a couple of things that running under Linux never did, namely a number of char arrays that were too small for their contents. In the end, the program works nicely, looking and feeling just like it does under Linux:

Speaking of compiling, here's a funny GCC error message encountered while fixing up some Xandros software for 64 bits:

ISO C++ says that `QCharRef QString::operator[](int)' and `operator[]' are ambiguous even though the worst conversion from the former is better than the worst conversion for the latter.

It took a few cross-eyed iterations to get the jist of what that means...

What spare time there was this week was spent reading about autopackage. The developer's guide and tutorial on their site covers interesting issues around binary relocation and portability.

I spent some time today producing an autopackage for Celestia. While I don't intend to check the modified code into CVS, providing an autopackage is not a bad thing. The current revision still needs some work; it would be good to make it load Lua if present, and possibly link small libraries like gtkglext in statically. Then, the only external dependencies would be libGL and GTK+ itself. Most computers running linux should have both.

I took my little sister to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire this afternoon. I liked it more than the last one (new director, and it shows), though I really miss Richard Harris as Dumbledore. The movies just aren't the same without him. But I was surprised to see the new Doctor Who as the bad guy!