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Codejedi: Why I want to smash a Pocket PC tonight
Mon, 25 Jun 2007

This is a vent. A rant. A "why the gorramned hell do I put up with this shit?" Time is tight. I have a little baby upstairs who eats up every ounce of time, so I cut into sleep to get anything done... and yet, in this decade, developers are being slapped in the face at every instant. Don't get me started about Palm right now, but let me focus on Pocket PC right now.

Alright, so my latest app works on about 6 platforms pretty much flawlessly.. but on Pocket PC its a little spotty. Let me check things off..

GAPI - A very low level API for essentially making games; ie: It grabs the screen and inputs for you, so that when someone pushes a physical device button or taps on the screen, your application receives the event instead of any other application. Player hits a fire button, you get a button press. Great! On my particular device, the stylus is in fact all captured by my application -- tap in the top where the Start bar normally would be and my app catches it. Great. An alpha tester tells me this isn't the case for them.. they can pop right out of the game by tapping in the wrong area and the OS catches it. I have a similar problem though -- some of the buttons on the device go to my application.. but some shoot right out to other apps in the OS, causing application switches when pressed. The entire point of GAPI for us developers is so shit like this doesn't happen. And its written by device vendors and included in the device.. and apparently is totally unreliable. Thanks. Perfect. PEACHY.

Memory allocation - OKay, on a Pocket PC device (2003SE say), you have storage versus program (runtime) memory sharing one pool; you play with a slider to adjust what you want -- more data storage, or more runtime memory. So my game here needs a lot of memory (for now, until tweaked more), so I slide the widget over and give myself some RAM. Exit the memory application and watch as the RAM automatically adjusts back where it was.. or worse, some other random place. OKay, so the OS decided it needed to update some file somewhere and that needed space so it readjusts the slider. Well, why the gorramned hell provide a slider if it randomly moves? I need to set it, and leave it the hell alone. I'm mad because I can set it, drpo the device into the cradle for debugging and that event triggers a memory re-slide and voosh, I lose half my RAM. Unusable.

Environment - Of course, all this depends on the application running, the debugger connecting.. vanilla things like that. Basics. Well, when you drop the device into the cradle it immediately runs at about 10% of its speed while it presumably jabbers with the machine its plugged into.. peachy but fine, I can deal with it, though my application requires speed and reacts differently when there isn't any. Fine. More to point is that half the time when you launch the debugger, the handheld crashes.. or Active Sync crashes, or the environment (eVC 4 say) hangs. It even tells you 'the device crashes, you need to exit and restart eVC now' -- holy shit, you guys cannot handle when the remote dies? More to point.. out of about 8 tries (each taking a few minutes, due to all the slowdowns and hiccups) only about 1 o2 2 will succeed.. the handheld will just go whitescreen, or RAM adjust will zorch out the ability for it to run at the last second, or the debugger connection will crash....

I started 4 hours ago trying to actually debug something. A trivial task in any modern environment, but anyone whose done it knows handheld development is on the other of 10 years or so behind (really, I mean that.) After 4 hours, I've not gotten _anywhere_ -- I've debugged RAM problems the OS causes, and debugged USB oddities to try and keep the connection up more, and I've fought with the handheld OS screwing with me over and over about its RAM allocations, and fought with GAPI letting events slip through, and with the memory allocator returning memory when its actually run out, and all sorts of Voodoo.

The only question now is -- with what implement will I smash this device?

I'm seriously going to reconsider this application; my time is so very tight.. whose isn't? Who can waste 4-5 hours just fucking around with shit that has nothing to do with what you actually meant to do?

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Codejedi: So wheres the new Linux target now?
Tue, 28 Nov 2006

I've spent a few days trying to suss out which version of OSX most Mac users are currently resting at, as you can see from prior blog entries. Interestingly enough, the Mac crowd seems to really stay afloat of OS updates and new versions. My assumptions on the Linux and Unix community are very different, though I've not really looked for any hard evidence yet. Total guesses I've been working from for a few years, but I think its time to rake through the Apache logs again and look for third party estimations if I can find them -- where is the 'most common' Linux user at in terms of kernel version and libraries? What distro are they using, so that I can determine those things? Since I need a few machines to produce each official release, its handy that I need to lag as it keeps costs down. In general, I'm cheap and always like to lag since I always say -- those who know how to use a machine can afford to use an older machine than those who are newbies; they don't optimize, so my machines are all old and cheap :)

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Codejedi: OSX adoption rate
Sun, 26 Nov 2006

In the previous blog entry I ask what the adoption rate for OSX is; it occurred to me after posting that I already have the tools at hand to make a complete guess. I imagine Netcraft and other groups have very accurate statistics but I'm far too clueless or lazy to figure that out, when I can hack something together myself in 5 minutes or less.

Checking one of my webserver hit logs should give a vague estimate; obviously google-bots and spam-info-collection-bots and such will cause a huge inaccuracy problem for comparison against other OSes, but the data does make for an interesting exercise in a like-for-like comparison. The logs include the web browser client information, so scanning for Safari (one of the browsers people use for OSX, when they're not using Firefox, say) is entirely possible. Different versions of Safari come with different versions of OSX, so you can make a guess... but obviously people who upgrade Safari on older machines will also skew things. Further, I don't really know which builds come with which OSXs, except to say Safari 2 comes with OSX 10.4 the distribution sites suggest.

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Codejedi: Getting back on top of OSX
Sat, 25 Nov 2006

I'm not really sure if you can call Apple 'the little guy' anymore, with their iPod bringing in the masses but I imagine an OS with a single-digit share of users must be teeny. Stores and other developers insist I'm an idiot but I'll always try to wave the flag for OSX, Linux, and FreeBSD. I hope that I'm doing my part, just as those who support Codejedi -- the small guy in the mobile world, do their part.

When lightning wiped out much of my gear a year back, it took our the monitor I was using on my Powermac G4; that was okay since I essentially use the machine remotely, but it definately got in the way of things. I used another monitor and it turns out the video card in the Mac was going funky but with some quick repairs its back in order on another monitor I've got... which led to moving the machine, which led to wireless, which led to purchasing an 802.11 card and finally led to the revelation that OSX 10.2 (Jaguar) that I use will not support my wireless network. Garg!

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Codejedi: A history of the first Shadow Plan CD
Sat, 23 Jul 2005

I suspect no one but my wife has ever seen this object, so its with great pride I present a photo of a CD burned probably 3 or more years ago - the very first Shadow Plan CD. (The 3rd and so one were sent out to various customers, but the first two were this one and a coaster :) (This reminds me, I should post photos of some of my obscure Atari artefacts, such as actual 'slides' from the Atari 2600 Battlezone commercial reel, and the insides of some custom chips from the Atari ST.. but I digress..) I've tried to avoid physical sales so I don't have to print up boxes and manuals or do packaging -- wrapping up hundreds of boxes for shipping is a total drag so I just go with burnt and labelled CDs as needed. Nearly all of my sales are done electronically, but when I hit up user groups and such I often carry a pile of CDs in to hand out since nothing beets swag, right?

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