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July 13, 2006
Dev Tools and Releases
In a most frustrating series of days, I've discovered a few things.
First gripe is Windows XP. Yeah, everyone complains about Windows, and many of us are forced to work with it daily. Here is an odd behavior though. One application, statically linked to be distributable, whose primary goal is to create a simulated cpu load on a system. For example, you want 30% CPU utilization, it will run some operands to create 30% load and dynamically adjust based upon the work load you add to the system. Under Windows XP this tool works fine. Under Windows XP SP2 this tool works fine. Under Windows XP SP1 one of two behaviors happens; A) CPU utilization hits 100% B) CPU utilization is $N + 10. Ugh. The solution required creative #defines and #pragma opimze per OS installs.
Second gripe for the day. I've enjoyed working with OS X for most of the time, only I can't stand XCode. I find it to be an atrocious tool, making simple things extremely difficult. I won't even begin to describe the non-useful syntax finishing that it currently utilizes. Currently I'm working on building a KEXT for use on the IA32 Macs, only all my development work has been on a PPC based system. XCode nicely abstracts away all of the messy details to work out between the two. What isn't mentioned is that XCode v2.2 for some unknown reason likes to include the -nostdinc flag, while providing no option for removing it or why your standard includes are gone. Upgrading to XCode v2.3 solves this problem, but that was discovered until well after several hours had been spent researching into this.
Yep... complaints.
On the brighter side, only a few more weeks until my kayaking adventure in Canada. I'm very excited. I need to get a few more batteries for the camera, and probably a few more items of clothes.
Posted by Dan at July 13, 2006 01:37 AM