Alex's Alliterative Adventures

Thoughts on Programming, Life, and Travel

Archive for June, 2008

How I spend most of my time

As a self-professed gamer and windows-zealot, this is a big deal for me. My laptop certainly spends more time booted into Ubuntu than into Windows. While it gets the job done, I really, really miss my visual studio.

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They won’t be cute for long

They’ll be hissing, honking pooping machines soon enough.

Go ahead, tell me that they don’t look like baby velociraptors.

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Visual studio 2005 can put that dual-core to good use

Visual Studio 2008 has a fancy new feature, the /MP build flag, that makes it compile multiple files in parallel. This can result in huge speedups in the compiliation phase on a multicore machine, since it’s pretty common for compilation to dominate a project’s build time.

For those of us who are still toiling away with Visual Studio 2005, there’s still a way to unlock this potentially huge speedup. Visual Studio 2005 actually supports the /MP flag, although it’s officially undocumented. I flipped the switch on all of my projects as soon as I read Herb Sutter’s words of wisdom, and it seemed to work perfectly. A full rebuild used to be spent using only one of my two cores for the majority of my build, but now I’m chugging away with every ounce of computation this computer can muster.

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Copying files with ssh

My partner and I now code our CS 452 assignments exclusively in Eclipse. Its Auto Build feature lets us write code, save, and see all of our errors almost instantly. I have a very low pain threshold for build times, so when I’m working from home, this is pretty much a perfect coding environment.

Working from school is different, since I typically run our code on the fancy servers, which means I have to get the code off of my laptop. Read more

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Drum and Bass 101

Yesterday was the first time I was able to share my love for Pendulum with someone who actually listens to them. It’s good to know that there are more people in the world who enjoy this excellent assortment of beats.

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A healthy learning environment

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All is well

My new mercurial repositories bumped into some file limits I didn’t know I had. Images are back, and everything is well again.

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Among brothers

While writing a midterm this evening, someone’s phone went off. I instantly recognized the ringtone as a soundclip from the old SNES RPG, Chrono Trigger.

Sometimes I just can’t deny that some part of this school suits me.

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Server woes

You might have noticed a bunch of spew on the side of the page where images used to be. I’m working with Dreamhost to resolve this as quickly as possible.

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Upgrading to Boost 1.35

This post is for geek eyes only. Pregnant programmers and people with weak stomachs for C++ templates should steer clear.

I decided to take the plunge tonight and upgrade my copy of Boost to 1.35. I had to fight through a couple of bugs when compiling with Visual Studio 2005, so I thought I’d share them here with the world.
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