So, we spent the weekend at one of spoony’s aunts’.
They had these stocking hangers over the fireplace that spelled out SANTA…
At spoony’s encouraging, I re-arranged them to spell something else.
Nobody noticed for a day, until spoony’s mom exclaimed: “Why does that spell SATAN!!?”.
I’ve been steadily working on a chat client, similar to irssi for a few months now.
My design is mostly single-threaded, except for DNS queries.
I use a GThreadPool (part of the lovely glib library) to run DNS lookups.
I’d like to run several of these, which means I must use something that is thread-safe.
The gethostbyname() C function is a typical way of looking up the IP of a given hostname. However, this function is inherently not thread-safe. The gnu libc provides gethostbyname_r, which is re-entrant. I could use this, but then I lose portability to platforms that use other libc implementations, such as OS X or one of the *BSDs.
However, there is a standard (POSIX) thread-safe DNS lookup function! getaddrinfo()!
Now, the manpage for getaddrinfo(3) under OS X says it is not thread-safe, but this is actually just a result of a manpage not being updated since 2004. I wonder, are there any other (up-to-date) platforms where getaddrinfo is not thread safe?
I have been working on article about how I wrote Lua code to generate C code to help wrapping object-oriented C (glib-style) and exposing it to Lua, however I have realized that as neat as this sounds, it is terribly difficult to maintain. So let’s pretend it never happened.
I mentioned in my previous post, I went to Dragon*Con with Spoony, Possum, and
William. Along the way kidnapped Syrra and PB, and all was well. Except for PB
shredding a tire on the interstate. Ooops.
There we were, Friday night, waiting on the interstate for a tow truck.
Possum fell asleep in the driver’s seat. I fell asleep in the “shotgun” seat.
When I awoke, the sun was rising. The tow truck arrived a little while later.
The driver deserves mention. He was a fan of the guy that designed the Aliens in
the movie Alien, Giger or something. By “fan” I mean he was covered in tattoos
in that style.
PB’s truck was towed to Tifton. PB and I rode in the tow truck, and everyone
else piled into William’s car.
Once there, we found the tire place was not open yet, but there was an open
restaurant nextdoor, so we decided to have breakfast.
Everyone except William — he slept in his car, with the car running.
The time was about 7:00AM.
With PB’s tire fixed, we started off again.
This Labor Day weekend I went to Atlanta, Georgia for Dragon*Con, and also to
meet Muffin.
I left on Friday with spoony, possum, and William.
William drove, since he finds my spoony’s car too small.
We wanted to avoid I-275 because the traffic there was thick, so we went north
on 49th St / McMullen Boot. We turned east too soon, and ended up circling
around tampa for an hour or two. The street signs in Tarpon Springs are not very
truthful.
Our first stop was in Valdosta to meet with Syrra and PB. They assumed we were
just stopping by to mean
planned to kidnap them and bring them along.
Everyone piled into William’s car — which was crowded and wrong on many levels.
Possum got moved around the most, since he fits almost anywhere.
William’s car did not appreciate the weight of all 6 of us, but we drove to
Moultrie anyway. Syrra and PB watered their cat, got some clothing, we were off.
We decided to head back to Valdosta. Syrra and PB would take their truck, and
that would be fine.
Except the truck got a flat tire 30 miles out of Valdosta.
We sort of were stuck on the interstate waiting for a tow truck until the wee
hours of the morning.
Wheew. It’s been a busy two weeks.
I didn’t mention this until now, but we (Spoony and I) had to move rather
quickly, as our landlord lost his mortgage.
This ended up being a good thing, as we found a house (rather than a duplex)
with the same monthly rent. We have a bit more space, and rather big front and
back yards.
This past weekend we also visited Spoony’s family, which was (as usual) pleasant.
I really wish I had more to write about, but I’ve not had much time to do
anything fun.
Last night I managed to get openc2e
building with cmake. It seems to work on gentoo and debian, and it mostly works
on OS X. My current goal is to allow hassle-free building on OS X with macports.
In addition, there are a few problems building on FreeBSD. I have not really
attempted that yet, since the only person likely to use a freebsd build right
now is me.
Windows building should be greatly simplified.
After the main part of the convention, we talked about Futurama, and somehow I became possum’s father.
Also, Mary got possum pregnant, and I threatened to get me shotgun unless Mary made Possum an honest … alien.
Leaving the anime convention, we went to the hotel’s pool. Nobody brought bathing suits, and nobody felt like swimming since the water was warm.
Still, we tried to trick possum into the water. When that failed, I tried forcing him into the water.
The only problem with that is Possum has been doing lawn care over the summer, and is in a lot better shape than I am.
I was able to lift him up, since he’s only 120lbs, however he thrashed too much.
I harassed a poor man that happened to remind me of a RedHat Linux
/ Fedora mascot at a recent Anime convention. I was not alone in this, either.
First, Possum and I followed him into an exhibition panel, and confronted him.
We both stated: RedHat Sucks. Then we went on to explain that gentoo/portage and
debian/dpkg were superior.
Visibly confused, he said “I don’t know what you’re talking about”.
He left the room. Apparently Mary saw him exit, and approached him saying:
“RedHat sucks!”. He reportedly said “Why does everyone keep saying that!!???”.
This past weekend Tina and I went to an anime convention in Orlando.
Full blame for this rests on Possum and/or Mary.
Alex, another good SLUG friend was also a member of our party.
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