I’ve implemented what I call “pseudo-reflection” in Nonpareil. Each processor architecture has a unique C structure defined which represents the architecturally visible register state of a simulated processor, and in order for general-purpose state save/restore and debugging access to be possible, the GUI thread needs to be able to ask the simulator thread what [...]

I’ve written a DTD for an XML Nonpareil state save file format, and code to read and write such files using libxml2. It was very easy. It’s not yet integrated into the main Nonpareil program, because it will need the new memory API and pseudo-reflection. In the mean time, I wrote a [...]

OK, so it’s not an official studio release, just a DVD someone has assembled from video cassette recordings, but it was still great to see it again after all these years. I watched the pilot episode this evening. I’m not sure I’d seen the pilot previously, but I think I saw most of [...]

Judging by the Freshmeat stats, lcdtest is way more popular than I ever would have guessed. There must have been some unsatisfied demand for a test pattern generator. Perhaps I’ll build Windows and MacOS X binaries for it as well. There already are some similar programs for those platforms, but perhaps there’s some utility [...]

Rather than developing another ugly little language to save and restore calculator state in Nonpareil, I decided that I’d try using xml, via the libxml2 library, which I’ve never used before. The last time I wrote any software to do anything with XML was six years ago, when I hand-coded routines to emit and [...]

A 200G drive in one of my RAID systems failed today. Since it was RAID 5, no data was lost. However, the original drive had an actual capacity of 203G, while new ones sold with the identical part number are only 200G even. So I can’t put an “identical” replacement in; I’ll [...]

On a mailing list, someone pointed out a Windows lcd test program that was useful for adjusting the pixel clock frequency and phase of LCD monitors with analog VGA inputs (vs. DVI). It puts up alternating white and black vertical lines one pixel wide. This is useful either for auto-setup or for fine [...]

I installed Fedora Core 4 Test 2 in a spare partition to see if the supplied X server would solve the Radeon 9200 16-bit/24-bit problem. No dice. Ended up installing a Radeon 9550SE card instead, which works OK.

I’m not sure that the Superfeet insoles are going to work out for me. I’ve always used cheaper arch support insoles in the past, and they’ve never caused me any trouble, but the new shoes with the Superfeet insoles are making my feet hurt. Maybe it’s the shoes rather than the Superfeet, though [...]

The refurb Sapphire Radeon 9200 card arrived yesterday. The card seems to work fine, as far as I can tell. Software is a different matter.