>My Collection of Gems

>I recently blogged about the way that GCC sometimes can write poetry. This has resulted in a small collection of gems and solutions: GCC Compiler Errors (and their meaning). Enjoy! If you want me to add something, do tell me. Either through a comment, or just mail me. I’m e8johan and use GMail.

The page is a part of the new wiki-based digitalfanatics.org – and the style sheets will need some more love before all is done. It is readable – but sometimes mixes colours that where not intended to be mixed. We’re currently in the process of moving contents to the wiki, so there will be changes but the links posted here aught to stay valid.

>GCC gems

>Everybody using GCC on a daily basis must have run into one of its hidden gems. Error messages that could be poetry, in a foreign language, written backwards. The message tells you pretty much – nothing. When you have found the problem and fixed you still wonder what GCC really meant and why it could not tell you something in English…

One of my personal favourites was when I was using C and wrote:

typedef struct { ... } Foo;

void function()
{
struct Foo foo;

...
}

Did you spot the mistake? GCC did – and told me this:

storage size of 'foo' isn't known

After much work I found that Foo wasn’t a struct, but a typedefed struct. Just skipping the word struct in the declaration of foo solved it.

What are your favorites? Comment!

>Pick a job – any job

>The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education – a.k.a. Högskoleverket – recently released as listing over the educations to pick if you want a job. I just wanted to give you my 0.05 EUR.

There are two problems with this list:

#1 If you are not interested in teaching or engineering – you will probably never be a good teacher or engineer. Only use the list if you want to pick a flavor – for example what kind of engineer that you want to be or at what level you want to teach.

#2 You are not the only one watching these lists. During the IT-boom everybody wanted to be an IT engineer. That meant that the backlash when the industry collapsed was unnecessary hard. By not going with the flow and instead pick something that you are genuinely interested in you are more likely to be able keep your job when bad times come. And bad times come now and then – if nothing else, that is something to learn from history.

>Spring is Arriving

>Today was just a wonderful morning. The sky in the east was getting brighter, and when I was driving into Gothenburg the sun started to raise above the horizon. I just had to take a quick photo of beautiful colour of the sky and the houses of Lunden lit by the early morning sun. The photo was shot at 6.40 a.m. – but soon the sun will start rising even earlier. I’m longing for the days when it has risen, almost in the north, long before 6.00 a.m. – and the summer nights – bright almost around the clock. That is when it is lovely to live in the north.

>Solaris

>Alvaro just tipped the world that the OpenSolaris project gives away a starter kit for free. Having browsed around their site a few minutes I saw that the licensing was OSI approved – so right now I’m waiting for the kit to arrive in the mail.

This connects back to the days when I discovered Linux. I was looking at all conceivable alternate operating systems – I even ran OS/2 instead of DOS. Right now the most interesting projects seems to be the desktop versions of BSD: PC-BSD and DesktopBSD. An interesting Linux project is the GoboLinux, an alternate approach to Linux. Then there is the Swedish OS: Contiki. Just the concept of being able to surf the web from a C64… wicked! :-)

>DM500T and Boxer

>I’ve just bought a DM500T DreamBox – this means Linux in the living room :-)

After an hour of work (and lots of thanks to Anders) I’ve got all channels from Boxer up and running (meaning the standard package – free channels, Discovery, Eurosport and some others). And my wife looks as if she’s actually accepted my new toy :-)

>Joomla

>I’ve been playing around with Joomla for a while now. It can be quite frustrating when you know what you want to achieve and how to do it in plain HTML, but you cannot find the right solution. Now everything except a decent style template is alright.

One example of what Joomla makes easy is the Software Projects section. Here you have a list of news for both projects: SpeedCrunch and the Mouse Gesture Recognizer. Then each project has a page or each own. The only problem now is that I haven’t updated the project pages in a while :-)

>Translation highlights

>I’ve recently noticed that the quality of the Swedish sub-titles at Discovery Channel has dropped dramatically. It seems that the translators work on a word-by-word basis, so the results can be described as machine-translated-ish. Yesterday’s highlight was the program host saying “Lifting it inch by inch” and the sub-title saying “Lyfter det 2.5cm i taget” – that is “Lifting it 2.5cm at a time“. Time to get a dictionary including phrases :-)

Other favorites include “Do you want coke” at the drug dealer – the translation was “Do you want a Coca Cola” (often refered to as a Coke in Swedish).