Cody Russell

#macdev

The people on #macdev are super cool and helped me get my dynamic library code working. It turns out I was missing one “_” character in a string. Woo!!

Wilbur

GTK is your friend.

If you are not a friend of GTK, then you are a foe of Wilbur. And Wilbur is not to be fucked with!

Slow..

Considering these Macs are dual-867mhz machines, they certainly seem to compile stuff much slower than my single-processor Athlon machine does.

Alas..

Now that they’ve installed the developer tools on one of the Macs, I can’t really use them most of the time because there’s always somebody on that machine. Sometimes they’re just using a browser to check their Hotmail accounts, sometimes they’re using Finale to work on some music project, and sometimes they’re working on a paper in MS Word.

I keep thinking that if it’s a person just checking their email, I’ll just go and ask them to use a different computer. I never do, though. MS Word is on all the Macs, but since Macs don’t even have floppy drives anymore it would be a pain in the ass to move from one Mac to another, so wouldn’t ask those people to move anyway. Finale also is only installed on that one Mac, and it’s obviously more important for someone work on their project than for me to hack.

NeoEngine

I got my initial MacOS X changes for NeoEngine merged into the source tree yesterday. I’m working on porting the OpenGL device now.

PSO Concert

Tomorrow is the Peabody Symphony Orchestra’s second concert. We’re playing some piece called “Aquarelle” that I’m not too fond of, and we’re playing Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No.2 and Debussy’s “La Mer”. The second movement of the piano concerto is so beautiful, and our soloist is fantastic. I’ll post a link to mp3s sometime maybe.

Chamber music at Peabody this year

Yeah, so this semester is sort of kicking some ass right now. For me I would say the most major difference in quality of school from last year is Michael Kannen, the new director of chamber music at Peabody. He’s a really badass cellist and musician, and he’s a lot of fun to work with. I have two groups that I’m playing with, and both are studying with him. The first group is my piano quartet that is playing Brahms c minor.

My other group, the group that I really love, is my string quartet that is playing Beethoven. So now you immediately understand how I must love this group. We’re playing Beethoven. Not only that, but this group has more of a friendly togetherness that previously only my SMU quartet with Gabriel and Fumika had. For example, last weekend Daphne burned her thumb on her stove (she was testing the surface to see if it was hot, and it was!). Any other group would have just decided not to practice and go on their own individual ways, but not our quartet. Hell no. We all went over to the Yacht Club for wings and beer. I don’t even like beer, but for some reason I got one anyway. Daphne got a Citrona, and it tasted so good that I’ve decided next time to get one of those.

The only bad thing about this quartet is that sometimes we have too much fun in rehearsals and screw around and get nothing accomplished. One rehearsal we sightread through our second movement far too slow, then we went too fast, and then we just lost our attention on it and decided to read something else just for fun. Valerie is taking an audition for San Francisco Symphony or something, and part of the audition is to play Beethoven Op.95 second violin part, so we read through that. Then George wanted to read through the last movement of our quartet just for fun, so we did, and we had a lot of fun. But in the end we didn’t really get any work done on the second movement. However, when we played it for Mr. Kannen in our coaching it really wasn’t that horrible, and we played it in a perfect tempo. Mr. Kannen said how everyone plays that movement too slow, and we had a great tempo.

The lesson? Don’t practice too hard, and always go out for wings and beer.

There are more things that are cool this year. I intended this entry to be about all of them, but I have quartet rehearsal now so I had to change this entry to be just about chamber music. Next time I will write about other things that are especially cool this semester.

High-precision color on digital displays

It just occurred to me today, but I wonder if digital flatscreens will work correctly with high-precision color video cards. Specifically, I wonder about something like the SGI 1600SW, where its multilink adapter converts DVI into LVDS or whatever SGI’s digital format is. Does anyone know how this works, or even if it will work when the NV30 and Radeon 9700 will drive higher precision than 24-bit? Both of them can do 96-bit color, but the NV30 isn’t out yet and as far as I know the Radeon 9700 can’t do it until ATI either finishes their OpenGL extensions or Microsoft releases DirectX 9.

Documentation

I’ve been digging through Apple’s Developer site recently, and I find their documentation sparse and poorly structured. I recently spent some time on Microsoft’s developer site while I was learning my way around the .NET Framework and C# language, and it’s really a very useful site. It’s amazing that Apple’s is so poor in comparison.

On Linux, I got used to learning the system by grepping through header files and occasionally reading source files that used things I needed. On systems that are more closed, like Microsoft’s and Apple’s, it’s not quite as easy to do that and so a good source of documentation for APIs is really essential.

Cocoa

I guess it made sense at the time that they were developing OS X, but right now I really dislike the diversity of Apple’s development platform. You have Carbon and Cocoa. You have C, Java, and Objective-C. This would be fine if all the functionality were exposed really well across all the languages, but it’s really not. Furthermore, I really don’t enjoy Objective-C that much, and unfortunately it seems like that’s what Apple really wants you to be using these days.

The Foot

I went to the hospital on Monday for my four week followup. I was not entirely pleased. They took their X-Ray photos of my foot, and then I talked to an intern doctor, and then with the older non-intern doctor. The intern doctor said it was healing very well, but wasn’t 100% healed. He didn’t think I needed to use crutches anymore, but I should keep wearing this stupid little blue shoe that I’ve been wearing, and said I should come back in two weeks. That seemed cool with me. Then the older non-intern doctor came in and said I should keep using crutches and then return in six weeks. That was most definitely not cool with me at all!

Compiler

I finally have a working compiler on one of the Mac machines here, which is quite cool. I installed automake 1.4-p6 and gettext 0.11.5, and I’ll try to install Glib tomorrow. gettext didn’t want to install, so I had to add a stupid little hack to intl/libgnuintl.h.

#define _INTL_REDIRECT_MACROS seemed to fix the problem.

It should be really simple to actually fix that permanently.