Category Archives: GNOME

Kid, you better change your feathers cause you’ll never fly with those things

In theory, I’ll be a father in a week and a half. It’s a little bit crazy to think about. It’s definitely feeling a lot more imminent lately. Joanne is very pregnant and ready to be small again, but doing really well. We’ve pretty much decided on a name, and have sort of entered a state of waiting.

Since it may be a while before we get to a nice restaurant, we went out for a meal at Vincent in downtown Minneapolis for Valentines day. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed food as much in my life. It was absolutely phenomenal. I didn’t even regret the small fortune we paid for the meal.

I just pushed out a new minor release of Agave and I’ve also recently added support for enabling and disabling breakpoints in Nemiver.

GDB slowness

Since I’ve been hacking on the Nemiver debugger, I’ve been doing a lot of faux-debugging (i.e. start up debugger, step through a few lines, shut down). One thing I noticed very regularly was that there were times when I’d step into a function (usually a function defined in an external library), and gdb would grind away for several tens of seconds at 100% cpu before it finally arrived at the next instruction. Apparently this generally only happens on Debian-based distributions due to the fact that debugging symbols for ld.so are not shipped by default. Installing libc6-dbg solves this problem since this package also includes the symbols for ld.so. But it would be nice if debian-based distributions (in my case, Ubuntu) would automatically install debugging symbols for ld.so as a dependency of gdb, since without these symbols gdb becomes nearly unusable. So if you’ve been frustrated with a slow gdb on Debian or Ubuntu, do yourself a favor and install libc6-dbg.