Principia Discardia

Summer Reading List

Ray Haleblian — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 04:56:35 +0000

Corn on Macabre: Picnic Horror Stories

Cooking with Heat

Vini, Vidi Sub Ubi, Vini: Erotica in Latin

The MacGyver Cookbook

Ventriloquism for Dummies

The Rough Guide: Greater Los Assoules

The Quotable G’Broagfran

Ray Haleblian — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 18:55:10 +0000

The only trivial task is the one avoided.

***

If, as it is said, clothes make the man, then our true selves are hanging in some retail store. If you manage to step foot into the right one, we hope they have your size.

***

He is one who would, upon shooting himself in the foot, blame the gun.

Missing Entries from “The Devil’s Dictionary”

Ray Haleblian — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 23:41:58 +0000

human – n. an ape with elaborate habits.

upgrading – v. the process of damaging existing software. Motivated by the human need to count upwards. Also see planned obsolescence.

Ray Haleblian — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 17:50:23 +0000

*

the new rage is

*

copy-and-paste journalism

*

The Wrong Version

Ray Haleblian — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:04:36 +0000

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Version

If the doors do not open, do not become alarmed, press the button marked ALARM
– Otis Elevator

So I asked myself: “Self, what is Self?”
— Gary G Broagfran

The Third and the Seventh

Ray Haleblian — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:41:26 +0000

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

dslibris: 1.4.1 Released

Ray Haleblian — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:29:48 +0000

This is a followup to 1.4 which resolves page drawing speed issues. Other aspects of operation will be faster too.

A little experimental feature also snuck in here: support for OpenType fonts. The font files you add must be named with an .otf extension.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ndslibris

dslibris: 1.4 Released

Ray Haleblian — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:11:29 +0000

1.4 is primarily a maintenance release. Among other things, it removes the limit of 2048 pages in books. See the the release notes on SourceForge for more details.

On Time Estimation: “I Can’na Do It, Captain!”

Ray Haleblian — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 21:57:04 +0000

IMHO, one useful model for estimating time for, say, software tasks, comes from Engineer Scotty of the Star Trek television series.

Scotty typically states his estimate verbally, usually 48 hours, or else invariably much more time than the current crisis will allow. In the end it takes 15 minutes or something. All of us are, like, “oh, snap-damn!”, because converting dilithium to trilithium does sound really complicated. Hell, is it even possible?

In this kind of case the obscure nature of engineering deck and some lack of transparency regarding what Scotty is up to when he’s offscreen helps to make this type of estimation and actualization pattern work.

Eclipse, devkitPro and debugging

Ray Haleblian — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:41:08 +0000

I was pleased to find that it was possible to set up Eclipse Galileo CDT to debug ARM code running under emulation; in this case, DS targeted homebrew built with the GCC ARM toolchain, via devkitPro, running inside of DeSmuME, on Ubuntu 9.04.

You make new a debug configuration and

under “Main” tab, set the executable to your ARM9 ELF binary (.elf file);
under “Debugger” tab, set the debugger to “gdbserver”;
point the debugger path to where your arm-eabi-gdb lives;
set the connection to use TCP from localhost at, say, port 10000.

Then, for convenience, make an external program entry for desmume with arguments

–arm9gdb=10000

Run desmume first, then Debug in Eclipse, and you will be paused in the first line of source.

Until this point I was using Insight targeted for arm-eabi to do debugging. Eclipse’s IDE is more robust, more powerful and, well, integrated.