If you are a bookstore aficionado you can’t have avoided noticing how they have deteriorated over the last ten years. Fewer books, less variety, more open spaces and chairs, fewer people, most of whom are there to drink coffee and work on their laptops using free Wifi connections — it’s hard to pin it down… Continue reading What's Happened To The Bookstores?
Category: Computers & Software
Singleton Madness
I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to exorcise a pesky singleton class from EP Simulator. This is the Options class, which contains all the program options that are saved from session to session. There is only one set of Options, so I had naively made the class a singleton. Singletons being what they… Continue reading Singleton Madness
Emacs Tip of the Month
Want real shell mode in Emacs? Using M-x shell only gives terminal emulation, which sometimes doesn’t display things correctly and which, since it supports all Emacs key bindings, makes you do things like use M-p instead of C-p to bring up previous commands in the command buffer ring. Most of the time Shell mode is… Continue reading Emacs Tip of the Month
EP Studios Projects Update
Here’s a rundown of current activity at the EP Studios mothership: EP Office EP Office is the flagship project of EP Studios. Version 1.7 is out and basically is the culmination of the original software, which started out as a Microsoft Access version 2 database way back in 1995. It is proprietary software, but very… Continue reading EP Studios Projects Update
Stupid Bug
Having just spent the last several hours chasing down a weird bug, there is a sense of anticlimax having finally figured it out. I have to say the debugger was less than useless in this matter: various functions mysteriously were not working, although identical code seemed to work elsewhere, variables were listed as “not in… Continue reading Stupid Bug
Amarok Startup Crash — Solved!
Every since I upgraded to OpenSuse 11.2, a source of frustration was that Amarok was broken, and I couldn’t fix it. Every time I tried to start it, I would immediately get a crash report from KDE. I could solve the problem by downgrading libxine to the version that came with OpenSuse, but that meant… Continue reading Amarok Startup Crash — Solved!
Plugging Away At EP Simulator
Just to show that I have been working on this project, here’s another screenshot which I posted at SourceForge. Source code is hosted at GitHub. I expect to upload Windows and Linux binaries soon for download for those of you who aren’t into compiling source code.
On Namespaces — Again!
I have a thing about C++ namespaces, and this is yet another post on the topic. Oh well, so my life isn’t that exciting… Namespaces avoid polluting the global namespace with names that might conflict with each other. Classes similarly encapsulate method and data member names from the big bad cold outside global namespace, but… Continue reading On Namespaces — Again!
Emacs Suprises
I shouldn’t be surprised anymore about the capabilities of Emacs. But now that Sluggo has moved into my closet as a headless server, I have been doing a lot of ssh’ing to the poor beast from my other computers in order to manage files remotely. Only recently though I discovered I could edit text files… Continue reading Emacs Suprises
EP Studios Blog Restored
After a fair amount of work, the blog is back close to what it was. I restored all the missing image links but one. I updated to the latest version of WordPress (2.9). I updated the database to UTF-8, getting rid of some funny accented characters, but in place some of the blogs have highlighted… Continue reading EP Studios Blog Restored