Random notes: 2014-11-05

Completed (“completed”) migration of this blog to the new webhost — DNS has been redirected, and there’s a non-zero chance that someone apart from me can see this. Next: all the other sites & services still on the old host… :\

(I find it interesting how much working on a host with a low ping vs one on another continent makes it genuinely appealing for me to get back to the command line on these boxes.)

Coding today, I was able to port filesystem wrappers & our archive filesystem to a new platform. And it worked second time (not counting the compile & link errors and code shuffling necessary to find the things that needed to be un-if-zeroed/implemented/if-zeroed). The biggest change was due to not using overlapped IO for the archive FS on the new platform — all archive IO is already async to the main thread, but there was support for multiple in-flight operations that can improve overall throughput. The first cut lacks that support for overlapped IO — and the bug I introduced was because I missed the explicit seek necessary to perform accurate reads from archives. Instead, random reads were being serviced sequentially from the start of the archive file. Easy enough to fix, and initial testing indicates that it’s Fast Enough. Until tomorrow, at least.

Found a bug that I’d added to some other code: I had added a new codepath, but failed to set some state in both the new and old codepaths. Fix applied was to hoist the setting of said state above the branch, but in hindsight I think the variable in question is able to be removed and the consumer of said state made a little smarter…

Found some other code that turned out to be not trivially portable, that was also not worth porting. Fix was the delete key.

Spent some time this morning helping to diagnose a weird compilation failure related to linker segment flags not matching in some wonderfully obscure circumstances. XP gained: decoding link flags from the “PE and COFF Specification” http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463119.aspx

Watched Jonathan Blow’s programming language talk (see other post)

Something from that game I worked on: http://www.playerattack.com/news/2014/11/06/sunset-overdrives-most-adorable-secret-uncovered/

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