OneAndOneIs2

Some of you may remember I got a new laptop around Christmas time. It came with Vista.

Because my internet connection was through WiFi and then through a USB mobile broadband thingy, both of which are a pain to get working under Linux; and because all I was doing with it was using it to run Firefox and Thunderbird, although I set it up for dual-boot, I got into the habit of using it booted into Windows.

MS's worst nightmare: The OS as an irrelevance

But now I'm trying to get back into programming and C. And my, how I miss my comfortable Bash+Vim+gcc combination

Well, actually, I have all three because I always have cygwin installed on any Windows machine I'm going to use regularly. But it's pretty slow.

I tried MinGW in hopes that it would be better, but found it so arcane I've wiped it again.

People are always telling me Windows has all the great IDEs and stuff. Outside of cygwin, what's the best way to compile & run simple C programs?

Slow news day? What DO you mean?

Right. It's been ages since I tried learning any C, so I'm scanning back through the K&R pages I already did as a refresher. I'm jotting down the things to remember as I do so in this post, so it probably won't be all that interesting, but what the Hell, it's my blog

Right.

The obligatory start:
#include <stdio.h> This is an instruction to the compiler to read the header file stdio.h, in which functions are declared so you don't have to redundantly declare them in every program you ever use.

int main() Every program has to have at least one function, the main() function. The 'int' tells the program that the function should return an integer. It isn't really necessary for main() to do this, but what the hell.

{ Brackets are used to define the start and finish of a function.

printf("Hello, world\n"); Printf() is a function, declared in stdio.h. "Hello, world\n" is the string you want it to print, with \n being the carriage-return character. The semi-colon at the end tells the compiler where the statement ends: Unlike, say, python, carriage returns don't signify a new statement in C

return 0; This is where we tell the function to return an integer, as we already defined main() as an integer-returning function. It doesn't have to be 0, it just has to be a number.
} And of course, we have to close brackets after we open them...

Well, that was fun, wasn't it? :o)

In three weeks' time, I'll be moving out of my flat, putting my stuff into storage in France, getting some other stuff out of the way, and then heading off to wander aimlessly around the continent for an unspecified length of time.

In the meantime, there's nothing to do.

I don't have a huge number of friends, and they're mostly busy at work at the moment, oddly enough. I'm not dating anyone and my flatmate's antisocial. I don't have a job and with so little time it's not really worth looking for a temping job somewhere. I can't pack stuff away because it's too early and I've no space for all the boxes anyway.

I keep having virtuous moments of thinking "I could get back into learning C or Blender" but I just can't be bothered. I have no motivation to do anything but sit around reading or watching DVDs. And even that's boring now.

I have three more weeks of this to get through.

What do you DO with unwanted free time??

I went to the zoo yesterday.

They had penguins.

Yay penguins!

They had a sign up, warning people (don't ask me why) not to feed pencils to the penguins.

I'm not sure this is what Larry Ewing had in mind for his much-loved penguin picture back in '96, somehow...

(Click for context...)

This time last year, if I wanted to run some of my favourite applications during the day, I had to SSH-tunnel through the corporate firewall to my desktop and use Xwindows' client-server nature to run my applications remotely through a Cygwin X session.

It wasn't the fastest way of getting a GUI application on your screen.

Now people like NoMachine are releasing new versions of NX, with "outstanding compression, session resilience and resource management and its integration with the powerful audio, printing and resource sharing capabilities of the Unix world"

Where were they a year ago? Huh??

No, not a car crash that left me paralysed. A trip to the chiropractor. Much the same thing, only if your spine doesn't snap first time, they adjust the position and try again.

Long-time readers will know I have chronic pain issues. I figured that since I have all this free time, and a certain amount of cash, I should try paying for treatment. So in I went, to make an appointment.

Only to be told that they had a space free right now, would I like to go right in?

What the Hell, I had nothing better to do...

So, in nothing but a back-fastening white sack, I was taken into a room containing what looked like a vertical dentist's chair. My back and shoulders were prodded as I was swayed back and forth for a while, and eventually I was given the diagnosis.

To my surprise, there was no problem mentioned with my right hip, which is one of my problem areas - it's higher than the left, and has quite a lot of tension in the surrounding muscles. But this is because my LEFT hip is out of alignment. Middle back is a little askew as a result, and neck and shoulders are pretty much the worst part - the inevitable result: everything above an askew joint goes askew to try and correct for it.

It's fun to say "askew"

So, I was lead to the upright dentist-chair, which then slowly tilted back until I was horizontal on what looked like a torture rack.

Because it was one.

Actually, it wasn't too bad, although I learned that when a chiropractor is going to work on your hip area, it's a good idea not to drink too much beforehand. Having a lot of pressure put on the back of your hip could go so very wrong...

My middle back made a lot of pops and cracks, and she dug her fingers into my shoulders rather harder than I'd like. I've known rock climbers with weaker grips.

And then I had to switch to lying on my back so she could "correct" my neck. Which involves a move that looks just like the guys in movies use to break necks: They grab hold of your head and twist it sharply around.

I had to tilt my head to one side, and she twisted it sharply around. Then told me to wiggle my toes. This was not reassuring.

I felt them move. Evidently, this disappointed her, because she tilted my head the OTHER way and twisted it sharply again.

The cracking sound they're so famous for is very loud when it happens so close to your ears. I was laying there thinking "There are so many ways in which this could all go horribly wrong"

But it didn't. And I do actually feel rather better than I did before I went. So I'll stick with it for a while. At least so long as I continue to be able to walk out of the place afterwards...

A while ago, I started getting emails from people asking if I'd be interested in making money out of putting text links on my site.

I never bothered to reply to any of them, since initially I thought that the total lack of adverts anywhere on my site would make it obvious that I wasn't interested in the first place - it's not like it's hard to get adwords installed, after all - and subsequently I ignored them because it got on my nerves how often I got "still haven't had a reply" emails.

I never kept paid particularly close attention, so it's only today, after I've had two in relatively quick succession and not bothered to delete either, that I notice they're coming from different people...

Hi,

I am writing to you again in case your spam filter ate my last email. I had written to you basically to offer a business deal. The deal namely is purchasing text-links on your site http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/. In case you have already thought over this, let me know of your views pronto.

Looking forward to your reply,
Regards,
Christan

and

Hi,
I am basically interested for business reasons. I had written to you about the offer a few days back. Perhaps you never got the mail in the first place. Anyhow, here is the deal. I found your site http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org really enchanting and would like to buy a number of text-links on your site.

Let me know if you would like to hear more of this.
Best regards,
Brad.

Hmm.

Try as I might, I can't really consider this blog "enchanting" somehow. So.. is this a slightly more sophisticated way of getting emails for spam links - look up emails on websites, email the owner with what looks like a legit proposition, and then spam the confirmed email address without mercy - or just a very lacklustre attempt to get as many webmasters as possible to accept text links?

Doesn't make much difference either way - it's unwanted, unsolicited email that I therefore consider junk and don't reply to - but I'm vaguely curious. . .

Forwarded to me by my brother:

Heh

Aren't some of these pix incredible?

http://thefairest.info/top.html