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Domain: claranet.fr

Stories and comments across the archive that link to claranet.fr.

Comments · 12

  1. All too easy, try -flying- kinetic sculptures ! by zboubi · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Kinetic Sculpture Race 2004

    The Icarus Cup gathers hundreds with the same spirit... except they're flying their sculptures !
    This event happens in october every year, here are the best pictures I could find :

    Check the flying effeil tower and Tintin's submarine

  2. All too easy, try -flying- kinetic sculptures ! by zboubi · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Kinetic Sculpture Race 2004

    The Icarus Cup gathers hundreds with the same spirit... except they're flying their sculptures !
    This event happens in october every year, here are the best pictures I could find :

    Check the flying effeil tower and Tintin's submarine

  3. Timex Datalink by chrysalis · · Score: 2 · on Citizen/IBM To Make A Linux Watch

    This new IBM watch is very geeky, but too bloated and finally useless. Not only because you have to load it every 6 hours, but also because it looks very large for a watch.
    Nice and useful watches were the Timex Datalink series. They have a light sensor so that you can program them just by lifting them in the front of your monitor (data is transmitted through blinking lines) . And yes, it works on Linux with Watchlink .
    Program? Yes, Timex Datalink watches can be programmed in assembly language. There are a lot of applications for it, ranging from games to utilities to do golf scoring, as well as new watch features (better chronographs, multiple repetitive alarms, etc) . Of course you can also fully customize alarm melodies, and synchronize your appointements with Outlook or Ical.
    Plus these watches are cheap.
    Ehm... were cheap. Timex doesn't sell these good'ol 150 and 150s datalink watches any more. But some local vendors still have stock, so if you can get one, go, go, go!
    Not only this is a geek watch, but it's also an useful watch. And it looks like an ordinary watch on your wrist, not like a PDA.

  4. My experience with DJGPP and Watcom by chrysalis · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Open Watcom Effort Makes First Public Release
    In the DOS-times, managing memory was a hell. It was both a hell for end-users (having to keep different sets of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to make different programs work) and for programmers.
    The good old Borland C only allowed 16 bits segments. It was really lousy.
    There was some hacks to avoid this. I wrote some assembly code to enable the flat mode (only one big linear page up to 2 Gb), and Borland C finally could access 32-bits segments. But the page was still 16-bits by default, so all 32-bits operations had to be prefixed.
    I wrote some games and demos with this, but Borland's produced code was very bad. On a version of Borland C, while(1) was compiled as mov ax,1 then test ax, compare with zero and jump if 1 != 0. Awesome.
    It's why I tried Watcom. Watcom's code was better. Moreover it had specific optimizations for 486 and Pentium-class processors. And with DOS4GW, it was easy to access 32 bits pages. However :
    • The C-parser was buggy. Some absolutely correct piece of source code were misinterpreted by Watcom. For instance, it refused some "const" pointers that were indeed pointing to constant values.
    • The compiler was buggy. When some optimizations were turned on, it produced wrong code, sometimes reusing a register while it was still in use by someone else. And it simply ignored the volatile keyword, that was needed for interrupts hooks.
    • DOS4GW was cool, but sometimes slow. It was way faster to allocate a big memory chunk at startup and then mess in it, than allocating multiple small chunks.
    • Inserting assembly code used a totally different syntax than Borland C.

    So Watcom was an excellent compiler, but it was really, really buggy. I always had to review the assembly code by hand. But I liked the fact that "char" was unsigned by default.
    Then, I tried DJGPP. DJGPP is a port of GCC to DOS platforms. It cames with a free DOS4GW-like called PMode.
    The resulting code wasn't that bad. For floating-point arithmetic, GCC produced slower code than Watcom (can't remember why, maybe GCC didn't use the arithmetic coprocessor). But it didn't matter, demos always use fixed-point anyway.
    GCC didn't produce buggy code like Watcom. And the code was...logical. Have a look at Ping for instance. It's a smooth pong-like game with carebears, bonuses, funny sounds, etc. I wrote that game with DJGPP, but if you look at the source code, you'll see that it looks a lot a assembly code. It's designed in a way that the compiler can translate one line of C in one line of assembler, and everything is pre-optimized. GCC respected this. I tried to recompile important parts of the code (sprite routines) with Watcom. The result was illogical. It tried to reorder some stuff, but this only gave slower code.
    The first releases of PMode were buggy, too. They worked very bad with Qemm. But then, it got better and finally was an excellent drop-in replacement for DOS4GW. But once and again, allocating a big page was faster than multiple pages.
    Why Watcom was cool : fast compiler (gcc was sooo sllooowww to compile), good optimizations for floating-point operations.
    Why DJGPP was better : free, comes with emulation of many Unix system calls, gives optimized code if the source code is already optimized. And GNU-assembler syntax is way better than TASM-like syntax.

  5. Re:People who never seen something else... by chrysalis · · Score: 2 · on GNOME Usability Study Report

    ...and even babies, check my OpenBSD baby .

    -- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.

  6. OpenBSD has female hackers by chrysalis · · Score: 3 · on Who Are OpenSource developers?

    OpenBSD has a very young female hacker

    -- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.

  7. Loft Story ! by chrysalis · · Score: 2 · on Google Reveals Popular Search Patterns

    It's really funny to see how popular Loft Story has been. Celebrity #1 : Loana. Nobody hear about her before Loft Story, and she's far from being as cute as Nikkie.
    I can hardly understand why Loft Story has been so popular on Google. Loft Story is only a french TV show, while Big Brother can be watched by far more people (english language) .
    Anyway, Loft Story is over now. The game ended yesterday. Loana and Christophe won. We'll have to wait until 2002 to see Loft Story 2.
    It was the first time something like Big Brother happened in France, and I have to say.... that I really loved it. As a proof, you can check my Loft Story for Unix client.
    But I still can't figure out why Big Brother has been beaten in Google's audience.

    -- Pure FTP server - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.

  8. Openbaby by chrysalis · · Score: 1 · on lpf Removed From OpenBSD

    The Open Baby will recode IPF from scratch. Just give her some time.

  9. IPv6 programming howto (french) by chrysalis · · Score: 1 · on Pentagon Wants IPv6 by 2008

    Maybe IPv6 isn't widely deployed because of the lack of compatible applications. Many programmers don't make a step to have their apps work with IPv6.
    I've written a french IPv6 programming HOWTO to help these people port IPv4-only apps to IPv6.
    IPv6 is something really worth to look at.

  10. Re:Maybe a little infalated.. by chrysalis · · Score: 1 · on OpenBSD: 4 Years Exploit Free

    The youngest OpenBSD hacker is a girl. Check that link .

  11. When slashdotted, here are mirrors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4 · on Mandrake 8.0 Comes Out

    OK, so when this is slashdotted, here is a list of mirrors for all you downloaders out there! Linux-Mandrake 8.0 release candidate mirrors for i586 processors.

    Austria, France, Germany , Sweden

  12. A great remake for Linux by chrysalis · · Score: 1 · on The History of Pong

    Pong fans should definitely try Ping .
    It's an svgalib Pong game with bonuses, carebears, hilarous musics and fx, and it rocks. The documentation says it's the official tennis simulator of the US army !