I need to brush up my C Programming Skills...

It looks like I have been Eating my own Dog Food for too long. I'm saying this because I usually make new code using code that I have already written down. This makes things easy: the principles behind the code are almost the same (if we don't factor in the natural evolution that comes with Age and Experience); the architecture is know; the flow is know and so on.

I'm trying to add a new feature to GNome's Rhythmbox application and I'm finding out that I'm a bit lost in their source code. It is a mix o C, with object oriented support built from scratch, and Python. Problems? Well, I don't understand their architecture and I have never written anything serious in Python. End result? I'm lost :-|

For me this means that I need to brush up on my C skills and also to learn Python. Maybe this was just the excuse I needed: a worthy challenge that would force me to dig into someone else's code.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to C: CMake and CUnit

I'm back at programming in C. I proposed something 8 months ago at work that was totally ignore. Now my boss wants me to do it because the other alternatives have totally failed. The idea is to implement an ODBC Driver. If I have the time I'll put a tutorial here on how to do that on Linux. But back to the point of this entry. This small guide will help you create a simple project using CMake to build it and cunit to test it. Yes, I believe in test driven development, no matter the language. Let's imagine a simple project that produces an executable that prints the result of 2 + 3 (I know, lame but sufficient for this example). To make it easier to test I split the application. The functions will go into a library and there will be a source file that starts the program. The library header file is called "lib.h" (extra points for originality). Here are its contents: int add(int a, int b) ; The implementation is on the lib.c file as follows: int add(int a, int b)
Read more

OpenClock and Gentoo

Image
OpenClonk is an open source game that has been in development for some time. Its fun and free. I downloaded a binary some time ago and started using it, but the latest release just doesn't work on my Gentoo machine in binary form. After some digging I didn't found an ebuild for this release, just for the live version. So I wrote my own and added to Gentoo's bug database . I learned a few things along the way but didn't get it as clean as I wanted. If someone knows how to convince cmake to install to a different directory than the prefix used it would be great. I ended up doing a patch for the generated cmake_install.cmake . If anyone knows how to avoid that patch I would appreciate the help. Here is a preview of the game:
Read more

Gentoo with LUKS and LVM

My company has security policy that forces us to encrypt the hard drive of the computer and any other media. Well, not the whole hard drive, but 99% of it: the 1% is what is required for the PC to boot and ask for a password to decrypt the rest of the drive. The good news is that I'm allowed to use Linux. The bad news is that they have red hat enterprise linux and I like Gentoo. For a long time I've been using kubuntu. It is not bad, but it is too easy to use that it borks some time and I like the control Gentoo gives. Since I only installed Gentoo 2 times, one in 2003 and another in 2007 I decided to write all the steps for a bare minimum Gentoo installation. I have tested these steps on a Virtual Machine using KVM. Next step is to make it on the real laptop. It should take something like 35 minutes to do this on a Core 2 Duo at 2.2ghz. Notice: This works for me. Use it at your own risk and remember that these commands wipe your hard drive so, if you want something special
Read more