After a pseudo-break from real coding I’ve settled back into this computer thing. Spent last night chasing gnome-games bugs, I had a bit of success which is quite satisfying after having let the bugs build up again. I’ve also been given a hint about a gnometris crasher bug: the wonderful difference between 0 and NULL when sizeof(int) != sizeof(void *). What I don’t get is why this causes a crash on little-endian 64-bit systems but not a big-endian 64-bit system (guess which one I have).
I’ve also been coding at work: writing up a straight-forward numerical simulation. It’s been a long, long, time since I’ve explicitly written an ODE solver. I normally use pre-packaged ones or just go into the lab and do it for real, but today I need speed and someone else is in the lab. Numerical Recipes is still your friend, the nice thing about the book is not the algorithms, but the succinct explanation of why (and why not) you want to do particular things with them.
On the subject of numerical simulations, I loved these fluid dynamics movies. Via slashdot’s SIGGRAPH discussion.
It’s snowing here. For the second day in a row. It snowed last week too. Snow is good in small quantities, but we already have twice what we normally get in a normal winter. I suppose this makes up for the complete lack of any last year.