Solemn's Site
Never stopping to think if I should.
Archive

I don't want to go on the cart!

Posted on 31 Aug 2022 at 16:36 UTC

So its been over 2 years since I last posted anything on this website, I'm still around though.

Those of you who follow me on GitHub have probably seen that I've been spending a lot of time on-and-off developing rehex (which I should probably write about here at some point), and besides that, most of my time has been taken up between my day job and a never-ending stream of repairs around the house.

Nothing exciting, just figured it was about time I put something here before people started auctioning off the furniture :v

Comments (0)

Testing IPXWrapper in The Cloud

Posted in Software Development on 27 May 2020 at 21:39 UTC

At the end of the last article (In September 2017 actually), I had a fully automated regression testing system for IPXWrapper. In September of 2019, after two years of not touching the system and doing a little work on IPXWrapper itself, I felt it was time to install Windows updates in the VM images... and that's where everything went wrong....

Read more...

Comments (0)

Capturing errors from the $(shell ...) function

Posted in Software Development on 07 Oct 2019 at 18:48 UTC

The GNU Make shell function executes a shell command, expanding to whatever it wrote to standard output. If the command fails, thats just fiiine - however much it did or didn't output is what you get.

command_output := $(shell command)

I use the shell function for (among other things) getting compiler flags necessary for using libraries (e.g. from pkg-config), and Make's behaviour of ignoring these errors is rather annoying, since it can mask the actual error with pages of output before getting to a build command that actually fails. Sometimes it can even mess up the compiler flags to the point you (or at least I) spend ages hunting down a phantom problem that doesn't exist.

Weirdly, I couldn't find any good solution on the web, with a bit of experimentation I wound up developing the following macro:

# Wrapper around the $(shell) function that aborts the build if the command
# exits with a nonzero status.
shell-or-die = $\
	$(eval sod_out := $(shell $(1); echo $$?))$\
	$(if $(filter 0,$(lastword $(sod_out))),$\
		$(wordlist 1, $(shell echo $$(($(words $(sod_out)) - 1))), $(sod_out)),$\
		$(error $(1) exited with status $(lastword $(sod_out))))

WX_CXXFLAGS := $(call shell-or-die,wx-config --cxxflags base core aui propgrid adv)
WX_LIBS     := $(call shell-or-die,wx-config --libs     base core aui propgrid adv)

If you don't mind depending on GNU Make 4.2 (a bit too new for my tastes), if can be simplified to:

shell-or-die = $\
	$(eval sod_out := $(shell $(1)))$\
	$(if $(filter 0,$(.SHELLSTATUS)),$\
		$(sod_out),$\
		$(error $(1) exited with status $(.SHELLSTATUS)))

Comments (0)

Serving static gzip-compressed content with Apache

Posted in Linux on 28 Mar 2019 at 18:49 UTC

The CI pipeline for one of my projects generates coverage reports as a collection of HTML files, which are published on one of my web servers. Each report is only ~8MB, but that starts to add up pretty quickly after a few dozen commits, so I wanted to compress the reports on disk and have them decompressed as needed rather than using up my precious disk space.

Strangely, this doesn't seem to be a widely-used (or at least well-documented) Apache configuration. All references I found were out of date or didn't do what I wanted.

So here's how I got it working...

Read more...

Comments (0)

IPXWrapper testing infrastructure

Posted in Software Development on 06 Mar 2018 at 21:39 UTC

In 2014 I wrote a fairly comprehensive test suite for IPXWrapper, which tests it end-to-end, from the APIs through to the network traffic they generate and process. It depends on a meticulously configured set of Windows and Linux machines, which I had duplicated using several different versions of Windows.

Eventually bit-rot set in and some of the Windows VMs became unusable for quick testing; sat installing updates whenever I booted them, broke themselves in odd ways, etc. Also my workstation doesn't have enough RAM for Chrome and several Windows VMs at the same time. No machine does.

...

Read more...

Comments (0)

struct XXX redeclared with different access

Posted in Software Development on 22 Dec 2017 at 15:29 UTC

Today I was writing some C++ and wanted to add a private struct within a class for storing some data, but not just any struct - I wanted a private abstract base struct with a couple of implementations.

So I wrote something like this:

...

That didn't compile, GCC gave me the following error and Google wasn't terribly helpful when I searched for it:

/home/solemnwarning/test.cpp:8:3: error: ‘struct Thing::PrivateAbstract::A’ redeclared with different access

...

Read more...

Comments (0)

IPXWrapper 0.6.1 released

Posted in IPXWrapper on 23 Sep 2017 at 22:06 UTC

IPXWrapper 0.6.1 has been released.

This release fixes a crash bug, adds support for more frame formats (LLC and Novell "raw") when sending/receiving real IPX packets and adds some missing DirectPlay registry keys needed by Virtua Cop.

Download link: ipxwrapper-0.6.1.zip

Comments (0)

wolwait update

Posted in software on 21 Aug 2017 at 16:41 UTC

I've released a new version of wolwait, most significant changes are support for IPv6 and sending WOL packets directly to the host.

Download link: wolwait.cpp

Comments (0)

IPXWrapper 0.6.0 released

Posted in IPXWrapper on 04 Dec 2015 at 22:03 UTC

IPXWrapper 0.6.0 has been released.

This release adds support for sending and receiving packets using the real IPX protocol, for older pieces of industrial control machinery and similar which can only be controlled over it.

There are also several bugfixes, including one which makes 3 or more players in most DirectPlay-based game work correctly.

Download link: ipxwrapper-0.6.0.zip

Comments (0)

wolwait bugfix: Allow MAC addresses with nonzero first octets

Posted in software on 30 Jul 2015 at 20:50 UTC

Apparently this bug got through my stringent testing too.

See here for more information and the download link.

Comments (0)

Older posts >>