ACCU

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By coincidence, today I arrive to the ACCU website. ACCU is an organisation of programmers who care about professionalism in programming and are dedicated to raising the standard of programming. They publish a magazine (C Vu) and a newsletter (Overload), and organize a yearly conference in Oxford, UK. Slides from last year’s conference are available online and seem quite interesting. Next year‘s conference is from April 22 to April 25 and one of the three tracks will be about patterns.

The Dark Knight, no OV :-(

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Yesterday my girlfriend and I went to the movies to see Batman: The Dark Knight but it was not without trouble!

Instead of going to nearby cinemas, as we usually do, we went to the IMF Cinemas in Torrevieja (a 45-min drive from home) because their website lists the movie as being played in original version (i. e. English) instead of the dubbed Spanish version. In case you didn’t know, movies are dubbed in Spain.

First of all, signs to the mall where the cinemas are located are scarce, so we ended up near the seafront. As we had plenty of time, we took the opportunity to go for a walk. Not that bad, in the end, but it we had been tight on time we would have not arrived in time for the movie.

After asking for directions twice, we arrived into the mall. Surprise: traffic jam due to lots of cars and only one lane in each direction. Second surprise: each shop has got its parking and the parking exit is closed when the shop closes. Given that we went to the 22.00 movie, that meant we had no other option than going to the cinema’s parking, which was already packed (first time we tried to get in it was complete, 15 minutes later we were luckier and got a spot).

But I’m not writing because it was difficult to get to the shopping center or to park my car. I’m writing because I was lied: I went to see a movie in original version but the movie is played in Spanish!

Turns out if you want to listen to the movie in English you have to deposit 20 EUR and you get a headphone set. You tune channel 1 and after 5 minutes you give up. You give up because the audio track in Spanish is so loud (the loudest cinema I’ve been in my life!) it’s impossible to properly understand the English audio. That’s in case you put up with the glitches, static and interruptions in the audio. “Latest infrarred technology”? Don’t make me laugh!

Other than that, the movie is OK. I don’t understand so much fanfare. I’ve read reviews which compare it to The Godfather. Give-me-a-break. It’s not even close!

Sun Studio 12 and Apache STDCXX

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This is mostly a self-reminder

I attended aKademy 2008 and there are so many things to write about I don’t even know what to start with. I’ll probably write something in a few days, when I’m feeling less sick (thanks to a Flemish waiter who had the OpenBossa guys, Knut and I waiting for almost one hour for dinner, I got a cold).

As you may know, part of my job (and hobby, too) consists on “shaking” software to make it compile on different platforms and with different compilers: I port Linux software which builds with gcc to Windows with Visual C++, or Visual C++ to MingW, or… well, whatever. It’s funny.

Back on topic: Wednesday as the Sun tutorials day and I got immediately interested in Sun Studio. Message to Sun Microsystems people: your installer is so broken on Linux it is impossible to make it work on Debian and Ubuntu (and I guess on anything other than RHEL). The only way I found to “install” SS12 was to download the Express version, remove the sh-code and untar the resulting package. It works but it’s so nasty hardly anybody would try that.

Sun Studio 12 is 100% ISO C++ compliant, which means support for wchar_t is not as good as most applications require nowadays. The best way to overcome this limitation is to use Apache Foundation’s STDCXX to replace SS12’s STL (which is STLport 4 (according to Adriaan, stdcxx would roughly correspond to STLport 6)

Building STDCXX is relatively easy, if you know the tricks:

  • export PATH=/path/to/sunstudioceres/bin/:$PATH
  • export CC=/path/to/sunstudioceres/bin/suncc
  • export CPP=/path/to/sunstudioceres/bin/suncc
  • export CXX=/path/to/sunstudioceres/bin/sunCC
  • You should be able to do this step by exporting CFLAGS, etc but it won’t work, so edit stdcxx-4.2.1/etc/config/sunpro.config and:
  • Replace
    CXXFLAGS= -library=%none
    with
    CXXFLAGS = -library=no%Cstd -YI,/path/to/source/of/stdcxx/include/
  • Replace
    CPPFLAGS =
    with
    CPPFLAGS = -YI,/path/to/source/of/stdcxx/include/
  • Replace
    LDFLAGS= -library=%none
    with
    LDFLAGS = -library=no%Cstd
  • make BUILDTYPE=12d
  • make locales(if you don’t use BUILDTYPE=12d, current Sun Studio Express Edition fails with yi_US, thus you need to edit stdcxx-4.2.1/etc/nls/gen_list and remove that line)
  • cd build && make install PREFIX=/where/you/want/to/install/stdcxx

    • At the moment, I’m trying to get Wt built with Sun Studio 12 on Linux. Given that SS12 is the compiler of choice for KDE4 on Solaris, I may try to get KDE4 built on Linux with SS12 at a later stage. That would help both the Solaris port and the Linux code.

    PS: Hello Planet KDE