Geeky odds and ends

In major (enough) life news, I appreciated the opportunity to become a TA, but (I think quite skilfully) declined the offer.

My Free Software apparel’s been coming in slowly and steadily. I now own two shirts. Finally got my blender hat from the blender shop.

Now, for some debian apparel and my geek clothing buys will have to stop for a while. Time to focus on making, as opposed to the usual spending, money.

Point being, if you can code well, help free software projects out. Or if you can’t, at least try the software out and report bugs and so on. Or if you’re lazy to that as well, least you can do is donate. If that’s not their cup of tea either, buy things from them. The profits go towards a good cause.

Else, you’re just mean.

More on the software front, got some C source to compile and build along with the standard FORTRAN code FEAP is based on. The utility of this (not so trivial) achievement is still to be seen. Though anything that prevents me from typing one less .ne. or something instead of the (the correct way) != for “not equal to” can only be a good thing. Also, now that I am experimenting with notoriously extreme compiler optimization flags
(-O3 -malign-double -fforce-mem -fforce-addr -ffast-math -fstrength-reduce -funroll-loops -funroll-all-loops)
among other things, file sizes are getting obscenely large. Not benchmarked speed differences or considered stability issues.

And in other code related news, got the latest mono to build happily as I was desperate to see Nat’s dashboard in action. But sadly, all I’ve got right now is an empty window that pops up, with two buttons that don’t do anything, and needs to be killed because the close button is just for show as well.

Ah well, sounds like one of my apps. Anyway, it looks so good that I HAVE to get it up and running soon.