Tuesday, March 04, 2003

Linux Packages. Looks like a good site for getting pre-built packages for Slackware (and presumably TopologiLinux). 10:22:41 PM

Ten years ago when I did mainly C and C++ programming I used to think that tracking down memory problems was easy. I didn't understand why anyone had problems doing it and I was fairly good at it. What I didn't realise was it's fine when working on a small system with the original programmers. As the system grows, different people come on board, or you maintain a code base written by someone else, then it becomes much harder. Tracking down double calls to 'free', overwritten memory, trashed stacks, etc is difficult without automated support. It wasn't until I started using other languages like Dylan, Common Lisp and Smalltalk that I began to realise that for some languages, that class of problems doesn't even exist. 6:22:20 PM

I've been doing mainly Linux programming recently. I needed a 'Purify' type tool to track down memory corruption and came across Valgrind. What a great tool it is! It's free, comes with source and works very well. I found my memory problems with just a few minutes work, along with a few other things as well. Valgrind includes functionality to profile your application and see how well it uses your processor cache. See KCachegrind for a tool that works with Valgrind to display all the statistics you'd ever want. 6:18:15 PM

Some information on posting to a Radio weblog without having Radio running. The conclusion seems to be...it's difficult to do without Radio running, but remote posting to a running Radio is easy. 6:14:44 PM