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Disable the private flag in Transmission
The private flag in BitTorrent, which disables any external peer exchange for a torrent, is DRM, plain and simple. It's a malicious feature designed to force the wishes of the content producers (the private trackers) on you. The P2P community shouldn't rail against DRM and simultaneously encourage it when it's convenient. I do sympathize with ( Read more... ) -
C# option parsing library
I wrote a command line option parsing library in C#, based on Perl/CPAN's Getopt::Long. I think it is better than all the others available for C#.
Features include:
- Scalar, array, or hash types for option arguments
- Incrementable options (e.g. --verbose --verbose --verbose for 3x verbose)
- Option bundling if enabled (-zxvf=foo.tar.gz is the ( Read more... ) -
C# gripe
Hey C# programmers! FACTORY CLASSES ARE EVIL.
Do not use factory classes. Every single use of factory classes can be done much more cleanly using private classes. Just replace the is-a relationship with a has-a relationship.
Here's an example of the wrong way to do it, which I see all the time:
public abstract class Pokemon ( Read more... ) -
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MPD and Sonata beat the shit out of iTunes and Apple TV as a way to deal with the problem of playing music through speakers that don't suck when your main computer is a laptop you take everywhere ( Read more... ) -
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I bought The Orange Box for Team Fortress 2.
It doesn't work.
(Wine + Ubuntu + Intel GMA X3100, for the small chance that someone is googling this and doesn't want to repeat my mistake.) -
Audio APIs for Linux
Some observations on Linux desktop audio APIs.
- ALSA is a nice driver framework. ALSA sucks as a high-level audio API. Stop coding your general desktop use app in it. It is hard to configure and finicky, and most apps that claim to support it (e.g. ZSNES) don't actually support it very well.
- OSS is great if you are living in the days when a Sound ( Read more... )
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Once I'm done with all this work, I want to code something.
I've always wanted to write an SNES emulator. I have some ideas for how to improve accuracy and performance. For instance, I'd like to try out the idea of a "lazy dot clock": one of the big stumbling blocks so far in SNES emulation has been emulating the PPU's process of continuously ( Read more... ) -
CHRISTMAS CARDS TIEM
Because I need some holiday cheer while I'm swamped in work and swamped with this awful cold... WHO WANTS A CHRISTMAS CARD?!
Since it was a success last year, I'm going to do the Christmas card exchange again! Just drop me an e-mail at pcwalton at uchicago dot edu with your address and I'll send you something. It's not necessary, but if you want ( Read more... ) -
New laptop soon
Apple declared my laptop DOA and said it would cost over $1400 and who-knows-how-long to repair. Screw that. I'll probably go down to pick it up, so I can grab the undamaged 160 GB hard disk out of it. I have a HDD enclosure, so that'll still be useful ( Read more... )