CentOS 5.3 (mostly) released

CentOS 5.3 has been mostly released; mirrors are synced, the .iso images can be downloaded, and I'm currently over 50% done downloading both the 32-bit and 64-bit CentOS DVD image torrents:

32-bit DVD image torrent

64-bit DVD image torrent

(Note that are issues getting these torrent files, but the file is well-seeded, with about 500 seeds and peers for both torrents right now)

I should have both files downloaded this afternoon.

yum update doesn't update to CentOS 5.3 yet, but should by tomorrow this time.

Deadwood snapshot update

OK, here is my first release with logging working in Windows with Deadwood. The log is placed in log.txt; right now the log is only updated when the program is stopped, and log.txt is overwritten whenever the service is started. Also, dwood2rc errors could look a little nicer. But, it's a start; I will clean up logging tomorrow.

It's at the usual place.

ObHack 005c released

I have released ObHack 005c today:

• Bugfix: The reason why the outdoors theme occasionally had a Wolfenstein door was because there were no doors marked for the nature theme, so ObHack would just choose any door at random. Fixed (Andrew had this fix for Oblige 0.97, but it took a bit of prodding to figure out which diff was the fix)
• Minimize the use of prefabs with Wolfenstein textures in non-Wolfenstein levels
• Memory leak in RNG plugged
• FLTK updated to use FLTK-1.1.9 (which actually makes the source tarball smaller; I also don't like having the code use a developer snap of some library to compile)

It can be downloaded at samiam.org/slump.

Deadwood snapshot update: Service now correctly stops

OK, I was able to squeeze in a little bit of free time this weekend in order to get the Deadwood service to correctly stop. When the service is stopped, Deadwood now writes the cache to a file in Windows. The main advantages of having Deadwood be a service is that it automatically starts at system boot time, it doesn't need an open window while running any more, and when it is stopped, it can write the cache to a file before terminating.

Basic service functionality is now ready. I've also revised some of the documentation so it is easier for people to compile and use this program in Windows. Next:

• Set up logging when Deadwood is a service (I did some of this work yesterday, so I just need to finish this up)
• Have the code that installs and removes the service make sure the service, in fact, has been installed or removed and tell the user this
• Remove all Win32 compile-time warnings
• Release Deadwood 2.2.01 (non-stable release of Deadwood), both as source code and as a Win32 binary

Today's snapshot can be downloaded at the usual place.

Deadwood snapshot update: A working Windows service

OK, I've made some progress with Deadwood today. It does work as a Windows service, but its service code has a number of kinks I need to iron out:

• The service can be started but not stopped without using the task manager to kill the process
• The service has issues with removing the service from the service registry
• There is no proper logging of Deadwood
• I have some basic documentation, but really need to properly document this service

I hope to have time to clean this up this weekend, but I'm going to be pretty busy. We'll see. In the meantime, people can download the Deadwood developer's snapshot here

No Deadwood update today

I had every intention of working some more on the service code for Deadwood today; however this morning, as I was setting up my computer, a co-worker came to me with a huge spreadsheet with over 8,000 entries. She told me she needed a number used for Mexican ID purposes calculated for all of these entries.

There's a fairly easy way of calculating a reasonable approximation of this number if you know their full name, their gender, and in which state they were born. Well, the spreadsheet this co-worker gave me only had their full name, and the name of the city (not state) they were born in.

So, not only did I have to figure out how to calculate this number, I also spent the day downloading a list of all notable cities in Mexico (cities with zip codes) and which state they are in, and another list of names and which gender usually has a given name. I haven't really touched Perl for a few years, but this kind of data consolidation and merging is perfect for Perl, so I wrote a series of shell, Perl, and awk scripts to consolidate this data.

When everything was said and done, I was able to reasonably accurately calculate the requested numbers for about 40% of the data I got. I gave this data to the co-worker this afternoon and told her I would work more on this next week. As you can imagine, all of this Linux scripting left me mentally exhausted by the end of the day.

Needless to say, I wasn't able to work on Deadwood. I will see if I can work on it tomorrow. In the meantime, I did post a snapshot of Deadwood yesterday with a copy of the service code I have been working on this last week here, but it hasn't been integrated in to Deadwood yet.

I've got a working Windows service running

I can't say I've mastered the black art of making a Windows service, but I now have a simple working Windows service that compiles in my MinGW-3.1.0/MSYS-1.0.10 setup. The "service" version of MicroDNS can be downloaded here (that's a link to click on) or looked at by clicking on this link.

MicroDNS is a tiny DNS server that does only one thing: It always sends a given IPv4 IP to any and all queries sent to the server.

The ip the Windows service version of this program sends is 10.11.12.13, and the service binds to the IP 127.0.0.1

This program is a Windows service; I would like to thank Steve Friedl who put a public domain simple Windows service on his web site at unixwiz.net; his public domain code made it possible for me to write the Win32 service code.

To compile:
gcc -O3 -DMINGW -o microdns-service microdns-service.c -lwsock32

After compiling, one needs to install this service:

microdns-service.exe --install

Then one can start the service:

net start MicroDNS

(It can also be started from Control Panel -> Administrative tools -> Services; look for the "MicroDNS server" service)

To stop the service:

net stop MicroDNS

(Or from the Services control panel)

To remove the service:
microdns-service.exe --remove

This program has been verified to compile and run in a MinGW-3.1.0-1 + MSYS-1.0.10 environment; for details on how to set up this environment in Windows, go to this page:

http://maradns.blogspot.com/2009/03/mingw-310-1-last-real-mingw-release.html

Now that I have the basics of Windows service programming down, the next step is to make Deadwood a proper Windows service.