Rough Week
Wow. The last week just fly blew. I can’t believe it has been a week since my last blog update. Let’s just say all things didn’t go as planned over the past week. Tuesday the 28th was actually my birthday so I took the day off to go to the amusement park to ride some roller coasters! The fun didn’t last very long past Tuesday however. For whatever reason, I started having problems with GDB and QtCreator. Whenever I would set a breakpoint, GDB would just crash. It got frustrating trying to continue without a functioning debugger. I’m the type of person who just writes code sloppily and then tries to compile+debug and clean up afterwards. Reinstalling QtCreator and the GDB packages didn’t stop the crashing. I got fed up and decided to try doing a clean install with Kubuntu instead of openSuse. Things just got worse from there. I mistakenly burned a copy of the x64 ISO which I then proceeded to install. After finally managing to get all the required packages installed, compiling would fail with Boost throwing up about 1500 lines of errors. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t get it to work. After realizing I had switched to x64, I figured it was perhaps a problem or incompatibility related to that. So again, I reinstalled Kubuntu, x86 this time. It managed to go a lot speedier the second time around. The whole situation with Boost is frustrating as well as the only supported packages available for Ubuntu are versions 1.35, which is horribly out of date. I could have built the needed Boost libraries from source, but unfortunately CMake wouldn’t properly find them and would instead only locate the /usr/include/ version that was forcibly installed with KDE! Updating KDE removed the Boost dependency and allowed me to install a new version of Boost. I managed to find more up to date packages on launchpad but it took a few tries and different versions to get it to work. In the end, I wasted about two days with this non-sense but it did end up compiling. The good news is however, I have a fresh install with the latest version of QtCreator (which resolves many debugger problems anyway) and my damn GDB doesn’t crash anymore. I think the lesson here is NOT to go damn messing with your development enviroment in the middle of crunch time. This has proven to be one of the more frustrating lessons in Linux. Installing software and packages can be extremely frustrating because of versioning and dependencies. Hopefully this new Ubuntu proposal makes it into the new versions and helps resolve some of these dilemmas. I really think this is one of the things holding Linux back from mainstream. … /end rant
Over the weekend I spent time cleaning up some code and doing a little refactoring. I’m also making some progress on object display but it is going slow. I’ll have more to report on this soon. There’s roughly 2 weeks left until the final deadline. I’m committed to having what was proposed at the midterm ready and in a functioning state. The revised proposal suggested the message system would be completed by the end of this week and the object system by the end of next week. I’ve suggested leaving the message system until next week as there still needs to be some code and functionality added to the protocol library before it will work. So the focus for this week is the starmap and object system as they are really partners in backend functionality (they retrieve their information from the server in the same way).