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Over the years, I’ve screwed with a lot of build systems. Both in the course of my own projects and other people’s, and I’ve come to a conclusion over the past fourteen years.

At best: you can reimplement make poorly. At worst you can reimplment half of autotools, poorly.

That’s pretty much what I’ve seen. Thus as time has gone on, I see it very hard to do better than good old Make. Especially when the GNU version has about five hundred pages worth of voodoo to appease even the worst masterbaters, and the need for autotools is kind of waning IMHO.

Enter ninja.

What I’ve generally found with Ninja is that it’s very simple. Like C: the little bit of syntax you need to remember is a small quantity. Opening a build.ninja file is probably enough to grok what’s going on if you’ve ever used an actual build system that involves editing files.

Likewise answers to questions that tend to make it easier to build a wonky, hellish, broken build monstrosity, tend to be “No, you can’t because that would make this slow”. And let’s face it, if you want much more than a relatively simple Makefile, you’re probably building a case for pain.

Based on the past year, I think ninja will be sitting next to vim and dump in my toolkit of loved and trusty computing companions.

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You know that a camera is pretty good: when you’ve got to time pressing the shutter button to a dog blinking her eyes. Because otherwise you get a superb shot of a blinking dog.

I still remember early tablets and phones, and that feeling that a rusted barn door with a cement block glued to it could swing faster than a picture could be captured by the device.
Ahh, technological progress :-).
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Watching The Outer Limits – s02e9 – Trial by Fire, I find myself wondering somewhat just what kinds of civilizations we could find out there amongst the stars.

Based on our own civilizations throughout history, I rather think there’s three ways that works out.

In a perfect world, we would probably have a first contact out of Star Trek. But I don’t really have that high a hope for humanity, so I expect our early associations to look more like Avatar or Enemy Mine.

In a way though, I worry that a more likely scenario given how difficult truly foreign beings are, and how fucked up we are, things would turn out more like the Earth-Minbari war in B5. Which could be summarized as a hot head meets cultural differences kicks off the near extimerination of the human race. Except I don’t think the Battle of the Line would turn out so fortuitous, so much as like an ID4 assault ship firing its primary weapon.

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When I consider grilled cheese a comfort food, it can be hard to decide if adulting is a little bit sad or if my cheese budget is just a lot more flexible than my mother’s, lol.

Tonight, I found myself in more need of a happy meal than a desire to cook. Plus it’sa little too soon to make pasta again, thus simple plans.

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How Steve Jobs saved Apple with the online Apple Store

Not sure if memory lane makes me feel old, or just makes me remember the shopping experience from when we bought our first WebTV back in the mid nineties. I also find the old snap of Dell’s site oddly appropriate, and appealing, as someone that experienced that era of the World Wide Web.

And with regards to our present time? Well let’s just say, Amazon is a big thing now.

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I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t for my efforts to only eat one helping for dinners, I’d be passed out on the floor, rubbing my pasta filled belly, and using leftover garlic bread as a pimple while I drool the sauce.
Needless to say, I rather like pasta.

My desktop is for games

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Ways to know your desktop has one true job:

  1. 80% of your storage use is installed software.
  2. 97.2% of that is your Steam library.
  3. You wouldn’t own a desktop if you didn’t need the huge GTX card.
  4. You wouldn’t need the huge GTX card if you didn’t play PC games.
Coincidentally, WinDirStat calculates my %UserProfile% is about 5% of my storage use and a bit of 7% is my non-steam games directory. Most of my user profile’s use is taken up by Android SDK files, and I don’t think I’ve even touched that in a couple years.
So, yes. I think it’s pretty safe in saying that Centauri only really has one true job.
That I also use the machine for video ripping and conversion, is secondary really. Or should we say a side effect that it’s the machine I have connected to a Blu-ray drive, and conversions are done on it because the only better candidates don’t run HandBrake.
Most other reasons, it just happens to be the machine in front of me at the time, and even then I’m often inclined to reach for my tablet instead.
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Misty being well aware of food.

Also, me remembering that if you’re going to eat chili out of a can, always grab Wolf chili when it’s on sale :).

Damn, hard drives are getting cheap and huge

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Passing thought: damn, hard drives are getting cheap and huge.

Judging by the prices, I kind of hope that my drives keep on lasting on, because if they do, by the time the older ones die, I’ll probably be able to get one drive for the same price: that fits my entire storage needs, lol.

Currently, storage around here is fairly simple but divided.

Centauri was originally a small SSD and a 1 TB HDD. Earlier this year I replaced the first SSD I ever bought with a modern 1 TB SSD, which frigging cost less than the original 120 GB SSD. With that migration: Centauri’s second drive is now mostly for things I haven’t bothered to move over.

Cream has its own internal storage media, but those are solid state storage for running its OS and associated trappings. It’s meat and potatoes are a pair of platter drives: a 2 TB that serves as cold storage, and a 3 TB drive that serves as media storage as well as a backup of the first. Originally cold storage was a 1 TB drive that I bought at the same time as Centuari’s, but it finally went the death of too many years of power on hours; and a 2 TB was the same price by then.

I suspect at some point, Centauri’s now redundant hard drive will be getting swapped with the drive hanging off my Xbox. Because that drive is both too damned small for games (~320G) and too damned slow for games (~5400 rpm laptop). With Centauri’s 1 TB drive now being the oldest still in use here, giving it a job where failure is not a problem but where capacity is, seems like a good plan.

The downside is of course this means actually getting off my fat arse and doing things (>_<).

I’m pretty sure if my drives just keep on trucking a few more years, drives these sizes will be free with a box of cracker jacks. Nevermind typical drive sizes being larger than their collective whole.

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Willow: wtf are you doing, human?
Me: trying to take a picture of your comfy.