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Turns our that my sickness wasn't solely to blame on my working conditions.

Been playing with different stuff lately, mostly Linux-related. The most fun of them was to get Linux working on an Amiga 4000 with a PPC 604e accelerator card. I was amazed at how easy it was to install the precompiled kernels and distos. The amazement continued, but on a darker note, when I tried to recompile the kernel myself. I've temporarily given up, but I advice interested parties to check out the Linux/APUS FAQ and the LinuxPPC site.

Also, I've been examining Qt Toolkit for making GUIs. Made a simple project manager in it at school. Finally, I took down GNU panorama for perusal, and played a bit with it. I expect to do something with this and Qt shortly.

The last months have been spent exhausting myself to the point of total breakdown. I'm now sick as (an unhealthy) dog, so much so, in fact, that I must take medication to function.

However, I have made some progress both here and there. First of all, I'd like to recommend the following books: Design Patterns, by Gamma, Helm, Vlissides and Johnson. It's totally awesome if you do any kind of C++ programming at all. Of course, it's pretty worthless if you don't care a tinker's cuss for the object-oriented methods.

Also in the wind: Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques. This one will only be good if you have a solid maths background, and a solid foundation in computer graphics. It is annoyingly terse at times, but where it's not, it's absolutely marvellous. This time, I actually bothered to have a look at the references, so the whole experience was all extremely worthwhile. Get this book if you're really into computer graphics, and not afraid of getting your hands dirty (and printer hot; you will want to download a lot of articles and papers after reading this book).

I've also had the chance to check out Gnome, which was neat but far from finished, POVRay on a Beowulf cluster, which was unstable but extremely neat and fast when it worked, a Cray Origin 2000 which was mind-bogglingly fast, and the chance to set up a web+news+mail server with its own domain name. At least I've learned from the experience.

I've just been working for the last 20 minutes to remove a stupid segmentation fault from a graphics program using PTC. I thought it was PTC's fault all along; some unstable internal bug or something, but it turned out (surprise, surprise!) to be my fault.

The reason is this:

const int myConst;

will (when running egcs 1.0.3 at least) be put into a read-only page, and thus your program will pagefault when you try to write to that memory address. I wanted to have a const GBuffer (bitmap descriptor) to the public, but I wanted it to updated internally (using some casts and pointers). That's not immediately possible without messing with compiler switches and #pragmas. Guess I'll drop the const for now.

This summer I picked up the book "The XML Companion" by Neil Bradley. It was very nice, but at times a bit terse. I'd rather have that, tho, than the usual american 1000+ pages books that don't tell you anything.

Anyhow. That book is the main reason I made these pages. I wanted to try out style sheets, HTML 4.0 and see if I really am functionally color-blind. In my quest for information about these subjects past the book, I tripped over the following URLs:

• The Homesite HTML creator
• The WWW Consortium's pages on CSS
• The WWW Consortium's pages on HTML
• Netscape's HTML reference