At last, the holidays are over. ‘Course, I’m not saying I didn’t have a good time, it’s just so tedious.
Recently I got my secondary box up and running. To celebrate, I and a friend spent some time playing Baldur’s Gate II: The Throne of Bhaal. I must admit that I never expected I’d like the whole multiplayer shebang in such games, but it turned out quite nice.
The last two days I spent setting up Slackware 10.0, compiling the latest Linux kernel, tweaking, building, et cetera. Everything went smoothly, except for the soundcard detection (I have a Soundblaster Audigy). The solution was simple, however. Just enable the sound option, get rid of all the pre-build ALSA/OSS/et cetera stuff, build and install the latest ALSA drivers. I reckon I might just revert to Windows on this box though. Instead, I’ll make the server box a dedicated Linux slave. It’d make more sense, anyway.
I watched Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (extended edition) recently. ‘Twas certainly better than I recalled. Next on schedule is to see the remaining two films (extended editions, of course!).
Yesterday was fun. Jan and I continued our Baldur’s Gate session, and the game never crashed after we patched it. We did, however, notice some odd and variably amusing bugs (or „random features“, if you prefer). At some point, Jan picked up several (four, I reckon) battleaxes +1, and sold them. And sold them again. And again. He never got rid of them, no matter how many times he sold them, they kept respawning in his inventory. Useful in those occassions when you’re running out of coin. 
We experienced a similar bug with another item, a single gem (fairly valuable, I just can’t remember its name). He sold it, and few more appeared in his inventory. He sold all of them, but they just kept multiplying. Those were the funny ones, at least.
We were also supposed to kill a demon to retrieve a gem to complete a certain scepter. For some reason, the demon just didn’t drop the item as he should have done when we killed him. That caused some major frustration and wasted time of wandering, or until I decided to hack in the missing item (in this case I can’t possibly consider it cheating).
Currently I’m, in the process of writing my own C math library. I’ve done it so many times for the various projects already, that I decided to just make a portable library out of it. Hell, I might just GPL it, too.
Last but not least, I’ve finally made a C macro for coffee breaks. Modern computers are just so bloody fast to compile even several dozen megabytes of source code, you never get a chance for that well deserved coffee break.
Just add a line like COFFEE_BREAK (30) to one of your source files, and voilá! The next time you compile, the preprocessor will spend half an hour processing that instruction. Joy!