February 2018

Just so Stories About Kodak’s Downfall

People love stories about big unwieldy corporations meeting their demise because they couldn’t innovate and while that certainly happens, the cartoonish way the narrative is applied to Kodak just misunderstands what happened and how technology works.

Problem Updating Samba in FreeBSD

Usually updating FreeBSD versions is pretty easy for me, but I did run into a hiccup during portmaster -a:

Installing samba44-4.4.16_1...
pkg-static: samba44-4.4.16_1 conflicts with p5-Parse-Pidl44-4.4.16 (installs files into the same place).  Problematic file: /usr/local/bin/pidl
*** Error code 70Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Apparently samba now comes with its own pidl due to a bug in the perl version of it. So deleting the package first fixed the issue:

pkg delete -f p5-Parse-Pidl p5-Parse-Pidl44
Code language: Bash (bash)

Create Inline Data from csv in Haxe

One of the things that makes haxe really powerful but can be intimidating is their macro system. With it, you can write code that generates code at compile time, allowing you to do useful things like checking the validity of data files or even transform them into literals in the code. There’s much more you can do with it, but loading data at compile time is something I see a lot in game development (including castle, which I blogged about previously).