Truth in advertising

Alright, I kinda hit a wall with the programming — weeks ago.  Something about prepackaged headers giving me syntax errors just threw me off and I haven’t really been able to get back on.  Ideally, I’m still 100% for OpenGL; but, realistically, I hate the Khronos group right now.  Khronos can suck it.  They don’t provide all of the headers you need in a convenient way, and then if you #include them in the wrong order they give you syntax errors — what the heck!  I’m not even sure how that’s POSSIBLE.

So, I hit a wall and I haven’t done jack about it.  Well, I downloaded nVidia’s OpenGL SDK, but that didn’t exactly spur me into action.  Even with nVidia’s “SDK,” things aren’t nearly as convenient as they would be with DirectX.  I’ll hand it to MS there; they can put together a package that puts everything in a single convenient place to point to.  MS messes up many things — I was forcibly reminded of this when my XBox forgot how to use it’s network adapter this morning.

Short answer, I haven’t made any progress with OpenGL and I might not get back to it.  The near-finality of that statement hurts me right in my pipe dreams, though.

-psivamp

What is the hold-up on these programming posts?

Alright, so I was a little premature starting the programming series. I’m running through a book on SDL and one on OpenGL currently, so there is nothing to report on unless I manage to bungle something horribly.  I’m hoping to be able to get to a point where I can at least have something vaguely interesting to show on the blog.

Until then, I’ll keep plugging along in silence and doing the LP.

Inauspicious beginnings

Using this unread blog as a spur to get myself into gear with programming, I have begun setting up my environments.  Plural.  I have no fewer than three versions of Visual C++ Express installed in Windows, and the usual command-line interface to gcc in linux.

I’m used to linux being ready to go as a development environment from my humble beginnings using Slackware in college. Ubuntu is NOT a development linux distribution by default.  Instead of already having all of the usual development libraries and include files by virtue of them being given to me or compiled from source, everything is pre-compiled and I lacked include files.

Ubuntu forums are not friendly places.  Advice for how to get the necessary libraries and include files ranged from “Ubuntu doesn’t come with them because most people won’t compile anything” to “Just use the synaptics package manager.”  Thanks, your assumption that people on linux don’t compile from source is just baffling and obviously use the package manager; next time, tell me what to get and/or how.  Actually, getting the necessary development stuff turns out to be a few simple calls to the package manager.