I have been trying not to be an utter nerd in this forum, but I feel a welling of nerdality overwhelming me today, and I feel helpless to resist. Non nerds may want to ignore the rest of today’s ramblings and check out some cool pictures of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, post-restoration.
Nerdaciousness again – I’ve been stuck on two programming problems over the last week:
1. Getting the Ethernet address on an IRIX box without spawning another program or requiring root privileges. (This is work related – I need to generate UUIDs.) It seems that on every other UNIX I care about, a couple of ioctl calls will extract the necessary information. On IRIX I can only accomplish the task by calling ioctl(SIOCGIFADDR) on a socket of type SOCK_RAW, opened with the RAWPROTO_SNOOP protocol – and this requires root access. This is, of course, completely ridiculous.
2. My TWAIN-somewhat-compliant app (I have been trying to write a tool to help with claymation) can’t acquire any images from the webcam. I’m at the stage where I’ve just enabled the data source (TWAIN-speak for the webcam), and the UI for the source has popped up on screen, but in the app event loop I never receive events from the source. I know next to nothing about Windows and MFC programming (I’m not even sure I’m checking the message loop in the right place) so I’m at a dead end.
I’m happy that I have some issues to be stuck on, though. I’ve been creatively blocked, programming wise, for the last two months – the MUD and the l2rib projects have been in limbo, and work has been spotty as well in that aspect. So the fact that I’ve now unblocked to the point that I’m only stumped by two measly issues – well, that seems to be an indicator of progress.
It looks like google has finally indexed me, so perhaps some random person will drop by, know the answer to one of these questions, and be a kind enough soul to share the information. That would just make my day.
