Adrenaline Hack

September 25th, 2007 at 14:39 · Filed Under Ada, At Home, At Work, Call Me a Geek, Computing, Days in My Life, Hacking, Mac OS X, Software Development 

Wow! I’ve done it! Yes! Yes! Yes!

After a successful hack to receive a server-push JPEG stream from a video server (more story here), the next challenge for me was to display the JPEG in a GUI window.

I have been trying to get Carbon binding to work with gnat 4.3 on xcode but I am forced to abandon it for a while. I switched my target to GtkAda which will require X11 on Mac OS X. One plus side is that my application will be platform independent if I use Gtk/GtkAda. That means my application can be compiled and run on Linux, Solaris and Windows with the platform-independent GUI. More business may be and hopefully.

I was working to get GtkAda to work on my Mac since yesterday but I had corrupted some of the files I installed with Fink. Fortunately, I have a backup (actually I copied) on my MacBook but I guess I won’t need it anymore since the Gtk+2 and GtkAda are working on my Mac Mini. I will delete the copy on my MacBook later and install it with the working Gtk+/GtkAda.

I spent the entire morning and noon to write a single window, stripped down application to display the JPEG image I downloaded using the application I worked on earlier. I could not get the result. After many hours of hacking, I finally got it to work!

It is so rewarding to see it happens and I have got a good dose of adrenaline today. The feeling is difficult to describe. So it is difficult for other people to feel the excitement and the rewarding state of mind I am into.

The next challenge is to write an experimental application to continuously receive multiple streams of JPEG images and display them in multiple frames in a window, the last and toughest task with parallelism involving socket and GUI. After this, comes the serious software development by integrating all these experimental applications into a nice GUI application.

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Comments

4 Responses to “Adrenaline Hack”

  • Zhang Wei on September 25th, 2007 22:28 1

    Absolute ecstasy! Ha.. ha..

    I enjoy rewards from solving programming problem very much though. That’s the reason why I chose CS.

    You are progressing very well. Good to hear about your success. More work ahead, man!

    On my side, I have not had very much progress except that I spotted 20 bugs in my algorithms. That’s good enough for the past few days.

    张薇

  • Adrian Hoe on September 25th, 2007 22:39 2

    Ha! Ecstasy pill for software developer.

    Kill 20 bugs and you said you had not very much progress? I guess you need triple dose or more! Ha!

    At times, I prefer to play Solitaire when I am thinking and solving problems. Some people thinks that I am ignoring them when I am switched to this mode. Most of the times I find it annoying when my kids come disturbing me.

    Today I ignored D but when I had successfully run my app, I was overjoyed and he was kind of surprised to see my sudden mode change. I talked to him. He had no idea what I was experiencing so I showed him my program. He felt very happy seeing that I was happy. He is too young to understand how I feel.

  • Zhang Wei on September 26th, 2007 0:44 3

    Same here. I don’t like people to disturb while I am working on codes. It can be very disastrous to disturb my work. Do all the software developers have this kind of bad habits? I wonder.

    Where did you get the gtkada for gnat 4.3 intel from? It seems no where can be found on MacAda site.

    I am not sure what will be the GUI part for my application as I am developing the backend process for receiving streams of digital signal. Worst case would be Cocoa with Ada interfacing to it. I can imagine the hell I will be working in then if Cocoa is the choice. I hope I can convince my team to use gtkada.

    张薇

  • HOWTO - Building GtkAda project with xcode | Adrian Hoe’s WebLog on October 4th, 2007 23:59 4

    [...] Adrenaline Hack [...]

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