Spent like a sailor on shore leave today, don't really know why. Doesn't matter, I'm home and my lady still loves me. Life is good. That remaining problem with the Win98 problem, and its solution, was very very good therapy for me. Gave me renewed confidence in my abilities. Yes, even though it was I who caused the problem, I managed to solve it without wiping the system clean, and preserving all my friend's installed programs. All thanks to the open source community and the ass-kicking tools that are available even for the closed-source Windows operating system, like WinDump and Cygwin, and last but by far the greatest, GNU and their amazing debugger, GDB. Only GDB allowed me to see the file that the Win DLLs were attempting to use, and which was causing the 60-second delay due to my having quarantined it away from its normal location. I don't care what anybody says, Stallman and GNU rule.
Then again, it doesn't take much for me to get into a debugger. Even DOS debug was a very good friend of mine. It's one of the few things Microsoft got right, and it just got better in later versions of DOS. I also was in love with DDT on the Decsystem-10 and later on the PDP-11, even though it was almost as enigmatic and user-hostile as TECO.
Well, I've got email to check up on and other timewasters to occupy my time, so, Intrepid Wanderer fans, get back to your work or your GF/BF or whatever, and I'll have more grist for your mills at a later date!
last updated 2013-01-10 20:31:21. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com