JDWTopGuy's Journal: That warm fuzzy feeling

Ahh! I finally submitted my patch to FreeVMS. Twice, actually. :P I accidentally included a screwed-up change in the first patch I sent.

Luckily the dude I sent it to was hip to the bad mojo, and I did a kind of snip-snip thang, and sent him a groovy new patch, daddy-o.

I have no idea what I just said. Anyway, my "little" patch was 887 lines long, with 26,564 characters. It eliminates a ton of compile-time warnings when compiling FreeVMS. (Several thousand lines of warnings, last time I checked.)

FreeVMS?

[Feztaa]

So, aside from the compiler warnings, does your patch *do* anything?

Sorry :)

Re:FreeVMS?

[JDWTopGuy]

It makes the code more "correct". And if I, a dude who's never written anything serious in C, can make the code more correct...

It's based off Linux 2.4.18, so I don't know how many of the issues were Linux issues, and how many were FreeVMS issues. There were conflicts between values in the Linux code and the FreeVMS code, and I cleaned up at least two. I also changed numerous calls to "bcopy" to call "memcpy", added a few missing prototypes, removed junk from the Makefile, etc.

Just basic cleanup. So no, m

Re:FreeVMS?

[Feztaa]

So, what interested you in FreeVMS in the first place?

It just seems like a "why bother?" thing to me.

Re:FreeVMS?

[JDWTopGuy]

Ehhh... it's another (free) OS to try. They have a lot of balls to try and clone one of the most proprietary operating systems, and it's a cool project. VMS only runs on proprietary DEC/Compaq/HP machines. FreeVMS is currently an i386-only project, which means I can run it on Virtual PC, or bochs, or even one of my real PCs once it's good enough.

Basically, I downloaded it to try it out, and all the errors were driving me nuts... so I made my patch. I never did get it to compile correctly; I'll have to try

Re:FreeVMS?

[Feztaa]

Heh, true I suppose. I still have to find a project that I can start contributing to (I haven't really found anything that I feel I can make a difference in). I don't want to become "just another kernel hacker", I want to develop on a small project that is in need of developers, but also something that is specifically useful to me (I don't want to work on a program I'd never use, for example).

I had a few ideas of features that I'd like to see, but I can't seem to think of them at the moment. Crap :-/

Re:FreeVMS?

[Feztaa]

Should have previewed :)

I had a few ideas of features that I'd like to see

Reread this, it sounds awkward. What I meant was, I had a few idea of things that I could contribute to certain projects that would make them better.

Re:FreeVMS?

[JDWTopGuy]

What programming languages do you know, besides perl?

It looks like I'm learning C/C++, to some degree. The only things standing in my way are learning to manually allocate/free memory when needed, and learning the APIs.

It looks like I need to learn as many languages as possible... the job listings here are insane. They want every programmer to have 5+ years experience in Java, C, C++, Visual Basic, C#, perl, ADA, PHP, JSP, COBOL, and FORTRAN. MySQL, ISS, Apache, BSD and XP! I swear, some PHB is just putti

Re:FreeVMS?

[Feztaa]

What programming languages do you know, besides perl?

I've learned TurboPascal in highschool and Java at the university, but I've taught myself perl, PHP, python (a bit), javascript, html (css, etc), m4, and scheme in my own travels.

For scheme, I never did master the language, I just learned enough to do what I was trying to accomplish (for example, the card game AisleRiot uses Scheme to define the rules for it's various card games, and it has a silly bug where it uses Vegas rules for the game called "Kl