Secrets of the ASCII table

The other day I actually read the ASCII table. Seems odd as I've dealt with this for probably more that seven years but I've never really looked at the special characters. I remember when I started programming with QBasic/Visual Basic I first looked at the table - I ignored the non-printable characters as they looked too complicated. And for some reason I've never really looked at them again.

In my last job there were a number of ASCII protocols using STX and ETX but even then I never looked at anything outside of tab and carriage return (don't get me started on this character...). So yeah it's a bit of a surprise and now I plan to make better use (or ignore) these characters in my future code.

Shake-up in the Glade world?

I recently found a Glade replacement: Gazpacho. It's basically a Glade rewrite in Python (for ease of development and maintenance). My previous experiences with Glade 3 have been a bit variable and Glade 2 has a number of annoyances so it will be good to try Gazpacho.

Also it looks like Nokia has been building a libglade replacement. Interesting times.

Great strides in usability

Just made some really nice improvements to glChess:



a) The move descriptions now default to a human readable form. You can choose to change these to either SAN or LAN using the menus.
b) Sexy, sexy Gedit/tooltip style message areas instead of pop-ups and many status bars.

Unfortunately none of this will be in the Gnome 2.18 release. I plan on making a sf.net release today (but sneak some other goodies in first) and all this stuff can get merged into Gnome 2.18.1. Oh and I'll have to disable the "Join Game" button for this release - it's still not quite all there.

What's this ACPI thing?

Here's a simple article