Fact #1: Sometimes I run Gimp on my work laptop because (1) my work laptop has a nice screen, and (2) I do not have a personal laptop, but I like to sit at the kitchen table and watch the cats run amok while I draw. Fact #2: I spent a lot of time working on my laptop in the lab area today; testing the communications module I just finished writing. The result of these two facts is that I left my power cord somewhere dumb and ran out of juice mid-drawing. Now all I have for tool #10 is this ridiculous spaceship/coke bottle/electric-toothbrush looking contraption:

Seriously though, this is about 60% of a completed Dremel. I could have ported this to Photoshop and hoped that everything translated ok, or I could have fought with Linux drivers for my Wacom tablet. Neither of those sound exciting. So…. I will finish, colorize, and embellish this drawing tomorrow and we’ll call it 10.1. Sound good? Great.

In other news, I re-learned an important factoid about embedded C-code today: you can define variables at the beginning of any valid stanza (ie: { } ), and if you hide such a definition in a macro called DO_SOMETHING_VAGUE you can make it very difficult to track down everything that contributes to the stack space of the calling function. I worked on this for about two hours today and didn’t make any headway, and then my boss stepped in and said “bazing! check your assumptions!” and I resolved it. Rock.

EDIT: I used “declare” instead of “define”… thanks for the jab/correction, Michael.

tags: tool of the day