TortoiseGit

I have been worrying about poor GUI support for Git because that is a major factor for many people not to use it. Especially true in companies where Git would cause some extra costs, at least initially.

Lo and behold, meet TortoiseGit.

Finding ALSA devices programmatically

Finding out the ALSA audio devices in a Linux box programmatically can be a bit tricky. I did it like this:



Of course if you don't need to do it yourself, you can use the aplay command from the shell.

Debugging in Linux with advanced IDE's

This took me a while to figure out. I have been trying out several different IDE's for Linux C development (KDevelop, Code::Blocks, NetBeans) and I only managed to get debugging work like I wanted (e.g. code stepping, local variables etc) in Code::Blocks.

Finally I figured out why: I was compiling the code incorrectly. I thought I was doing it right, but I was actually only giving the -ggdb flag to the linker. Code::Blocks worked because it creates a new project for you and knows how to compile for a debug compilation.

KDevelop is just poor, it keeps crashing and the interface is rather unintuitive (how to use a Makefile and how to compile an application without a GUI?). Code::Blocks is nice, if ugly-looking but unfortunately it doesn't want to use the original Makefile. NetBeans is big and slow, but supports the Makefile directly. It's going to be a tough choice between Code::Blocks and NetBeans...

The only thing going for KDevelop is it has support for git, but then again, you can use it from the command line....

But how to do the Makefile correctly:

After that all the debugger options work inside the IDE.