For some reason, probably due to a sever mental defect, I actually enjoy writing C code. Yes, there are plenty of other languages which have plenty of aspects which are better then C, but I just don’t find any of them as satisfying to actually write code in. Ruby comes the closest, but as languages go, it’s still a little wet behind the ears while C is mature. What does that mean? I’ve been working on tcpreplay again- even after I claimed I was putting it away for the foreseeable future.
Lately, most of my work has been on improving tcpbridge, which frankly hasn’t been getting much love over the past few releases. Most notably, it’s the only tool in the Tcpreplay suite which doesn’t work under Windows, so I’ve been working to resolve this.

This has led to the gnashing of teeth.

I’ve never liked Windows, and frankly, my most recent experience of “out of memory” errors has only further proven to me that Windows sucks. Right now, I do all my Windows development in a virtual machine (VM) under Parallels. It’s slow, but up until now, I can say it worked. For some reason, now Windows XP is constantly popping up errors saying I’m out of memory- this is with 1GB of RAM and 750MB page file and only running a single Cygwin terminal that is compiling code. Yes, that’s right, I’ve got 1.75GB of memory and it’s not even enough to run ‘make’. Honestly, it’s almost enough for me to wipe out my Windows disk image and reclaim the 5-6GB of disk space on my laptop.

Anyways, this isn’t meant to be a rant, so I’ll just stop there.

End result is doing Windows development is frankly a lot more painful then it should be and it really puts a damper on the enjoyment potential I was talking about earlier. I’m going to need to come up with a workaround before I give up and go back to working on something else.