Capturing a trace with UIforETW

Published on .

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) is an incredibly useful tracing mechanism built into Windows, however, it’s not the easiest thing to use. In my day job, ETW is incredibly useful to get profiling samples from customer machines to get insights into performance issues. Since I keep writing the same How-To for everyone, I figured I just write down once here and then link it to people. If you are here because I sent you such a link, welcome! Read post

Sushi - A Gameboy game

Published on . Filed under gamejam programming project

This is a blogpost I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, it’s about a game Nils and I wrote back in January 2017 for the Inno Games game Jam. That game jam happened together with the global game jam and the topic was: Waves. The source code for the game can be found here Nils and I both like challenges and even before going to the game jam we had decided to write a game for the original Gameboy (1989) and we decided to write it in assembler. Read post

Anatomy of a graphics driver bug

Published on . Filed under debugging x-plane

X-Plane’s plugin systems allows authors to load models in two ways: Asynchronously and Synchronously. Most plugins tend to use synchronous loading, but since all plugins run on the main thread there is a need and desire for some to use asynchronous loading. Up until now, the latter was broken however, and plugin authors complained about invisible models. From what I understand Pilot Edge were the first to complain, but they want to use async loading to dynamically load in models of planes that flew in via multiplayer, which makes it non-trivial to debug. Read post

Investigating a X-Plane plugin's crash to desktop

Published on . Filed under debugging x-plane

This post is about a crash to desktop that I investigated in a popular plugin for X-Plane, X-Assign. This happened in my free time, although I had the advantage of having the X-Plane source code at hand. Git bisect My new favourite tool on earth is git bisect, which I used to find the offending commit rather quickly. At this point I wasn’t sure who was at fault for the crash, X-Plane or X-Assign, since the issue only showed up with the update to X-Plane 11. Read post

Moving servers & domains

Published on .

For years I have hosted all of my servers at uberspace, which are a fantastic company that makes hosting websites incredibly easy. At this point in time, I have 4 uberspaces running. As you may or may not have noticed, this blog now sports a new look and also a new domain name! Under the hood, it also moved away from Uberspace and over to Linode. This change has been a long time coming, feresignum. Read post