As a good friend of mine would agree to, C and I had have a rocky past. I'm still not sure I like C/C++ and all it's nasty pointers and buffers, but I absolutely do respect it. I just find it convoluted and annoying to read personally and love how easy C# makes things. I'll take C# over C++ any day of the week and twice on Sundays... :p
Anyway, there comes a time in every tech geeks life when they go to use a FOSS product and realize it doesn't do quite what they need. This recently happened to me with a very cool media centre project - OpenELEC.
It's a really, really quick booting stripped down Linux based XBMC setup that's optimized for different platforms (like x64 Atom CPU and Nvidia ION graphics). The whole install is ~90MB and it'll run of a MicroSD card, USB, stick, etc. I'm very impressed with it and recommend anyone who likes XBMC check it out. I digress.
So OpenELEC is great and all, but I'm still a huge fan of using an Xbox 360 wireless remote to control things and this is where it fell down. The Linux xpad kernel driver isn't the best, and the SDL joystick code in the XBMC version that ships with OpenELEC is straight up broken when it comes to the 360 wireless controller.
This is where my old friend C and I met again. In digging through event captures, debug logs, and source code I was able to find the code that was causing my problem. Then I got rough. I cut out blocks of code that weren't called, I stubbed out procedures that weren't needed, and I hack-hack-hacked my through some changes to produce a file that not only compiled, it worked!
All in all it was a great learning experience both for working with Linux systems as well as C++ and I can honestly say I enjoyed it. And because I fixed this myself the victory is that much sweeter.
If anyone is interested I shared the changes here on the OpenELEC forums. Now excuse me, I've got some stunning HD content to watch on my now fully functional Asus 1012p EeeBox media centre. ;)
-A
