Penguin's Diary

HDD power off disable for HP 6510b

2012-01-25T21:47:00.001-08:00

sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

That prevents drive parking at sec interval when running on battery.

OpenGL tutorials

2012-01-02T15:02:00.001-08:00

http://ogldev.atspace.co.uk/index.html

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html -- book

GCC vector intrinsics example

2011-12-29T07:19:00.001-08:00

typedef int v4si __attribute__ ((vector_size(16)));

typedef int RGBA[4];

void diff(const RGBA & a, const RGBA & b, RGBA & out) {
#if 0
    for(int i = 0; i < 4; ++i)
        out[i] = a[i] - b[i];

    for(int i = 0; i < 4; ++i) {
        int v = out[i];
        if (v < 0) v =0;
        if (v > 255) v = 255;
        out[i] = v;
    }
#else
v4si va = *(v4si*)a;//{a[0], a[1], a[2], a[3]};
v4si vb = *(v4si*)b;//{b[0], b[1], b[2], b[3]};
v4si vr;
    vr = __builtin_ia32_psubd128(va, vb);
    *(v4si*)(&out[0]) = vr;

#endif

}

nimrod programming language

2011-12-28T13:44:00.001-08:00

Found this interesting:

http://force7.de/nimrod/download.html

Integer division optimization

2011-12-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

The idea is to replace division with multiplication and bit shift.

Found it interesting (GCC does it for you, but FPC not):

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/FindMulShift.aspx

http://libdivide.com/

Memory Leaks

2011-12-22T12:33:00.000-08:00

Nice article on the topic: http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/Article.asp?Name=Memory

By the way, Pascal's manner of declaring variables in a single place ('var section') seems unproductive for C/C++ fans but it is very helpful in tracking resources (class references) -- look for the known block in a function and check if all of the references are properly freed on return.

Lazarus problem solution for Ubuntu 11.10

2011-12-16T14:43:00.000-08:00

" Lazarus applications have problems to run on latest Ubuntu 11.10 where the reason is new Taskbar menu and scrollbar.

To get application running like on older Ubuntu we have to remove some functionality from Ubuntu using by this command:

sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt
liboverlay-scrollbar-0.2-0 "

http://62.166.198.202/view.php?id=20520

LG Optimus One P500 factory menu

2011-12-12T02:07:00.001-08:00

Working solution for GPS problem for LG P500 Optimus after update to Gingerbread lies in hidden menu which can be opened with 3845#*500# combination in Dialer. Then choose GPS Test > gpsApp Main Menu > Settings > GPS Type and choose Standalone instead of A-GPS (as shown on picture).

http://muj.trus.cz/post/9622985470/working-solution-for-gps-problem-for-lg-p500

FreePascal experience

2011-12-11T08:54:00.001-08:00

Tried FPC 2.4.4 recently, what I must say, Lazarus and console fpide are unusable under Ubuntu 11.10 and MacOSX -- crash all the time, no debugger support and strange GUI bugs, although I have not tried them under Windows.

However, the big POSITIVE side is that the compiler (FPC) is a lightning fast one and easy to install at any platform. It's even faster than javac. I'm really impressed. And GDB understands well pascal programs, tried to debug and it's amazingly feature rich. The language is plain simple and you can easily program in any decent text editor. I really enjoyed playing around with it. The generated applications are lightweight like in good old times, native, fast, not so hungry for memory and cpu resources. Also FPCMAKE is a good tool if you plan to develop a more or less complex application.

FPDOC tool is not what I like to use (it requires documentation not in the source comments but in a separate xml file), better to pick pasdoc (http://pasdoc.sipsolutions.net/) for those who used to javadoc and doxygen.

As for the Pascal programs I've used -- they are not pretty stable, I think it's the fault of the poor memory management strategy applied. It's better to use reference-counting techniques like in GNUstep/Cocoa than TComponent's sole ownership and dangling pointers.

Playing with the compiler I have tried to implement a base class to do that counting and one more to track weak references. It was a success, so it's not the language fault but the programmers who use it, because my solution looks good and I plan to publish a library on GitHub if I ever program in FP.

One more deficiency is the lack of Unicode strings support in OS calls, e.g. for file names on Windows. Although it's no problem under Linux and/or MacOSX.

Generally FPC is a great tool, and there are a lot of useful libraries to make life easy.

jEdit performance workaround

2011-12-11T08:52:00.001-08:00

Runs slow on my Ubuntu, but if I make

jEdit global options -> Appearance -> Show the systray icon to OFF.

it runs as fast as native. Strange bug on Gnome 3.

D language status, LDC2

2011-12-06T23:04:00.001-08:00

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/State_of_LDC_148791.html

FreePascal status

2011-12-04T08:06:00.001-08:00

Unicode is supported by LCL (Lazarus) via UTF-8. There are several functions to convert from system encoding strings (codepage on Windows) to utf-8 strings.

http://wiki.freepascal.org/LCL_Unicode_Support

According to the docs, fpc supports MacOSX 32 and 64-bit, iOS targets.http://wiki.freepascal.org/LCL_Unicode_Support

Digitalmars D version 2 a fresh look

2011-11-06T12:24:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I spotted the D language and was quite impressed by it, although the division of standard library, the development of a new 2.0 version and the stale state of many libraries stopped from active usage of it.

Now a lot of things changed, the 2.0 version is more or less stable and there's a GNU D compiler for this version and it's actively developed/supported, and even planned to be maintained as one of the GNU Compiler Collection. I wish it come true.

Having reviewed the specs for the D 2.0 I should admit that the language is engineered VERY thoroughly, with many features I was missing in Java and C++, it's clean and rich at the same time.

At first I was planning to use LDC compiler for D 1.0 because failed to compile GDC for MacOSX, but then I decided to start coding something useful for Linux only to study the language, and probably later there will be a viable implementation for MacOSX. The official implementation (DMD) can compile only 32-bit binaries for MacOSX, that's why I'm concerned on alternative implementations like GDC, LDC2...

Here's the link to the site:

http://www.d-programming-language.org
http://www.digitalmars.com

LDC under ubuntu 11.10 one more try

2011-11-02T00:36:00.000-07:00

Installed through apt llvm-2.9, downloaded trunk LDC, executed ccmake, and added -ldl to LIBCONFIG_LDFLAGS. Successfully built!

Build tango, and adjusted /usr/local/etc/ldc.conf:

// This configuration file uses libconfig.
// See http://www.hyperrealm.com/libconfig/ for syntax details.

// Special macros:
// %%ldcbinarypath%%
// - is replaced with the path to the directory holding the ldc executable

// The default group is required
default:
{
    // 'switches' holds array of string that are appends to the command line
    // arguments before they are parsed.
    switches = [
        "-I/usr/local/include/d",
        "-I/usr/local/include/d/tango/core/vendor",
        "-L-L/usr/local/lib",
        "-L-ltango-ldc",
        "-d-version=Tango",
        "-defaultlib=tango-ldc",
        "-debuglib=tango-ldc"
    ];
};

LDC under Ubuntu 11.10

2011-11-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

Install llvm 2.9 from repo, ccmake, specify path to llvm-config tool: /usr/lib/llvm-2.9/bin/llvm-config, finally was unable to build from sources. :(

D programming under MacOS X 10.6, LDC

2011-10-31T12:46:00.000-07:00

See http://dsource.org/projects/ldc/wiki/OSXBuildInstructions

Macports to install llvm package (2.9). Then get the latest LDC (tip) from bitbucket mercurial repo, ccmake, adjust paths to match those of MacPorts (/opt/local).

Then build and install tango, as described in the link above.

Edit ldc.conf

switches = [
"-I/opt/local/include/d",
"-I/opt/local/include/d/tango/core/vendor",
"-L-L%%ldcbinarypath%%/../lib",
"-L-ltango",
"-d-version=Tango",
"-defaultlib=tango-ldc",
"-debuglib=tango-ldc"
];

LDC under MacOSX

2011-01-27T07:43:00.000-08:00

Can't build it yet but the information I gathered is as follows:

Setup


sudo port install llvm
sudo port install llvm-devel
sudo port install mercurial
sudo port install ruby
sudo port install cmake

hg clone -r 0.9.2 https://bitbucket.org/lindquist/ldc
svn co http://svn.dsource.org/projects/tango/tags/releases/0.99.9 tango

Building LDC


cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DDEFAULT_TARGET="x86_64-apple-darwin10" ../ldc
make -j2

Building Tango

Links

https://bitbucket.org/lindquist/ldc
http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango
http://dsource.org/projects/ldc/wiki/BuildInstructionsTangoTrunk

ext2/3 from macosx

2011-01-26T07:44:00.000-08:00

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ext2/

Genius G-Pen 560 under Ubuntu 10.04

2010-10-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

1) add ppa and install wizardpen driver (xorg) from it
2) edit /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-wizardpen.conf to the following:

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "wizardpen"
MatchIsTablet "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
# MatchVendor "UC-LOGIC|KYE Systems|Ace Cad"
Driver "wizardpen"
Option "TopZ" "32"
Option "BottomZ" "1023"
Option "TopX" "185"
Option "TopY" "372"
Option "BottomX" "11811"
Option "BottomY" "8793"

EndSection
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "wizardpen ignore mouse dev"
MatchIsTablet "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/mouse*"
# MatchVendor "UC-LOGIC|KYE Systems|Ace Cad"
Driver ""
EndSection

3) reboot

link once (simulating c++ template code in pure c with GCC extensions)

2009-12-27T09:20:00.001-08:00

The following definition will be merged in all compiled object files, i.e. the first function implementation will be linked into the produced binary and the following copies rejected.


__attribute__((section(".gnu.linkonce.c"))) int commonFunc(int a, int b) {
    return a-b;
}

Simmulating "exceptions" in pure C

2009-12-27T08:06:00.000-08:00

 #include <stdio.h>  
 #include <setjmp.h>  
 typedef struct ExcHandlerDesc_ {  
     struct ExcHandlerDesc_ * prev;  
     jmp_buf jmpBuf;  
     int handled; // 0 = did not handle the exception  
     int excId; // the id of unhandled exception for rethrow  
 } ExcHandlerDesc;  
 static ExcHandlerDesc * xroot;  
 #define XR_CODE_BLOCK 0  
 #define XR_FINALLY_BLOCK -1  
 // starting exception id  
 #define XR_EXC_ID 2  
 //#define X_TRY(exchd_) addXHandler(exchd_); switch (setjmp(exchd_.jmpBuf)) {  
 //#define X_END(exchd_) }; removeXHandler(exchd_);  
 ////////  
 void throwIt(int v) {  
     if (xroot == 0) {  
         printf("Unhandled exception %i !!!\n", v);  
         exit(1);  
     }  
     xroot->excId = v;  
     //xroot->handled = 1;  
     longjmp(xroot->jmpBuf, v);  
 }  
 void addXHandler(ExcHandlerDesc*d) {  
     d->handled = 1;  
     d->prev = xroot;  
     xroot = d;  
 }  
 void removeXHandler() {  
     if (xroot) {  
         xroot = xroot->prev;      
     }  
 }  
 ////////  
 void funcWithExc() {  
     // throw  
     throwIt(2);  
 }  
 void func1() {  
     funcWithExc();  
 }  
 void func0()   
 {  
     int a;  
     // try  
     ExcHandlerDesc xhd;  
     addXHandler(&xhd);  
     a = setjmp(xhd.jmpBuf);  
     if ((a != XR_CODE_BLOCK) && (xroot == &xhd)) {  
         removeXHandler();  
     }  
     switch(a) {  
         case XR_CODE_BLOCK:  
             func1();  
             break;  
         case XR_FINALLY_BLOCK:  
             // do cleanup  
             if (!xhd.handled)  
                 throwIt(xhd.excId);  
             break;  
         case XR_EXC_ID:  
             // handle it  
             printf("Caught %i !\n", xhd.excId);  
             // handler is removed and rethrow here is allowed  
             throwIt(2);  
             break;  
         default:  
             // unhandled!  
             xhd.handled = 0;  
             break;  
     }  
     // cleanup  
     if (a != XR_FINALLY_BLOCK)  
         longjmp(xhd.jmpBuf, XR_FINALLY_BLOCK);  
     /// end exception handling  
 }  
 int main() {  
     func0();  
     return 0;  
 }

Ubuntu 9.04 on HP Compaq 6510b

2009-05-17T03:05:00.000-07:00

Core2Duo T7250, 2GB, intel 965

LiveCD runs fine, all hardware works.
After installation everything works just fine except compiz -- it doesn't run, although 3D games like TuxRacer, Chromium etc. run smooth.

Beholder BeholdTV 507 Lirc settings

2009-03-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

/etc/lircd.conf

begin remote
name Beholder
bits 16
eps 30
aeps 100
one 0 0
zero 0 0
pre_data_bits 16
pre_data 0x8001
gap 132757
toggle_bit 0

begin codes
1 0x0002
2 0x0003
3 0x0004
4 0x0005
5 0x0006
6 0x0007
7 0x0008
8 0x0009
9 0x000A
0 0x000B
UP 0x0067
LEFT 0x0069
RIGHT 0x006A
DOWN 0x006C
MUTE 0x0071
VOL- 0x0072
VOL+ 0x0073
POWER 0x0074
RECALL 0x0081
MENU 0x008B
SLEEP 0x008E
OK 0x0160
INFO 0x0166
MODE 0x0175
TV/AV 0x0179
FUNCTION 0x0181
AUDIO 0x0188
CHANNEL+ 0x0192
CHANNEL- 0x0193
DIGITS 0x019D
end codes
end remote

Genius G-Pen 560 Tablet on Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid

2008-11-29T09:20:00.000-08:00

This tablet is detected as "Aiptek" and successfully managed by aiptek kernel driver. However, for X11 you'll need a recent wizardpen_drv (0.6.x)

1) Find in "wizardpen.c" lines with case BTN_LEFT etc. and add BTN_STYLUS, BTN_STYLUS2 and BTN_TOUCH where appropriate. Compile and install as described in the README.

2) Do not add tablet description to xorg.conf, instead comment the mouse definition in the layout section of the config and add file "99-x11-wizardpen.fdi" to "/etc/hal/fdi/policy"

---

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>

<match key="info.product" contains="Aiptek">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">wizardpen</merge>



<merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.TopX" type="string">185</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.TopY" type="string">372</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.BottomX" type="string">11811</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.BottomY" type="string">8793</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.MaxX" type="string">11811</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.MaxY" type="string">8793</merge>

<merge key="input.x11_options.TopZ" type="string">32</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.MaxZ" type="string">1023</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.BottomZ" type="string">1023</merge>

</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
---

Beholder TV tuner 507 on Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid

2008-11-29T09:18:00.000-08:00

Create new file, e.g. "beholder.conf" in /etc/modprobe.d/
with the following text:

-----

options tuner secam=d
options tda9887 secam=d
options saa7134 tuner=38 card=67 gbuffers=4
alias char-major-89-* i2c-dev
options i2c-algo-bit bit_test=1

----

Now reboot.

watch and capture TV on Linux

2007-07-11T03:15:00.000-07:00

How to capture and watch tv

Use xawtv (it doesn't lock the devices and doesn't hang, at least while I was experimenting ;) and ffmpeg.

run xawtv, switch to favourite channel.

ffmpeg -f mpegvideo -acodec mp2 -ar 48000 -ab 192 -ac 2 -ad /dev/dsp -vd /dev/video0 -vcodec mpeg2video -b 6000 -s 720x576 -aspect 4:3 test_cap.mpeg

To fix problems with SECAM:

select SECAM channel in xawtv, then

v4lctl setattr norm SECAM-DK

Here is a sample .xawtv file:

[defaults]

norm = PAL

[tv xxi]

freq = 77.240

[tdk]

freq = 111.240

[eurosport]

freq = 119.240

[nat. geo]

freq = 126.899

[discovery]

freq = 135.239

[animal planet]

freq = 143.239

[tvc]

freq = 151.239

[dziecki]

freq = 159.239

[euronews]

freq = 167.239

[hallmark]

freq = 175.239

[soviet kino]

freq = 191.239

[one.by]

freq = 215.239

[ont]

norm = SECAM

freq = 222.599

[belmuztv]

freq = 239.239

[8]

freq = 247.239

[rambler]

freq = 487.240

[disc. science]

freq = 503.240

[extreme]

freq = 551.240

[history]

freq = 567.240

[dziecki2]

freq = 575.240

[WF]

freq = 783.240

[ntv]

norm = SECAM

freq = 58.930

[lad]

norm = SECAM

freq = 84.900

[stv]

norm = SECAM

freq = 92.930

[bt]

norm = secam

freq = 182.970

[mtv]

freq = 198.510

[rtr]

norm = SECAM

freq = 207.150

[mir]

norm = SECAM

freq = 230.750

Beholder TV tuner

2007-06-04T01:11:00.000-07:00

For kernel 2.6.19.2

How to setup Beholder TV tuner

1)see README.saa7134 in linux-source/Documentation
2)modprobe -r saa7134
3)modprobe saa7134 card=67

Create /etc/modprobe.d/beholder.conf with:
options saa7134 card=67

Sound card setup:

Create /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf with
options snd-hda-intel model=6stack-dig

Use ALSA mixer, Front for general sound, Analog Mix for TV sound + Line-In for kdetv.

G-Pen 560

2007-06-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

How I made my Genius G-560 tablet working in Debian Linux 4.0 .

1) Downloaded wizardpen driver

http://www.stud.fit.vutbr.cz/~xhorak28/index.php?page=WizardPen_Driver

2) Unpacked to home directory.
3) In the make file Adjusted the directory for the directory where x.org drivers lie.
4) Did as it is written in INSTALL and README.
5) with cat and hexdump utilites I have found the proper /dev/input/event device for the tablet ;-)
6) Modified the x.org file for:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Tablet"
Driver "wizardpen"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event1" # adjust for yours device for the tablet
Option "MaxX" "11939"
Option "MaxY" "8939"
Option "MaxZ" "1023"
Option "TopZ" "32"
Option "BottomY" "8650"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen" 0 0
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Tablet" "AlwaysCore"
EndSection

7) Restarted the x.org server.