Jewish amulet

Our chef put an interesting thing in the doorway.

He promised to do that to the chef system administrator after successful and quick move into the new office.

“Tears in the rain”

I’ve discovered an interesting tool that allows to record a screen cast. Thus I’m able to record some educational videos of how to use the Vim editor or the GNU/Linux operating system.

Let’s see!

Unix way

If people knew the grep, sed and vim tools, millions of useful software products would have been never developped.

I’ve just noticed that it’d be good to change the string new test_suite to more stable macros BOOST_TEST_SUITE. A very simple command did everything for me after spending 5 minutes for this:

[sakhnik@incognito ~/work/mps]$ find . -name '*.cc' | \
    xargs sed -i '1,$s/(new test_suite(\([^)]*\)))/ = BOOST_TEST_SUITE(\1)/g'

That’s exciting!

Колискова

Слухаю — і ніяк не можу наслухатися, просто заворожуючий звук. Може, моя мама мені так само співала? Це те, за що я так люблю цю культуру!

Гойда-гойда-гой, ніченька іде,
Діточок малих спатоньки кладе.
Під вікном тремтить вишенька мала,
В хатку проситься, бо прийшла зима.
Гойда-гойда-гой, очка заплющи,
В сні щасливому зігрієшся ти.
Йди до хлопчика, люба вишенько
В колисочці буде тепленько.
Гойда-гойда-гой ніч прийшла до нас,
Діточкам малим спатоньки вже час.
Рости, хлопчику, з вишенькою враз,
Хай не скупиться доленька для вас

How to trust them our money?

That’s what I see sometimes:

Advertisement in the underground

Can it be possible in the epoch of context ads?

Global logic is an outsource software company.

Shrek’s new line

Do you recognize this brilliant face? It looks like there’s no limit for ukrainian pirates.

Composed characters

I’ve noticed that there’s a way of depicting stress signs in Cyrillic text, like the following: КМІТЛИ́ВИЙ, ТЯМУ́ЩИЙ, МЕТИКО́ВАНИЙ, МЕТИКУВА́ТИЙ, ПОКМІ́ТЛИВИЙ, ШТУДЕ́РНИЙ. I don’t know how they were typed. But analysis revealed that they refer to so-called composed utf-8 characters. On the way of the investigation it appeared that the XOrg allows to define a custom composition key to type complicated characters easily.

There follow few examples below:

<rctrl>=e ⇒ €

<rctrl>--- ⇒ —

<rctrl>'e ⇒ é

<rctrl>~n ⇒ ñ

Nice! So I know how to type diacrytic characters in any graphical application. Additionally, to the graphical stress sign is one of composed unicode characters, it can be inserted into an XML by its code: ́. There’re many other composing characters, which can do interesting things: w̳o̸rld.

Sorting in the StarDict

Always mixed up accents in foreign words, and it was difficult to find wrong spellings in the StarDict. So I googled the problem.

It appeared that the unix-way is to rely the comparison during sorting on the current locale. Besides the StarDict allows a user to set any language-specific collate function:

I’ve chosen the utf_unicode_ci, and now I’m astonished with the result:

Core dump

Where’re those known from the university times core dumps on Linux? How can I discover a really rear bug in the server daemon?

Well, it appeared that they’re just turned off for ordinary users in the /etc/profile:

# No core files by default
ulimit -S -c 0 > /dev/null 2>&1

Really, why a user should know about such a weird thing? Now I always reset the ulimit before starting an application being debugged.

Nostalgie on se ressemble

Good bye, salsa LA

Finally I’ve given up the LA style. The main reason is that I like much more the casino, which is more authentic. The small one is that I’ve got annoyed by its complexity and pretence. That was a hard step after a year of intensive study.

Wireless networking is easy

I always wandered how difficult would it be to use wireless network on my linux box. But all the complexity reduced to installing proper driver for the on-board

[~]$ /sbin/lspci | grep Wireless
08:04.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318
[AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

From the web it appeared to be the native bcmwl5 guided by the ndiswrapper.

Almost there! The GNOME’s NetworkManager applet showed available wired and wireless networks to be chosen.

Old good flying friends

At last I visited my friends yesterday. It seemed that we never parted.

Here’s Dima taking off:

And this is Tonya:

Meet the nspluginwrapper

The gnash was a temporary solution, because it produces inaccurate output and doesn’t play some movies. Fortunately, I’ve been advised of an alternative: to use the original Adobe’s flash player plugin by means of the nspluginwrapper.

That’s appeared to be nice!

Remote administration via GPRS

I’ve given my old laptop to the parents, having told them not to reinstall the system. I wanted they learn working with an open source system (linux). But a problem appeared: how to maintain the system? The only connection to the internet is a dial-up GPRS one.

Well, actually this is no more a problem. Let suppose my father establishes a connection to the internet, then connects to the well-defined server, which we both have SSH access to:

[smm@home ~] ssh -R 1234:localhost:22 koresha@koresha.org

Thus, any connection to the port 1234 will be forwarded to the home:22. So, now it’s my turn:

[koresha@koresha.org ~] ssh -p 1234 root@localhost

And that’s it! I have the desired root console remotely.

Cell phone and GNOME

I’ve been using the ObexFTP by today. But it appeared that this is much more easier.

There’s a VFS plugin, which enables native browsing and handling experience of data. So I just open the url obex:/// in any of nautilus applications, and vois-là! This is really cool, because I don’t need additional software or sophisticated bools.

Hello world, YouTube!

Finally, I’ve succeeded installing the gnash to play Adobe flash videos. It took me three times of recompiling it with different options to support ffmpeg. Actually, the out-of-the-box version doesn’t support playing YouTube movies, and the hint was found on pages of the Wikipedia.

Thus, when I’m able to watch videos from YouTube, I’ve tried myself to upload one. Enjoy!

Robots help us

A year has passed quickly, and I celebrate my first anniversary of salsa LA study.

I’ve understood how not to spend much time updating my software. There’re packet managers, which work in my Fedora 7 just well. So I’ve stopped compiling software from sources.

But they don’t updated the Vim as quickly as I want. So recently I set up the aap build system. And now to update my Vim I just type:

$ aap update; sudo aap install

And that’s it! It’s fascinating, isn’t it?

Setting up distcc with BBv2

I believe that compilers must do much work for me, that’s why I prefer metaprogramming techniques. Boost::spirit, boost::mpl make my code very resource demanding during the compilation process. But it’s worth indeed.

To make builds faster, I’ve just installed and set up so called distcc — the distributed C/C++ compiler. The result is just exciting!

To use the compiler with the boost build system, I just modified a line in the user-config.jam:

using gcc : : distcc g++ ;

Thats all I’ve done to get ten times faster build!