Archive for the 'Life' Category

Noteworthy video driver performance article

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Well, these days most news sites just publish the press releases of product announcements. Or re-tweet news from other sites. Personally I find really authentic, journalistic work such as the recent Tom’s Hardware video driver, 2D blitting vs. Windows 7 review particularly outstanding. Heck, they even wrote their own performance metric test utility for it!

LLVM clang support in T2 SDE (Linux)

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

With T2 r35579, I just added the required build system, configuration and glue to let the T2 SDE (System Development Environment) utilize clang and clang++ as the default C and C++ compiler. And I just successfully compiled the first packages on a x86-64/T2/Linux test build:

-rw-r–r– 1 root root 3949 Feb 16 15:41 9-atop.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 21444 Feb 16 15:45 9-libelf.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 55854 Feb 16 15:45 9-fontconfig.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 3827 Feb 16 15:45 9-renderproto.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 34883 Feb 16 15:46 9-libxext.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 12765 Feb 16 15:46 9-libice.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 22070 Feb 16 15:46 9-libsm.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 31354 Feb 16 15:47 9-libxt.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 15357 Feb 16 15:47 9-libxmu.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 15243 Feb 16 15:47 9-libxpm.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 12157 Feb 16 15:48 9-libxrender.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 13854 Feb 16 15:48 9-libxft.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 13782 Feb 16 15:48 9-libxkbfile.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 135931 Feb 16 16:00 9-openssh.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 344112 Feb 16 16:05 9-openssl.log
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 17024 Feb 16 16:06 9-screen.log

The resulting ssh and screen even worked as expected (so far, anyway).

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ExactScan 2.9, high-speed^9

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

ExactCODE just released another major ExactScan product family update: the new version 2.9 brings vast improvements all over the App. Most notably are excessive image processing performance improvements. For weeks we did nothing else but revisit our algorithms and fine tuned line of code that stood out.

With years of solid foundation code at ExactCODE, ExactScan already was pretty solid. However, even we received reports about issues. So likewise, for months, we where tracking every single stability issue brought to our attention. All of this contributes to making the version 2.9 the most performing and stable release, ever.

It even comes with new, built-in scanner drivers. For example the new Avision D2 models are now all supported, e.g. the AV220D2+, AV320D2+, and various other (yet unreleased) models, even various other vendors.

Of course work continues on the next planed updated, 2.10. For this next, of course free, update we even have another major surprise for you. Stay tuned, it’s just some weeks of QA away.

Read more: ExactScan homepage

Darn, how I hate this GNU/auto* junk

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Day, life could be so great:

!> ./configure: line 14867: syntax error near unexpected token `$SDL_VERSION,’
!> ./configure: line 14867: `AM_PATH_SDL($SDL_VERSION,’

Damnit.

To quote David S. Miller:

“whirrr, whirrr, whirrrrrrrrr…” :-)

That’s the sound my brain makes when I’m working on low-level sparc code.

Well, it’s also the sound my brain makes when I look at this macros, of macros of generated and M4 processed script fluff. Just that low-level OS, SPARC, etc. code is certainly more entertaining, educating than this useless piece of sh*t script.

Update: And just because your compiler is accidentally not named “gcc”, or “cc”, you end up with gibberish like:

libtool –silent –mode=compile clang …
libtool: compile: unable to infer tagged configuration
libtool: compile: specify a tag with `–tag’

Using localedef to add more supported locales

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Your system keeps telling you a locale is not supported by your system’s C library? For example:

svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US.UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct

or:

firefox: (process:4376): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
Using the fallback ‘C’ locale.

or even while compiling software, such as:

setlocale(LC_CTYPE,”en_US.UTF-8″) failed!
make: *** [extra/locale/c8tables.h] Error 1

You can use “localedef” to add them to the cache from the verbose source definitions:

localedef -i en_US -c -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

Update: Note to self:

iconv -f windows-1252 -t utf-8 in.txt > out.txt

The progress of LLVM

Friday, February 5th, 2010

…, Clang is now self-hosting! Congratulation to the LLVM and Clang team around Chris Lattner.

Guess that’s the days where I should start making clang a system compiler option in T2, and leave GCC and it’s C days of the ’80s behind :-)!

The iPad videos

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

The best of Steve Ballmer

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

However, Steve Jobs is amazing, too:

The Apple iPad

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Well, the iSlate name rumor sounded really strange. iTablet? Oh well. iPad indeed makes a little more sense.

However, honestly, the “iPad” is not really what I’ve been waiting for. Having one device for a job is so from the 90th - where several manufactures wanted to sell a device per job: one for calculation, one for phoning, one for your music, etc. pp. Obviously that did not turn out to be accepted too well. The iPhone was such as success because it combine so many required things in one device: phone, email, photo, web, music.

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1201T - The first Asus Eee PC with AMD CPU !!!

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Honestly I saw a lot coming, but not Asus actually, finally switching to something more useful than the serve limited Intel Atom any time soon.

The Eee PC 1201T apparently comes with all the goods the AMD platform brings:

  • a little more performance (the Neo X2 would bring way more)
  • reasonable graphic performance
  • digital video, HDMI, output
  • higher resolution screen (1366 x 768), compared the standard NetBook one where not even all Windows dialogs fit onto (1024 x 600)

Let’s praise Asus for this move, and recommend it to all your Netbook-longing aunt Tillis and neighbor’s kids around!