Actualy it has been updated, several times, with a few minor enhancements etc. I've just haven't bumped the version number, nor updated the webpage. lazy me. I also have a new version the work, with tabs etc; but that needs more work! http://oomz.net/tabs.mov
Well, I'm GLterm author, and AFAIK GLterm is perfectly ANSI, which is different to being a DOS "ANSI". I've had plenty of users using iirc ANSI ascii "art", MUD players using GLterm with their ANSI art as well. Gee I've been sent megabytes of sometime pretty borderline "films" to ensure they work.
My own suggestion is to get a lame DOS box, old laptop or something. I'll probably be cheaper than a GLterm registration:D
My wall/screen is already white (and slightly textured) so at night, really, it's near perfection. The Sony Thing would make it work in plain daylight, which in truth is the only problem of projectors really. but somehow having a black wall doesn't appeal that much to me.
When sony makes windows with a opaque/clear liquid cristal layer for InstantDark(TM) Technology, I get these !
As long as they don't sell that screen material for the same price as a plasma TV of the same size, of course.
Just installed a Sanyo Z2 16x9 projector at home, and despite the obvious dailight/sunlight issues, it's absolutely incredible to have a 3m x 2m high quality picture!
I've been thinking about using the GPU for audio DSP work for some time, even got to a point where I could transform some signal by "rendering" it into a texture (in a simple way, I could mix two sounds using the alpha as factor). The problem is that these cards are made to be "write only" and that basicaly fetching back anything from them is *very* slow, which makes them totaly useless for the purpose, since you *kmow* the results are there, but you can't fetch them in an usefull/fast maneer. I wonder if it's deliberate, to sell the "pro" cards they use for the rendering farms
Isn't that calling for trouble to get them near earth "this fall" ?
The amount doesn't matters, it's the stickinness
on
Tuning Linux VM swapping
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I dont mind the kernel swapping out "old" stuff to grow a huge disk cache. Really, thats OK, it makes things faster for disk hungry processes allright.
However, what I mind is the fact that the pages that are swapped out STAY there! Why not aging the disk cache the same way the RAM pages are aged ? On an idle machine, the disk cache would gradualy decay and be replaced by the pages back from the swap, and the machine would be all responsive again.
It means that if the user leaves for lunch and a cron wants to eat all the disk, with some luck, when the user gets back, his machine is as responsive as it was when he left.
I have a laptop with 192Mb of ram, I always hate when 2/3 of the ram is "free" while it takes 10 seconds for the kmail window to move to the front. Even if the machine has been idle for hours.
I even regularly do a "swapoff -a;swapon" to claim back the cache!
The iGesture tested in that article is *nothing* compared to the full keyboard/mouse; the TouchStream LP. I have been using the keyboard/mouse combo for 9 months, and everyday I'm still amazed at what it can do.
The list of amazing stuff is too long to even quote here. A few would be: + amazing way if editing text, especialy the left-hand cursor gestures to move/select text + right hand "wheel" scrolling that also work as an *horizontal* wheel + configurable "programmers keypad" that gives you like an extra shift to type programming symbols without moving your hand to reach the [{}]\!= etc etc + touch thumb+pinky of the right hand *anywhere* and that does Return. I configured left hand thumb+pinky to do TAB. Imagine that for programing, it's awesome : no more reaching for those keys, they are always underneath your hands. + "auto capslock" when you type a uppercase constant for example, it will disengeage the capslock automagicaly when you have finished typing the word. + The general gestures that had been very carefuly tought of. + The config utilities, where you can reconfigure *everything*. That thing is amazingly powerful + They have a SDK to play with the "raw" events digested by the sensors.
It's true the learning curve is hard, but after a month or so you realise that it was well worth the effort!
Every french person knows that before puberty! What to discover next, "ice cube is a red bordeaux is a bad idea" ? or "people who put fizzy water in their chablis should be shot" ?
1. apt-get install kernel-image-2.4 2. pick a 2.4 package optimised for your architecture and install it 3. add the initrd=/initrd.img line to your lilo.conf as advised during the upgrade process
4. Reboot, and, well, never reboot again.
I had a firewall/laptop with an uptime of 400+days, last month since I knew the uptime would be ruined anyway, I decided to upgrade the kernel to the "latest" Stable one and reboot for another year or so.
The thing is, my poor faithful laptop (P1 @ 166, 32Mb) just had become incompatible with the latest 2.4.18 for some reason (a "fix" rendered that IDE controller incompatible).
So, the machine panicked on reboot, and I was left with an unbootable machine, because my "old" working kernel had had it's module overridden somehow by the dist-upgrade.
If you are cursed with VIA USB 1.1 controlers (UHCI) having slow 2.0 device that will talk to the EHCI par of the controler makes LOTS of sense. The EHCI/OHCI are infinitely smarter and have a much lesser impact on the PCI than UHCI!
So I'd be happy to find a USB 2.0 mouse, if I had a VIA chipset!
Apple shipped MiniDIN serial ports for about 20 years before they ditched them with the iMac Even better, the later generation of it even had a +5V, making it absolutly perfect for embedded stuff.
Why the pcs still carry DB9s for serial, I just don't kow!
How to kill bayesian filters in pne stupid post
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
Fabulous, you just rendered the only working spam filters (bayesian based) obsolete by posting this. Now THAT was clever wasn't it?
My 2 * 1.42 powermac has an EHCI controler (whatever that is called USB 2, 2.5 etc). All the "FW800" powermacs have, I guess apple just coud'nt get supplies of the old OHCI ones anymore.
It is disabled by default by OpenFirmware, but can be kicked into life if you use linux and work just fine then.
Start using stone to build stupid houses, that helps greatly to keep the thing together a little further than the 10 years mark.
I'm always amazed when I go to SF or any other town in the US at the fact houses are made of... WOOD! In european terms, thats called a "hut", not a "house".
And wow, a "castle" that is 400 years old is not OLD in "europe", it's a young upstart. Most plain houses in old quarters of european cities have parts that were VERY OLD... 400 years ago.
That was a very enjoyable article. I already bookmarked 3 of the hardware reference he gives. Like those small mobos that *I never heard of before* and the super cheap pcmcia 802.11b (bought one this week for £29!) you could virtualy wireless *anything* in your place (or behond). That tiny distro he references also looks very interesting. I run a woody on a P1/133/32Mb laptop at the moment, and it seems that distro could run on your wristwatch!
THATS proper hacking, the guy got my standing ovation. Wish/. had more of the same.
Yeah, with an OpenGL that lacks half the extensions to exploit the features of those cards. Lovely.
Those 'new' (ie ATI 7500+, NVidia 4MX+) cards are just expensive radiators in macs. Oh sure, you pay twice the price for them due to the stupid ADC connectors and/or a custom firmware, and you get half the features for it.
And, yeah, I have macs, and I have those graphic cards. I even flashed an ATI 8500 for my G4, however, if you have an ADC display, you are screwed.
Sure, buy a crap card (LE means it didn't pass the "non LE" test, it's underclocked). Then flash it with an ATI firmware. FYI the GPU & RAM clock speed are... in the firmware.
That means his card is "overclocked" an probably instable as well, else they wouldn't sell it a LE.
Then, test some drivers, and make a flame report about it, and then get it posted on/.
So, instead of encouraring the company to make competitive drivers (binary, not binary, who cares: we want drivers THIS YEAR) lets do the contrary and flame them.
All crucial userland APIs on OSX are written with at least a plain C API. They might be C++ inside (CoreFoundation, CodeAudio, MIDIServices) but they still are presenting C APIs to the OS.
The IOKit is embedded C++ (no multiple inheritance etc). The BSD stuff is plain C of course.
Carbon is a set of plain C APIs. Lots of stuff inside is C++, but well, the APIs published as C.
Now there is cocoa. Objective-C + Cocoa is a semi interpreted language. Calling Cocoa "Native" is like calling Java bytecode "native". Cocoa is not JUST Objective C. Objective-C describes the syntax changes and grammar relative to old pre iso99 C, Cocoa is a runtime it sits on plus a class library. Runtime that is MUCH larger than a C++ runtime, it has to analyze and runtime-link lots of stuff to get working.
So, yeah, writing apps in Cocoa is easier (if you don't want to stray) however the result is also quite slower than the same equivalent statically linked C/C++
Cocoa is strikingly similar to Qt -the messaging system is a large strength in both-. We also know that "lets send messages all around" approach leads extremely quickly to unmaintainable code, in both Qt, and Cocoa.
There is no compiler available that can optimize away the bloat the stl generates. Code bloat might not be a problem memory wise, but it'll have an impact on your instruction cache anyway.
Debugging usualy involves rewritting the bit of code without the STL so you can actualy understand the execution path.
If you, by mistake, fall into the STL itself with a debugger, you usualy stay there for the next 10 minutes trying to step out of it.
Usualy teaches non-experienced programmers to write stupid code, like passing objects via value instead of references "because the compiler will optimize it away" Or making a vector for 5 bytes "so I can't go out of bounds because the operator [] checks it for me". Or using hash tables for 10 values maximum "because hashes are fast!", etc etc. makes for lazy bastards you'll have to Zap +4. Oh and they swear recursion is cool, too. Stack space is infinite after all.
char *data; memcpy(data, someotherdata, somesize); "Why it crashes, my data is declared!"
Of course, the zealots will tell you the contrary, but heh, I've been mopping behind that kind of 'programmer' all fresh from school and full of STL crap for a few years.
I always tought the lawyers at apple were BAD. but that story is really the cherry on the cake.
Before lawyers ruled apple, they KNEW the 12 years old useless kid MIGHT become a professional developer and contribute to the apple world.
I know first hand, I WAS one of those. I received free copies of 'confidential' documentations, free access to some developer resources, a bunch of encouragment, LOTS of patience and ultimately a few friendship with some apple people that date back like.. 20 years now!
But then, I spent the last 20 years as a die-hard mac developer, writing many shelf software. so it DID pay to humor me when I was a useless and fuckingly curious kid.
And now, the morronic lawyers decide to stick by their fucking law books and ENFORCE that to everyone with the sense to realize that age has very little importance.
Slashdot Mirror
Actualy it has been updated, several times, with a few minor enhancements etc. I've just haven't bumped the version number, nor updated the webpage. lazy me.
I also have a new version the work, with tabs etc; but that needs more work!
http://oomz.net/tabs.mov
Well, I'm GLterm author, and AFAIK GLterm is perfectly ANSI, which is different to being a DOS "ANSI".
:D
I've had plenty of users using iirc ANSI ascii "art", MUD players using GLterm with their ANSI art as well. Gee I've been sent megabytes of sometime pretty borderline "films" to ensure they work.
My own suggestion is to get a lame DOS box, old laptop or something. I'll probably be cheaper than a GLterm registration
My wall/screen is already white (and slightly textured) so at night, really, it's near perfection. The Sony Thing would make it work in plain daylight, which in truth is the only problem of projectors really. but somehow having a black wall doesn't appeal that much to me.
When sony makes windows with a opaque/clear liquid cristal layer for InstantDark(TM) Technology, I get these !
As long as they don't sell that screen material for the same price as a plasma TV of the same size, of course.
Just installed a Sanyo Z2 16x9 projector at home, and despite the obvious dailight/sunlight issues, it's absolutely incredible to have a 3m x 2m high quality picture!
I've been thinking about using the GPU for audio DSP work for some time, even got to a point where I could transform some signal by "rendering" it into a texture (in a simple way, I could mix two sounds using the alpha as factor).
The problem is that these cards are made to be "write only" and that basicaly fetching back anything from them is *very* slow, which makes them totaly useless for the purpose, since you *kmow* the results are there, but you can't fetch them in an usefull/fast maneer.
I wonder if it's deliberate, to sell the "pro" cards they use for the rendering farms
Isn't that calling for trouble to get them near earth "this fall" ?
I dont mind the kernel swapping out "old" stuff to grow a huge disk cache. Really, thats OK, it makes things faster for disk hungry processes allright.
However, what I mind is the fact that the pages that are swapped out STAY there!
Why not aging the disk cache the same way the RAM pages are aged ? On an idle machine, the disk cache would gradualy decay and be replaced by the pages back from the swap, and the machine would be all responsive again.
It means that if the user leaves for lunch and a cron wants to eat all the disk, with some luck, when the user gets back, his machine is as responsive as it was when he left.
I have a laptop with 192Mb of ram, I always hate when 2/3 of the ram is "free" while it takes 10 seconds for the kmail window to move to the front. Even if the machine has been idle for hours.
I even regularly do a "swapoff -a;swapon" to claim back the cache!
The iGesture tested in that article is *nothing* compared to the full keyboard/mouse; the TouchStream LP.
I have been using the keyboard/mouse combo for 9 months, and everyday I'm still amazed at what it can do.
The list of amazing stuff is too long to even quote here. A few would be:
+ amazing way if editing text, especialy the left-hand cursor gestures to move/select text
+ right hand "wheel" scrolling that also work as an *horizontal* wheel
+ configurable "programmers keypad" that gives you like an extra shift to type programming symbols without moving your hand to reach the [{}]\!= etc etc
+ touch thumb+pinky of the right hand *anywhere* and that does Return. I configured left hand thumb+pinky to do TAB. Imagine that for programing, it's awesome : no more reaching for those keys, they are always underneath your hands.
+ "auto capslock" when you type a uppercase constant for example, it will disengeage the capslock automagicaly when you have finished typing the word.
+ The general gestures that had been very carefuly tought of.
+ The config utilities, where you can reconfigure *everything*. That thing is amazingly powerful
+ They have a SDK to play with the "raw" events digested by the sensors.
It's true the learning curve is hard, but after a month or so you realise that it was well worth the effort!
Every french person knows that before puberty! What to discover next, "ice cube is a red bordeaux is a bad idea" ? or "people who put fizzy water in their chablis should be shot" ?
1. apt-get install kernel-image-2.4
2. pick a 2.4 package optimised for your architecture and install it
3. add the initrd=/initrd.img line to your lilo.conf as advised during the upgrade process
4. Reboot, and, well, never reboot again.
I had a firewall/laptop with an uptime of 400+days, last month since I knew the uptime would be ruined anyway, I decided to upgrade the kernel to the "latest" Stable one and reboot for another year or so.
The thing is, my poor faithful laptop (P1 @ 166, 32Mb) just had become incompatible with the latest 2.4.18 for some reason (a "fix" rendered that IDE controller incompatible).
So, the machine panicked on reboot, and I was left with an unbootable machine, because my "old" working kernel had had it's module overridden somehow by the dist-upgrade.
"doh"
If you are cursed with VIA USB 1.1 controlers (UHCI) having slow 2.0 device that will talk to the EHCI par of the controler makes LOTS of sense. The EHCI/OHCI are infinitely smarter and have a much lesser impact on the PCI than UHCI!
So I'd be happy to find a USB 2.0 mouse, if I had a VIA chipset!
I've got a Fingerworks TouchStream LP for about a month now. Best $300 I ever blew ! Fingerworks
The learning curve is step, but geez, once you get going you feel like a mix of a jedi knight and tom cruise in Minority Report!
Apple shipped MiniDIN serial ports for about 20 years before they ditched them with the iMac
Even better, the later generation of it even had a +5V, making it absolutly perfect for embedded stuff.
Why the pcs still carry DB9s for serial, I just don't kow!
Fabulous, you just rendered the only working spam filters (bayesian based) obsolete by posting this. Now THAT was clever wasn't it?
My 2 * 1.42 powermac has an EHCI controler (whatever that is called USB 2, 2.5 etc). All the "FW800" powermacs have, I guess apple just coud'nt get supplies of the old OHCI ones anymore.
It is disabled by default by OpenFirmware, but can be kicked into life if you use linux and work just fine then.
1280x768 on 29" ? what a joke!
Only good thing I can think of is that if you have a dead pixel you can replace it yourself with a screwdriver, while drunk!
My Apple Cinema Display 23" 'native' (non stretched) is 1920x1200; now thats desktop real estate.
So that their banner look like... stupid banners!
Now, where is the class action suit against stroboscope ones ?
Start using stone to build stupid houses, that helps greatly to keep the thing together a little further than the 10 years mark.
I'm always amazed when I go to SF or any other town in the US at the fact houses are made of... WOOD!
In european terms, thats called a "hut", not a "house".
And wow, a "castle" that is 400 years old is not OLD in "europe", it's a young upstart. Most plain houses in old quarters of european cities have parts that were VERY OLD... 400 years ago.
Steves invades two of the G7 council's countries, there you go, G5!
Might be much easier than getting it from Motorola, too!
That was a very enjoyable article. I already bookmarked 3 of the hardware reference he gives. Like those small mobos that *I never heard of before* and the super cheap pcmcia 802.11b (bought one this week for £29!) you could virtualy wireless *anything* in your place (or behond). That tiny distro he references also looks very interesting. I run a woody on a P1/133/32Mb laptop at the moment, and it seems that distro could run on your wristwatch!
/. had more of the same.
THATS proper hacking, the guy got my standing ovation. Wish
Huhu
Yeah, with an OpenGL that lacks half the extensions to exploit the features of those cards. Lovely.
Those 'new' (ie ATI 7500+, NVidia 4MX+) cards are just expensive radiators in macs. Oh sure, you pay twice the price for them due to the stupid ADC connectors and/or a custom firmware, and you get half the features for it.
And, yeah, I have macs, and I have those graphic cards. I even flashed an ATI 8500 for my G4, however, if you have an ADC display, you are screwed.
Sure, buy a crap card (LE means it didn't pass the "non LE" test, it's underclocked).
/.
Then flash it with an ATI firmware. FYI the GPU & RAM clock speed are... in the firmware.
That means his card is "overclocked" an probably instable as well, else they wouldn't sell it a LE.
Then, test some drivers, and make a flame report about it, and then get it posted on
So, instead of encouraring the company to make competitive drivers (binary, not binary, who cares: we want drivers THIS YEAR) lets do the contrary and flame them.
All crucial userland APIs on OSX are written with at least a plain C API. They might be C++ inside (CoreFoundation, CodeAudio, MIDIServices) but they still are presenting C APIs to the OS.
The IOKit is embedded C++ (no multiple inheritance etc). The BSD stuff is plain C of course.
Carbon is a set of plain C APIs. Lots of stuff inside is C++, but well, the APIs published as C.
Now there is cocoa. Objective-C + Cocoa is a semi interpreted language. Calling Cocoa "Native" is like calling Java bytecode "native". Cocoa is not JUST Objective C. Objective-C describes the syntax changes and grammar relative to old pre iso99 C, Cocoa is a runtime it sits on plus a class library. Runtime that is MUCH larger than a C++ runtime, it has to analyze and runtime-link lots of stuff to get working.
So, yeah, writing apps in Cocoa is easier (if you don't want to stray) however the result is also quite slower than the same equivalent statically linked C/C++
Cocoa is strikingly similar to Qt -the messaging system is a large strength in both-. We also know that "lets send messages all around" approach leads extremely quickly to unmaintainable code, in both Qt, and Cocoa.
There is no compiler available that can optimize away the bloat the stl generates. Code bloat might not be a problem memory wise, but it'll have an impact on your instruction cache anyway.
Debugging usualy involves rewritting the bit of code without the STL so you can actualy understand the execution path.
If you, by mistake, fall into the STL itself with a debugger, you usualy stay there for the next 10 minutes trying to step out of it.
Usualy teaches non-experienced programmers to write stupid code, like passing objects via value instead of references "because the compiler will optimize it away" Or making a vector for 5 bytes "so I can't go out of bounds because the operator [] checks it for me". Or using hash tables for 10 values maximum "because hashes are fast!", etc etc. makes for lazy bastards you'll have to Zap +4. Oh and they swear recursion is cool, too. Stack space is infinite after all.
char *data;
memcpy(data, someotherdata, somesize);
"Why it crashes, my data is declared!"
Of course, the zealots will tell you the contrary, but heh, I've been mopping behind that kind of 'programmer' all fresh from school and full of STL crap for a few years.
I always tought the lawyers at apple were BAD. but that story is really the cherry on the cake.
Before lawyers ruled apple, they KNEW the 12 years old useless kid MIGHT become a professional developer and contribute to the apple world.
I know first hand, I WAS one of those. I received free copies of 'confidential' documentations, free access to some developer resources, a bunch of encouragment, LOTS of patience and ultimately a few friendship with some apple people that date back like.. 20 years now!
But then, I spent the last 20 years as a die-hard mac developer, writing many shelf software. so it DID pay to humor me when I was a useless and fuckingly curious kid.
And now, the morronic lawyers decide to stick by their fucking law books and ENFORCE that to everyone with the sense to realize that age has very little importance.
Burn them!