http://codelore.com/ Eat. Sleep. Breathe. Code. en Copyright 2008 Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:41:40 +1000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss One of the reasons I haven't had much time for writing here lately is that I've been working on starting a company. We're all perfectionists in this company, so there's still a bit more work to do before we actually make a release, but we've put out a video to let people know what's coming. There's a high-quality version here on blip.tv, and there's a lower-quality (but more compatible, it seems) version here on youtube. You can sign up to be informed of updates over at our website.... read the rest http://codelore.com/2008/07/gasbag.html http://codelore.com/2008/07/gasbag.html Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:41:40 +1000 This is a poor substitute for an entry, I realise, but I've just made packages of Google's OCRopus(tm) project for Ubuntu Hardy Heron. You can grab it here. No support for apt-get/aptitude, as I'm sure it will be in Hardy+1 and don't want to dilute your /etc/apt/sources.list file with entries that will rapidly become stale. Also, it's unsigned. Sorry. The md5sum of the file is 9aee9459a6dc120a5a5537b49a67db0e if you want to verify it. It has a handful of dependencies that are all in the main distribution, so you should be able to sort those out in short order. So, why? Well,... read the rest http://codelore.com/2008/05/ocropus_tm_packages_for_ubuntu.html http://codelore.com/2008/05/ocropus_tm_packages_for_ubuntu.html Thu, 08 May 2008 01:25:58 +1000 I've been trying to buy a new laptop recently, a project which I have not yet succeeded in. However, I've learnt a few things about buying a laptop that I thought might be worth sharing. Buy it from America Laptops are seriously half-price if you can get them anywhere that's not Australia. But the US is an especially good place to buy because of the Aussie dollar's relative strength. I don't know why, but laptops cost approximately half as much. Don't believe me? Compare US Lenovo's Thinkpad price and Australian Lenovo's Thinkpad X61 price. At the time of writing, the... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/11/buying_a_laptop.html http://codelore.com/2007/11/buying_a_laptop.html Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:30:43 +1000 There was a bit of a stir not so long back about PCC (or more informative wikipedia page) being imported into OpenBSD. For reasons I hope to elucidate upon in a follow-up to this article, I was interested in giving PCC a try, but there were no packages for my OS of choice: Ubuntu. So tonight, I built such a package. You can get it here, possibly for a limited time only. It's pretty basic, I've just used the extremely handy dh-make and forward-ported the patches from the FC7 package. So far I've confirmed that it can compile "Hello, World".... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/11/pcc_package_for_ubuntu_gutsy.html http://codelore.com/2007/11/pcc_package_for_ubuntu_gutsy.html Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:05:42 +1000 The solution to this one always seems to be harder to find than I remember, so I'm writing it down here. The problem is that you add some sources to apt, and then you do an update, and apt helpfully reports E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room As far as I can tell, it's complaining because it has tried to use my favourite syscall (no, really, it's awesome), mmap to load its dependency database into memory lazily, and a sanity limit has been reached. The solution, on Ubuntu, is to put the following into a file called /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00local (previously... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/10/e_dynamic_mmap_ran_out_of_room.html http://codelore.com/2007/10/e_dynamic_mmap_ran_out_of_room.html Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:44:03 +1000 I thought it had been a bit too long since we'd had an entry on codelore about code. So, here it is. A while ago, I was trying to write some code to do some image processing. The first step, to read in an image file, proved to be immensely, horribly, painfully difficult. There's a bunch of libraries around, but the problem of "please give me a 2D array of pixels" is somehow not a use-case they anticipated. I don't quite know how this dire situation came about, and I'm not that interested (though I expect one could learn a... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/10/reading_and_writing_image_file.html http://codelore.com/2007/10/reading_and_writing_image_file.html Sat, 06 Oct 2007 18:03:31 +1000 Mary just read my previous piece CV Advice and mailed me with this question: why not just advise people with a non-Anglo surname to list their visa status? Is there some reason why "Mohammed al-Rashid, 42 Waratah Way, Sydney" is more reassuring that "Mohammed al-Rashid, present location: Sydney, visa status: Australian citizen"? I must confess that that particular piece of advice didn't come from my own reading of CVs; I make a point of leaving aside such considerations of "are they legally allowed to work for me?" until my second pass, because I realise that it can be a somewhat... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/08/more_cv_advice.html http://codelore.com/2007/08/more_cv_advice.html Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:41:59 +1000 It just so happens that over the last few weeks, I've been spending crazy amounts of time editing CVs. I didn't really think I was much of an expert on the subject until sitting down and finding just how easily it comes to me to tear one of these no doubt carefully constructed documents to shreds. I guess I took a bit for granted the idea that everyone possessed some basic level of knowledge about what to write in a CV, but having thought about it some more I've realised that I only have this knowledge because of the sheer... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/08/cv_advice.html http://codelore.com/2007/08/cv_advice.html Sat, 25 Aug 2007 02:36:25 +1000 Carl, over at cysquatch, who is more types of ninja than most people are aware exist, has written about something I think is pretty important in his recent article: metrics. This is awesome because I've been trying to find a point to start talking about metrics for a while. Metrics in a project are super-important, because anything you can't measure, you don't have. Every important aspect of your project needs to have a system for tracking its performance, preferably an automated system. There's all manner of ways to think about this, but at a very basic level, if you can't... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/07/metrics.html http://codelore.com/2007/07/metrics.html Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:55:39 +1000 If you're a programmer, and you use the excellent vim editor, you really need to get into ctags (the 'exuberant-ctags' package on debian, not the normal 'ctags' one) and cscope. These are both awesome tools, but there's plenty of info on making effective use of these tools for your own builds (cscope info here, and ":help ctags" for ctags, or google around), I thought I'd share a couple of other tid-bits on how I use them which have improved my productivity. The Alias Pretty simple really, I throw this: alias t='ctags -R; find . -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cc" -o... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/06/ctags_and_cscope.html http://codelore.com/2007/06/ctags_and_cscope.html Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:01:39 +1000 Ultra quick entry for today to let you know about webcast.berkeley.edu where you can watch lectures given at UC Berkeley. If, like me, you'd just like to queue up downloads for the whole lot and watch them at your leisure, mplayer is the way to go. Fetch the file they link to from the webpage, it will contain a link that looks like this: rtsp://169.229.131.16:554//classes/s2007/ee225b/20070117.rm?start=00:00:05&end=01:14:11 Which mplayer can view and, more importantly, dump out to disk. Like so: mplayer -dumpstream 'rtsp://169.229.131.16:554//classes/s2007/ee225b/20070117.rm?start=00:00:05&end=01:14:11' You'll get a stream.dump file with the lecture in it in RealMedia format. Alternatively specifying the '-dumpfile' argument lets... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/06/online_lectures_from_uc_berkel.html http://codelore.com/2007/06/online_lectures_from_uc_berkel.html Mon, 11 Jun 2007 23:24:11 +1000 A quick one for today, sparked by recent events at work. It can pretty much be summed up in this even quicker question: do you know what your program does when it's out of resources? Out of RAM, out of disk-space, out of address-space, out of time? Computers are indeed powerful beasts these days, and there's a bunch of people who would like you to believe that they are effectively infinitely powerful, but observing your code working with limited resources, even if those limitations are artificially imposed, can tell you a lot of things you mightn't have known previously. I... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/06/on_resource_pressure.html http://codelore.com/2007/06/on_resource_pressure.html Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:27:44 +1000 The other day I found a webpage that I thought was worth sharing, which presents a set of practices you can follow to deliver defect-free software. I'm going to leave aside in-depth discussions of exactly what "defect-free" means right now, but as you may have guessed, I started researching the topic in the interests of improving the code-quality of my own team's product. I've also been thinking about the topic independently (indeed, that line of research is what led me to the page), so I'm writing this down to hopefully impart some new ideas, gather some new ones from you,... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/05/defectfree_code.html http://codelore.com/2007/05/defectfree_code.html Wed, 30 May 2007 00:49:23 +1000 I wanted to share some thoughts of mine on using a bug-tracker effectively. I started using bug-trackers about a decade ago under duress, as a way of settling an argument with a company my employer was working with. At the time, it meant that there was a more reliable TODO list than before, but we were still left with the fundamental problem which was that the TODO list wasn't being effectively managed. Over the years I've changed the way I've used bug-trackers, as my needs from them have evolved. No doubt my requirements will continue to evolve, and my usage... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/05/on_bugtracking.html http://codelore.com/2007/05/on_bugtracking.html Wed, 09 May 2007 01:21:48 +1000 A few years back, google did a recruitment drive whereby they put up a bill-board which said: {First 10 digit prime in consecutive digits of e}.com The idea being that you work out the first 10 prime digits in consecutive digits of e (as in euler's number), tack on '.com' and surf on over in your web-browser. What followed was another challenge, which appealed to the number theorists in the audience, and once that was solved, you finally got to an exam, whose successful completion would qualify you for an interview with google. I was pretty happy with my job... read the rest http://codelore.com/2007/05/first_10_digit_prime_in_consec.html http://codelore.com/2007/05/first_10_digit_prime_in_consec.html Wed, 02 May 2007 00:52:08 +1000