Archive for category Software
Sun Studio 11 (Compilers/Developer Suite) is now free
Posted by stany in Solaris, Tech. Support on 03/10/2006
Alan Coopersmith (whom I’ve never met, yet whom I respect about as much as I respect Casper Dik) mentions that Sun Studio 11 is now free.
Download link is here.
Specifications – Basically Solaris 8 or newer on Solaris SPARC or x86. There is mention of Linux (RH 4 or Suse 9) on the sysreq page too, but I am kind of both disinterested by Leenuks, and somewhat puzzled, as RH 4 is circa 1997 and Sun folks probably mean Fedora 4. Or something.
Here Alan is doing some comparisons between Sun cc and gcc for compiling the X subsystem for Solaris.
I own single license for Sun Studio 6, which I picked up at a dot.com bancropcy auction (it was a box with never registered license codes) for 100 CAD. As part of a deal I got about half a cubic meter of Cisco propoganda for Cisco 25xx routers, but it was worth it.
Owing a license for a Sun’s C compiler for a while made me the coolest kid on the block, as I could compile 64 bit versions of IPF (gcc at the time stood in the corner and nerviously smoked whenever it had to compile 64 bit kernel modules)
Floating Point numbers Part I
Posted by stany in Mathematics, Software on 03/02/2006
Here is an easy example to see if your mathematical software deals with floating point correctly.
You want to divide two thirds by five sixths. So you use GNU bc
stany@Gilva:~[11:13 PM]$ echo "(2/3) / (5/6)" | bc -l .79999999999999999999 stany@Gilva:~[11:14 PM]$
Matlab, which is arguably better at math then bc is, gives me this:
EDU>> (2/3) / (5/6)
ans =
0.8000
EDU>>
2*6 / 3*5 = 12/15 = 4/5 = 0.8 so Matlab is correct, and bc is wrong.
Checking for mail and DNS problems
Posted by stany in Rant!, Software, Tech. Support on 02/27/2006
Dave’s recent arcicle about problems with Mail.app reminded me that sometimes mail (and DNS) problems occure on the sending end, and some time on the receiving.
So I’ld like to take this opportunity to plug DNS Report, which is a really handy tool for rooting out problems with DNS and mail configs (or at least checking if DNS and mail are configured properly).
Here are a couple of examples:
DNS and mail config for theconsultant.net
DNS and mail config for sherman.ca
I am not linking to my own domain, as it shows so much red, that I am embarrassed.
P.S. Dave, you might want to at least fix mail to postmaster. Thankfully stoopid folks from rfcignorant.org picked up their toys and left the sandbox. I hope so did the sheeple that used rfcignorant.org RBL.
Ok, rant time…
RBLs are a great idea in theory, folks. Sure, I know Dave, we have similar ideas about what e-mail is useless, so if he doesn’t like e-mail from Sonya Abacha, most likely I’d not want to read it either. However, what happened to every bloody RBL out there is that the moment it got sufficiently big, folks who created it (and they tend to be loudmouthed, obnoxious and highly opinionated folks, kind of like me) decide that they need to force their opinions on to others.
They tell the rest of the world that no, they are not forcing their opinion onto others, and that people are free not to use their RBL system. Vaild opinion. But how many e-mail systems come with RBLs enabled by default, and how many people heard that “Gee, RBLs are great, they stop spam cold!”, an d enabled it, only to start losing valid mail?
In particular I had an axe to grind with rfcignorant.org. I had a /27 sub-allocated and routed to me from achilles.net. At one point Achilles had a problem with spam to postmaster (that by RFC must exist and must be read by humans), that Andrew Hutton started replying to all postmaster mails with auto-reply with a phone number and e-mail address that was read.
Some dumbass reported achilles.net to rfcignorant because this was “against the internet rules”.
Another dumbass at RFCignorant promptly added entire Achilless netblock to their RBL.
And for the next 2 years chaos ensued – Andrew Hutton instead of giving out an e-mail addy that was actually read promptly started to /dev/null all spam coming to postmaster, generating illusion of postmaster being a valid e-mail address, I had problems with my own e-mail (that I hosted on DSL link from achilless, under a different domain name, and which was technically a totally separate organization just buying inet access from achilless) because entire Achilless IP space was blacklisted, attempts to get de-listed from the RBL proved to be futile, because dumbass at rfcignorant would add, but never remove entries, etc.
I learned about it when some of my e-mails replying to a mailing list question (“I am not subscribed, so please CC me on any replies”) got bounced with apropriate reply.
People that really got screwed on the deal were the rest of the interweb, I feel, as those who used rfcignorant RBL missed out on my insightful, witty e-mail commentary. Or something like that.
Oh well. That’s all water over the bridge now….
On the other hand, I have no moral qualms about bouncing all mail from Korea, or all mail from hotmail.com… Talk about double standards….
iLife 06 and G3 processor and rant about Pacifist.app
After cobbling together an iBook (long story, but iBook in question is 600Mhz G3 with 100Mhz bus (as opposed to 600Mhz with 66Mhz bus that would make it much closer to molasses) 40 gig HD and combo drive), and throwing a clean install of 10.4.5 onto it today, I proceeded to turn it into a master disk image.
Every once in a blue moon I create an up to date install of OS with all the apps, system configured how I like it, accounts set up as I like them, and then use asr to back them onto an external hard drive. Then, in event I need to quickly roll out a system or recover from disaster I’d just need to asr the image back.
Two words about asr. Personally, I love asr. It can act as a poor man’s backup tool to create an identical bootable disk on a different drive (especially useful if you have some sort of bootable CD/DVD from which you can boot, as then asr would use fast block copy to copy data from disk to disk). Coincidentially, vast majority of macs (Let’s not talk about x86 ones. I am not yet sure I like them) supports firewire disk target mode. asr is also useful in creating and restoring from disk images.
Sadly for things like recovery disk I tend to use junky drives, as it’s not really a priority, just convinience, and coincidentially there is no funding for it. A disk with my last image died, so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity, as I were setting up a new system from scratch, with no baggage of software archeologies.
When I put in iLife 06 DVD into iBook and attempted to install it, I were told that iLife 06 only works with G4 and up processors.
So not being deferred, I’ve used Pacifist (See rant about Pacifist at the bottom) to extract iMovie package into a folder, to see what it is that Apple is trying to do on me.
I’ve talked about Fat files and lipo earlier, in case you feel like a review.
So a quick check with lipo confirmed what Apple is saying…. the compiled the binary for G4 and x86 processors only, obsoleting G3s. *sigh* First the cut off was presence of Firewire, then with iWork 05 (which was like 650 megs, yet shipped on DVD) it was presence of DVD, but now it’s G4 and up. I got to give a credit to the marketing/built in obsolescence people at Apple – they are good!
stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$ lipo -detailed_info iMovie\ HD
Fat header in: iMovie HD
fat_magic 0xcafebabe
nfat_arch 2
architecture i386
cputype CPU_TYPE_I386
cpusubtype CPU_SUBTYPE_I386_ALL
offset 4096
size 3217924
align 2^12 (4096)
architecture ppc7400
cputype CPU_TYPE_POWERPC
cpusubtype CPU_SUBTYPE_POWERPC_7400
offset 3223552
size 3327624
align 2^12 (4096)
stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$
7400 is, of course, G4.
Attempts to run it generate ldynamic linker errors:
stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$ ./iMovie\ HD dyld: incompatible cpu-subtype Trace/BPT trap stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:54 AM]$
Now a quick rant about Pacifist.
Dear Charles Srstka.
I like Pacifist. I’ve not registered it using a pirated serial, and see 15 second time out each time I start it. One of these days I’ll even send you some money to support your effort (which seem to have been stalled since 2004). But, can you give me an answer to one question: Why the heck does Pacifist ask for administrator password each time one attempts to extract a file out of a package? Shouldn’t it only do that if one doesn’t have write permissions to the folder one is extracting files into? If I have read/write rights to files in package and to Desktop onto which I want to extract package’s contents, why does Pacifist want my password? Isn’t that getting users used to Pavlovian response of typing in admin password every time there is a prompt on screen, regardless of the need?
Please, think of the users, esp in view of the recent series of Mac OS worms that also ask for admin passwords.
Damn, if you fix it to actually check (and tell user why) if it needs admin password, and e-mail me about it, I’ll buy a license for Pacifist.
Little Annoyances: Mail.app
1) Next unread message.
I prefer to use a plain list view for a mailbox, and have to open a message to view it.
Remember Eudora? I used to use Eudora, and sometimes think I still should. It has this nice feature where you hit the spacebar, causing the current message to page down web-page style. When you reach the end hit that spacebar again and you jump to the next unread message in that mailbox. Nice, eh?
That does not work in Mail.
So, how about a key command to do that? Nope, not available either.
2) Invalid Email addresses.
What is so hard about telling me you can not send the email because I was too stupid to enter in a proper email address? Mail will happily harass you about opening too many windows at once.. so why not invalid email addresses?\
Yeah, I caught myself BCC’ing several people, and some of them were not actual email addresses, just the domain name. Took me way too long to figure out too!
An Applescript for playing DVD’s off of your local drive
Joshua, now 2 and a half, loves to watch his Thomas the Tank Engine movies. I want to keep him away from the original media.. so the contents of the DVD is now on my drive.
Being irritated at the number of clicks I had to go through to play it, I found a script that would make things simple.
Thanks to the folks on the forums at applescript.net who also wanted to do this!.
Anyhow, here’s the script:
set prefix to “ExternalHD:”
set suffix to “:VIDEO_TS:”
set choice to “”
tell application “Finder”
set movies to the name of every item of alias prefix
set choice to (choose from list movies with prompt “Pick a movie to watch”)
set themovie to ((prefix & choice & suffix) as alias)
end telltell application “DVD Player”
activate
open dvd video folder themovie
set viewer full screen to true
play dvd
end tell
To use it you will need to edit the “ExternalHD:” to match wherever your movies are.
JFLAP
Posted by stany in Mathematics, Software on 12/13/2005
Mental note: If for some really bizzare reason I might need to draw lines pointing at circles, or try to figure out if
S -> aSb|aS|ε actually matches L={a^ib^j| i>=j}, I will try to solve the problem by hand first. However, in event I am really lazy, and forgot how to convert an NFA to DFA or actually want to trace the stack of a PDA matching a CFG, I will download JFLAP and use it.
Now, why did I discover this thing after I wrote my final exam? So that I could learn how to do it by hand, that’s why. It would have rocked my world about 3 months ago, but I probably would have failed the exams, relaying on it to do everything for me.
Oh, and notation it uses for CFG/PDA is somewhat different from one used in Sipser (Which is a damn fine book, BTW. Unlike Lawson it actually covers CFLs.).
P.S Mark Lawson actually makes reasonably good notes available on his page about basic automata. It still doesn’t go into CFLs/PDAs.
DjVu Take II
Posted by stany in Software, Tech. Support on 12/05/2005
A while ago I blogged about uselessness of djvu format under MacOS X.
New version, 6.0, of djvu software came out, that actually has a functional DjVu Plugin Host.app. Now I can look at Penthouse and Playboy issues again. Or at least at issues of “Junyj Technik” from 80s.
Still no reasonable way to convert the format to other formats, though.
iBook and ATI video
Posted by stany in Software, Tech. Support on 11/23/2005
So I installed ATI Displays for Mac OS X version 4.5.6….
Little did I know….
My iBook (G4 late 2004, 1.2Ghz 12″) started randomly locking up. Easiest way to trigger the lockup was by starting up matlab.
After some panicing on my part I’ve decided that maybe it’s my RAM that is failing – matlab tends to gobble up all the RAM you have and then some. Of course this happened just when I urgently needed to graph something that was due in a couple of hours.
I’ve re-seated the RAM in the iBook,
downloaded and installed memtest for Mac OS X , booted into single user mode (CMD-S on bootup), and run memtest all 3 -L.
Memtest took forever (1 gig stick + quarter gig on board), but didn’t find any problems.
So while in single user mode, I’ve started looking into /var/log/system.log.
Found this little gem:
Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: ** ASIC Hang Log Start ** Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 0x01005c63 4f000217 00000007 00000003 Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 0x0200a859 c0001c04 00000002 00000008 Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 0x00004443 01e1f827 00000e0e 80010140 Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 0x4000ffff 001e0000 51b3a220 72001005 Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 0x080a0f00 00000000 040100f8 80000003 Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 0x0008bbbb 00000002 Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 0:0x000101ce Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 1:0x10014020 Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 2:0x00000002 Nov 23 11:53:32 gilva kernel[0]: 3:0x000101ce [about 1020 lines more of similar kernel messages] Nov 23 11:53:42 gilva kernel[0]: 1021:0xffffffff Nov 23 11:53:42 gilva kernel[0]: 1022:0xffffffff Nov 23 11:53:42 gilva kernel[0]: 1023:0xffffffff Nov 23 11:53:42 gilva kernel[0]: 0x56500bb3 Nov 23 11:53:42 gilva kernel[0]: ** ASIC Hang Log End ** Nov 23 11:53:42 gilva kernel[0]: ATIRadeon::submit_buffer: Overflowed block waiting for FIFO space. Have 5, need 6. RBBM_STATUS 0x80010140. VAP_CNTL_STATUS 0x00000002 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: ** ASIC Hang Log Start ** Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 0x01005c63 4f000217 00000007 00000003 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 0x0200a859 c0001c04 00000002 00000008 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 0x00004443 01e1f827 00000e0e 80010140 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 0x4000ffff 001e0000 51b3a220 72001005 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 0x080a0f00 00000000 040100f8 80000003 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 0x0008bbbb 00000002 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 0:0x000101ce Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 1:0x10014020 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 2:0x00000002 Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 3:0x000101ce Nov 23 11:53:53 gilva kernel[0]: 4:0x10016020 [ ditto ] Nov 23 11:54:03 gilva kernel[0]: 1021:0xffffffff Nov 23 11:54:03 gilva kernel[0]: 1022:0xffffffff Nov 23 11:54:03 gilva kernel[0]: 1023:0xffffffff Nov 23 11:54:03 gilva kernel[0]: 0x56500bb3 Nov 23 11:54:03 gilva kernel[0]: ** ASIC Hang Log End ** Nov 23 11:54:03 gilva kernel[0]: ATIRadeon::submit_buffer: Overflowed block waiting for FIFO space. Have 5, need 6. RBBM_STATUS 0x80010140. VAP_CNTL_STATUS 0x00000002 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: ** ASIC Hang Log Start ** Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 0x01005c63 4f000217 00000007 00000003 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 0x0200a859 c0001c04 00000002 00000008 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 0x00004443 01e1f823 00000e0e 80010140 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 0x4000ffff 001e0000 51b3a220 72001005 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 0x080a0f00 00000000 040100f8 80000003 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 0x0008bbbb 00000002 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 0:0x000101ce Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 1:0x10014020 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 2:0x00000002 Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 3:0x000101ce Nov 23 11:54:15 gilva kernel[0]: 4:0x10016020 [...]
Based on what I understand, right now the problem is either in the hardware of the system (I’ll run the system through AHT paces once I make it home), or in the ATI Displays driver.
Joys. Somehow my bet is on ATI Displays kernel drivers being buggy. This agrees with me:
On Dec 29, 2004, at 9:37 AM, Avelino Santa Ana Jr. wrote: Dec 27 21:52:27 localhost kernel: ATIRadeon::submit_buffer: Overflowed block waiting for FIFO space. Have 4, need 6. RBBM_STATUS 0x80116100. VAP_CNTL_STATUS 0xd4f40002 Howard Shere http://blogs.greendragon.com/index.php/gdc Altair 8800a to Mac OS X so far... Hi, Are you using vertex programs in your port? What hardware are you using? Is it an R200 based chipset (Radeon 8500-9200)? If so, I recall seeing similar issues with a couple of games I beta tested. The problem had to do with the R200 drivers and vertex programs. I'm not sure how the developers solved them. I just glanced in the archives and Nicholas Francis noted a cause in his app (fog and vertex programs). This was in May 18, 2004 "Re: ARB vartex program crashbug" [...]
I’ve run 4.5.1 for months with no problems, so I guess I will be reverting to that version, and will see if the problem went away.
Update 20051207: I broght iBook home that day, and run the extended tests using Apple Hardware Diagnostics disk. It passed all tests without any problems, although a gig of Kingston RAM took about 20 minutes to check.
Once I booted the system back up, it locked up about a minute after loging in.
I rebooted, and it locked up at the blue screen that shows for a few seconds while various services are loading (first graphic screen, essentially).
At that point I were still thinking that maybe something is wrong with my install of the OS.
I tried booting from a bootable CD of 10.3.4 (Some repair disk I downloaded a good long while ago, that essentially was starting up, creating RAM disk, and starting 10.3.4 to Finder, with a few diagnostic applications and Terminal.app), but system also locked up as soon as graphic mode started. By this point I knew that the probem is not with the OS. When I booted from the 10.3.5 install DVD that was originally shipped with the system, and it locked up, I knew for certain that the problem is with the video circuitry on the logic board.
I broght it to my local authorized service provider (who gets no link and remains nameless, because they are not great), their technican checked it out, confirmed that the logic board is malfunctioning, and ordered a replacement logic board. At this time system is less then a year old (bought late december 2004).
Looking for Disk Image Automator Actions!
Does anyone know of an Automator action, or Big Cat script, that when you right click on a mounted Disk Image, will unmount it and *delete* the original image.
Why? Well.. My download folder is huge.. and I need a faster way to look into a mounted disk image, test out whatever is in there and then delete it. If I like the application, or whatever it is, I will copy it to a more permanent location, and still need to delete the original!!!
If no such thing exists I’ll cobble one together, which should not be too hard seeing as I can start with Laine Lee’s work: Show Disk Image File of Selected Volume