Ask Mr Make

Ask Mr Make is a tips and tricks column on build systems with an
emphasis on GNU make. The wealth of information provided by these
articles apply directly to real world problems, something that the
manual does not do. Also, there are fun articles like solving the
Tower of Hanoi problem using make that demonstrate the extent to
which make can be (ab)used. Highly recommended if you are the kind
of person who writes makefiles by hand.

s/screen/tmux

I've replaced GNU Screen with tmux as my preferred terminal

multiplexer. The main reason is that the defaults are better in tmux

and I don't have to worry about setting up a config file. For

example, with screen, I need a (rather simple) configuration file

to get the status line that I get with tmux by default. I also like

Ctrl-b better than Ctrl-a used by screen as Ctrl-a is a heavily

used key combination (emacs, terminals with emacs-like line editing

etc).

tmux seems to use less memory than screen and for me this is be a big

plus as there is very little RAM left on my VPSs when running the

various fastcgi and squeak processes.

The code for tmux is arguably better than that of screen and it is

under a BSD license. Recently it was imported into the Open BSD

base system. This is what Theo had to say about the software:

The most impressive thing about tmux, in my view, is how

frustrating the code audit was. In 2 hours, I found only one

or two nits that had very minor security consequences. It was

not accepted into the tree based on license alone. It is high

quality code.

Here's an interview with the author of tmux:

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20090712190402

s/GCC/Clang

I've been using Clang as a drop-in replacement for GCC for compiling C

code and so far it has been pretty good. While I did not see any

drastic increase in performance of the generated code, the compile

times have come down considerably. For example, compiling a fresh tree

of the latest emacs pretest took 1m55s using GCC on my quad-core

box. The same test with Clang took just over a minute. Other things

that I've built using Clang that are working well without any problems

include: GNU Smalltalk, cmus, tmux and a whole bunch of stuff.

Clang is a C/C++ and Objective-C frontend for the LLVM "compiler

infrastructure". As of now, the C and Objective-C frontends have

reached production quality on x86 and x86-64. The C++ frontend is no

way near completion and is not expected to be complete in the near

future.

Apart from the compilation speed one other feature that is in favour

of Clang is the shockingly expressive diagnostics. Along with the

message, the exact code fragment that is causing the problem is also

shown. If the C++ frontend is able to provide this feature and I'm

sure it will as it is a fundamental goal, this feature alone is going

to propel the adoption of Clang. GCC sure does have its place thanks

to the support of other languages like Ada, Fortran, Java, Pascal

etc. However Clang improving at this rate is surely going to supplant

GCC atleast on the primary hardware platforms. The BSDs in particular

are quite keen on replacing GCC as is evident from the funding of the

development of the Portable C compiler. With Clang already compiling

the kernel source and 99% of the userland, FreeBSD is seriously

considering replacing GCC with Clang in the base system. I think it is

just a matter of time.

An excellent intro to Clang can be found here:

Clang features can be found here: http://clang.llvm.org/features.html

Instructions for building Clang can be found in the Clang Getting Started

page. In addition to the instructions given there, I added

--enable-optimized to the configure script when building llvm to avoid

building the debug versions as they tend to take up a lot of disk

space.

Building programs with Clang is easy. It comes with a gcc compatible

driver called "clang" so all you need to do is to make sure

llvm/Release/bin is in PATH and run configure as

CC=clang ./configure

LinuxMint 7 "Gloria"

It's been six months and time for change. I’ve switched from OpenSuSE

11.1 to Linux Mint 7. Prior to that I was running ArchLinux for a year

and it was a solid distribution with a fantastic package manager. But

after Chip Magazine came out with the 11.1 DVD I wanted to try out

OpenSuSE 11.1. OpenSuSE, overall, has been mostly stable for me and I

loved the artwork. While things like package upgrades were efficient

through the use of binary (x)deltas, the package manager itself drove

me nuts. It was way too slow on my not-so-fast connection. Over the

course of six months, I had to install a few packages from the build

service which prompted me to add a few additional repositories. Now

everytime the package manager was launched it tried to refresh the

package list. While I understand the reasons it simply was

annoying. Sometimes the refreshing would simply hang. So everytime I

had to hit Skip Refresh after launching the package manager and the

whole exercise was irritating.

Another reason was the PulseAudio sound system. This caused the

biggest pain and I din't manage to resolve the problem. Sound input

never worked and the output volume was too low. To add to the misery,

I had a skype meeting and the webcam was not working. While the camera

was picked up the device /dev/video0 had permission issues. I'm sure

these things can be fixed after enough googling but I simply didn't

have the patience for it. I had issues running virtual machines under

KVM.

Finally, my / partition had grown to 80% of its size which is a signal

that enough cruft has accumulated on my system and that usually is

when I switch to another distro :)

I had been watching the progress of Linux Mint and when 7 came out I

decided to switch. Thanks to its Ubuntu base, installation was a

breeze and post-install, I didn't have to hunt for codecs as the

installed mplayer played most of the videos I threw at it. Artwork is

as good as OpenSuSE's and even the menu was very similar. The

"mint-green on dark" theme looks very nice and overall it's a lovely

green desktop.

The package manager (mintInstall) has a list of "featured"

applications for things like Adobe Reader (stay away from it!), Skype,

VLC, Audacity etc. Handy.

Audio is still controlled by PulseAudio but on Mint7 there was a

control panel to control it and I was able to adjust the output to an

audible level. Sound input is still not working. Skype picked up the

webcam and that is a relief.

Overall, I really like the system. Boots fast, plenty of packages

thanks to Ubuntu and Debian underneath, nice green desktop, KVM

virtual machines not complaining. Happy!

9x18

I was looking for a bigger font for my terminals as 6x13 was starting
to look too small on my display. For terminals, I prefer the crisp and
sharp appearance of bitmap fonts although Envy Code R is not bad at
all. Ctrl-Rightclicking on XTerm gives you a menu where you can select
a large font which turns out to be 9x18.

Originally part of the ucs-fonts package, the font got merged into
core X distribution. This is what the website says about the font:

9x18 is an improved version of 9x15 that has more space above and
below the base characters to increase readability and to allow
overstriking combining characters to work properly.

Indeed, the font is nice and tall (although some may say spindly) with
a good inter-line spacing making it a good choice for terminals. Also
the font has a good coverage of characters. For example, it includes
all mathematical symbols, smiley and even chess pieces (terminal based
FEN viewer anyone?)

-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1 is the
actual XLFD 9x18 is aliased to but on my machines (Ubuntu and
OpenSuSE), the fonts.alias file did not have the entries so I had to add
them manually.

Versions of -misc-fixed family are also available for Windows. My cmd.exe
windows use 6x13 giving me plenty of lines of clear text.

...

For the last two weeks, I've been down with chicken pox. While the first
10 days were pretty bad things are improving as I'm finally off of curd
rice and raw onions and slowly getting back to eating some tasty food.

This little period of rest is a god-send for me as I was getting worked
up at work and an ever piling reading list adding to the irritation. The
last few days, apart from reading, the tool seeker in me has found some
really cool tools and when you start dreaming of use cases for these
cool toys and tools, the pain and the irritation just vanish. Hopefully,
I shall blog about them here this week as I'll be quarantined for atleast
another week.

LyX, LaTeX and books...

I'm typesetting a book for a friend. Initially I had to decide between LaTeX and ConTeXt. Although LaTeX had a WYSIWYM editor in LyX I've always liked ConTeXt for its perceived completeness (their documentation always looked better than the rest) but I haven't touched it since 2002 when I last used it for preparing reports for college. However after checking out LyX 1.61 the choice was easy. LyX has come a long way since the early versions that used the XForms toolkit.

As for the document class to use for the book the popular choices seemed to be KOMA-Script and Memoir. I almost selected KOMA-Script when at the last moment decided to take a look the Memoir documentation and I was pleasantly shocked! The documentation for the memoir class is simply brilliant! (and beautifully typeset too!). It is not only a class documentation but also a complete introduction to typesetting. I'd say it is mandatory reading for any novice getting into typsetting. Google for memman.pdf and give it a good reading.

I ended up using LyX with minimal ERT needed to customize the memoir document class.

Here's an article that presents a good overview on designing a book with LyX:

http://www.linux.com/feature/56471

Also a good set of tips was picked up from
http://www.markschenk.com/tensegrity/latexexplanation.html

For preparing bibliographies, JabRef is a nice utiility for managing your BibTeX databases.

I haven't really looked at indexing options but the book is mainly an internal monograph so the index can be omitted.

Hello again!

Back to blogger after roaming elsewhere for three years. As was mentioned in my last post here, I moved my blog to WordPress but was never happy which ofcourse had to with the then prevailing confusion in my life rather than wordpress itself. I eventually deleted that blog in early 2008 and then moved my blog to my own VPS on linode. After grappling with toolset issues (dokuwiki, blorg, ikiwiki) finally settled on pier which is what the fork of this blog is currently running on at http://scriptek.co.in/seaside/pier .

In the meanwhile this "dead" blog was getting more hits than all the other blogs put together. Also blogger is now a google service which meant that it was auto-associated with my gmail account which happens to be my primary email account. There were also additional conveniences like mail2blogger which suits my workflow than logging in and editing posts inside a HTML editor (which I really hate btw). All these factors made me want to switch back to blogger and continue my original blog. However there was a nasty problem: I forgot the password and the email that was associated with my blogger account was no longer there. So this blog was more or less orphaned but the hits kept coming. Wrote a few times to Google but I guess my requests went to /dev/null.

Finally, today I sat down to methodically try and eliminate all the passwords I've used so far in my life. After an hour of trial (and getting kicked out) I managed to login!!!

So here I am, back to where I first started.