TheBlindCow » my blog

Stack state drawing

apol — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 22:58:41 +0000

These days while doing my Operating System Project (PROSO) I rescued a project I made a year and a half ago, while I was learning x86 ASM. It can output the resulting stack representation to the console (text) or html which looks far better. It may be useful if you’re learning x86 ASM. Syntax used in the output is the AT&T one, which is the gnu standard.

If you want to check it, you can look here.

Call for testers

apol — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 12:32:23 +0000

A lot of time has passed by since my last post in this blog. The reason is that I’ve been busy with some University projects and I haven’t been able to tell anything here.

I am posting today because I’ve talked a lot about my new KAlgebra version and I like someone to try it out. Its on my svn trunk, very easy to compile (qmake && make). If you prefer me to give you an executable just tell me, now it is really multiplatform (I’ve got some for GNU/Linux, MacOS X (my computer is a macintel, i don’t know if its going to work for ppc), and windows). If someone could check it a bit would make me a great favour.

Thanks!

Some explanation

apol — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 21:34:01 +0000

It was a friday morning, between 8 and 10h when we (Alberto and me) were trying to do a PI practice. We were programming the card we use there so that it sent a key over the USB when a button was pressed in the same card. The problem was that we were sending a key and right after a backspace while waiting a bit so the user could see it.

We made it in the polling function so it was called continuously. When we changed the time that the timer was waiting, the program stopped working because the key was pushed too much time and too many chars appeared. When we showed that to the teacher he looked at it and asked us: Where do you initialize to 0 the buffer in the loop?

There was no loop, we used the polling function.

Its better to ask the right question

apol — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 11:32:13 +0000

In a peripheral class (PI for fibers).

Teacher: Where do you reset the buffer in the loop?

Me: Do you see any loop?

I like tales

apol — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 23:59:13 +0000

Once my father told me this little tale. It is not even a tale, its just something that happened to him but that I think that is somehow powerful.

His father worked in a winery these days, thats when he was 7 or 8 years old at most. He was on holidays, he didn’t have to go to school and went with his father to help him at work. When he was there roaming around, a Coca Cola sales representative entered and when he saw my young father he gave him 2 pens. Both pens had the same color but one of them was a simple pen and the other was a made in USA (note that in these days, the USA where an example to follow here, not what they are nowadays). When he saw it, immediately he knew that he liked it (sweet childhood…).

When he arrived at home, my grandfather told him to share them with his sister (my aunt obviously, note that she is a bit older than my father) and he went and showed her them both and told her to choose. She took the made in USA one, the one he liked.

The result was that my father finished with the pen that he didn’t want.
The problem is that he expected her sister to choose the other one, just to make him happy, but she didn’t realize that he wanted her to choose something. The other result is that he still remembers it.

Updating a bit

apol — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 23:00:10 +0000

As some of you might know, I’ve recently being been making a new calculation module for KAlgebra which I wanted to do it a lot of time ago and I decided it was de correct moment.

The problem was I was storing everything on a DOM tree (numbers as strings, awful) and now I’m building my own trees which in a way similar the DOM ones, but using more suitable types and so. For the moment it is quite stable, but still needs a bit of love (tree to strings, simplification,… ). First tests show something like a 10% improvement, quite good , I like it, we will se how it works in the future.

I’ve worked as well with a stupid program which talked to my macbooks SMS, a motion sensor, which modified some OpenGL images, nothing spectacular, but if someone is interested on it, you can tell me and I’ll publish it.

If someone is reading this, take care!

Back from the offline world

apol — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:06:52 +0000

As some of you might know, I’ve been away for a while. Not only away but offline… yes, there is some kind of life in the offline world xD. Well, sorry if someone has entered my site and seen that nothing happened here, now you know the reason.

I’ve been looking at the spam messages that I’ve received during the last month and now I thank the guy who made this feature. More than 200+ spam comments telling me that my web is great and telling me I suffer hair loss (even Britney Spears told it to me).
Anyway, now I’ll spend those last holidays and I’ll be back to the university on 12th.
I’m writing back soon I hope.

Bye!

Headphones on Macbook

apol — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 23:52:32 +0000

Theoretically it is not possible to use our headphones on the macbook without hearing eveything on the speakers. There is an ugly way to arrange it until any smart hacker arranges the alsa driver . The way is by turning on the alsa option: “Line in as output” and then disabling the front sound entry .

Hope helps someone .

Last days briefing

apol — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 15:59:03 +0000

Since my last posts I haven’t been able to work very much with my projects due to university exams and so, but today I’m going to update it a little bit.
My last work has been centered in a project called KTorpedo (I always prefer to give awful names to my projects when I create them) which tries to be something like a minicli replacement. The idea is tho give it autocompletion and some usability work.
I’ve been working a bit with KAlgebra too. I want to finish it up a little bit so I can let it a bit nice while I move it to Qt4 which (i think that) will let me do lots of nice things with it .

Last week I received my new laptop, its an Apple Macbook, works fine with kubuntu , I’ll talk about it this week.

Bye!

Fast and short alsa trick

apol — Wed, 10 May 2006 00:07:06 +0000

Since alsaconf was dropped as a alsa configuration command I’ve missed some way to select which soundcard I wanted to use, I’ve found asoundconf that lets me do it, it’s simple (tested in K|Ubuntu dapper):

apol@gran:~$ asoundconf list Names of available sound cards: Audigy2 V8237 U0x46d0x8b2

We see the list of cards we have, here we have in first place the default one I’ve set, after the integrated one and then the webcam’s mic.

If we want to change the default, it is as easy as doing
asoundconf set-default-card V8237

I hope someone will find it useful. Bye!