Lunchtime Semaphore

Finally, I solved an issue that had been pestering me for months. Regularly, when casually browsing, my computer would slow down dramatically for 1-2 min before continuing as if nothing happened. That was particularly irritating and I couldn’t fix this until I found a good way to reproduce it. This half broken bugs are the harder to fix because the incentive to sit down and fix it is much weaker than when everything is broken.

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A syntax that I’ve been looking up far too many times over the past few days:

sort -rnk2 -t $'\t'

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With all the recent multicore CPU, the bottleneck of processing is increasingly the IO from the disk. When compiling a bit project (especially linking), when processing gigabyte of data (now that loading up 4 GB in RAM is not a problem)…

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OTB is a complex system, if you don’t believe it, look at the image here (click on it for a full view): Read the rest of this entry »

Finally I gave in to the netbook trend and got a Lenovo S10-2. I couldn’t get a linux version, but sure enough Debian was running on it few hours after unpacking.

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I don’t usually follow the latest gadgets and tend to skip a few generations of products before getting a new one. That’s what happened recently when I switched from my Pocket PC staring Windows Mobile 2003 to the HTC Dream (aka G1) with Android. That’s a 6 years gap between technologies and involved some workaround to migrate the contact data.

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Web server are not easy beast to handle: you want to make the stuff work but at the same time for security, you want to have as little stuff as possible to be opened.

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Few months ago, I moved from Toulouse to Singapore. As I continue to play with satellite images, I wanted to keep an access to the OTB repository and still participate to this open source project. It was also a good opportunity to move to a distributed source control system: sometimes, when you’re stranded in a plane/train/meeting, you really wish to have access to a full repository to do some clean work. Also, if the repository is behind a triple firewall with no possible outside access, this is not a really good way to encourage contributions…

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After updating my Debian yesterday, I needed to restart because of some kernel changes. At first, nothing unusual, vlc player was working fine, net surfing went without a glitch but… couldn’t start the amarok player : Segmentation fault. Read the rest of this entry »

Situation

Your exchanging pdf files with an editor for a journal publication. Each time you send a list of modifications to be applied and the modified pdf file comes back to you, usually with some additional modifications that you didn’t ask for. How to spot these change easily and to make sure they are relevant? Read the rest of this entry »