Red Wine and Sleeping Pills

Emacs and high CPU usage

ew3rt0n — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:41:15 +0000

I have recently noticed that whenever I opened emacs in my recently installed Slackware64 13.1 system, one of my two CPUs would get to 100% usage right away, which also greatly contributed to raising the temperature of my laptop. After recompiling emacs with the CVS version, the problem appears to have gone away.

Note: you can use (and possibly modify) the slackbuild script provided in the sources folder of a slackware tree (or the install DVD, CDs) to recompile and reinstall emacs.

Another note: if, for some obscure reason that escapes you know, you have uninstalled the texinfo package (which contains makeinfo), you may need to reinstall it in order to properly build emacs.

EDIT: this is all wrong! May apologies. Sort of, anyways. Let me explain: the development version of emacs must now be downloaded through bzr, not CVS. Thus, the version I downloaded from CVS was actually an older one — 23.1.90, to be precise. That fixed my problem, but not with versions 23.2 and newer. In fact, i think this may be an incompatibility between qt-gtk-engine and the newer versions of emacs; once I removed the former, the later — emacs — the problem was gone. Incidentally, it may be worth mentioning that the problem was only present in the graphical version of emacs anyways; running emacs -nw was always fine.

Video Capture and OpenGL

ew3rt0n — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:04:52 +0000

Dear reader (probably myself),

I have been trying to find a good video capture software for linux that works with (possibly accelerated) OpenGL. I tried Yukan/Seom, but it didn’t quite work for me: compilation problems. Also, the documentations seemed really lacking (particularly for the new rewriting), and my browser insisted that the security certificate of their server had a problem.

I then came across the glc project, which claims to be inspired by Yukan/Seom, as well as Fraps (for Windows). It has been working very nicely so far (that is, since last night when it was installed).

Installing and using cgkit

ew3rt0n — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:20:15 +0000

Building and installing cgkit2.alpha9 worked mostly without problems in my Slackware 64 installation, by following the steps described in the README files. However, I needed to install PyProtocols in order to have it working.

Gnuplot and pdfmark

ew3rt0n — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:25:06 +0000

If you use gnuplot to generate eps figures for use with latex, much like I often do, you may have encountered this problem: the gnuplot eps figures tend to overwrite the global “Title”, “Subject”, and other pdfmarks associated with the final pdf generated through latex — notice that I use the classic tex –> dvi –> ps –> pdf process to generate my files instead of pdflatex; I don’t know if this problem also affects it.

By editing the eps file directly (with a text editor) it is possible to isolate the section that sets the pdfmarks — it starts with SDict I think — and erasing (or commenting) it solves the problem; which is rather a lot of work, but I have so far been unable to disable this automatic pdfmark generation “feature” of gnuplot. In fact, what I often do is to ignore the problem and set (overwrite) the global pdfmarks only in the end. If you know a better solution / workaround, please feel free to drop a note in the comments.

Embedding fonts in files created through Latex

ew3rt0n — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:23:32 +0000

While latex supports the creation of different files that can be displayed to the user (e.g. dvi, ps, pdf), very commonly, one uses latex with the aim of creating a pdf file by the end of the day. I very often still use the traditional 3-step way for getting pdf files from latex, that is the tex –> dvi –> ps –> pdf enterprise; thus the rest of this post relates to this procedure (incidentally, I hold no prejudice against pdftex, only I am not very much familiar with it).

Recently, I have spent some time trying to figure out how to embed all the fonts to my final pdf file, including the 14 base PostScript fonts (e.g. Time-Roman, Symbol). At least with my set up, adding -dSetEmbedAllFonts=true to the ps2pdf command did not work for the 14 base fonts; only after also including the -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer could I get the base fonts embedded.

slackpkg upgrade-all and dual-boot

ew3rt0n — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:09:39 +0000

If you have a Linux/Windows dual-boot system set-up in an old-school fashion — by hacking the windows bootloader, adding stuff to boot.ini — much like myself, and have recently upgraded your kernel, you may have the same problem I had a while ago — a non-booting system; the solution was then simple and unsurprising: update your linux.bin file (or whatever the name you gave to the file referenced in boot.ini). However, something intrigues me: before effectuating the replacement of the old linux.bin file, the windows bootloader would go as far as to initialize lilo, and the system would halt only as lilo attempted to boot slackware; I imagined a problem should have arisen before that. If you know what happened, please drop a note.

Apparent problems with collision detection in ODE: Remember to use dInitODE()!

ew3rt0n — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:20:34 +0000

I have been recently acquainted to the ODE – the Open Dynamics Engine – project, and have been violently wrestling around the same problem for quite some time now. After following the steps of the splendid tutorial by Xavier Decoret (which combines ODE and QGLViewer for OpenGL), I noticed that my simulations did not quite work; indeed, the collision detection seemed not to be functioning properly as my objects kept going right through the planes that were supposed to block them. Because the source files had been taken directly from the tutorial website, and I had had no compilation problems, I first thought that the problem was likely related to my environment — which is 64-bit Linux, one I cannot claim to be really familiar with — or my installation of ODE. After a while, however, I thought it would be a good idea to check to source code as well. Eventually, I noticed my dCollide function always returned zero, even when things were clearly overlaying and collision was undeniable; it was then that I thought to examine this issue more closely and ended up reading this.

Forget not to dInitODE()!

pLatex and Windows XP

ew3rt0n — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:48:33 +0000

Recently, I have been trying to properly set up a Japanese-capable latex environment. I has been dreadful.

Because the CJK extension for regular latex appears to have a series of shortcomings (which will not be discussed here), I opted to try using something called pLatex (not to be confused with the Polish PLatex!). Simplifying a little, I guess one could say pLatex is the Japanese version of latex made by the Japanese for the Japanese. Needless to say, available documentation is found, almost exclusively, in Japanese; and yet, I decided to give it a try — after all, I do understand some Japanese, or like to think so.

Normally, I use a latex system built around the TeX Live distribution, in Slackware. However, I did not wish to risk breaking my hitherto well-behaving latex installation, and decided in favor of installing it under my Windows XP system; which is often broken anyways.

In order to proceed with the installation in Windows XP, I basically followed the steps described here. However, some problems arose:

After setting the environment variables as described, when TEXMFMAIN was set to point to texmf and texmf-local (simultaneously), texhash would correctly recognize them both, but somehow fmtutil would complain about not being able to find its configuration file; however, if TEXMFMAIN was set to point exclusively to texmf, everything would seem to work fine.
Many recent (and useful) packages were missing — particularly, the subfig package! My workaround for this problem was to download a complete install of MikTex 2.8 and copy the relevant files into texmf (and using texhash afterwards, naturally).
Several font-related problems, and dvi-to-anything-else conversion problems (which may well be, fundamentally, one and the same problem) were quite a pain in the butt; the former were partially solved, automatically, when I followed the already mentioned steps described in there, with more accuracy (taking a closer look at the font-related points). The conversion problems persist: I still cannot use dvips (the message error I get has something to do with goth10.vf), but dvipdfm worked after the font problems were (partially) resolved.

I think that’s about it. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, fill free the use the comments bellow.

Some of my favorite films

ew3rt0n — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:15:27 +0000

In a particular order:

Match Point
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Citizen Kane
Lost in Translation
Fahrenheit 451
Pi
The Matrix
Romeo + Juliet
Irréversible
Dancer in the Dark

Killing Time

ew3rt0n — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:35:43 +0000

“I’m not living, I’m just killing time”. Those words never fail to produce a certain, almost nostalgic, poignant sentiment in me, every time I listen to Radiohead’s song True Love Waits. Recently, I have heard very similar words when watching the classic 66′s movie Fahrenheit 451 (which I certainly recommend), and I believe that is what prompted me to write this post.

For the last year or so, I have felt that I have just been killing time; with all the shame, hatred, obnoxiousness, and contempt for life attached to the verb to kill. After ending an important personal relationship, I found myself in a pays étranger, surrounded by people and things foreigner to me, and doing a job I no longer seemed to love as I once had. I was alone, as I have never been before, and this isolation smelled much more of pathetic loneliness than of any sort of glorious solitude.

With no roughly precise purpose in life — “No telos, no τέλοϛ!”, shouted the paranoid Greek into my ears — I had no real reason to wake up in the morning. I did keep waking up every morning though, and dragging myself through the day consistently killing time, murdering it; not violently, but rather calmly and orderly, much like grains of sand moving inside an hourglass. I have been trying to recover some control over my own Will — with a capital W, as Zarathustra would have it! — and show more respect for my time, but the slaughter continues.

I hope to stop killing time, and start living soon.