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  • How to use GCC 4.7 in place of 4.6 (Ubuntu 12.04)

    - by Larz Conwell
    So I'm working on a project and I wanted to use some C11 features for C. To use those features GCC 4.7 is required, so I went to synaptic and looked up 4.7, and I found the packages gcc-4.7-base so I installed it[1]. So now that gcc-4.7-base is installed I expected to be able to use 4.7, but no, when I do gcc --version it still shows 4.6.3 even more, when I try to directly call 4.7(via /usr/bin/gcc-4.7) it doesn't exist, though a gcc-4.6 executable does exist. How do I "activate" GCC 4.7? I read here, you do some crazy stuff with update-alternatives, but it doesn't work for me as the gcc-4.7 executable doesn't actually exist on my machine. Notes: 1. I also saw gcc-4.6-base, so I figured I'd uninstall it, but synaptic attempted to remove every package I had installed and install a Java runtime, so for obvious reason I decided not to remove it.

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  • Change in Job Title and Responsibilities

    - by John Conwell
    I've spent the past 7 years focused primarily on code and database performance.  It's an area that I have a passion for, as well as a propensity.  But what I've found is that its very hard to change the culture of a development environment.  You can teach performance, you can encourage performance, you might see slight shift in how devs think about performance.  But without full management backing and support you wont get long lasting changes in the development culture.  And in the end, you are back to being the "Perf Guy", fixing performance design flaws, after the fact, one by one by one. Which is why last year I asked my boss to changed my title and responsibilities to more naturally align with the team I was working for.  So now I'm a Computing Research Engineer (vague, I know), researching in the field of Big Data analytics and visualization. I've found this change revitalizing and a lot of fun.  And given the nature of Big Data (its, um…big) the performance aspects are always ever present.

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  • Did Microsoft designers got their butts kicked 3 years ago?

    - by John Conwell
    This is something I've been wondering about for about a year now.  Microsoft has a history of creating very useful products, with lots of useful features.  But useful does not mean usable.  A lot of stuff coming out of Redmond the past 10 years don't really seem to have been well thought out from a user design point of view.  Lots of extra steps, lots of popup windows...very little innovative thinking going on about the user experience of these products.But about a year ago I started seeing changes in the new products coming out of Microsoft.  Windows 7 is a good example of a big change.  They really got their asses handed to them on Vista, so they had to make a change.  But it looks like this change in philosophy has bled over to other areas.  The new Office (2010) lineup has a lot of changes in it to make it way more usable. Given that big changes like this take about 3 years to go from start to actually shipping product, I'm curious what happened internally at Microsoft that really drove this change in product design.  I think that Microsoft got so focused on just adding new functionality for so long, they forgot about the little things that can really make or break a product.  Office 2010 is full of these little things that make it much nicer to use.  I just hope its not too late for them.

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  • Win7 is not a tablet OS, no matter what the boys in Redmond think.

    - by John Conwell
    Despite what execs at Microsoft think, Windows 7 is NOT a tablet OS.  Just because you can install some software (or OS) on a device, doesn't mean that device is meant to run that software.  This seems to be the step that the non-engineer execs at Microsoft have seem to not understood.  In order to seamlessly work with a device, the software needs to be designed with that device in mind.  That has been the problem with the Windows PDA platform, the Windows Mobil platform, and now with trying to force fit Windows 7 on a tablet.  Its just not designed for that style of interaction.   Windows is designed to be interacted with via a mouse and keyboard.  In fact, it is brilliant at that.  But, It is NOT designed to be interacted with by your fingers.  And that is why the Windows tablet failed 10 years ago, and why it will fail today.  Its not the hardware's fault like Microsoft claimed 10 years ago.  Its the User Interaction design that failed. And this is why the iPhone and Android OS's work wonderfully on a tablet.  The user interaction was designed for small screens, navigated by big fat fingers.  I love these OS's and how I interact with them.  And when I play with a touch screen Windows 7 device, I am feel like I'm playing with a brittle wana-be.  And its not the hardware's fault.  The touchscreen is very responsive.  I actually like the hardware.  But the OS and the software are just not designed to be interacted with, with my big fat fingers.  In order to be successful, Microsoft needs to start from scratch, and build a platform AND SOFTWARE specifically for use by fingers.  Thats why everyone was so excited when they though Microsoft was going to release the Courier tablet.  Because it looked like a totally different platform.  Something that might actually work.  But Windows 7...I hate to burst your bubble, but you are not a touch platform.

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  • Create Pivot collections much faster than DeepZoomTools CollectionCreator class

    - by John Conwell
    I've been playing with Microsoft Live Labs Pivot to create a hierarchy of collections all linked together to allow someone to explore a hierarchy of data visually. The problem has been the generation time of the entire hierarchy. I end up creating 500 - 600 collections total and it takes hours and hours using the CollectionCreator class that comes with the DeepZoomTools.  So digging around I found a way to make the actual DeepZoom collection creation wicked fast. Dont use the CollectionCreator!  Turns out Pivot doesnt actually use the image pyramid generated by the CollectionCreator. Or if it does, its only when you open a new collection it shows all the images zooming in. But once the zoom in is complete, Pivot uses the individual DeepZoom images. What Pivot does need is the xml generated by the CollectionCreator, which is in a very simple format.  So what i did was manually generate the xml for the collection image pyramid, and then create the folder structure required (one folder per level of the pyramid), and put a single pixel png file in each folder.  Now, I can create the required files and folders for 500 collections in about 10 seconds. Sweet! Now you still have to use the ImageCreator to create a DeepZoom image for each image in the collection and that still takes some time, but at least the total processing time is way better.

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  • Creating SparseImages for Pivot

    - by John Conwell
    Learning how to programmatically make collections for Microsoft Live Labs Pivot has been a pretty interesting ride. There are very few examples out there, and the folks at MS Live Labs are often slow on any feedback.  But that is what Reflector is for, right? Well, I was creating these InfoCard images (similar to the Car images in the "New Cars" sample collection that that MS created for Pivot), and wanted to put a Tag Cloud into the info card.  The problem was the size of the tag cloud might vary in order for all the tags to fit into the tag cloud (often times being bigger than the info card itself).  This was because the varying word lengths and calculated font sizes. So, to fix this, I made the tag cloud its own separate image from the info card.  Then, I would create a sparse image out of the two images, where the tag cloud fit into a small section of the info card.  This would allow the user to see the info card, but then zoom into the tag cloud and see all the tags at a normal resolution.  Kind'a cool. But...I couldn't find one code example (not one!) of how to create a sparse image.  There is one page on the SeaDragon site (http://www.seadragon.com/developer/creating-content/deep-zoom-tools/) that gives over the API for creating images and collections, and it sparsely goes over how to create a sparse image, but unless you are familiar with the API already, the documentation doesn't help very much. The key is the Image.ViewportWidth and Image.ViewportOrigin properties of the image that is getting super imposed on the main image.  I'll walk through the code below.  I've setup a couple Point structs to represent the parent and sub image sizes, as well as where on the parent I want to position the sub image.  Next, create the parent image.  This is pretty straight forward.  Then I create the sub image.  Then I calculate several ratios; the height to width ratio of the sub image, the width ratio of the sub image to the parent image, the height ratio of the sub image to the parent image, then the X and Y coordinates on the parent image where I want the sub image to be placed represented as a ratio of the position to the parent image size. After all these ratios have been calculated, I use them to calculate the Image.ViewportWidth and Image.ViewportOrigin values, then pass the image objects into the SparseImageCreator and call Create. The key thing that was really missing from the API documentation page is that when setting up your sub images, everything is expressed in a ratio in relation to the main parent image.  If I had known this, it would have saved me a lot of trial and error time.  And how did I figure this out?  Reflector of course!  There is a tool called Deep Zoom Composer that came from MS Live Labs which can create a sparse image.  I just dug around the tool's code until I found the method that create sparse images.  But seriously...look at the API documentation from the SeaDragon size and look at the code below and tell me if the documentation would have helped you at all.  I don't think so!   public static void WriteDeepZoomSparseImage(string mainImagePath, string subImagePath, string destination) {     Point parentImageSize = new Point(720, 420);     Point subImageSize = new Point(490, 310);     Point subImageLocation = new Point(196, 17);     List<Image> images = new List<Image>();     //create main image     Image mainImage = new Image(mainImagePath);     mainImage.Size = parentImageSize;     images.Add(mainImage);     //create sub image     Image subImage = new Image(subImagePath);     double hwRatio = subImageSize.X/subImageSize.Y;            // height width ratio of the tag cloud     double nodeWidth = subImageSize.X/parentImageSize.X;        // sub image width to parent image width ratio     double nodeHeight = subImageSize.Y / parentImageSize.Y;    // sub image height to parent image height ratio     double nodeX = subImageLocation.X/parentImageSize.X;       //x cordinate position on parent / width of parent     double nodeY = subImageLocation.Y / parentImageSize.Y;     //y cordinate position on parent / height of parent     subImage.ViewportWidth = (nodeWidth < double.Epsilon) ? 1.0 : (1.0 / nodeWidth);     subImage.ViewportOrigin = new Point(         (nodeWidth < double.Epsilon) ? -1.0 : (-nodeX / nodeWidth),         (nodeHeight < double.Epsilon) ? -1.0 : ((-nodeY / nodeHeight) / hwRatio));     images.Add(subImage);     //create sparse image     SparseImageCreator creator = new SparseImageCreator();     creator.Create(images, destination); }

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  • Why is my laptop so sluggish? Or Damn You Facebook and Twitter! Or All Hail Chrome!

    - by John Conwell
    In the past three weeks, I've noticed that my laptop (dual core 2.1GHz, 2Gb RAM) has become amazingly sluggish.  I only uses for communications and data lookup workflows, so the slowness was tolerable.  But today I finally got fed up with the suckyness and decided to get to the root of the problem (I do have strong performance roots after all). It actually didn't take all that long to figure it out.  About a year ago I converted to Google Chrome (away from FireFox).  One of the great tools Chrome has is a "Task Manager" tool, that gives you Windows Task Manager like details for all the tabs open in the browser (Shift + Esc).  Since every tab runs in its own process, its easy from Task Manager (both Windows or Chrome) to identify and kill a single performance offending tab.  This is unlike IE, where you only get aggregate data about all tabs open.  Anyway, I digress.  Today my laptop sucked.  Windows Task Manager told me that I had two memory hogging Chrome tabs, but couldn't tell me which web page those tabs are showing.  Enter Chrome Task Manager which tells you the page title, along with CPU, memory and network utilization of each tab.  Enter my amazement.  Turns out Facebook was using just shy of half a Gb of RAM.  Half a Gigabyte!  That's 512 Megabytes!524,288 Kilobytes! 536,870,912 Bytes!  Or 4,294,967,296 Bits!  In other words, that's a frackin boat load of memory.  Now consider that Facebook is running on pretty much 96.3% (statistics based on absolutely nothing) of every house hold desktop, laptop, netbook, and mobile device in America, that is pretty horrific! And I wasn't playing any Facebook games like FarmWars or MafiaVille.  I just had my normal, default home page up showing me who just had breakfast, or just got finished with their morning run. I'm sorry...let me say that again...HALF A GIG OF RAM!  That is just unforgivable. I can just see my mom calling me up:  Mom: "John...I think I need a new computer.  Mine is really slow these days" John: "What do you have running?" Mom: "Oh, just Facebook" John: "Ok, close Facebook and tell me how fast your computer feels" Mom: "Well...I don't know how fast it is.  All I do is use Facebook" John: "Ok Mom, I'll send you a new computer by Tuesday" Oh yea...and the other offending web page?  It was Twitter, using a quarter of a Gigabyte. God I love social networks!

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  • Seeking questions about creating Microsoft Live Labs Pivot collections

    - by John Conwell
    I've spent the past 3 weeks working a lot with Pivot from Microsoft Live Labs (http://getpivot.com/).  Pivot is a tool that allows you to visually explore data. Its an interesting take on visual data mining. Anyway, I've been writing a lot of code that creates a hierarchy of Pivot collections, where one item in the collection drills down into an entirly new collection. The dev community around Pivot is still very young, so there isnt much tribal knowledge built up yet.  I've spent a lot of time trying to get things to work through trial and error, as well as digging around in Reflector.  But I've finally got a framework built for programatically creating DeepZoom images, Pivot collections, Sparse Images, etc.   If anyone has any questions, or suggestions on a post topic, leave a comment and I'll try and answer your question.

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  • Error in eclipse on run android project

    - by Larz
    I am trying to get a simple hello world android project working in eclipse using an android emulator. I have been using the examples on developer.android.com. I actually did have a hello world app working. I then modified it's xml files to have a text input field and a button as in the second example shows on that site. This failed to run on the emulator. I then went back and tried to create another simple hello world project, but it fails to run. The console says "Waiting for HOME ('android.process.acore') to be launched, but nothing happens or sometimes a messenger in the emulator says "unfortunately Android Wear has stopped". Below is a sample error filter on the log file. I find trying to debug this is something new to me and I am not sure the best way to go about it. I am just trying to learn some basic android developer skills. 05-30 16:19:07.336: E/SELinux(469): SELinux: Loaded file_contexts from /file_contexts, 05-30 16:19:07.336: E/SELinux(469): digest= 05-30 16:19:07.376: E/SELinux(469): b0 05-30 16:19:07.376: E/SELinux(469): 4b 05-30 16:19:07.756: E/SELinux(469): 03 05-30 16:19:07.756: E/SELinux(469): 4a 05-30 16:19:07.826: E/SELinux(469): 73 05-30 16:19:07.886: E/SELinux(469): ab 05-30 16:19:07.886: E/SELinux(469): 6d 05-30 16:19:07.896: E/SELinux(469): 46 05-30 16:19:07.896: E/SELinux(469): b4 05-30 16:19:07.896: E/SELinux(469): a5 05-30 16:19:07.896: E/SELinux(469): 73 05-30 16:19:07.896: E/SELinux(469): 8a 05-30 16:19:07.896: E/SELinux(469): ee 05-30 16:19:07.896: E/SELinux(469): ac 05-30 16:19:07.906: E/SELinux(469): 68 05-30 16:19:07.906: E/SELinux(469): ff 05-30 16:19:07.906: E/SELinux(469): 04 05-30 16:19:07.906: E/SELinux(469): dc 05-30 16:19:07.906: E/SELinux(469): b8 05-30 16:19:07.906: E/SELinux(469): a2 05-30 16:19:11.806: E/SensorManager(511): sensor or listener is null 05-30 16:19:16.196: E/BluetoothAdapter(378): Bluetooth binder is null 05-30 16:19:16.206: E/BluetoothAdapter(378): Bluetooth binder is null 05-30 16:19:17.186: E/WVMExtractor(54): Failed to open libwvm.so: dlopen failed: library "libwvm.so" not found 05-30 16:19:17.776: E/AudioCache(54): Error 1, -2147483648 occurred 05-30 16:19:17.796: E/SoundPool(378): Unable to load sample: (null) 05-30 16:19:18.536: E/AudioCache(54): Error 1, -2147483648 occurred 05-30 16:19:18.546: E/SoundPool(378): Unable to load sample: (null)

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  • 80x86 16-bit asm: lea cx, [cx*8+cx] causes error on NASM (compiling .com file)

    - by larz
    Title says it all. The error NASM gives (dispite my working OS) is "invalid effective address". Now i've seen many examples of how to use LEA and i think i gots it right but yet my NASM dislikes it. I tried "lea cx, [cx+9]" and it worked; "lea cx, [bx+cx]" didn't. Now if i extended my registers to 32-bits (i.e. "lea ecx, [ecx*8+ecx]") everything would be well but i am restricted to use 16- and 8-bit registers only. Is here anyone so knoweledgeable who could explain me WHY my assembler doesn't let me use lea the way i supposed it should be used? Thanks.

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