Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

I’ve been reading Keegan’s A History of Warfare for a while now; it starts slowly, and I’ve skipped certain passages that bored me to tears. Now, however, it’s coming to life. I’m on page 186, and the roman empire is crumbling before my eyes!

I’m bad. I’m skipping class to go hear Erez Hadad talk about the O(1) scheduler in tonight’s Haifux meeting. And I didn’t do my homework, either. Nee. I’m a bad boy and must be punished. I think I’ll use windows tomorrow![0]

[0] Don’t worry, I don’t actually have any windows machines around. Plus, it’s cruel and unusual punishment, and we don’t actually do those.

I will be giving a one day class later this week on C programming. The
audience is people who have had some programming experience, but not
necessarily in C. I just started preparing it, and here’s my tentative
agenda. Comments will be appreciated, especially on possible
exercises. Note that There’s tons of stuff missing, but it’s only a
one day class…

• one hour introduction (0900-0950): origins of c, why learn c, hello
  world, compiling with gcc on linux

• one hour syntax of c(1000-1050)
• exercise(1100-1150): small (100 line) program in c, contents TBD.
• 1200-1300: lunch break
• pointers and dynamic memory allocations(1300-1350)
• structures, ADT(Abstract Data Types) and OOP in c(1400-1450)
• exercise(1500-1600): write a program that will use dynamic memory,
  adt, oop (menu driven user interaction? interactive game?)

• different aspects of c(1600-1650) c the standard, cross platform
  c, c as portable assembler, c as an interface to the operating system,
  libraries, posix, kernel.

Stuff I won’t be talking about: general programming, debugging,
profiling, optimizing, macros, kernel hacking =)

Having just registered to OLS 2004. Happy happy joy joy!

fiasco, the colocated server that handles all email for mulix.org, appears to be having some qmail problems. I suspect Shachar’s anti-virus installation, as qmail complains about ‘temporary problems after the DATA stage’, which is exactly the point I’d expect the anti-virus to kick in.

I took a look at the server and restarted clamav and qmail, but that didn’t work. We have a pretty complicated setup and I’m afraid to mess it up worse than it is right now, so I guess it’ll wait until Shachar gets back 😦

[edit: should’ve thought of it earlier… you can always reach me at muli(at)il.ibm.com]

So, we’re going to OLS 2004. Current plans are spend a few days in Boston first (Thursday July 15th to Tuesday July 20th?), head over to Ottawa on Tuesday the 20th, meet gby and Limor there, hack^H^H^H^Hparty like mad at OLS, and then I split and head for Tucson on Sunday the 25th. Spend a week in Tucson meeting my Arizonian colleagues and conceivably even working, and then head back to .il just in time for August Penguins 2004. Sounds good to me!

Got the word at work today; OLS 2004, here I come!

[more tomorrow, too tired to tyhpe coherently right now]

It’s the end of the vacation. Back to the slave grind tomorrow. For some odd reason, I’m looking forward to it – I’m all vacationed out.

Bought lots of books today, both off and on-line. The loot includes:

• Miles,
  Mystery & Mayhem, by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is another Baen omnibus edition in the Vorkosigan
  saga, following Cordelia’s
  Honor (which I’ve just finished) and Young
  Miles (which I recently read). The Vorkosigan saga is the best
  kind of space opera, engrossing, riveting, and does not shy away from
  the messier sides of life, both in the moral and physical sense.
• Hacking
  the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, by Andrew “Bunny”
  Huang. I’ve heard lots of good things about this book, and look
  forward to getting my hands on it. The fact that I don’t currently own
  an xbox is immaterial.
• The
  Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan of Cimmeria, Book 1), by
  Robert E. Howard. Those of you that have known me for some time know
  that I have somewhat of a Conan fetish.
• Principles
  of War, by Carl von Clausewitz. No home is complete without
  it.
• The Art of War, by
  Sun Tzu. Too bad the store didn’t also have a copy of A Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No
  Sho), by Miyamoto Musashi.

Here’s one on how to generate proper PDFs from LaTeX+prosper
sources, from yrk in private email:

Hello, here is some advice you didn't ask for:

I've noticed while reading your lecture slides for "User Mode Linux"
that the rightmost part of the page is cut off.

I had the same problem and found that adding the "-t a4" option (resize
for a4 paper) to the dvips command line will solve this.

Hope this helps.

And here’s one from Oron Peled, seen on the Haifux mailing list:

Usefull LaTeX tip (especially for PDFs):

    \usepackage[colorlinks=true]{hyperref}

    % some more text...

    and now let's put \url{http://www.gimp.org}

You can get all your URL's automagically linked in your PDF's.
BTW: The docs for hyperref are worth reading for other nice effects.