Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

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.

Had a lazy day today, didn’t do much of anything. Got a hair cut in the morning, went for an invigorating walk on the sea shore with ladypine around noon, and then spent the evening reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cordelia’s Honor[0]. Orna made me a cup of Earl Gray tea, to which I promptly added a generous dollop of Glenmorangie Whisky. Ahh, bliss!

[0] Does anyone know what is up with the weird aftermaths for “Shards of Honor”? I found it lovely and chilling, but I can’t figure out why Bujold put it there.

Al Viro shot down my ‘remove %n from printk’ patch. Oh well, ain’t going to argue with him. He was polite about it, too, which is a bit disappointing – I was looking forward to a flame haiku, at least.

In other new, lwn.net‘s weekly kernel summary is telling me that Rik Faith’s lightweight syscall auditing framework *will* be included ih 2.6.6. Missed that on lkml. Someone mentioned in the comments that the snare folks are working on how to integrate with it, and I have a feeling syscalltrack should too, but I just don’t feel like working on it.

In other other news, registration to OLS has begun!

Lovely day out today. Could’ve been lovelier, had we not spent large parts of it stuck in traffic.

Japanese lunch with the Codefidence Crew, Limor and Gilad. Much fun was had. Excellent discussion, great food, lovely doggy. Must give Maud the cat online presence.

Didn’t make it to fantasy.con. Have I mentioned the traffic?

Looks like a certain unnamed company I used to work for (I was young and stupid, what can I say) got 16 big ones in funding. I trust the investors will get exactly what they paid for.

I’m on vacation now; I check my work email twice a day, and try hard to resist urge to answer. Occasionally, I fail.

Recently read or currently reading: C/C++ Users’s Journal April Issue, with an article by the one and only Zwane Mwaikambo, Barbara W. Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror – The Calamitous 14th Century (barely started), Peter Norvig’s Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (almost finished), Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cordelia’s Honor (good yarn) and the IBM Journal of Research and Development volume on Physics of Information (look, pretty pictures!).

Great Job Offer.

There was some interest on lkml from Pavel Machek and
offline from Randy
Dunlap, in the ‘remove %n support from printk’, so I have
resurrected it and fixed the sole user of ‘%n’ in the kernel.

patches/printk-dont-supoprt-percent-n-2.6.5-rc3-B1 – the
printf man page has this to say about ‘%n’:

“The number of characters written so far is stored into the
integer indicated by the int * (or variant) pointer
argument. No argument is converted.”

Very little code actually uses %n for that. Now days, %n has
a much more common use – in printf format string
exploits. Since no kernel code appears to be using %n (thus
said grep), this patch removes support for it. To preempt
the obvious argument, I agree that printk should look and
behave as much as possible as printf – except where it’s
harmful. We don’t support floating point, for example, and I
doubt we should support %n – although I don’t strongly care
one way or another.

The patch is a bit more intrusive than I would’ve
liked. fs/proc/task_mmu.c:show_map() called seq_printf with
%n, in order to calculate the proper number of spaces to add
in each line in the /proc/$PID/map output for named maps. I
changed seq_printf to return the number of characters
written (not including the final ) as returned from
vcnsprintf. This required two changes to the only two
callers of seq_printf who bothered to check the return
value. One of them (cris/arch-v10/kernel/setup.c) was
trivial, and the other (arch/i386/kernel/cpu/mtrr/if.c)
didn’t do anything with the return value anyway. (prev:
-A1)

I’m enjoying a nice Passover vacation, after meeting tough deadlines on both work projects. This blog will resume shortly.

Happy mailman day, y’all!

Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, Volume Two of The Baroque Cycle is going on sale in two weeks. Now I have a dilemma – buy it, wait for the paperback, or just ignore? Considering what I wrote about Quicksiler, “it’s a 900 page tome about a 300 page story”, the rational thing to do would be to wait for the paperback. But since when have I ever been rational about books?