Before anything: Recent distros come with packaged utilities for encrypting a disk, partition, USB stick or whatever block device. This little cookbook is for those who are not that lucky, or prefer to do things with their bare hands. If you’re not familiar with using loop devices, I suggest playing a bit with them before [...]
When I first discovered that there is both BLOB and TEXT in databases, I was puzzled. They occupy the same amount of disk space, and the database doesn’t alter the data itself anyhow. Why two? Of course, I followed the stream, and went for TEXT and VARCHAR for everything, since I don’t store binary data [...]
Some electronic imaging system dumped a 4:2:2 YCbCr raw image into a file. It’s a debug output. Now I wanted to see this image. GIMP doesn’t import that format. ImageMagick had the solution. It was as simple as convert -size 800x600 pal:ImageOut.raw ImageOut.bmp I don’t know why they picked the codename “pal” to represent 4:2:2 [...]
I reached that point, at which place and route sometimes met timing, and sometimes it didn’t. It was all a matter of playing with the placer cost table number. The FPGA guy’s gambling for lucky numbers. The ISE tool (Xilinx’ native IDE) supports an feature called Multi-Phase Place and Route (MPPR for short), which basically [...]
Introduction 2022 update: This is probably quite pointless today, but that’s not reason enough to delete this post. cdepend is a cross-reference utility, whose main purpose is mapping which function calls which in a C language project. As projects grow and develop, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of which functions are actually [...]