Copying gigabytes of disk can get the system sluggish. On Linux, the solution is so simple. If process 18898 happens to take control of your disk, just go: ionice -c 3 -p 18898 And you have your computer back. “-c 3″ means class 3, which is idle class. In other words, take the disk when [...]
A short note about installing libraries on an Intel 64 bit machine (Fedora 12 in my case). It all starts with a short conversation like this one: [root@short Downloads]# rpm -i VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora12-1.x86_64.rpm error: Failed dependencies: libQtGui.so.4()(64bit) is needed by VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora12-1.x86_64 libQtOpenGL.so.4()(64bit) is needed by VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora12-1.x86_64 THE WRONG THING TO DO IS: [root@short Downloads]# [...]
The (non-) problem The truth is that there never was a problem. What really happened was that I got things confused between a few versions of mplayer/mencoder, and only the latests (of those I have, 1.0rc1-3.2.2) does the job. Bus since I wrote down some things I might want to return to some day, here’s [...]
Introduction I’m using Xilinx’ MiG 1.7.3 for running DDR2 memories on a Virtex-4 FPGA. It didn’t take me long to realize that the controller never finishes initialization. The problem is that I had no idea of why, and as far as I know, no documentation to refer to in my attempts to understand where the [...]
The whole story began when I decided to be kind enough to tell the Xilinx tools (ISE 9.2 in my case) that the Virtex-4 I’m targeting is a grown-up. Stepping 2, to be precise. I added CONFIG STEPPING = “2″; to the UCF file. It must have been one of those moments where I believed [...]
The purpose I use GIMP a lot. I store the images in the native file format, XCF. Now I’m stuck with a lot of files I can’t see outside GIMP, but I don’t want to save those files as anything else, because I’ll lose all the layer data. Solution: Batch conversion to JPEG as a [...]
Foreword Before I say a word, my children, I have to warn you: What I’m about to teach you here is basically how to mess up your computer. It’s how to make Windows install the wrong driver for a USB device (possibly PCI devices as well). Don’t complain about a headache when you want to [...]
(…or why the Verilog-emacs AUTOARG is redundant) In Verilog, I never understood why port declarations appear both in the module declaration, and then immediately afterwards, along with the wires and registers. I mean, if the ports in the module declaration are always deducible from what follows immediately, why is the language forcing me to write [...]
The old way Sometimes all you need is a quick crawl within a site, which requires to log in first. There are two main techniques I can think about: One is to POST the login form with your script, and get the necessary cookie setting. The second is to login manually with a browser, and [...]
Someone once told me that WWW stands for World Wide Wait. But when the page is held because the browser waits for a Google Ad to come in, that’s really annoying. I didn’t want that to happen in my site. So here’s the story about how to have the page displayed first, ads later. One [...]