Stephan Paukner :: syslog

CUDA is a technology by NVIDIA to accelerate scientific computations by the help of GPUs. Unfortunately, Debian isn’t supported officially yet. The toolkit for Ubuntu should come closest to it. First, the toolkit has to be installed, e.g. to $HOME/share/cuda, and then the SDK, e.g. to $HOME/share/NVIDIA_CUDA_SDK. These two paths shall be referred to as $CUDA_PATH and $SDK_PATH in the following. GCC and g++ have to be downgraded to version 4.1 (from ‘etch’), as 4.2 (from ‘lenny’) doesn’t work with CUDA yet.

Like described in $SDK_PATH/ReleaseNotes.html, $CUDA_PATH/bin has to be in the $PATH and $CUDA_PATH/lib in the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough for Debian to successfully compile the examples (via cd $SDK_PATH && make): The $CUDA_INSTALL_PATH in line 38 of the Makefile $SDK_PATH/common/common.mk has to be corrected to the $CUDA_PATH.

To compile the GLUT code, the development package freeglut3-dev has to be installed. With that it’s now possible to compile the examples; the binaries go into $SDK_PATH/bin/linux/release.

If your amavisd-new suddenly doesn’t want to start anymore, reporting that some required Perl modules aren’t installed allegedly, then maybe the cause is something like

Took me 2 hours. I need that CPAN stuff apart from Debian at least for Geo::IPfree to map IPs to country names for my web statistics.

My search for a new occupational challenge found a positive end: Center Communication Systems GmbH offered me a position at their Development Image Processing department. Their products include intelligent video surveillance systems that are able to detect uncommon situations e.g. in traffic. I’m with the algorithmicians that do applied research in and keep track with modern image processing methods. My tools seem to be a modern quad-core Linux PC, MATLAB and C++.

This position is indeed what I was looking for: I didn’t want to come too far away from signal processing or image processing, I stay in touch with the corresponding mathematics and can justify that it is really used in practice. I’m excited!

It’s a really good tip to use the -x flag to debug bash scripts. I had a problem that GDM wasn’t starting anymore after the regular aptitude upgrade. I didn’t find a hint in the log files and had a look at its init-script /etc/init.d/gdm, which appeared quite complex to me: It sources various config files and calls macros that are defined in there. How the heck should I trace the problem down? The best way was to change the initial line to

what starts the debug mode when the script is invoked. Here’s what it does: It prints every single command that is executed line by line in a fully expanded form, no matter if macros were defined or several other shell scripts are invoked from within. The lines are indented by a sequence of plus symbols to represent the invocation depth of the other scripts. By this, I saw that the last calls referred to splashy, a bootsplash package that I had installed for test purposes but never had configured. The solution was to simply remove that package.

Another tip: Don’t do experiments on a system that is supposed to work! This also means to not install the complete Debian ‘testing’ version on it. If you need a selected number of some more recent software, upgrade it individually, but keep the basic packages ‘stable’. On the other hand, you wouldn’t learn much if you weren’t forced to fix things once in a while.

On April 1st, 2008, it’s 10 years that I’m a netizen. I already had an e-mail address a few months before, but it was April 1998 when I seriously started to use the internet. This gives me some motivation to round it all up a bit.

I took my first programming steps around 1986 on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. It was a home computer similar to the later following Commodore 64: It had a black/silver keyboard with a slot for cartridges. It could be connected to an ordinary TV, and own software was saved on ordinary MCs by a special tape drive—It was quite funny to listen to the noisy sounds when playing the MCs on an ordinary player. We had two game cartridges: TI Invaders (screenshots) and Hunt The Wumpus (screenshots). The computer had a TI BASIC interpreter built in. The first program my stepdad taught me was:

Da ich derzeit auf der Suche nach einer neuen Herausforderung bin, wie’s so schön heißt, habe ich in diversen Web-Jobbörsen ein Profil hinterlegt. Komischerweise konnte ich an den entsprechenden Stellen keinen Lebenslauf als PDF hochladen. Auf meine Nachfrage bekam ich folgende überraschende Antwort:

PDFs werden von uns nicht verwendet, da sie nicht dem Standard beim vollautomatischen E-Recruiting entsprechen, denn E-Recruting-Software und Knowledge-Systeme durchforschen nur HTML- oder Word- bzw. Text-Dokumente, aber im PDF finden sich viele Softwarelösungen nicht zurecht (PDF ist ja gerade dafür gemacht, dass man es nicht so einfach editieren kann), und manche Systeme könnten Ihre Bewerbung nicht finden.

Aha?? Seltsam, denn laut meines Wissens verhält es sich so, dass das Word-Format ein proprietäres Format mit geheimgehaltener Spezifikation ist und nicht dafür gemacht worden ist, von anderen leicht editiert zu werden, während PDF offengelegt ist und derzeit sogar auf seine Eignung als ISO-Norm geprüft wird. Und seltsam auch, dass zahlreiche freie GNU-Tools PDF sowohl direkt erstellen (PDFLaTeX, OpenOffice) als auch konvertieren und extrahieren können (z.B. pdftotext aus den xpdf-utils).

Der Grund muss also völlig offensichtlich ein anderer sein. Blöd nur, dass damit IT-Experten die Möglichkeit genommen wird, sich als solche zu präsentieren, weil die Präsentation eines DOC-Lebenslaufs einen Widerspruch dazu darstellt.

My grandpa (87) conferred his stamp collection upon me. So far I didn’t have any interest in philately, but the effort for building such a collection is impressing, and every single stamp is an artwork of its own. He has three(!) complete collections of freshly printed Austrian stamps from 1970-2001 and wants to hand them out to his children and grandchildren. He stopped collecting at the beginning of 2002 where the old Austrian schilling was superseded by today’s euro.

I want to find out how much that collection is worth, but I won’t sell it. On the contrary, I want to see if it makes sense to complete the collection by the Austrian euro stamps from 2002-2007 and to subscribe to the new prints.

So far I was only interested a bit in numismatics, where I bought a collection of circulating coins from the euro countries (even a set of four coins from San Marino) plus some affordable sealed euro starter kits from various countries (Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Spain and Finland). I wasn’t interested in accumulative euro coins so far. I like to collect beer coasters from all around the world, but not in an purposive manner.

It took me long to finally get there, but the EOS 40D is now mine, all mine! I spent more than €2700 today for the body, the EF-S 17-55mm, two 4GB CF cards, a polarizer, a cleaning brush and a bag. I had some vouchers with a total of €500, and Canon’s Cashback sales promotion will decrease the amount by another €130.

The first thing I thought at home after unpacking was: What the hell am I going to do with such a big camera? I just spent an impressive amount of money on something that I’m yet unable to use! That expensive device is to be handled with care, so: Am I really willing to take it out when it’s freezing outside? Am I really willing to take an uncomfortable, rigid bag with me to crowded places? The answer obviously is: Well, if you spend so much money on such a thing, then, yes, you have to take your camera out to crowded places on freezing days!

But before I do so, I have to become acquainted with the camera. It wouldn’t make sense to try to shoot nice pictures seriously when the result isn’t predictable.