Setting a process’ processor affinity in linux

Sometimes, people like me like to run stuff on a dedicated cpu instead of using all available cpu’s. The key to success here is this nifty tool: schedtool. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it anywhere in suse’s package database, nor the build service (if you know a repo or util package, please let me know).

But don’t worry, I guess nobody cares to make a separate package as it is such a small util. Just download the source from the website and make/make install (configure isn’t even needed).

Then, to run a process, in this case a dir listing, on CPU0, use:

schedtool -a 0x1 -e ls -la

-e specifies the command to execute
-a is followed by a bitmask in which each bit represents a CPU.

I have found that somehow it is best to always use the hexadecimal notation, even if your number is less than 10.

Opera 10: it’s unbelievable

Opera 10 seems to bring ground-breaking news for people using Opera Mail. It seems they finally got hold of the resources needed to implement the 2 most asked features ever! Behold:

  • Rich text email composition
  • Remove mail from server after X days

Can you believe it??!! After all these years of denial? I for one surely didn’t see that one coming. 🙂 Read the full changelog here.

Kiki the nanobot

Kiki always reminds me of a friend I know since childhood who somehow got stuck with the nickname kiki. 🙂

Anyway, kiki the nanobot is not to be confused with my friend. It is an open source 3d puzzle game, or like the author states: “basically a mixture of the games Sokoban and Kula-World“. A colleague recommended me to try it out. I was a bit reluctant as it didn’t seem to support linux, only windows and mac were mentioned on the website. Which was quite awkward as it seemed to use python and sdl.

So today I decided to find out the truth about kiki and checked out the cvs head. 🙂 I was delighted to find a linux subdir with a readme, yes, there were even makefiles! I installed the prerequisites (dev packages for python, sdl, sdl_image, sdl_mixer) and was ready to go! I did have to adjust a makefile to point to the right python headers (why not use the general /usr/lib/python instead of /usr/lib/pythonX.X?) Then, everything built just fine. Kiki’s core is in C++, levels and configurable parts are written in Python, bridged using SWIG.

Kiki the nanobot seems like a great puzzle game although it could use some polishing here and there, but given its age (6 years!) and the timeframe in which it was developed (3 months, for a contest), I think it’s quite an achievement. 🙂 You can read a dev post-mortem here.

Kiki the nanobot

AVG antivirus makes another mistake

Since AVG8 had a terrible performance on my parent’s computer, I am very glad now I moved to another AV soft as it seems AVG is suffering a major bug right now which causes your windows to stop working! Note that this problem is not affecting all versions, but guess what, Dutch is one of the affected ones!

In the meantime, I have switched to Avira Antivir, but that didn’t last long either as there came nasty popups about potential threats which scared the hell out of my mom, only because she was using the free version instead of the professional one. Also, it doesn’t have an email scanner.

So, currently, they are running Avast Home edition. It comes with a whole lot of crap (‘advanced’ antivirus shields) which you will want to disable. You might also want to disable the automatic checksumming of every file on your box, because obviously it generates a lot of I/O, especially when you don’t want it.
But it does automatically reroute pop3 and smtp connections so email traffic gets scanned automagically without any configuration (which is a relieve in comparison with AVG where you have to configure it manually if you don’t use M$ crapware like outlook). There was one catch, as it seems your free download version ‘expires’ after 30 (?) days, unless you register it. No problem, registration is free. It seems you have to reregister every year in order to be able to keep using it. Sounds fair enough to me: if you keep using the AV soft, it means you’re satisfied, so why not let them know you are using it by registering it for free.

It kinda reminds of this funny article, in which one argues Windows should become Ad-ware. 🙂 I sure woudn’t mind using an adware version, as long as I can play my games full-screen. 😉

Numa is back!

That’s right our favorite e-lebrity Gary Brolsma is back! =) Not as funny as the first one, but still, you just gotta love this guy 😉 Note, that he’s not really on a come-back, just in a day dream 😉

It’s funny though how a whole merchandise has emerged around this guy, going from ringtones to t-shirts to cartoons, the whole marketing shebang. 🙂

He also did a contest with some real hard cash prizes to win and it can be entertaining to watch the results. 🙂

Even more pdf fun on linux

Who says pdf support on linux is weak? 😉 Using free tools only, I can actually do more on linux than on windows.

A friend asked me to adapt a brochure which is in pdf format so that his contact data are filled in at the designated area on the last page. I didn’t have high hopes, as I know pdf editing is clumsy, even on windows using Adobe Acrobat. But I thought I’d give it a google search, and guess what, I stumbled upon pdfedit which seems to be able to do the job quite adequately! The only downside is the speed. I hope they port it to Qt 4 and fix the speed issues while they’re at it. 😉 (and apparently there are some plans!)

pdfedit ftw