miscellaneous.debris

There is a very convenient possibility to remote access folders on computers via ssh: sshfs. On Mac OS X there is also a possiblity to use sshfs and this is a short introduction how to do that.

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“The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is a numerical library for C and C++ programmers. The library provides a wide range of mathematical routines such as random number generators, special functions and least-squares fitting. There are over 1000 functions in total with an extensive test suite”.

Binaries of the GSL 1.11 were already provided in an earlier post including instructions on how the package was assembled. Here, the binaries for GSL 1.12 are provided.

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Puh, that’s a long title. I’m working on Mac OS X and use Virtualbox to run Windows XP as a guest operating system. Virtualbox runs exceptionally well and it’s even free. But the keyboard mapping is problematic since Windows XP assumes a standard PC keyboard. The layout of the Apple keyboards is different, so if you are not a Windows guy, you’ll have troubles to find the backslash ‘\’ or ‘@’. I was looking for a solution for a long time now, but didn’t find anything until now. Stefan Bohm actually published a solution for the same problem if you run parallels. He provided a new keyboard layout for installation (the layout is called ‘Parallels Keyboard Map’) as well a registry hack so that the ‘alt’ keys work as expected.

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The binaries for GSL 1.12 are provided in this post: MinGW (3.4.5) binaries of GNU Scientific Library 1.12 for use with MinGW and Visual C++

“The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is a numerical library for C and C++ programmers. The library provides a wide range of mathematical routines such as random number generators, special functions and least-squares fitting. There are over 1000 functions in total with an extensive test suite”.

GSL is quite Unix centric but one might want to use the library at least with MinGW on Windows. I didn’t find any MinGW binaries of GSL apart from the one provided by the Ascend package or the binaries from GNUWin32 (which is only at version 1.8), but I don’t like graphical installers for libraries and I needed the static library. Therefore I compiled my own library with MSYS (I updated MSYS according to this link) and provide here the tarred binary package, which can also be used with the MinGW compiler without MSYS and with Visual C (import libraries for the shared library are provided).

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The installation of a NTFS driver on Mac OS X for read and write access is actually covered on many websites, so I just write this entry to summarize the installation process and to write about my experience with the driver.

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I’m in the process of writing a DevPak for the libharu libary. These are actually tar.bz2 packages of whatever you think is a good idea to install into the Dev-C++, Code::Blocks or wxDev-C++ IDEs. E.g. precompiled libraries and necessary header files. In addition one adds a so called DevPackage file, which tells the IDEs where to put all the files. Since you are also allowed to install files into the windows directory, these packages are also quite dangerous – you should check the package content first (rename xxx.DevPak to xxx.tar.bz2). The DevPackage file format is more or less straight forward, but first I couldn’t find a documentation for that. In the cvs repository of Dev-C++ there was actually a documentation (File Format.txt), but it contained some errors. So I updated the file and make it available in this post. Read the rest of this entry »

I regularly make backups of all my data, it’s also synchronized on several computers and hard disks. But since I backup only once a week, I don’t really have several revisions from files available between the backups. This is espacially necessary if you work on some code of a small project, which is not revisioned via svn or cvs – and you don’t want to or have no access to svn. Also you don’t want to set up a local svn or cvs repository. You could use Time Machine on Mac OS X and there are some other tools available on Windows, like FileHamster. But FileHamster wasn’t always trouble free and by coincidence I found another solution which is rather appealing: Mercurial.

The nice thing about Mercurial is, that it is a fast, distributed, lightweight Source Control Management system – you don’t need a server for it. The revisions are save to the local .hg folder. In this post I just explain some basics to get started (on Windows – but apart from the installation process, it’s the same for Mac OS X and Linux).

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I got a new shiny Nokia 3110c phone, nice and simple. But iSync has no plugin to sync the address book and the calendar on my iMac with the phone’s memory. But searching the web I found James Lloyd’s website, where plugins are provided for the Nokia Series 40 phones (3110c is one of them).

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“netCDF (network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data”. On its homepage you’ll find a lot of precompiled libraries for Unix derivates but only a binary of netCDF 3.6.1 compiled with Visual C++. It’s possible to use this binary in MinGW also, but I prefer to use libraries compiled with the same compiler toolkit I’m working with. Read the rest of this entry »

In research sometimes you want to make a movie from single images, like plots from experimental data or from calculation to visualize changes or so on. In order to achieve this you can use ffmpeg. First you have to create the images and save them, where the images need to have a continuous number in the filename, e.g. img0001.png, img0002.png, …, …img5467.png. Take care that there is no image missing and that you have enough zeroes in front of the image number, so that the files are in the correct order. Read the rest of this entry »