Is It Worth the Time?
Today's XKCD starts to answer: how much time should I spend making a routine task faster?
Ongardie
Bullets in Inkscape
Inkscape is a good open-source drawing program for vector graphics. I'm currently using it to make a research poster, but unfortunately, Inkscape doesn't do bullets. This post discusses your options if you want to use bullets in your Inkscape drawing and introduces a simple Inkscape extension that makes this much easier.
Color GDB Prompt
To add color to your GDB prompt, place the following in your ~/.gdbinit file:
set prompt \033[0;33m(gdb)\033[0m\040
This makes it easier to find your place visually.
Leveraging Web Technologies for Local Programs
Client-side web programming (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) has improved greatly in recent years. Meanwhile, node.js has become a reasonable platform for server-side JavaScript that interacts with the outside world. This environment already makes sense for building local applications. The node-webkit project takes this one step forward: it integrates the node.js libraries into a Webkit environment.
SQLite Database in Git
I store nearly all files of even moderate importance in Git (including this blog post). These are usually plain-text files, but sometimes it's necessary to put binary files under version control. Unfortunately, those are typically difficult to diff and merge, but I recently discovered some features of Git that make this less painful. This blog post focuses on SQLite database files, but at least some of it applies to other binary file types.
rlwrap: readline Wrapper Program
Dealing with a basic command-line prompt in a loop can be painful, so many programs, such as shells, interactive programming languages and debuggers, provide a more featureful prompt. For example, pressing the up and down arrows in a good prompt will flip through previously entered input lines. Programs will often make use of the GNU readline library for this functionality.
If you need to use a program that only has a basic prompt, you may be able to wrap it with the program rlwrap to get some more advanced features. From the man page:
The Cost of Exceptions in C++
Most people seem to have an opinion as to whether exceptions in C++ are slow or fast, but very few people have put any useful numbers out there. Here's a lower bound.
Book Log
Rice.edu Email Account Deleted
Rice has deleted my undergraduate email account,
diego.ongaro@rice.edu,
since I am no longer a student there. If you tried to send to that address
and received a bounce notification, please resend your email to the same
username at alumni.rice.edu instead.
Twin Peaks iPhone Panorama
I went up to Twin Peaks in San Francisco with Jay a few weeks ago. It was a nice view but kind of a worst-case scenario for a photo: my iPhone camera (VGA), poor lighting as the sun was setting, and stong winds.
That day I took a bunch of overlapping shots with my phone. Then I used the GIMP's automatic white balance correction on each of them. Next I stitched them together with Hugin, and finally I edited the stitched image with the GIMP. The following mediocre image is the result (click for the full 1534x652 image):
