Re: gEDA-user: merge multi symbol components
With its lack of types, declarations and explicit return values scheme is anything but transparent to the casual hacker. Add to this the abundance of heavily nested parenthesis and result is black-box magic to the uneducated eye. C'mon, be fair. In this, it's no different from any other unfamiliar language. (The details will differ, but an unfamiliar language is still an unfamiliar language.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Broken mail clients
To: geda-u...@seul.org Reply-To: gEDA user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org Even emacs can't help but send two copies with headers like this. Only if you insist on adding the To: address to the Reply-To: address when sending. If there's a Reply-To:, it's probably there for good reason, and it should take specific action to reply to anything not listed there. As for receiving, there's a simple procmail rule that eliminates duplicates. :0 Wh: .msgid.lock.$LOGNAME | /usr/bin/formail -D 8192 .msgid.cache.$LOGNAME If, of course, you have procmail available and you don't mind losing all duplicates, for pure same message-ID values of duplicate. (Including, for exmaple, private copies of list mail; at least some people I've heard from _want_ separate copies, since they file direct mail and list mail separately.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: merge multi symbol components
I'm all in favor of this. But the right way to do that with a toolkit is usually to wrap the tools with high level scripts. Adding features to the tools themselves is the cat -v approach, the road to bloat and inflexibility. As much as I agree with the basic point, I think cat -v is not a good poster child for it. To quote http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/, mentioned upthread, cat isn't for printing files with line numbers, it isn't for compressing multiple blank lines, it's not for looking at non-printing ASCII characters, it's for concatenating files. Quite aside from the who died and made _you_ god of what cat is for? question (which actually carries comparatively little force in Rob Pike's case :), this is just silly. Presumably this means Rob Pike (and, I gather, you) would prefer to have a separate program for adding line numbers (let's call it cat-n, to avoid the need to think of a better name now), one for compressing blank lines (cat-s), and one for visiblifying nonprinting characters (cat-v). These will need to duplicate (almost?) all of cat's functionality, with additional code for their particular functionality. How is this better than sharing that common code by making them flags to cat? What flexibility is lost by turning cat-n, cat-s, and cat-v into options to cat? What gain would splitting them out into separate programs bring? In general, I agree with the hamster approach - each program does one well-isolated thing well. But I even more believe in using a few brain cycles, looking at the tradeoffs in a particular case, rather than dogmatically applying dogma everywhere. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: merge multi symbol components
My programming is mostly done in java using Eclipse, so I don't deal with Make at all. Ugh. What you gonna do when you need a microcontroller running the show? Probably about the same thing I'd do if I were to need to put a Windows GUI in front of something: get someone else to do it, go through the pain of learning a new environment, or let it slide. (So far, I've been letting it slide - this example is not hypothetical, but, since it's not anything I'd get paid for) Different environments, different tools. I can hardly imagine programming without make, but then, I daresay a (say) dyed-in-the-wool Ajax guru has tools provoking the converse reaction upon learning I don't have them /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Can we fix the HTML stripping on this list?
However, when properly used, rich text enhances email messages significantly, increasing clarity and visual appeal of a message. Even if true, what does that have to do with the list? Do you believe it is possible to use RTF properly in email between people who have no prior arrangement? Also, the discussion was about HTML, not RTF. And, if we're voting, I too vote for automatic unsub of anyone sending HTML to the list. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: PCB patches
It's safe. __DARWIN__ would be bad as darwin can run on other hardware. Does __DARWIN__ even exist? A while ago I wanted to port some software to Tiger and the best approximation to we're on Darwin I found was __MACH__ and __APPLE__ together. Was it brought in post-Tiger, or did I do something wrong, or what? (I was using Apple's compiler suite.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: [OFF] high current amplifier
Or it produces nailbiters like this one: http://www.wadenelson.com/gimli.html It's a very interesting story, to be sure, but I'm having trouble seeing the error. It says [...] each time using 1.77 pounds/liter as the specific gravity factor. [...] The factor the refuelers and the crew should have used on the brand new, all-metric 767 was .8 kg/liter of kerosene. But 1.77 pounds/liter is the same as .8 kg/liter, to within something like a third of a percent. Perhaps it's just bad reporting and/or writing, but I'm having trouble seeing the error. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: [OFF] high current amplifier
I have to design an audio amplifier that can deliver 100Amps. [...50Hz...500W...] [...sketch...] This is the highest efficiency type of driver since [its] driving transistors are never in active region -- always full on or off. High efficiency is what you need to put out 500W. It occurs to me that this could also be viewed as a switching power supply whose regulation target voltage varies at audio-signal rates. You might find useful literature by looking for switching power supply design info. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: [OFF] high current amplifier
I guess I wasn't clear, so I have to add that it won't be used to drive a speaker, I used the word audio to refer the frequency range. 500W audio amplifier that designed to drive 4-8 Ohms is easy. But 100A, is something you won't get in a pro audio store. 100A 500W...5V...that's .05 ohms load. Now you've got me curious. What _is_ this driving? Ten feet of #3 copper? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: [OFF] high current amplifier
~5 tons, enough for a 3000 sq ft house. And neither makes dimensional sense ;-) 1 ton refers to the equivalent cooling power as melting 1 ton of ice - Still not dimensionally right. Need time in the denominator. Yes - per hour. A ton of cooling is 12 Kbtu, about the heat of crystallization of one ton of water, per hour. Why do engineers use so many whacky units? Why pretend Rumford and Joule never existed? What's wrong with watts? The same reason people will say a bulb shedding about 40 watts of light when they really mean about the light given off by a bog-standard 40-watt light bulb (meaning maybe as much as 6 watts of light). The same reason people still occasionally cite weight in stones. The reason people say thing like weighs about two kilos even though two kilos is a mass, not weight, measurement. The same reason machine screws are still sized with small integers (as in the 6 in 6-32) rather than overt measurements. That is to say, tradition and convenience. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: [OFF] high current amplifier
A ton of cooling is 12 Kbtu, about the heat of crystallization of one ton of water, per hour. Why do engineers use so many whacky units? [...], tradition and convenience. Good excuses for the masses. Not so good for engineering, which depends on precise communication. Which measuring air conditioning capacities in tons provides. Just because it's disorienting to those who are acquainted with only other meanings of the word doesn't make it any less precise. It's not even ambiguous, since air conditioning capacity doesn't have units of weight. You might as well ask why motor power is measured in horsepower - that's another historical unit that's cryptic and baffling to the uninitiated, but is perfectly good to those in the industry. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: good books about footprint and land patterns
Working in industry, we now have a rule that we should avoid GPLv3 like the plague, [...] Can you be a bit more specific? An example that pinpoints the problem would help. I'm not Steven, nor his employer(s), but I too consider GPLv3 unusable. Why? I've read it over, and I have no friggin' idea what it permits and under what circumstances. It's just too complex. And that makes it unacceptable for my use. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: good books about footprint and land patterns
Hmm, thanks, I didn't know that applied to stuff you post on the web into free forums. It depends on the terms of the forums. [...] And, in some cases, the license you declare on the work. Yes, in most countries, everything copyrightable is born copyrighted and stays that way (unless it's explicitly released into the public domain, for jurisdictions which support that - and a few other exceptions, such as works to which an applicable government would otherwise hold the rights, some of which pass into the public domain as of their creation). For example, if I post some ASCII art to usenet, and someone else posts a copy elsewhere, I can sue for copyright infringement (caveat fair use laws) as I never granted a license-to-copy to anyone. Well, you can sue, but (at least in the USA) you can sue pretty much anyone for anything. In the case you sketched, you're unlikely to win; I daresay courts would find that posting it to usenet constitutes a grant of license-to-copy to every usenet site carrying the group(s) in question and quite probably something even wider - especially if you didn't place an explicit copyright notice and license on it. (And, even if you do win, you're unlikely to get more than a takedown injunction; I can't see a damages award for someone copying a usenet post, except possibly in very special circumstances such as a group for which posters have a reasonable expectation of very restricted distribution but which leaked.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: fritzing
Does it really matter *why* they use any given OS? You still need to make it relatively easy for them to use your software if you want to grow it market. (a) Only if you want to grow its market _into that segment_. (b) Do you want to grow its market? The world is full of bad things that were once good things, but driven into growth by someone who thought growth was always a good thing. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: fritzing
My very personal view: People not interested in Linux are not interested in free software at all. They may be interested to save some bucks, but they may use illegal copies with more fun than really free, open source software. Not to disagree that your personal experience is what it is, but I'm an existence proof that it is hardly universal - maybe you see what you see because you hang out with Linuxheads? I don't run software - including operating systems - that I don't have source to. (The closest thing to an exception is my gf's iMac, which runs Tiger. I don't count that as one of my own machines; if it were it would be running something else.) But I have no use for Linux. None of my own machines run it. I have some experience with it - three of the machines I work with regularly at work use it - and all that experience confirms my distaste for it. I can't think of any respect in which I like Linux more than I like the other open-source Unices I've tried. Quite poassibly because I don't hang out much with Linux geeks, I see almost none of the !Linux - !open-source implication you do in the people I know. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: fritzing
All the comments about Fritzing vs. gEDA are very true. It would indeed be nice if gEDA (particularly the gschem - PCB flow) were more polished and newbie friendly. Would it? In many cases I've seen, making something newbie friendly results in also making it expert crippling. I have seen exceptions, but it might be worth at least thinking about the danger. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: fritzing
One key, I think, is transparency. The NeXT InterfaceBuilder [...] [i]n the beginning [] output actual Objective-C code to set up the objects to implement the interface. I first got started with SQL that way: I was watching over the shoulder of someone who was using a GUI to do some changes in a database. When this GUI did something, it would display the underlying SQL it issued to the database server. This made novice-level learning of SQL pretty much trivial. I'm sure this forms some kind of argument in this discussion, but I'm not sure in which direction. :-) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: What commit for the log redirection?
One other nagging thing, is there anyway to disable the backup file creation (schname.sch~) on gschem? My working directories are currently cluttered with logs and ~ files and it's getting quite annoying doing an ls and seeing over half the stuff in the directory is backups and logs. I assume all of your text editors have their configurations modified to not make backups either? What makes you think they needed modifying? I use two editors routinely and a third occasionally. None of them do backups by default. (One of them I have configured contrary to the default.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Meaning of --with-x and --without-gui for pcb
If anything, I'd suggest that the presence of this flag represents a minor, cosmetic bug which one could file against the GNU autotools. That may not be minor .. Autoconf is loaded with irrelevant checks. If one of them fails, and prevents it from building, when nothing is really wrong, that is a major bug. Autoconf-generated configure scripts are horrible, horrible beasts. They are security disasters waiting to happen (they are almost perfect trojaning targets - mind-numbing to vet manually, very hard to sandbox, far harder than programs to vet mechanically, and, worst of all, they are training people to blindly run them). And, when they get something wrong, they are hell to fix. At work I recently had occasion to try to set up amanda 2.6.1 on NetBSD 4.0.1. amanda needed glib, which in turn needed pkg-config. Each of these three uses an autoconf-generated configure script. pkg-config's configure script produced a syntax error complaint from sh. glib's configure script broke because it tested statfs(), found that we had such a routine somewhere it could link to, and jumped to the (incorrect) conclusion that we had the full API. (statfs() is present for ABI compatability; the API is not present.) Then, based on that, it tried to figure out how many arguments it takes, which failed because the API isn't there, and fell over hard. Then, amanda's configure script broke trying to figure out GNU tar and smbclient, apparently because of shell quoting bugs in the script. (I ran into plenty of other problems too, but they aren't relevant to configure scripts.) That's three for three where I had to edit the configure script to make it even run to completion, never mind actually getting things right. No, when I run into something that uses configure scripts, I almost always throw it into /dev/null and look for alternatives. (Amanda I was being paid to struggle with, and even then I insisted on pushing the decision to ignore the security nightmare upstairs from me. If it had been for my own machines, fugeddaboutit.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: PCB Polygon code (with r-tree speedups) triggers GCC bug...
I guess I'll have to look out for any stack variables used in the routines which use setjmp / longjmp, and make sure they are not going to cause trouble. Since PCB works, I'll assume that the likelihood of that case is low. On *most* current systems, *most* objects retain their values, even if they're auto and non-volatile. The usual case that causes trouble is when the object happens to be kept in a register across the call which ends up longjmping; when longjmp unwinds the stack and restores registers, it restores the object's value as well. But the C people wisely decided not to try to cast the current problematic cases in stone as the only allowed-to-be-problematic cases, to allow more latitude in the implementation of setjmp and longjmp (and, quite probably, to avoid making it impossible to implement without ruinous efficency penalties on some of the more arcane architectures). Making such objects indeterminate rather than changes may be rolled back allows things like part of an object being in memory (and thus not rolled back) and part in a register (and thus rolled back). And, of course, there's no guarantee that longjmp is implemented that way So don't assume that the code is correct just because it currently doesn't break. The chances of being bitten by this issue at the moment are low, even for buggy code, but the next compiler release may include a more aggressive optimizer, or just a different code-generation module, and render such bugs blatant instead of latent. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Building the PCB+GL branch [WAS: Re: Open GL survey (for PCB)]
And if I had a nickel for every time I've heard people, even knowledgeable people, incorrectly use the term broadband to mean high-speed Internet connection (when most such connections are, in fact, baseband).. They are? DSL certainly isn't (the baseband there is the audio range, which DSL specifically avoids) and, while I don't know the cable-TV transport well enough to be sure, what little I've heard indicates that it's not baseband either Unless you're talking about the customer-facing interface of the CPE, usually 10baseT or 100baseTX, which is indeed baseband but isn't really very interesting - it's the provider-customer last-mile that's actually of interest. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Building the PCB+GL branch [WAS: Re: Open GL survey (for PCB)]
They are? DSL certainly isn't (the baseband there is the audio range, which DSL specifically avoids) and, My definition of broadband is multiple communication channels sharing bandwidth on the same medium, which does not, IMO, describe DSL. What is yours? The one from which my remarks were derived came from googling and reading three or four pages which gave definitions, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband. It is that baseband uses the frequency range whose low-frequency end is at 0Hz; broadband avoids this, with its low-frequency cutoff well above that. As the Broadband wikipedia page points out, the term can also refer to any signal whose bandwidth is wide compared to something else, but that's not a very useful definition in this context, as there is no obvious something else to compare to. Actually, channels sharing bandwidth can happen on baseband or broadband, via either TDM or FDM (though whether FDM is baseband depends on your point of view; an FDM-shared medium is not baseband for more than one of the signals making it up, though if you think of them as aggregated then the term may be fair). /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Building the PCB+GL branch [WAS: Re: Open GL survey (for PCB)]
[...], while me, having grown up (at least chronologically!) in the 1970s, broadband is a more relaxed way of saying multiple information channels via frequency-division multiplexing on multiple independent carriers. And, doesn't DSL fit that? At the physical layer, at least - the multiple physical-layer channels get combined into one bit pipe, but if that's relevant, then all these mass-market last-mile technologies are the same, because they all end up providing a simple bit pipe at the customer interface. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Preferred debugger/development environment: PCB
I'm starting to dig through the PCB source - just a quick survey for those who hack on the source code: what do you use for debugging and development of the project? Same as any other program I'm hacking on: gdb (and/or printfs) for debugging, usually my favourite text editor (a non-GNU emacs, I think a Gosling derivative) for writing code and such. Why? Seems to me it matters more what you're used to than what we use. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: label printing
I would like to print labels. For this I'd generate N times some labels, with slight different content. Then I have N *.eps file. Question. How do I merge them into one A4 postscript page? Options I have so far. * LaTex. It is pain to do it, but once it's done, it's okay. Actually, TeX proper (and LaTeX is just a TeX macro package) can't; all it can do is drop a directive in the DVI that tells the DVI converter to do something implementation-specific. You then need a DVI-to-PostScript converter that does what you want when it sees the resulting \special in the DVI. Also, where's the pain? Is it not just a suitable \halign or \valign? * Postscript. It should be possible to include *.eps into the main page. That's what I'd recommend. Does anyone have any experience with Postscript programming? Yes. :) Any other idea is welcome. It would be nice if the solution was scriptable. Creating PostScript is scriptable in principle, since PostScript is just plain text (with suitable content - that is, PostScript is plain text just as much as, for example, C is). How easy is it? If you're willing to make a few assumptions, such as the amount you need to scale the labels by (which may be reasonable in your case), then it's probably just a matter of catting together the pieces of a template with the label files. It might even be as simple as doing gsave NNN NNN translate NNN dup scale save ...label file 1 goes here... restore grestore gsave NNN NNN translate NNN dup scale save ...label file 2 goes here... restore grestore gsave NNN NNN translate NNN dup scale save ...label file 3 goes here... restore grestore ...etc... showpage where the NNN things in the gsave...save lines are values you need to work out to control where on the page the label files appear (first two NNNs) and what sizes they are (third NNN). In a proper general-purpose solution these would be computed based on the bounding box of the EPS file, but doing that may be more work than it's worth in this case. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Text encodings [WAS: Re: Open GL survey (for PCB)]
- but pcb supports iso-latin-1 8-bit at the moment, aside from the missing font issue. Its dangerous do document that we support iso-latin-1, lest anyone draws themselves fonts, and then gets cross if we decree in future, that PCB text is in UTF-8. Does it do Latin-1, or does it do raw octet streams and you get whatever your font gives you with them (8859-7 if you use an 8859-7 font, for exmaple)? For example, does it know that 1/4 of the possible octet values (00-1f and 80-9f) are not printable characters, or is it willing to put most/all of those into strings and let the chips fall where they may when it comes to display? I consider this an important distinction; I've seen two things already which are, strictly speaking, unimplementable on many Unix variants because they require that OS things be character strings when they actually are octet strings. (What are they? ssh, which specifies UTF-8 for usernames and passwords, and POSIX extended tar header format, which specifies UTF-8 for file names. But on the Unix variants I've worked with, usernames, passwords, and filenames are not character strings; they are octet strings, with conversion to and from characters happening elsewhere if at all.) I'm not sure whether I think switching PCB's philosophy from octet strings to character strings would be a good move. (I think it would be difficult to do, but that's a separate issue.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: [RFC 5/6] Use of X server clipboard
I would actually recommend you use PRIMARY, not CLIPBOARD (though I also recognize that you may not have meant clipboard to be the technical term here). No, Peter B and I discussed this, and we explicitly did _not_ want to use PRIMARY. Hm, then I suspect you'll find yourself unable to paste into X clients with relatively unsophisticated selection paradigms (which are likely to use PRIMARY and nothing else). The UI paradigm for PRIMARY is passing the currently selected text between applications. Well, the currently selected object. Text is perhaps the commonest use of it, but it's by no means restricted to text. But see below. If we start claiming the PRIMARY X selection every time someone has a schematic object selected in gEDA, [...] Oh, yes, certainly. I wasn't thinking you'd take the selection every time an object is selected; I was expecting selecting as in picking an object to operate on and selecting as in preparing to paste would be different operations (with unfortunately similar names). I don't know of any other applications which claim the PRIMARY selection for graphical objects. That's odd. I don't see any basis in either the ICCCM or the EWMH for the use of anything else for routine selection data transport. Is there something I missed, or is this just an observation that some client authors think they know better than the ICCCM spec that PRIMARY is the principal means of communication between clients that use the selection mechanism? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: [RFC 5/6] Use of X server clipboard
Currently, if you 'copy' in gschem and 'paste' in another program, nothing useful happens. We should ideally try and use the X clipboard. I would actually recommend you use PRIMARY, not CLIPBOARD (though I also recognize that you may not have meant clipboard to be the technical term here). 1. Copy in gschem, paste in text editor. Should it paste schematic file source code equivalent to copied elements? Maybe. An ascii-graphics rendering of the schematic might actually be more useful in some circumstances. 2. [...] 3. Copy in gschem, paste in program that understands images. Should paste an image representation of the copied elements. The X selection protocol provides the data sender with a way to advertise a list of short names (X atoms) for types that it is willing to generate data in; the data receiver then selects one of these types and requests the data using that type. Thus, you may want to provide a way to restrict the types gschem advertises, so that when pasting into something which can understand both text and images, you can control which one you get. (A good data receiver will allow the user to control this, but you might not want to count on the data receiver being good in this respect.) Also, the presence of only one text type means that if you want to support pasting multiple kinds of text (as I mentioned above, for example) you'll need to provide some such control anyway. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Power (and other non-graphical) pins
The generalist will be at a disadvantage when faced with a task that pushes state of the art for a specific field. Absolutely not. The generalist has a huge advantage, because at the cutting edge there is no specific field, only a problem to be solved. To truly push the state of the art almost always requires importing ideas from outside any specific field, because the specialists have mastered *those*, and that's what defines the state of the art. But there is a way in which the generalist will be at a disadvantage, too: the generalist will not be familiar with the detailed tools available to the specialist. For example, if I (mostly a generalist) were to want to write data-blind multiplication code (something that is valuable for cryptography) based on Fourier transforms but didn't know anything about FFTs, I would be at a substantial disadvantage. If I weren't familiar with even the concept of a Fourier transform, I would be at a pretty much catastrophic disadvantage. (As it is, I'm at a mild disadvantage bceause I don't know FFTs in detail, but only a mild one because I know they exist, have a vague knowledge of them, and know how to find details when I care.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: one fix for building under Solaris
It does not require bash. NetBSD's stock sh, for example, which is definitely not bash - it appears to be based on ash - accepts it just fine. [I]t's still not a Bourne shell script, if it contains stuff that the Bourne shell does not recognize. Well, yes; that's almost a tautology. But what is a Bourne shell these days? If you mean just the shell written by S. R. Bourne, then yes, it's not a Bourne shell script, but that's pretty much irrelevant, because I doubt there's anyone still using the real Bourne code. (Well, anyone who cares about gEDA; there are probably a few people running V9 on real PDP-11s and the like.) Also, the real Bourne code lacks a lot of things that everyone supports these days - I think a more useful working definition is stock /bin/sh, which is a different thing for each target environment and is more a matter for deciding what platforms to care about and what ones not and experimenting. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: one fix for building under Solaris
(! test -z $LIBTOOLIZE) || {
...requires Bash, and blows up when run by the Bourne shell.
It does not require bash. NetBSD's stock sh, for example, which is
definitely not bash - it appears to be based on ash - accepts it just
fine. (This is as of both NetBSD 1.4T and 4.0, probably meaning
everything in between too.)
This is not to say that it's not better to avoid it, especially given a
relatively common Unix variant (Solaris) that breaks on it. Perhaps
test -z $LIBTOOLIZE {
works better? I can't see any reason it would be semantically
different, unless there is further control structure following the
closing }. (I can't easily test it myself, as I have no machines
running Solaris.)
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Re: gEDA-user: OT: Recommendations for laptop?
- Closed source OS rubs some folks the wrong way - even when they provide free development tools documentation for coding on top of the OS, not having access to the guts is annoying. It actually can be anywhere from irrelevant to intolerable, depending on what you're trying to do. For me, crippling is usually about the right level. NetBSD does run on many of the Apple laptops, but then, as I put it before, most of the Apple benefits go away (if they haven't already - as I remarked, Apple's UI is not a benefit for me, for example). So given you don't like Apple, what do you recommend for a good laptop? It depends fairly heavily on what you want to do with it. Perhaps, for you, Apple _is_ a good choice - for example, if you don't mind spending money on the OS, and you just want to run (say) geda--pcb, it may well be a reasonable choice. For me, it isn't; the closed-source OS is pretty crippling on pragmatic grounds and intolerable on philosophical grounds. I haven't found anything I really like. The best two laptops I have so far are an IBM WorkPad z50 and a Tadpole SPARCbook whose model number I forget. Each has a non-Intel-architecture CPU (MIPS and SPARC), which I consider a benefit. Neither one has tremendous screen resolution (800x600 maybe? I forget), and their colour capabilities aren't flashy. Each one has difficulty with disks (the z50 has no interface designed for disk - I use a CF-interface microdrive - and the SPARCbook takes SCSI laptop drives, which are thin on the ground and usually small (~1G) when you can find them, and the OBP doesn't play nice with the IDE-to-SCSI laptop disk adapter I have handy, though another just the same works fine with my Voyager). The z50 has good battery life, something like six hours, mostly because I got a new battery for it; the SPARCbook has just about no battery life, but I haven't replaced its battery. Each has good keyboard feel and tolerable (but not especially good) keyboard layout - I'm picky about keyboard layout. The z50 has a fairly low RAM limit, and my add-on RAM for it died, so I haven't turned it on in quite a while - I don't recall what the SPARCbook has for RAM, but I think it's plenty. If I found myself needing a working laptop, I'd probably try to get each in working order, which means getting a new battery for the SPARCbook and looking harder for a RAM module for the z50. Oh, and look for multi-gig mass storage with a PCMCIA interface, for the SPARCbook. I know just about nothing about what's available new. I _really_ don't want to spend money on an Intel-architecture machine, and I don't know of anyone making laptops with anything else - though it hasn't mattered enough for me to put serious effort into looking. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Wish list for gschem
Actually, no; ^C per se is not supposed to do anything. It just happens to be probably the commonest setting of c_cc[VINTR]; [...] The above is *not* true (or even relevent) in a GUI environment. I think it actually is, in the context of the text that was a reply to. You deleted that; the relevant quote is [...] ctrl-c which is supposed to kill command line processes. It specifically mentions command line processes, which require a commmand line, and thus something ttyish - combined with a GUI environment, this presumably means a terminal emulator window. It's only true and relevent when an application is running [under] the [purview] of the termio subsystem, which is *not* the case for gschem, which is what we're talking about. Depends on how gschem is started. Not that that's really relevant to what I wrote, which was a response to the assertion that ^C was supposed to kill command-line processes. Certainly for lots of people who _do_ use terminal emulator windows, the risk of typing a ^C into the wrong window and killing something by mistake is real regardless of what UI standard you prefer to listen to, so making the copy gesture user-configurable is a perfectly reasonable desire. I know I've typed into the wrong window often enough, and can't believe I'm alone in that. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: OT: Recommendations for laptop?
I just can't say enough good things about my Mackbook Pro. [...] I've been happy with Apple laptops for a few years now. [...] To offer a slight counterweight to the Apple gushiness...I wouldn't. I once had an Apple laptop for a week or so, and I wouldn't recommend them unless you find closed-source system acceptable - I don't, and I found that most of the Apple benefits go away then (for example, that means dumping Aqua, the Apple UI - it's not a UI I could stand for extended use, but it's usually cited as one of Apple's advantages), and the ones that remain don't outweigh the price. Even if you _do_ find closed-source acceptable (most people seem to), prepare yourself for having to relearn most of your sysadmin skills. I've worked as a Unix sysadmin for most of my career, and the Apple OS (some flavour of OS X, I believe it was) was at least as different from other Unix flavours as the more unusual of my experience - think AIX, only more so and in a different direction. For example, it took something like half an hour (and some lucky guesses - with twenty years' experience guiding them) before I figured out how to boot the machine single-user, and probably another half-hour or so before I figured out what I needed to poke to get the result I wanted. (Times approximate; this was quite a while ago and I no longer recall details.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: electrolytic capacitors
[Electrolytics] can explode pretty violently, so let me tell you a story. [...785V on a 450V cap...serious dent in plaster...] My exploding cap story is not quite so impressive, but I know I certainly found it convincing. I put together a circuit - can't even remember what it was, now - on one of those solderless breadboards. Turned it on and it seemed to be working, but then I heard this hissing noise. I was just starting to try to locate it when the cap let go. Fortunately it was a small one (perhaps half a millicoulomb rating); all it did was make a bang and a small cloud, which settled in moments to cover everything within about a 6 radius with a thin film of something oily-feeling. On reflection, I realized I'd been running it at something like twice its rated voltage. Ever since I've been substantially more careful to think about voltage ratings when selecting electrolytics. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: pcb, how to remove mm garbage (very short lines)?
1. Really high resolution integer coordinate space. Reduces available board dimensions due to size of integers. Not if you enlarge the integers to match. Do any compilers the gEDA tools care about lack a 64-bit integer datatype? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: OT: D-sub pin-shorter / pin-breaker?
I'm working on a project that cables several boxes together, which signal each other using dry contacts; i.e. by closing or opening a pair of wires. The interconnect cables all use D-sub connectors (DB9, DB15, and DB25). ITYPM DE9 and DA15; I've never seen a 9- or 15-position connector in a DB shell (but I've often seen DE9 and DA15 miscalled DB9 and DB15). But that aside, For testing, I need to inject some hardware faults of the kind where such a pair of wires fails closed or fails open. I am looking for a little device that has, say, a DB15 male on one end and a DB15 female on the other normally connected straight through [and which can create such faults] I've seen these for DB25, in the form of connectors brought out to what I might call 1-pin sockets into which one can plug jumper wires. (A batch of jumper wires typically comes with them, but pretty much any moderately-fine-gauge wire works fine, such as the stuff from spare Cat5 or Cat3 cable.) The ones I've seen generally hardwire pin 1 connected through, because they're designed for serial-line use, but I suspect that's not universal (and even if it is, you can interpose adapters which permute the pins to put the pairs on, say, 23, 45, etc). I've never seen them for DE9 or DA15, but I imagine they exist. If nothing else, it would border on trivial to wire up adapters with a DE9 (or DA15) on one end and a DB25 on the other, so you can use the DB25 version of the thing. Or, you can just solder wires to a connector and plug them into a bog-standard solderless breadboard. (I'm assuming your signals are slow enough that rat's-nest wiring isn't going to produce unacceptable levels of crosstalk.) These suggestions do assume you don't mind manually moving wires to induce faults. If that needs to be automated, you may need to wire them up to relays or some such. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Adding extra layer
Anyway, memory is cheap. Only for mainstream mass-market hardware. Of course, that may be all gEDA cares about If we lose users in order to save 1 K, or even 1 Meg of RAM, that doesn't make sense. Depends. To what extent is more users an overriding good? In this particular case, I think the conclusion is correct. I just don't like the reasoning being advanced here. (I would even more prefer to see max-layers settable at startup time, but I daresay that would be a substantially more intrusive change.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Poor man's O-scope?
I would avoid eBay / Paypal like the plague. Same here. Last I heard (it's been a while since I checked, but nothing I've heard indicates they've gotten better) their user agreement was multiple dozens of pages. They also required agreeing to foreign legal jurisdiction. Either of those alone would have been enough to keep me away. But then add to it all the horror stories I've heard about how they don't enforce even what rules they have, and it's not even worth checking periodically; if they change drastically enough for me to become interested, I'm sure I'll hear about it. Stopping running an unregulated bank would be a good first step. (Yes, I consider them a bank. They quack like a bank, they waddle like a bank) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Question for DJ about his alarm clock
I noticed that on p. 3, the ST part (U300) has PVDD and PVSS connections through 4.7 ohm resistors to PWR and GND, respectively. There's noise on both power and ground lines. The P* pins are for the PLL's power supply, which need as clean a power source as you can provide. How do resistors help with that? Or are there other relevant components not mentioned in the email? (I'm just wondering whether I'm missing knowledge of the circuit or missing something electronic...) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Question for DJ about his alarm clock
The power plane? That board has two planes (power and ground). Why is one always the reference? In low-voltage electronics, there is no such thing as a voltage in isolation; voltage exists only in reference to somewhere else. In high-voltage electrostatics work, there is an absolute reference, that being electrically neutral, as in having equal amounts of positive and negative charges. In theory, the same measure could be applied to low-voltage circuits too, but the imbalance in charge carriers is so tiny compared to the number of charge carriers involved in the kind of current flow typically involved in low-voltage circuits that it's not a useful way to look at it in practice (whereas in high-voltage electrostatics work, current flow is so low compared to the potentials built up that the converse view is more useful). In many - I'd even go so far as to say most - low-voltage circuits, there is only one reference, and it's called ground. When mixing analog and digital, this is sometimes split into 'analog ground and digital ground, but each is still ground to its portion. Which is all to say that I'd say that, _by definition_, the ground plane is the reference: using the term ground for it is effectively saying this is the one that's my voltage reference point. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: How to unsubscribe?
Yes you've got it. The list uses Mailman thankfully rather then that nuisance Majordomo who isn't as good as it thinks it is. Gads, is anyone actually still using Majordomo? [...] that pest. Majordomo may not be perfect, but mailman sure isn't either. I've come to dread the first of the month, and I've actually had to set up scripts to repair autosuspended mailman subscriptions - apparently it's not smart enough to realize that some mail getting through means the problem is with the mail rather than the subscriber. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gEDA/gaf development version 1.5.0.20080706 released!
IIRC the control key does not create a key-press-event. This is not true at the X level. It may be true at some higher level, but, if so, it's a defect in the interface layer between that level and the underlying X level. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: poll: How do you geda?
In fact, [gschem and pcb] are currently pretty unfriendly to keyboard driven people due to the lack of scripting or even a decent command line interface. That really is not that difficult to fix. Well, at least for PCB; converting the action framework into a real language would not be all that big a deal - well, at least not for people willing to bite the backwards-incompatibility bullet. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: poll: How do you geda?
* What OS do you run geda applications on? NetBSD/sparc 1.4T (with a number of local hacks, none of which are terribly relevant here). You didn't ask, but, in case you care, the hardware is a SPARCstation 20. * How did you install your copy of geda apps? Download the pcb-20080202 tarball, unpack, say a few uncomplimentary things about its choices, discover it's fairly easy to compile by hand, and say some distinctly complimentary things about other of its choices. :) Start reading code and eventually writing code. * Which apps do you use. What is your typical workflow? (That first sentence is worded like a question but is not punctuated like one. I'll assume it's the punctuation that's wrong.) Which program(s)? PCB. I don't have a typical workflow, at least not yet, because PCB is not yet functional; I'm writing my own HID for it and it's not yet done. The workflow I expect to use eventually is something like need - vague design - breadboard and more definite design - test--tweak loop - PCB - board fab house. * Did you (have to) modify portions of geda to suit your needs? Yes; as mentioend above, I'm writing a new HID, because I have neither GTK nor Lesstif/Motif, I want to not install either, and writing a pure X HID is not that big a task for me. (I expect creating the HID will be less effort than obtaining and building either GTK or Lesstif would be, and I expect that using either of the provided HIDs would be somewhere between irritating and intolerable for me.) * What is the general flavor of your projects? (analog, digital, HF) The project that was the proximate cause of pushing me into doing this is digital; most of my projects have been. Who knows what the future holds, though. * (add your favorite question here) FF. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gschem: what's this debug message mean?
I see there are some basic incompatibilities between *nix and Windows. Is there a way to resolve this? Cntl-C is the CUI control for copy and I, for one, use it instinctively. It would be a hard habit to break... This is not really an incompatbility between Unix and Windows. ^C in a Windows command-line window works much the way it does in a Unix shell window; the only real difference is that shell windows are ubiquitous in Unix and command-line windows are comparatively rare in Windows. The way to resolve it is actually quite simple: make sure your keyboard focus is where you want it to be before you type. (Keyboard focus is X-speak for where keystrokes go. Most window managers provide some kind of visual feedback to indicate which window has focus; twm, for example, changes the title bars.) As someone else already pointed out upthread, backgrounding gschem on startup will also help suppress the symptom, because then a ^C in the shell window won't kill it. (It won't do what you probably want, but that's almost always true of typing into a window other than the one you think you are.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering
I don't know gEDA proper, but PCB is very far from lowest common denominator. Indeed that's a substantial part of why I'm building my own HID for it now: I neither have nor want GTK or Lesstif, so I'm building a plain X HID. I presume you're ok with a partial requirement for M4 and some posix shell, which is common on UNIX, but is a real pain for the win32 port. Well...I'm okay with that in a pragmatic sense, since I do have m4 and sh, but I'd consider those misfeatures (hard-to-fix misfeatures, maybe, but that's a separate issue). (Hmm, what does it need sh for? I need to have another look at the code) Partly, but partly not.. there is no reason someone like yourself could not build cairo etc., if you wanted it. Well, and if I were willing to accept the prices, which quite likely would include an OS change and substantially beefier hardware at a minimum. The main reason it wouldn't be viable would be if you were running on hardware which isn't fast enough to be usable with that level of graphics quality. Which is likely true in my case. I've done the rendering portion of the HID first, and it takes it nearly a minute to render tut1.pcb. It's likely I can speed that up some, but only some; I don't expect to ever get it below, say, five seconds, on this hardware. Limited by hardware is what I meant by lowest common denominator. Avoiding things like GTK by choice is just that, your choice, and comes more under the m-r-c definition. So l-c-d is hardware and m-r-c is software? /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering
Which is likely true in my case. I've done the rendering portion of the HID first, and it takes it nearly a minute to render tut1.pcb. It's likely I can speed that up some, but only some; I don't expect to ever get it below, say, five seconds, on this hardware. Good heavens, what do you have in that SS20, a single SM30? cpu0 at mainbus0: RT620/625 @ 125 MHz, on-chip FPU cpu0: 256K byte write-back, 64 bytes/line, sw flush: cache enabled I don't know what that is in SMxx terms. I've had sixty shell users doing mail, usenet, etc on a well-equipped SS20 with good responsiveness. I can't imagine simply drawing a PCB layout to the display could really take five seconds. There's a delay of at least a few seconds before it even _starts_ drawing; PCB must be doing _something_ piggish, but I don't yet have any idea what. It's clearly not _just_ the drawing that's taking all that time. It strikes me as slow too. I don't know why it is so slow; I need to find out, but first make it work, then make it better. I've got lots of speculation, but so far it's only speculation. There are at least four processes involved, for example; I speculate that it's context switching too much, but until I measure I won't know whether it's worth putting any effort into cutting down on context switches. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering
It strikes me as slow too. I don't know why it is so slow; I need to find out, but first make it work, then make it better. [...] Perhaps some profiling is in order. Some profiling of some sort (not necessarily of the cc -p sort) is definitely in order. I can think offhand of a half-dozen places I could usefully instrument the code /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering
This really makes me wonder what else may be going on inside the pcb core. I would have thought that going back to a pure xlib hid would have the ability to make pcb feel pretty darn snappy especially on smaller layouts. I've been using tut1.pcb - which is pretty simple - as my test case. But don't put too many brain cycles into it yet; it could very well be that much/all of the problem is in my code, not PCB proper. (Probably not all; there is that odd delay before it starts drawing. But that's only a small fraction of the total wall-clock time.) Is it the polygon dicer maybe? My HID specifies 0 for poly_dicer, in case that's relevant. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: selection quirk, and placement guidelines
I has been a *really* long time since I used a DIP socket, but I want to say you can't place them any closer than 100 mils between pins, and I'm not sure you can get them that close. It depends on the sockets. To an extent, it also depends on the chips. A lot of headers are designed to be stacked end to end and form a continuous 100 mil spacing of pins. But I want to say you can't necessarily do that with DIP sockets. You can't _necessarily_. But there are sockets that are designed to be stacked end-to-end (that is, pins 1 and N of one socket next to pins N/2 and (N/2)+1 of the next). I've never tried stacking them sideways (1 and N/2 of one next to N and (N/2)+1 of the next), but based on memory of the sockets I have (they're at home and I'm not), I'm fairly sure at least some sockets would do that just fine. As for depends on the chips - I've seen some chips whose cases extend far enough that you can't stack them end-to-end with only 100 mil spacing regardless of the sockets. 200 mil is fine; 150 mil would probably work, but I have't tried it. But I've also seen other chips whose cases end right at the edge of the operational portion of the pin; they can be stacked substantially closer than 100 mils end-to-end. And I've never seen a DIP with anything mechanically preventing side-to-side 100-mil stacking (which is not to say no such exist). /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering
It is getting quite frustrating to keep coding for the lowest common denominator, I don't know gEDA proper, but PCB is very far from lowest common denominator. Indeed that's a substantial part of why I'm building my own HID for it now: I neither have nor want GTK or Lesstif, so I'm building a plain X HID. It's likely you actually mean lowest common denominator that meets my idea of a minimal reasonable configuration. And there's nothing wrong with that...provided you recognize that's what it really is, and document what your idea of a minimal reasonable configuration is, for the benefit of those whose idea of a m-r-c differs from yours. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: Using 60Hz mains frequency for timing?
Just a quick non-gEDA design question -- I have the choice between using the zero crossings of the 60Hz mains voltage or my MCU clock (generated from an 18.432MHz quartz crystal producing a 48MHz CPU clock via PLL built into the MCU) for low-resolution timing. It depends. :-) Either one is easy to use -- I just want to be as accurate as possible. I was going to say, it depends on whether you care about accuracy, or short-term repreatability, or long-term repeatability, and on what kinds of durations you'll be timing (seconds, minutes, hours, days). But you specifically call out accuracy as your goal If the durations you're measuring are several hours or more, you're probably more accurate with the mains (provided, of course, that you're actually getting power-grid mains power; as someone else pointed out, running off a generator or inverter will break the assumption of accuracy of mains power frequency). As others have remarked, mains frequency is very accurate over the long term but wobbles a little in the short term. For short durations (less than several hours), the most accurate thing I can think of offhand is to use both. Use the mains frequency over long periods (days) to measure what the crystal is generating, then use that to measure the short duration in question. Depending on your intended use, you may also want to consider the possibility that you'll end up being fed 50Hz power (say, if someone takes it to Europe - and runs it off a stepdown transformer, if you don't use a universal-voltage power supply). /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: (OT) New York City wants to ban detectors
New York City is debating a law that would require a permit to own devices capable of detecting biological, chemical, and nuclear agents. Would this also include ionizing smoke detectors? What about human noses? Canine/feline noses? They - especially the latter - are capable of some pretty impressive feats of detection. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: 3 questions on a 4 layer board
Turns out that for the purpose of impedance (which is why you want your traces close to the plane) a power plane is exactly the same as a ground plane. ..or, at least, if it's not, you need better power bypassing. :) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
gEDA-user: What to do with some bugs?
Okay, normally I like to read at least a handful of messages on a new list before sending anything, but this one seems awfully quiet at the moment. I've picked up PCB (the 2008-02-02 snapshot) and have started working on it, trying to adapt (port is perhaps a little too strong a word) to my environment, which means writing a new HID (and this is why it's PCB I'm working on, because this architecture makes it easy to do - I was very pleased to find it). Mostly this is neither here nor there, though I wouldn't mind talking with someone about some internals questions I have at some point. At the moment, the issue is some latent bugs - code that is incorrect and thus really ought to be cleaned up, but which will not exhibit misbehaviour on most modern systems and thus would be difficult to turn up with testing, at least until someone happens to try it on a system that breaks the concealment condition. (The concealment condition is basically that all nil pointers have the same size and bit pattern, in a varargs argument list, as integer zero. This is primarily CPU-dependent, but could also vary with calling convention and in some cases maybe even compiler implementation.) I tried writing to an address I dug out of the package I used, and got a bounce. The person who pointed me towards PCB also pointed me towards this list. Any recommendations? Is this an appropriate place to report such things, or should I write to someone specific, or what? And, if there's anyone with the time, inclination, and knowledge to answer some internals questions, the internal documentation I've found seems to be inadequate - presumably the PCB-HID interface is not intended for general use and thus hasn't received the kind of documentation attention that the HID-human interface has. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it _would_ save a fair bit of time and effort to get the design from someone who knows it instead of having to glark it from the code. Now let's see if the list is actually working for me. :-) *SEND!* /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: What to do with some bugs?
to my environment, which means writing a new HID What environment? Curious minds want to know... Mine. I'm not sure which aspect(s) of it you're interested in. It's X11R6.4p3 on NetBSD/sparc 1.4T plus a bunch of local hacks - all of which is irrelevant to my decision to build my own HID. I would rather write a new HID than subject myself to the pain of fetching and building either GTK or lesstif - and then the additional pain of using the resulting interface. I have fairly sharp UI preferences in many regards, and as far as I can tell they are such outliers that any toolkit that's achieved reasonable popularity will result in an interface that's somewhere between irritating and intolerable to me for more than trivial use. (Not that this means there's anything wrong with GTK or lesstif per se, just that they're wrong for my use.) I don't expect any significant number of people will like the resulting HID's style, but anyone who wants is certainly welcome to a copy of the code. Once I _have_ code, that is; at the moment it's almost entirely printf() stubs. (The concealment condition is basically that all nil pointers have the same size and bit pattern, in a varargs argument list, as integer zero. [...]) We already test on both 32 and 64 bit hosts; all such null pointers should use the NULL macro. [The following applies to the 20080202 snapshot, .tar.gz MD5 933eda642f3838b24d417224693f8386. For all I know some/all of them may have been fixed since then.] Well, they don't; most of the calls to the HID's confirm_dialog use a bare 0 as a terminator. If memory serves, two more calls have no terminator at all, and a third call sometimes is two (varargs) args plus a terminator and sometimes three with no terminator, depending on a run-time test (it's got a ?: in the third variable arg). But the real problem is that using NULL is simply _wrong_ in a context which provides no type - and there aren't many such contexts in C, but a varargs argument that's in the variable part of the arglist is one. C implementations are permitted to define NULL as an integer constant expression with value zero, or such an expression cast to void *. Because of the first option, bare 0 is suitable anywhere NULL is (from a code-correctness point of view, that is; in many cases there is some slight value in the implicit comment that the author thinks of it as a pointer), so using 0 is no worse than NULL...but it's wrong in this case, because the argument needs to be a char *. (void * is acceptable in this particular case, because there is special language in the C spec requiring char * and void * to have identical size and representation, but in general the actual argument type must match the formal argument type, except for qualifiers.) hid_actionl() has similar issues. Others might too; those are the only ones I've noticed so far. However much some people might wish otherwise, C simply does not have a generic nil pointer suitable for use in contexts that, like varargs arglists, don't provide a type. I believe it - NULL, that is - simply should never be used. The confusion it produces just isn't worth the tiny additional pseudo-comment that the coder thinks of the value as a pointer, which is all it provides over a bare 0 (indeed, all it _can_ provide, since bare 0 is one of the blessed definitions for NULL). Any recommendations? Is this an appropriate place to report such things, or should I write to someone specific, or what? geda-dev is slightly better. I've sent in a subscribe request, and will take the code discussion there. (There are some other bugs as well; the NULL issues are not the only thing I've found.) And, if there's anyone with the time, inclination, and knowledge to answer some internals questions, [...] Mostly, that's me. Again, geda-dev is the best place for that. Again, I'll take those there, then. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: What to do with some bugs?
Well, OK, maybe some would, but they have been working on PCB for so long they are benignly blind to the needs of the rest of us. I'm not blind to the need, just sorely lacking in time to do anything about it. [...] Hey, I understand completely. Me too. Saying that the internals doc is lacking is not criticizing _you_! It's better than most of my own code's internals doc - probably even most of the code I distribute. One of the things I intend to produce for my own use is a reference for the PCB-HID interface - and that's one of the things I'll be happy to feed back for others' use. If desired, that is, which it sounds as though it is. My comments were not meant as criticism, sorry if it came off that way -- just trying to set expectations for the OP. Ah yes, expectation management. The customer-interface people at work talk a lot about managing customer expectations. (I work for an ISP.) I don't really _expect_ anything here. Even if nobody helps me at all, PCB will still save me a lot of time and effort as compared to what I was more than half expecting I'd have to do, and I thank everyone involved in making it so. A few bugs are inevitable - try to find anything anything like PCB's size that doesn't have bugs! - and if dragging my language-lawyer persona out of the closet will help eliminate some of them, I'm certainly up for it. See y'all over on geda-dev for the details. :) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: What to do with some bugs?
I'm curious what GUI toolkit you're interested in using? Either Xlib or none, depending on whether you count Xlib as a toolkit. (Yes, I know the Henry Spencer quote. I think he's wrong.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
Re: gEDA-user: my HID [was What to do with some bugs?]
Either Xlib or none, depending on whether you count Xlib as a toolkit. Are you modelling it after some other UI ? No. I was planning, to the extent I was planning at all, to drive the UI design by trading off what I'd find convenient and pleasant to use with what's easy to implement, perhaps with close cases resolved based on the eexisting UIs' documentation. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B ___ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
