Once again, here is an update to my gimp plugin. NVIDIA released the first beta for CUDA 3.0 a few weeks ago and I updated the plugin for this version. Mainly the SDK layout changed a lot and the way the SDK is incorporated needed some updates. I hope I didn’t break any backward compatibility ;)
The plugin is still here available for download. It should work with any CUDA version from 2.0 up to 3.0 on GNU Linux and Mac OS X.
After installing CUDA on my new MacBook I tried to get also my GIMP plugin to work. I installed the latest version of GIMP from MacPorts and to my surprise the plugin just compiled and installed without any modifications. However, when I chose the plugin from the GIMP menu only the CPU version worked. Some weeks later I stumbled across a post in the NVIDIA forums, which mentioned that the toolkit installer doesn’t install the kernel extension by default. That is why CUDA didn’t work! After I installed the missing kext manually, also the plugin worked flawlessly :)
The plugin can be still downloaded here. In the meanwhile it has been also tested and reported to work on some more Linux distributions and with CUDA 2.1.
Last update for the Rommel widget rctcosx, since I leave the student hostel. It still displays the basic information of the user, of the user’s cardwash account, and the current temperature in the hostel. The new version comes along in a new look (in consistence with our new web design, though I liked the old one better) and was “ported” to use Dashcode. You can get the widget from rctcosx.zip and the widget project from rctcosx.wdgtproj.zip.
This week I needed xfig to edit some figures, however my font path wasn’t set up correctly on gentoo, at least for xfig, and I got the following message (despite of ugly tiny default fonts):
File /home/ritschi/thesis/graphics/mrfilt.fig:
Can’t find --helvetica-medium-r-narrow—13------ISO8859-, using 6x13
Can’t find --helvetica-medium-r-narrow—10------ISO8859-, using 6x13
In order to get the fonts working, I had to add the following line to my xorg config (/etc/X11/xorg.conf ) and to restart X:
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript”
Installing xfig on my MacBook from MacPorts yielded first the following warning:
Either you have a very old app-defaults file installed (Fig), or there is none installed at all. You should install the correct version or you may lose some features. This may be done with “make install” in the xfig source directory.
This is because MacPorts mixes the paths and X11 uses /usr/X11/lib/X11/app-defaults, while MacPorts installs the files in /opt/local/lib/X11/app-defaults. Just copy the files to the X11 folder and the warning will go away. Anyway in order to get rid of the first message, the font path for X11 has to be corrected. Till now I haven’t found a way to do this permanently, so I have to do it every time currently:
cd /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts
ln -sf /opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/ ghostscript
fc-cache ghostscript
xset fp+ /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/ghostscript
xset fp rehash
xfig
Today I was looking for a way to use my Apple Remote as a remote control for presentations. The solution of my choice was iRed Lite, a small program, which allows to write layers to control applications. Unfortunately there was no layer for Adobe Reader, so I wrote one, which can be downloaded here.
Basically it performs the following mapping:
For some time now I connected my MacBook to an external display and use it in clamshell mode. Therefore I use a litte tool called synergy as a KM switch, which shares one keyboard and mouse (and your clipboard!) via network between several computers. However I had some troubles to start synergy automatically as described on its homepage.
In order to start synergy automatically when you log in, you have to use launchd for Leopard. Create a plist file for launchd with the configuration for synergy, e.g. /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>net.sourceforge.synergy2</string>
<key>ServiceDescription</key>
<string>Synergy Client</string>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/opt/local/bin/synergyc</string>
<string>--no-daemon</string>
<string>--no-restart</string>
<string>--debug</string>
<string>WARNING</string>
<string>--name</string>
<string>MacBook</string>
<string>192.168.1.1</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
After this adjust the permissions of the file:
sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist
and to load or unload the daemon tell launchd to load the script:
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist
sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist
Since MacPorts 1.6 on Leopard (or even earlier?) the proxy environment setting doesn’t work anymore. In order to get the latest MacPorts use the proxy, you have to set the variable explicitly before running the port command, e.g.
sudo env ftp_proxy=”http://proxy.rommel.stw.uni-erlangen.de:80” port -d -u upgrade outdated
In addition you have to tell port to honour these variabled in your macports.conf (/opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf):
extraenv httpproxy httpsproxy ftpproxy allproxy noproxy
