Tuesday 29 July 2008

Some pure old Mac fun

So i'm basically worn out of all these projects to hand out, and after an entire day completing the before last report, i've decided to take some free time and play with my Mac

I was so happy with the results that i want to share them with you all

1. Open in Terminal
Sometimes you're browsing with Finder and you find yourself in a relative long path; then you realize that you need to use a shell command on a file in that far away folder! oh the pain!
Open Terminal helps you with this task: if you move it to the application bar it will open a terminal in the folder selected/dragged/present in Finder! it comes with a contexual menu as well!

The only drawback is that it uses horrible icons, but you can change them and use these ones (follow the instructions reported) which are OpenTerminalHere ones

Open Terminal is much quickier than the other "open-here" apps because goes in the background, consuming no more than a Dashboard widget (but it works also without it, and it's alwasy a little faster than the others)

2. Open from Terminal
Here I'm reporting two tricks for when you are in the Terminal
The first one follows the above one: you can create an alias for calling the Open Terminal script that cds to the Finder active folder
alias cdf='eval `osascript /Applications/Utilities/OpenTerminal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/OpenTerminal.scpt `'
Put that line in your ~/.profile file and you're done (if you want to use it right away do source ~/.profile)
The second one is for opening the folder of where you are right now (in the Terminal)
open .
really that simple! open is a Mac utility that call the associated application for opening the what is given as argument, very useful; so if you "open file.txt" it will start TexEdit!

3. Cd Up
Last trick for the Terminal: when you are in a very long path (in Macs this happens often) if you go in another folder by mistake, you have to write the whole path again!
However if you put this simple line
alias up='cd "`env | grep OLDPWD | cut -f 2 -d =`" '
in your ~/.profile, you can return to your previous location just by calling up
This works also for any Linux distro :)

4. View in FullScreen
This is a nice AppleScript that opens a Finder Window in full screen in CoverFlow mode!
Very nice, but lacks of a nice icon! Fortunately you can use the lselect one found before.

5. Quicklook for source text files
So as i work mostly with VHDL, i wanted to have a way to have a quick preview of the source file, just like any other .c or .java file!

Well this is possible and it's also rather easy: inspired by this hint i started looking in every Info.plist files until i found the right one! The XCode one!

You just need to perform these simple steps and you'll be able to use Quicklook for .vhd and practically any other text file format.
  1. open /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Info.plist
  2. go to line 1439
  3. insert a line like vhd (replace vhd with the extension you need, i also added .dat and .cmm, but these two don't get highlighted)
  4. save the file and touch the application (touch /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app) to update the preference contents
  5. run a sudo qlmanage -r to restart the Quicklook daemon
6. X11 shorcuts like Mac shortcuts
Well, one of the reasons X11 is denigrated so much is that it has different cut/paste/save shortcuts, no drag and drop and different copy buffers

However this can be resolved very easily: just create a ~/.xmodmap file containg
keycode 63 = Control_L
keycode 60 = Alt_L
keycode 66 = Alt_L
clear mod1
clear Control
add mod1 = Alt_L
add Control = Control_L
In this way Copy and Paste will work like in Mac native apps, Cmd+c and Cmd+v, and all the shortcuts which required Control, will run with Cmd instead!


Well enough fun for now :)
It's time to go back working on GLX
Vittorio

Friday 25 July 2008

3k-cc BETA 1 released

After almost a month of waiting, it is finally here!
the compiler for the GLE-MiPS family of custom processor!!!! download here!

it is written in Java using JFlex and CUP and it is released as a beta as there might be some akward unexpected condition (have mercy, it was done writing at 6,30 in the morning!)

you know the site
http://gle-mips.googlecode.com

Monday 21 July 2008

Our newest author with HTML5 paper and slides

Welcome to Alberto Trivero, our new ProjectSymphony author!
He's made to the author level with two interesting computer security documents

they are about HTML5 sheets, explaining the new client storage capability of browser and how to abuse of them :)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4012693/Abusing-HTML-5-Structured-Clientside-Storage
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4012743/slides-Abusing-HTML-5-Structured-Clientside-Storage
doc and slides

good job Alberto
Vittorio

Sunday 20 July 2008

GLE-MiPS 1.2 - with Pentium4 Technology

A new version of your favourite process has been released today!
The main news is that the adder is now implemented with a Sparse Tree Adder scheme, the same one found in Pentium4 cpus

subsequently all the modules that used an adder (like the multiplier) have been optimized, while simpler modules that didn't need such a complicated device retained their ripple-carry-adder scheme.

Here is the changelog:
  • adder now uses a Sparse Tree adder scheme
  • testbench included by default
  • ROM revisions
  • optimizations for modules using adders
You can download the source code here

http://gle-mips.googlecode.com/
Vittorio

Monday 14 July 2008

QUATTRO 1.0 is out!

And here we have QUATTRO
a new microprocessor design for small embedded systems!

With only 4 bit data, it features a shunk down instruction set of GLE-MiPS 1.1 (from which all the code derived)
with such small amount of speed we can gather a nice 120 MHz processor, big only a few transistors (synthesizes completely on a Spartan 3)

You can grab the code here
and visit the renewed version of the site

http://gle-mips.googlecode.com/

Expect some lines for documentation soon :)
Vittorio

Friday 4 July 2008

GLE-MiPS 1.1

First revision of the stable release! some improvements here and there but the central update is for the multiplier which now explicitly uses the Booth Algorithm

here is the source and the changelog
  • multiplier uses explicitly the booth algorithm
  • control unit revision
  • instruction decode and main architecture cleanup
  • register and multiplexer coding reviewed
  • bugfix in the comparator
http://gle-mips.googlecode.com/

Vittorio



All the projects here are under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence! You can use and distribute them as you like (just quote the author so he knows his work is not useless)!

If you wish to get in touch with me write at projectsymphony@gmail.com