clang colorized html output

I love that clang has COLOURS in its output, but how to keep this formatting when copying the output to a file?

The solution is simple, add a -fcolor-diagnostics option and pipe the result to ansi2html. Of course since most of the interesting output is on stderr, don't forget to correctly redirect it (2>&1).

So in the end

$ clang -fcolor-diagnostics temp.c  2>&1 | ansi2html > temp.html

Many thanks to nemo for sharing this trick and several others on this blog!

pemissions on .ssh

Remember that every user's .ssh folder needs to have 700 as permssion, or ssh will complain and revert to passphrase authentication.

It is also good practice to have authorized_keys as 600.

Libav function prefixes

For future reference, all (or most of) functions and structs in libav have a prefix that indicates the exposure of that functions. Those are

• av_ meaning a public function, present in the API;
• ff_ meaning a private function, not present in the API;
• avpriv_ meaning inter-library private function, used internally across libraries only.

Source: #libav-devel

CMake library location

For some reason, you either know what kind of library you're going to build (STATIC or SHARED) or there is no way to know which prefix and suffix your library is going to get.

However, you can use the LOCATION property of the target and do some magic there.

See http://www.cmake.org/Bug/view.php?id=5195

Fast authors for Mercurial

In case you need to find out who commited the first version of a file to a Mercurial repository, there is this little command that does so quickly.

hg log -r 'first(file("path/to/file"))' --template '{author}\n' -f

This is using hg log together with hg templating. You can customize your output with stuff like {date|isodate} or {desc). -f follows through renames and removals.

Working with D3D9 device Reset()

...lost context and going fullscreen!

At work I got the opportunity (sigh) to work with some DirectX rendering for video pipelines.

A lot of fun was spent in trying to make the graphics card behave correctly during a context restore. When switching fullscreen or changing modes there are very precise steps you must follow or you get very cryptic error messages (by the way using M$ tools is no fun at all and I'll explain why) .

First of all when you switch to fullscreen you need to call Reset() on your device with the new backbuffer size, which *must* correspond to one of the resolution supported by your device (and don't forget to set the refresh rate too).

Before doing so you absolutely need to delete any surface, shader and whatever you allocated with a Get* method, using a proper Release() call. Beware *not* to delete your d3ddevice [1]. Then you just recreate all surfaces and you are done, it make sense to reuse the same initialization code for this purpose.

If you don't do this procedure you can get different results, but usually you'll just get a lot of D3DERR_DEVICELOST after a Present(), and only after it (so don't bother checking for this error anywhere else). Other rendering functions such as StretchRect() will just silently fail.

In order to avoid leaks of any kind and check for other errors you might be tempted to use DirectX Control Panel and turn on the Debug version of DirectX. This might work, but beware that on some architectures (I'm looking at you, NVIDIA ION) you might get a lot of exceptions (especially in within Reset()) that make no sense at all [2]. While normally these reports are useful and the breaks help you find mistakes, sometime it just get frustrating when there is a bug on someone else's code.

So if you get desperate in debugging a perfectly working restoration code, just try disabling debug mode or run your code on another architecture...

[1] Actually you can delete the d3ddevice, but then you don't have to call Reset() and have to recreate both the device and the surfaces again. It works but screen glitches a lot and it's a plain waste of resources.

[2] Error such as "Lost Device Due to Display Uniqueness Change" and "Could not get exclusive mode when we thought we could". If you Google them you'll get a lot of information on how to properly do a context restore, but the solution might be closer than you thing.

Finally one libvlc_video_set_format_callbacks() example

libVLC new (2.0) API for video size and chroma (libvlc_video_set_format_callbacks) is much more powerful than libvlc_video_set_format. It allows either to get video size and chroma dynamically so that your rendering pipeline can adapt, or to modify such values to get the values you need.

However, I find it a little more complicated to use and spent some time looking for an example. Apparently I am not alone, so I'll share my finding.

The main source example I found is from FBVLC, a web browser plugin based on VLC. You can read the full source here: http://code.google.com/p/fbvlc/source/browse/FBVLC.cpp

Basically you need to create two functions with this exact signature

static unsigned video_setup_cb(void **opaque, char *chroma, unsigned *width, unsigned *height, unsigned *pitches, unsigned *lines);

static void video_cleanup_cb(void *opaque);

and as the names go initialize all variables in the first function and cleanup in the second one. You can find sample implementation in the previous source code, under the name of

video_format_cb and video_cleanup_cb.

I spent some time in selecting the right chroma to adopt (and missed the fact that you had to memcpy there) for my standard h264 420 file "RV32" was working fine. Also the pitches variable is important, it represents the the video width in luma components, so for 420 it corresponds to width * 4.

I want this bugfix

Please commit it NAO

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?23273

CMake Linker Test Flags

Source: http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2011-July/045525.html

If you need to test linker flags, try out this code snippet, and make sure to unset the variable or subsequent tests will fail!
 

include(CheckCCompilerFlag)
set(CMAKE_REQUIRED_FLAGS "-Wl,-z -Wl,noexecstack")
check_c_compiler_flag("" HAVE_NOEXECSTACK) #empty because we are testing a linker flag
if(HAVE_NOEXECSTACK)
    list(APPEND pascal_flags "-k-z" "-knoexecstack")
    if(NOT ${MINIMAL_FLAGS})
        set(CMAKE_C_FLAGS "${CMAKE_C_FLAGS} ${CMAKE_REQUIRED_FLAGS}")
    endif()
endif()
unset(CMAKE_REQUIRED_FLAGS)