December 2011 – scrambled tofu

kpartx – mounting partitions inside disk images

This is a neat trick, and so I thought worth reblogging. I was handed a corrupt SD memory card yesterday and asked if I could try and get some Christmas photos off it.

Typically, the first thing I did was image the card with ddrescue (package gddrescue in Debian/Ubuntu), confirming that the partition table was intact, it looks like the problem was a corrupted FAT, so I wanted to run fsck on the partition.

Back in the day this would have involved either dd-ing the partition out of the image, or re-imaging the card, both slow, or screwing around with loopback offsets. Instead I discovered a tool called kpartx which maps the partitions from the image into the device mapper, giving a device like /dev/mapper/loop0p1, which can be used like a regular block device.

Unfortunately while different, both FATs were damaged, and has been incorrectly repaired by something, and I ended up recovering the files with photorec instead.

Linux work available in Perth, Australia

Happy new year, everyone!

Once again my former employer, Fugro Seismic Imaging, is looking for two new R&D staff for their office in Perth, Western Australia (one to replace someone who’s moving on, and another to grow the team).

The team there is approximately half a dozen people, generally open-source experienced, who are primarily developing graphical front ends to geophysics applications (there’s also some other stuff, in general it’s pretty cool). You’ll almost certainly have to know C. Knowing any of C++, Python, Perl, GTK+, Qt or Fortran also a benefit. You don’t have to know any geophysics, but knowing a bit of maths and physics helps. You’ll easily pick up what you don’t know as you go along.

Pay and conditions are very good. FSI have previously provided sponsored work visas for skilled applicants looking to work in Australia.

If you’re interested, send your CV to the regional manager, Kelly Beauglehole.

more on DPI

Daniel Stone recently wrote this amusing summary of why saying OMG I ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE MY DPI CORRECT is rarely, if ever, correct.

Since most people who say this aren’t considering the two monitor case, I thought I’d provide a illustrative screenshot.

This is an old screenshot of the resolution-independence branch of GTK+ running the demo program on two different monitors. It shows that both apps the physical same size, with the same physical size fonts (ignore the size of the title bars, those are provided by Metacity, which is using the system GTK+).

However, the font rendering looks different. This is because of the amount of anti-aliasing that goes into making fonts look smooth when you have less pixels to play with. Notice how in the title bars the font looks the same, even though they’re different sizes. That’s because they’re using the same number of pixels, and thus the same amount of anti-aliasing.

I couldn’t find a screenshot of what happens when you have a window that crosses between two monitors. [Perhaps it’s a nonsense case, but it can come up.] At this point everything just looks like crap. We have to choose the scaling of one monitor or the other. It will look wrong on one monitor or the other. It will be a different size to everything else on that monitor. [Before you suggest it; we can’t divide the window and calculate the scaling separately for each monitor across single widgets].

The thing is, for day to day computing, you don’t really care about the DPI, you care about having readable, attractive fonts and visible, clickable icons. So Federico is right. For some specific applications, you do care about DPI, but those applications can already use the XRandR data to take care of themselves [I have written visualisation apps which do this, presenting a scale on the screen of millimetres on screen to metres in the real world. ((And in using these apps, I’ve found plenty of monitors that return nonsense DPIs, forcing me to hardcode the monitor size in X11.))]

This said, I’m not sure why the only font size settings now in GNOME is a quantised Small, Normal, Large, Larger setting in the Universal Access settings pane. gnome-tweak-tool includes a scaling slider. The slider is hard to use though, especially when your text reflows while using it. Federico’s idea seems better.

As DPI continues to increase, it’s probably worth also applying scaling factors to our scalable window graphics, lest icons and the like become increasingly harder to hit. At this point we will likely need to adopt a resolution independent GTK+. However, again what will matter will be readable fonts and visible icons. Using the actual monitor DPIs will likely not be that important.

the death of the engineer

I find it so amusing yet depressing how afraid your average engineer now is now afraid of a computer.

My brother started his first real engineering job and rapidly found himself with a problem he needed to solve. He can’t afford Matlab or Mathematica, so I suggested he teach himself Python and use that. After all, Python has excellent scientific credentials. He looked at Python and agreed it looked easy to learn and met his needs.

His boss however, vetoed the idea on the basis that if a tool were written in Python, no one would be able to come back later and edit it. The implicit assumption here seems to be that programming is hard. That no one else could learn enough of the language to later edit the program.

Once upon a time, computers didn’t do very much. They could read and write data and execute programs. Engineers and scientists had to teach themselves to write their own programs to solve their problems.

Over time programs got bigger and more complex. Then people started collecting them together into packages of tools and turning them into a product to sell to other people. They hired engineer-programmers to work on them. Eventually they glued user interfaces on top and so we get the engineering and scientific packages you see today. [My first programming job was working on one of these packages.]

New engineers start in the field and they are simply taught the package at the user interface level. Sometimes they hit the limits of the interface, and learn how to drive the individual programs underneath.

Rarely though do they still see the computer as the blank canvas which they can use to solve their problem. It does so much now that the idea of learning to make it do more seems foreign. Engineers are now afraid of the tool.

It is my belief that engineering students should be compulsorily exposed to some computer science; The core stuff with useful tools. They should have to implement algorithms that have meaning to engineers: solving equations, not a booking system for tennis matches. Perhaps then they’ll stop being afraid of using computers to do computation.