CUDA Compute 20 Error and other issues

There’s a quirk of using older CUDA drivers is that the latest NVIDIA SDK code examples are not backward compatible, i.e compiling the 3.0 SDK against the 2.3 toolkit (that I’ve spent the last day doing) is a fools errand (Thanks very much to @thebaron on #cuda on freenode and tkerwin on StackOverflow.) Basically, the 3.x drivers reclassify newer cards based on the; previously, the ‘compute’ value (a measure of OpenCL adherence) would max out at 1.3, but now the range is extended up to 2.0, but the 2.3 toolkit does not recognise this value, so craps out. ...

April 14, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Intel 4965: Poor wireless performance under Ubuntu

I had an incident recently where the Windows 7 side of my laptop connected easily to an open AP, but the Ubuntu 10.04 (or 9.04, tried both) wouldn’t, with the Intel Iwlagn drivers reporting in syslog a deauth (reason=6), basically the card spoke too soon. I eventually found the solution. After several weeks of asking the same question everywhere I could think of (as well as emailing Intel…) I found the answer a lot closer to home, from a PhD student ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Graduate in my University over LinkedIn (Ironically enough, I’m actually working with him on my Final Year Project next year… Good stuff to come :D ) ...

July 8, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Customised User Directories in Ubuntu

I’ve been doing alot of messing around in Ubuntu recently and there are lots of tweaks I like to make. One of them being to show the contents of my home folder as my desktop; I don’t need any more pointless folders…. Dead easy, there is a .config directory under your $HOME dir, containing several files. The one we need is user-dirs.dirs , and it looks something like this. # This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update # If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're # interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run # Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped # homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an # absolute path. No other format is supported. # XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop" XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads" XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates" XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public" XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents" XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music" XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures" XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos" And this is what I changed mine to ...

June 1, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Automagic Kernel Cleaning under Ubuntu

Sick of having dozens of old kernels sitting under your /boot/ dir? Want a simpler boot-life? Well we’ve got the solution for you. Just one course of cleankernel once an upgrade cycle will remove all previous kernel entries from your bootloader and /boot/ dir. Basically, it lists what kernels you currently have in your /boot/ and removes them using apt .

May 31, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

SEE, Programming Abstractions, Assignment 1

SEE, or, Stanford Engineering Everywhere, has turned out to be my favourite E-learning resource; I’ve dipped into it a few times over the past few years but in light of my recent investment into a CUDA enabled Graphics Card, I thought that it was coming high time to brush up on my C++ programming, which I’ve basically left stagnant for two years after advancing no further than function pointers, structures, and templates. So, in the spirit of openness that SEE tries to foster, I’ll be blogging my work through their CS106B course, Programming Abstractions, the second of three programming courses. (I passed on CS106A, Programming Methodology, since I’ve had enough Java shoved down my throat to last a lifetime…). ...

April 28, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Add a Twitter @anywhere hovercard to links containing tweeps

Everyone and their dog has a walkthrough of adding @anywhere hovercards to your blog. But the default has a small failing that irked me when I was re-doing my Blogroll (check them out, they’re all great! I promise!), and that was that if you take a tweep, like @god for example, it’ll happily wrap the hovercard around it, but if you have a link to this great status that @god posted, @anywhere won’t pick this @god up. ...

April 17, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Shaded Headers in Thematic

So, as you can see the blog is sporting a new, cleaner look. Nothing better than experimenting! One of the nicer aspects of the new setup is the shaded headers (ie. <h1>/<h2> tags). I started off my experimentation by going through WebDesignerWall’s walkthrough on the subject of text effects, but the limitation that I came across was that if you use their implimentation, any links (<a\>) in the header are lost ‘under’ the span. ...

April 16, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Listing just dot-files

Its a problem that I’ve come across, and I’m not the only one, so heres what works for me to find those pesky files that start with a . ls -a | egrep -i "^\." This only works in the current working directory, which is the normal usage. FYI the reason that this is problematic is that the ‘.’ symbol is a single character wildcard; most people are familiar with the asterisk ‘*’ indicating ‘anything, however long’, whereas the ‘.’ means ‘any single character’. ...

April 9, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

The DE Bill, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tor

Folks, we’re basically screwed; The Digital Economy Bill recieved Royal Accent on April 9th and is officially now Law. So after barely three days of parliamentary ‘debate’ where only 20-ish MP’s actually spoke on the subject (but somehow 189 MP’s decided it was a good idea anyway), our civil rights have been sacrificed infront of the alter of copyright. Many sites have a much more indepth tretise on the subject than I could do so I’ll keep this short. ...

April 9, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Mod_Rewrite in Apache2

Just incase you forget how to fix this the easy way: Enable mod_rewrite for URL voodoo; (Or any module replacing the rewrite ) $sudo a2enmod rewrite $sudo service apache2 restart Remember to fiddle with /etc/apache2/sites-available.*< \pre> and change "AllowOverride none" to "all" in any places that you're having trouble with rewritten URL's

April 1, 2010 · Andrew Bolster