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Quick Index

this page got...a bit long. Maybe this quick-index will help.

A Longer Description

DWARF Debugging Information Format

The DWARF Debugging Information Format is important to many who write compilers (for C, C++ and several other languages) and debuggers. If that is of interest to you look at my DWARF-related software and pointers to the standard.

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Networks and Network Manager and Netplan, Oh My!

The following notes are obsolete. My systems are mostly Ubuntu 22.04 now and NetworkManager gui panels work much better than they did back in 18.04. I am not using netplan now. Used to be to enter a static IP address (and the other fields required) the NetworkManager gui panel would make the entire line of fields disappear while typing, one could never be sure which field the program thought you were filling-in. Awful. Better now.

If you've installed Ubuntu 18.04 (or any of the derivatives) you may not have noticed netplan, the new and superior way to manage your networks. Easy to follow syntax. See Ubuntu Networking with Netplan for the details. With Ubuntu 20.04 though, I had trouble getting Netplan to be followed. NetworkManager can be difficult to fully get rid of, and getting rid of it is maybe necessary for Netplan to work as it should.

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And...more

Food and Health

Most people in the US are overweight and not healthy. Due to the Standard American Diet. If you have weight or immune system diseases or bad arteries (also an immune issue) you owe it to yourself to check out our Food Health page to find an overview and references to the MDs who have understood the very latest research on the body (including the biome).

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Recent Books

Some recent books seem, to me, to be so important that they deserve a few words here. These books seem to add fundamentally to our understanding of history. I don't mention any books from the traditional Western notion of "Great Books" as those are well covered in many places. If anyone finds this list interesting enough to read at least one of them then this web site has served a purpose!

Lotus Cars

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Lotus Cars, Trackdays and more are made near Norwich, England. Lotus was founded around 1950 --- many many other car companies were founded in the UK at about the same time. Lotus has had an eventful past (having nearly gone out of business several times and having been the the constructors of many famous racecars). The Lotus Evora is currently sold in the US for street use. A couple other models are available but not legal for street driving in the US.

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Fun stuff: Trackdays and more, these are now historical as I retired from such in the middle of 2019. After 49 years on track. I realized I no longer have the energy level needed to drive on track safely. Lotus track/racing activities.

Perhaps you will find Stories of the four Lotuses I've owned of interest. Specifically: A 1966 Elan though it was restored and converted to Sprint configuration about 1990, so it is but is just like a 1972 Elan Sprint. A 2009 Lotus Elise SC Type 25 came to us in 2019. The next two have passed on to new owners: A much modified 1972 Europa. A 1979 Esprit Commemorative Edition.

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I'm active in the California (and points well beyond) Lotus car club, the Golden Gate Lotus Club.

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Software

The Software page encompasses various writings by well known authors as well as some software and software advice from me. It's C/C++ and (as of June 2019) some python software.

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Solar and Water

The Solar Power page tells a bit about our home solar power installation. We're playing our part to reduce carbon emissions. The Water page tells a bit about our water use.

Internet of Things devices

I also got a bit interested in the electrical grid and the Internet Of Things so am using some TP-Link switches to reduce consumption when PG & E may need to fire up an old and dirty powerplant. We connected with OhmConnect and those folks reward us with a small amount of cash because when they call for it the TP-Link switches reduce our electrical usage. Sometimes they call for 15 minutes of reduced usage and on rare occasions up to 2 hours. They recently reduced the cash-reward amounts by 90 percent, but it's still something.

We installed over 20 of the TP-Link devices which makes reducing usage fully automated. For example, one of them turns off the power to the refrigerator on demand. Leaving the refrigerator off for an hour (or even two) does not harm anything.

I was using a Belkin Wemo Switch but Belkin changed their interfaces so OhmConnect.com was unable to work with Wemo.

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Patents on software are ill-advised

Software patents are a costly and inappropriate use of the patent system .

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Palm device data (Palm devices long gone)

In moving Palm calendar data from Windows to Macintosh I encountered a major 'gotcha' but I found a workaround.

Personal Accounting

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We switched our home accounting from a proprietary solution to GnuCash. See some details on gnu cash. I wrote a Python application to do specialized searching and reporting of the GnuCash data. The application source is https://github.com/davea42/searchgnucash

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Redhat Package Manager hint

RedHat Package Manager (RPM) building is generally very well documented, but I found one little hint allowing build as ordinary user (not root) that you may find of interest if you are new at building RPMs. I used to use RedHat and Fedora and Centos, but have moved on to Linux releases from Ubuntu, Mint, Raspian, and (for a PinePhone) Mobian.

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Obsolete Netbook comments

EEEPC is a 'Netbook' family of inexpensive computers which are pretty much useless now, the industry has moved on with tablets, phablets, and Cromebooks and more --- better screens and better software. The eeepc page might be of interest if you are curious about eeepc.

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Obsolete Debugging Format

An older Debugging Information Format, sometimes called Mdebug, is documented in a postscript file dated 1996. It is most unlikely you have any reason to look at Mdebug information because Mdebug had largely fallen out of use by 1996. Mdebug was invented by Peter Rowell, founder of Third Eye Software. and various companies acquired rights to use it, including MIPS and SGI. Peter Rowell is quite distressed by the ways folks like MIPS, SGI, and others extended the format to do much more than it was ever intended to do. See Peter Rowell's comments if the link still works. Or see a local copy of Peter Rowell's comments here . Some of the worst SGI extensions never even got documented. One day I was writing up the (nasty) C++ extensions SGI defined (defined without consulting with me though I was the dbx [debugger] guy). With all the extensions documented, and before I had the changes saved in SGI source code management...I accidentally deleted the revised document. Not a good day. So we are left with the incomplete Mdebug document. SGI moved on to DWARF2 as its debugging format (as have nearly all modern compilers) so I never again felt the motivation to add those C++ extensions to the Mdebug document.

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Contact me at:

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Forty-two is, of course, the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything". You could look it up :-)

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