Richi's blog

A blog about personal projects and experiences

  • Playing with Smart-Cards

    Ever since reading the book “Kryptographie und IT-Sicherheit” where I first learned about how SmartCards work, I wanted to do some SmartCard programming. In the book it describes some inner workings of Smart Cards, and that some of them have a small Java VM inside. But it turned out that the entry was not as […]

  • Installing to an external harddisk with qemu

    The harddisk of my aunt’s pc was broken, and I had an old disk around that I could use for replacement. Now I wanted to install it prior to go there. Of course there is the option to take my harddisk out, and use my PC to install her harddisk. But I wanted to use […]

  • Reviving my vintage 3d shutter glasses

    Many people don’t even know that there were 3d rushes before the one that’s currently fading. In a previous one, some ten years ago, I bought a very expensive ASUS graphics card with shutter glasses. It was really cool for gaming with the 21 inch CRT, but nothing compared to the graphics of today’s games. […]

  • A sink for the kids to play

    When the new kitchen was installed in our camper, I didn’t throw everything of the old one away. Only the part with Mirella’s bad memories. I kept the faucet so that I could use it for the kids one day. Recently I exchanged the pump and the water tank. With the old parts I had […]

  • Robot arm part 2 : ROS connection

    As the name implies, ROS is not just another library to get familiar with. It is an operating system for robots. That is also quite different to a traditional operating system. As I didn’t want to learn a whole bunch of stuff first, I learn about the concepts and facilities as I move along. After […]

  • Optimizing compile time of a large C++ project

    The codebase of our PointLine CAD is certainly quite large. sloccount calculated roughly  770’000 lines of C++ code. I know, this is not a very good metric to describe a project, but it gives an idea. Over time the compile time steadily increased. Of course we also added a lot of new stuff to the product. […]

  • OpenCL First Steps

    There is an increasing noise about GPGPU computing and how much faster than CPU (even parallel) it is. If you didn’t hear about all that, GPGPU is about using the computer’s graphics card(s) to do general purpose computations. The key to the performance lies in the parallel architecture of these devices. From what I read, […]

  • CyanogenMod and Ubuntu on my Samsung Galaxy S

    I wanted to install a real debian based linux distro and Cyanogen on my Android smartphone for a long time. First I was scared off by voiding the warranty on a new phone. But now it’s one and a half years old. And recently they announced that there will be no more firmware upgrades for […]

  • packaging libboost compiled with llvm clang

    I read many articles and posts over the last year or so, citing how great llvm clang is. On one side it shall have a static checker that makes lint redundant, and on the other side the optimizer has an -o4 where the -o3 shall be comparable to other optimizers. On top of that, compilation […]

  • Earthquake

    Today early morning I sat in front of my desk, when I suddenly felt everything slightly moving. Robert who sits next to me felt it as well, but most of the others in the office didn’t. Last time I sensed an earthquake was in 2007 on our South America camper trip in Argentina . Unbelievable […]