Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engine brain damage

These companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others) let the user to rank the result of search, but I think the way they uses is completely “brain damage”.

When you do a search on Google for example it will list a number of sites and the phrase in this site with texts related to your searched words. For each result you have the “Promote” and “Remove” button, but how can I promote it if I didn’t read the problem content of that site?

I think a better idea could be using a footnote (obviously at bottom of page) of visited web site where the user could to define your opinion. Nobody like page headers with Ads or anything, but I think using this pool at bottom of page will not bother.

Just my 2 cents, I hope someone from these companies see this comment and think about this idea.

Library Interposers

Few years ago I saw in a reverse engineering web site a trick using LD_PRELOAD to overhead the strcmp function, this way the guy found the password used by a program.

Today I found an interesting article explaning how to use the same approach (called Libray Interposers) to help debug software.

You can read the complete article here:
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/lib_interposers.html

Robot Operating System

MIT and other universities are developing an opensource operating system to be used by anyone willing to develop robots.

This way you will not need to reinvent the wheel to get your robot working (playing :-).

More info:
http://ros.sourceforge.net/browse/list.php

GTK Application to see webcam image

I developed a GTK Application to see webcam images based on Mauro Chebab’s v4l2grab. It is working fine on my embedded system ARM9.

I compiled it this way:

LTIB> gcc gtkwc.c -o gtkwc -I../../../rootfs/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I../../../rootfs/usr/include/cairo -I../../../rootfs/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I../../../rootfs/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I../../../rootfs/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I../../../rootfs/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I../../../rootfs/usr/include/atk-1.0 -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lv4l2

Or just:

LTIB> gcc v4l2grab.c -o gtk_v4l `pkg-config –libs –cflags gtk+-2.0` -lv4l2

Thank you Douglas Landgraf for suggesting me to use v4l2grab

Image Compositing Fundamentals

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall00/cs426/papers/smith95a.pdf

LDD3 Examples Updated

The Linux Device Driver 3th Edition has many source code examples which will not work with recent kernels.

BTW you can find these source code updated here:

http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/devices/lxr/source/2.6.25/ldd-examples/

Testing Logitech Quickcam on Embedded System

I am testing “Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks Pro” on an embedded board (ARM9 processor).
Camera ID: 046d:08b1 Logitech, Inc.

This camera is supported by “USB Philips Cameras” (symbol USB_PWC).

After loading the “pwc” module I was getting this error message:

pwc: isoc_init() submit_urb 0 failed with error -38

To solve it I selected “Full speed ISO transactions” (symbol USB_EHCI_SPLIT_ISO)

undefined reference to `clock_getres’

If you are getting this error message:

$ gcc showhz.c -o showhz
/tmp/cc073N3P.o: In function `main':
showhz.c:(.text+0x3c): undefined reference to `clock_getres'

Then you need to add -lrt in your compilation parameter:

$ gcc showhz.c -o showhz -lrt

All right!?

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/922492/use-of-clockgetres-newbie-linux-c