reviving posting...
I looked at my blog again today and it turns out that my last post was in August of last year. That’s around the time that the Fall travel season picked up, followed immediately by Thanksgiving and Christmas, so things have been pretty busy for me. Here are the highlights from my period of radio silence:
[...]disable animations in Skim to avoid using the MacBook Pro external (power hogging) GPU
My work laptop is a 15” MacBook Pro from the current generation (first batch with Nehalems). This laptop includes two GPUs: an integrated one from Intel and an external one from Nvidia. The integrated unit has generally lower performance but generally lower power consumption as well. The external unit has generally higher performance but generally higher power consumption.
[...]fix codetrunk diff/patch colors in Firefox
At work I often use codetrunk.com to share patches for code review with other developers on my team. I used to use pastebin.com, but ever since it changed ownership a few months ago it has been far less useful. They broke the major pastebin command line tools and the syntax highlighting for diff/patch types is very poor.
[...]ltrace + pthreads
I was recently debugging some threading issues in MPICH2 and tried using ltrace to tell me the return code from pthread_mutex_lock and a few related functions. Tools like strace, ltrace, and valgrind are essential for debugging MPI programs because you can’t always strap a debugger on them, and even when you can it tends to be a heavyweight procedure.