Comparing performance of common Unix shells
on Nov 15, 2009 in programming shell script Probably most programs written by a user of a GNU/Linux operating system are scripts interpreted by programs inspired by the Bourne shell. Although most of their work is either interactive (so most probably faster than a human can see) or done by eff...

Some limitations of popular free Web log analyzer software
on Nov 1, 2009 in programming WWW log analyzers spam It is useful for a blogger to know how their site is used. Understanding which information the users are searching for, which sites linked them to it, relationship between post’s popularity and weekday, might help making more useful content. But ge...

Six tips for optimization of homework C programs
on Oct 17, 2009 in programming C optimization A nice aspect of formal computer science education is that it requires writing useless programs in a low-level programming language like C which pass automated tests with harsh time and memory limits. The following list shows several methods which I...

Using Gentoo on a server without C++ compiler
on Oct 4, 2009 in Gentoo GNU/Linux C++ ebuilds After reading a post by Diego E. Pettenò about replacing groff with heirloom-doctools leading to having nearly no C++ programs in a Gentoo system, I tried to rebuild all packages on my Gentoo-using server without C++. The main difference is that my...

Difficulties of typesetting quote marks in LaTeX
on Sep 30, 2009 in LaTeX typography logical-markup-utils Probably the most complicated to typeset punctuation marks used in English are the quote marks. Although they should be used for short and simple quotations and other simple fragments of text, they are designed for more arcane uses. This combined wit...

Three HTML elements improving document usability
on Sep 20, 2009 in WWW HTML usability One of the main advantages of the Web is that nearly everyone can use it. The same document may be rendered in very different ways on different devices. This is the reason why HTML, the markup language used for most text on WWW, specifies semantics o...

Making dashes from hyphens in LaTeX
on Sep 14, 2009 in LaTeX logical-markup-utils Probably many users of LaTeX (including me) learned that dashes and hyphens look differently from texts about LaTeX. Many people, supported by keyboards limited to ASCII with some national and unused characters, write only hyphens, with various spaci...

Finding duplicate files using GNU uniq
on Sep 9, 2009 in programming system administration shell script uniq The standard POSIX program uniq may list repeated lines from its output. Its implementation in GNU Coreutils supports listing all occurrences of such lines. How could this be used to list files of the same content located in a given directory? The so...

Porting ununiq to OpenSolaris
on Sep 8, 2009 in software Autotools C Gnulib OpenSolaris uniq In previous week I began writing ununiq – a program listing unique lines of its output, but unlike uniq using a hash table and treating also nonadjacent lines as duplicates. Today I decided to check if it will compile on an operating system not us...

Converting LaTeX to HTML
on Sep 7, 2009 in LaTeX HTML TeX4HT Documents typeset with LaTeX are usually shared electronically in PDF files or printed on dead trees. Since on the Web it is clearly better to use HTML instead of PDF, it may be useful to make these documents available in HTML. This post lists the pr...