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CSS sprites aren't anything new. They have been around for years now, and are one of the methods to optimise website load time. The idea is to incorporate several images into a single bigger one and in this way decrease number of round trips between HTTP server and a browser.

In its traditional use, CSS sprites work as a replacement for images and cannot be used as a background. But background is exactly how I'd implemented quote image left of long quotes and flags indicating paragraph language, eg:

A few of the entries on my blog have text both in English and Polish. On those, I use some simple icons to indicate which is which:

Polish flag on the left indicates paragraphs written in Polish.

UK flag on the left indicates paragraphs written in English.

After a bit of playing around I finally figured out how to get this working, and even though there are some caveats, sprites can be used as a top-left no-repeat background image as well.

Surprisingly I couldn't find on the Internet any HTTPS-aware example how to drop the www. prefix from web hosts in Apache, so I had to come up with one myself. Firstly, the following lines need to find their way to the end of Apache configuration file (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf or something):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1$1 [L,R=301]

Secondly, analogous lines need to be added inside of the <VirtualHost _default_:443> directive of mod_ssl configuration file (/etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf or similar), like so:

<VirtualHost _default_:443>
	# … various directives …

	# Here's what needs to be added:
	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1$1 [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

Now, after a restart, Apache will drop the www. prefix for both secure and insecure connections.

Dnia dzisiejszego będę miał przyjemność prezentować Contiguous Memory Allocator na seminarium dyplomowym (CMA jest bowiem tematem mojej pracy). Dostępny jest również referat opisujący z większą ilością detali zawartość slajdów. Aktualizacja: Z racji, że jestem już po obronie, dodaję również link do pracy inżynierskiej.

• Praca inżynierska, źródła.
• Prezentacja, źródła.
• Referat, źródła.

Prezentacja nie opisuje sposobu użycia CMA zatem po więcej szczegółów odsyłam do materiałów z LCE 2012. No i oczywiście jest również strona mina86.com/cma/, z której linkuję do przeróżnych materiałów dotyczących CMA.

LinuxCon / Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2012 is nearly over, and I had a pleasure of talking about the Contiguous Memory Allocator. The slides from the talk are embedded below, are available for download from Google Drive, and their source code can be accessed at GitHub.

Unfortunately, in contrast to other LCE/ELCE conferences, talks were not recorded, so the video of the presentation is not available.

For more links regarding CMA, I've set up a resource page at mina86.com/cma/. Beside the link to the final CMA patchset and to the LCE/ELCE presentation, it links to various articles and patches relating to CMA directly or indirectly.

I have got involved in a discussion… on YouTube… and about creationism non less… Yeah, I am still wondering how that happened, but it did. In this discussion I was prompted to watch a pro-creationism video, which I decided to do and comment on it. This entry is the result.

Paths of destiny lead mysterious ways. Not so long ago, I was a hard-core C hacker and now, I spend a lot of the time coding in Python.

In somehow related news, I have discovered that my search-foo is not good enough, when I was unable to find a decent implementations of several design patterns in Python.

What I needed was a generic proxy that would defer initialisation of an object to the moment it is first used. Here is what I came up with:

class LazyProxy(object):
    def __init__(self, cls, *args, **kw):
        object.__setattr__(self, '_LazyProxy__data', (cls, args, kw))

    def __get(self):
        if len(self.__data) == 3:
            cls, args, kw = self.__data
            object.__setattr__(self, '_LazyProxy__data', (cls(*args, **kw),))
        return self.__data[0]

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        return getattr(self.__get(), name)

    def __setattr__(self, name, value):
        return setattr(self.__get(), name, value)

    def __delattr__(self, name):
        return delattr(self.__get(), name)

This is the first part of an extended version of an LWN article on CMA. It contains much more detail on how to use CMA, and a lot of boring code samples. Should you be more interested in an overview, consider reading the original instead.

Contiguous Memory Allocator (or CMA) has been developed to allow big physically contiguous memory allocations. By initialising early at boot time and with some fairly intrusive changes to Linux memory management, it is able to allocate big memory chunks without a need to grab memory for exclusive use.

Simple in principle, it grew to be a quite complicated system which requires cooperation between boot-time allocator, buddy system, DMA subsystem, and some architecture-specific code. Still, all that complexity is usually hidden away and normal users won't be exposed to it. Depending on perspective, CMA appears slightly different and there are different things to be done and look for.

I have already mentioned some problems with the null pointer but my recent discovery knocked my socks off.

By now, it should come with no surprise to anyone that 0 in pointer context acts as a null pointer (no matter of its actual representation). Moreover, it takes only a tiny bit of experimenting to figure out that expressions like (int)0 do as well. The latter is in itself a bit of a pita but it is conforming to the C++ standard which says:

Anyone working in a big corporation must have been hit by some “funny” mail from a coworker that helps everyone gets through the day. No different at my office – at one point all engineers have been challenged to write the shortest code in C that prints all prime numbers (and only prime numbers) less than a hundred each on separate line.

This is an interesting brain-teaser so posting it here so others may choose to think about it while their code's compiling.

Of course, a “C program” needs not to be taken too seriously – depending on not too far fetched undefined behaviours of given implementation is all right (but please do not use system() or exec() family of calls ;) ).

It has been a long time since my last entry. In fact, it was so long, that this condition has already been pointed out pushing me into finally writing something. Inspired by Adriaan de Groot's entry, I decided to write something about 0, NULL and upcoming nullptr.

I will try to be informative and explain what the whole buzz is about and then give my opinion about nullptr. Let us first inspect how a null pointer can be donated in C and C++.