Recent blog entries for rkrishnan

NixOS

Posted on April 15, 2014 by rkrishnan

I am a long time (and proud) Debian GNU/Linux user and developer. As a debian developer, I have not been active for one or two years but off late, I am following mailing lists, uploading a package or two and starting to be more active.

I have also been getting more and more convinced that Functional Programming paradigms are more suited to solve problems than using imperative languages, at least for a lot of tasks. I have been learning Haskell for the past few months and thoroughly enjoy the beauty and expressiveness of Haskell and the purely functional programming which lends itself to many tasks. It has some kind of beauty that is only found in Mathematics, which I have never seen in any other programming language I ever use.

I also sometimes use a work Macbook Air machine. Since my work involves building linux kernel, making changes to it and so on, I generally work on GNU/Linux boxes. But sometimes I am not in the office or sitting on a couch and I really like the portability of the Macbook hardware. I am not a fan of Apple and do not intend to replace my PC hardware and the very nice Debian system with Apple hardware and software, expecially in the wake of Snowden revelations. But just to make my life easier while using the Mac, I had been looking at various “packaging” systems in the OS X.

People have attempted a few times to create a good packaging system for OS X. Mac-ports, the NetBSD pkgsrc and so on. And then there is homebrew which seem to be the current popular package manager, which was recommended to me by one of my friends who is a long time Apple aficionado.

The problem with brew is that it is source based. This is both good and bad. Bad because it takes me ages to get stuff built and installed. I would love to have binary packages available that can be readily installed. But then there is the binary compatibility between OS X versions. I admit to know nothing about the binary compatibility.

Enter NixOS. NixOS is a GNU/Linux distribution (well, they call it a linux distribution, but I prefer to call it GNU/Linux distro to give some credit to the GNU project which started this all and still contribute a big chunk of software we all use) that brings the concept of Purely Functional programming languages to an OS distro. What does that mean? It means many things.

  • if a package installation fails, it does not leave the system in a useless state. It is in the same state as we started with.
  • The expectations from the OS is “declared” in a configuration file written in a lazy, functional, dynamically typed language called nix expression.
  • One can roll back to any of the previous states of the system.
  • One can install multiple versions of a package. If a package is not used by any other package, it can be “garbage collected”.
  • One does not need any special privilages to install packages. Any user of the system can install packages.
  • NixOS does not have the traditional /etc, /usr, /bin and other directories. Instead, there is a ~/.nix-profile that takes care of linking to the package which is stored in the “nix store”.

If all these sound interesting (or not), I would encourage everyone to read this wonderfully detailed and readable paper on Nix.

Another thing to note. Nix is the name of the packaging system (like apt or rpm) and NixOS is the OS built around nix. Nix can be installed on any POSIX compatible OS like GNU/Linux, *BSD or OS X or any other Unix-like systems.

Nix packages are maintained via github. I don’t personally like such a crucially important project dependent on a commercial network infrastructure like github. But at the same time, I see that github “pull requests” is certainly one of the reasons why a project like Nix is able to keep up with the ever changing Free software versions and builds. It certainly reduces the bureaucracy.

I already sent a couple of pull requests which were merged readily. Github and the pull request mechanisms greatly reduce the barrier to contributions. But the same time, I should note that Debian’s trust model for developers using the GPG “web of trust” and signed package uploads exist for a reason. I wish more and more distributions adopt it.

My OS X experience is now a lot better. I have latest versions of a lot of packages installed. For those that are failing, I am trying to fix them and send the fixes in. And I am having a lot of fun learning about the Nix. There are many rough edges with Nix still. A lot of free software is not packaged yet and packaging itself is boring and a thankless job. But in my opinion the Nix expressions is a nice “Domain Specific Language” to do the packaging. I will certainly be playing with it more in the coming days. But of course, I do not plan to stop using Debian any time soon.

Syndicated 2014-04-15 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

rkrishnan.org -- now with SSL padlock

Posted on March 9, 2014 by rkrishnan

I just bought an SSL certificate (free for the first year) from gandi.net and configured nginx to serve the pages over SSL. It was very easy to enable SSL, the whole process took me about 30 minutes (including the verification time from Gandi). I mostly followed Ben Jeffrey’s excellent blog post with a few trivial changes. I chose to use a “file” verification method instead of DNS or email. This is very easy to do, one needs to download a file and put it at the root of one’s website.

A friend tells me that I should probably get the EV Certificate. I think it probably makes sense for e-commerce websites or those websites that authenticate users and take their personal data. I am doing none of these. My website is just serving some static pages. Then why bother with https at all? Because one can. I just wanted to convince myself that it is easy to encrypt data between the browser and the server.

Syndicated 2014-03-09 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

On writing books

Posted on March 2, 2014 by rkrishnan

Off late, I had been reading the Plan9 papers from Bell Labs. The papers prompted me to go back and read some of the books written by the same folks at Bell Labs.1 What is so astonishing is that the books written by these finest engineers are the clearest form of writing about programming that has ever been produced. These books almost never exceed 300 pages. Let me list some of the books here:

  • The C Programming Language, Kernighan and Ritchie.
  • The Unix Programming Environment, Kernighan and Pike.
  • The practice of programming, Kernighan and Pike.
  • Software tools, Kernighan and Plauger
  • C traps and pitfalls, Andrew Koenig
  • The AWK programming language, Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan
  • Elements of programming style, Kernighan and Plauger
  • Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley.
  • More programming pearls, Jon Bentley.
  • Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, Aho, Sethi and Ullman.
  • The design of the Unix operating system, Maurice J. Bach.

I believe this covers the list related to Unix/C and other related tools. There could be more that I don’t know about.

At the risk of repeating myself, here are the salient features of these writing (and also the Plan9/Unix papers).

  • concise.
  • clear and unambiguous.
  • lots of clean code examples to illustrate the points.
  • wonderful exercises.
  • lots of real life examples.

The AWK book has an example showing a simple implementation of make, in ~5 pages. Tell me any other book that does that.

Why is it that these authors consistently wrote these high quality books and papers? I believe it is because they worked on it first and were genuinely interested in sharing their work with others. They also strived for the highest quality in all their work - be it writing software or writing documentation.

Contrast it with the modern world. Within a few months of a new language or a library or better a “framework” appearing in the Internet, a bunch of books gets announced on Twitter and twitter handles setup to announce the upates of the book. Most of these are written by people with the sole intention of getting more search hits for their names in the popular search engines and have not built anything big and “real world”. Some of these books only discuss very superficial examples and lack exercises and real examples. Some present-day authors like to fill their books with footnotes. If I were interested in history rather than content, I would rather look up elsewhere on the web.

The Bell Labs books were all “Real World” books without attaching “Real World”2 on the titles that some of the current generation books do in order to differentiate themselves from the non-real-world ones. This is a pity and is mostly the author’s fault. In their rush to fame, the poor reader and her money and time has no place!

If you are a potential author, please read at least some of the above listed books and try to emulate them, please, for the sake of computer science!


  1. Reading these papers also prompted me to think how much of an antithesis of Unix, the “modern unices” have become.

  2. I didn’t mean anything bad about “Real World Haskell” or “Real World Ocaml”. They are both fine books written by great authors with lots of experience on the topic and it shows.

Syndicated 2014-03-02 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

Haskell books

Posted on January 3, 2014 by rkrishnan

There are lots of books on the programming language, Haskell, which, the folklore say, has a steep learning curve. I am no Haskell expert, having embarked on the journey to learn Haskell myself two years ago and still very much learning. A friend of mine recently asked me for recommendations on Haskell books, which inspired me to write this post. Again, I am no Haskell expert, still very much a journeyman Haskeller.

Usually two books get recommended by almost everyone. Those two books are

There is no question that these two are great books. I have paper copies of both the books and still use them. I think everyone aspiring to learn Haskell should read these books, especially RWH. I am not a big fan of LYH though. I feel that the Haskell Tutorial or YAHT already covers everything in LYH in the same or better way.

There are some other books that I like along with RWH. One of the thing I look, in any programming book that I intend to buy (investing my money) and read (investing my time, because I am serious about learning the material) is that they contain exercises. I feel that testing one’s knowledge of understanding is extremely important and good exercises of varied difficulty (good books indicate the level of difficulty of exercise problems) is very important, as far as I am concerned. So, with that in mind, here are my recommended books on Haskell:

Actually I read the previous edition of this book co-authored by Phil Wadler but that book had its examples in Haskell’s pre-cursor language, Miranda. I think just about every programmer should read this wonderful book for the clarity of presentation.

Hutton’s book is probably what one should read (and work through) to get deep into Haskell. It has some great exercises as well. Some people compare this book to K&R C book. For those experienced in other Functional programming languages, this is a great book.

Writing real world programs

I found myself staring at my editor sometimes with just the below lines on it:

  main = 

The problem is that most of these books teach the purely functional part of Haskell beautifully well. While that is very important and requires a different mindset, especially if one has a prolonged exposure to imperative programming, it can only help to get the room warm by heating up the CPU. One need to interact with the real world to do some stuff in and out. It is extremely easy to do I/O in Haskell. Just start using it without worrying about Monads.

And that brings me to the next topic:

Do not learn monads by analogies. Do not read any Monad tutorials which compares Monads with anything else. Just start using it. Take some time to learn the type signature of Monads and start building programs with them.

If you really want to read a monad tutorial, I highly recommend these two papers.

If you are allowed to read just one blog post on the subject, I would suggest reading Chris Taylor’s post on IO Monad. Be sure to read it after reading Wadler’s and SPJ’s papers.

This is where RWH comes into picture. It has a number of great examples and is written by programmers who have contributed tons of great code to the Haskell community.

Algorithms

Traditional algorithm books describe algorithms in imperative style. Two great books exist in the Haskell world that beautifully describe algorithms.

Other misc resources

Another great resource is Don Stewart’s StackOverflow answers on Haskell and the #haskell freenode irc channel. I am not big into irc. I join the channel occasionally, it is one of the most friendly places to hangout with other Haskell programmers.

Happy Haskell Hacking!

Syndicated 2014-01-03 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

2013 in review

Posted on December 31, 2013 by rkrishnan

2013, like other years, was a mixed bag. For the first time in years, I had to witness the death of someone very close to me. I spent a lot of time in hospitals, in front of Intensive Care Units, slept on the benches on the hospital corridors, talked to many others like me who were anxiously hanging out at hospitals waiting to hear from the Doctors who made lightning visits, uttered a few words and left.

Some of the people went home alive, some unfortunate old and young didn’t.

On the positive side, I completed two courses on Coursera, Algorithms Part-1 and Algorithms Part-2. I really felt after completing these courses that I made a step forward in my own quest to become a better programmer.

I have no big ambitions for 2014. I just want to be a better human being, spend more time with family, do more of what I like and be with people I love.

I also hope that the world would judge people for what they are, rather than by the tags they carry (age, sex, qualifications, job…).

Happy 2014!

Syndicated 2013-12-31 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

Optimizing Iceweasel/Firefox for privacy

Posted on December 1, 2013 by rkrishnan

Ever noticed an apparel that you looked up on a website showing up as an Ad when you are browsing another website? What is going on here? How did a web page show you ads for products you visited on a totally different website?

Partly this is the work of those facebook like buttons and Google’s +1 buttons. Let us say you were logged into facebook on a browser tab. Now you visit many other pages on other tabs. Some of these pages make have the “like” buttons. Now, here is the deal: Every time you visit a page, a series of HTTP GET requests are made by the browser to get the elements (like images etc) on the page. Facebook knows from the cookies that who you are. Now they also get a HTTP GET request for a button along with this cookie and so they know which website this button appears in and so they know you visited that page.

In fact, facebook’s data usage policy page explicitly states this:

  Advertisers and their partners sometimes use cookies or other similar technologies 
in order to serve and measure ads and to make their ads more effective. Learn more 
about cookies, pixels and similar technologies. 

Here are a few plug-ins I use with Iceweasel (that’s the name of the popular Firefox browser on the Debian GNU/Linux system) that help in making web browsing, a pleasant experience.

1. Adblock Edge

Adblock Edge(ABE) is a fork of the excellent Adblock Plus (ABP). AdBlock Plus sold out to Ad companies like Google and included a bunch of ads in their whitelist. ABE is a fork before they made the change. I guess we are indebted to ABP author for the great contribution. ABE with “EasyPrivacy” and “EasyList” filters can make the web browsing experience a lot lot nice! To see the difference, try browsing a few popular websites with and without ABE for a day.

Install

2. HTTPS Everywhere

HTTPS Everywhere is a plugin to force https protocol if it is available, for safe and secure browsing. Most websites which requires one to login (like email, banking etc..) all implement https. But some still don’t or give an option for http vs https. In such cases, this plugin forces the use of https.

Install

3. Duck Duck Go search widget

I had been trying to move away from Google for most of my daily browsing needs including search. Duck Duck Go search quality has been improving steadily and is very much usable for most purposes. DDG explicitly has privacy of its users as one of their goals. They are a company like Google, so they can change their policies (like the way Google did with the “don’t be evil” goal). So, watch out. Until then, enjoy DDG. Unlike Google, DDG does not wrap URLs in the search results with a redirector to track clicks.

Install

4. Greasemonkey + NoScript

It is interesting to see the amount of code we execute on our machines without explicitly invoking a program. Every webpage include a number of JavaScript files which gets downloaded and executed when we visit websites. What do those JavaScript files do? Some of them are libraries like JQuery. Some of them are explicitly there to track users (like the Google Analytics scripts). We, the users, should have control on what should run on our machine and tracking should be opt-in, rather than opt-out.

It is also well known that a user can be uniquely identified from the Browser’s user agent string.

A number of websites work quite nicely without any JavaScript at all. GMail has a mode which works well without JavaScript. But unfortunately many don’t work well (like Amazon.com, for instance). But with NoScript, one could make this experience less painful.

Install Greasemonkey Install NoScript

5. RefControl

Everytime one clicks a URL on a webpage, which takes us to another page in the same website or a different website alltogether, the HTTP request message also sends a Referrer header which tells the website, where the request came from. This is a crucial piece of the puzzle in constructing a graph of anyone’s web browsing habbits. We could turn off those referral requests with the RefControl plugin.

Install

6. Disconnect

There is yet another privacy plugin called “disconnect” that promises to keep trackers (twitter, facebook, g+ buttons, cookies etc) away. Since I use it in conjunction with other plugins, I don’t know how good it is working. Looks like Disconnect is some kind of a well funded company.

Apparently there are many in this category being developed by funded companies like Ghostery, DoNotTrackMe and so on. I used Ghostery and DoNotTrackMe in the past. But currently I use Disconnect as its code is freely available.

Install

7. Other Misc settings

A few other tips:

  1. Turn On the private browsing mode in the browser if you don’t want to store the history. Some people like to have the history to make their browsing experience easy and it has its own merits and demerits. I visit facebook only on a browser in private browsing mode. This is not enough. One also need to make sure that no other websites are visited while the facebook page is open in a tab. One need not worry about logging off. If one closes a browser in private browsing mode, no cookies are stored, so the “like” buttons on other websites cannot track the identity. (Remember, they still can profile a user based on the User Agent string)

    I also clear history and cookies when I quit the browser. This can be set up on Firefox preferences.

  2. Turn on the “Do not Track” option. Both Firefox and Chrome has this option. But make sure that you turn the DNT option on, it may not be on by default.

  3. Use a browser that has its source code published as Free Software. This means, Firefox or variants, Chromium, or one of those webkit derivatives like Epiphany. Note that Google Chrome is not Free Software but Chromium is. Mozilla is a non-profit corporation and I trust them more with protecting the web users than a for-profit corporation that explicitly wants to know everything about everyone.

    Google has access to your emails(Isn’t it ironic that they filter out email SPAM and show you spam in the form of ads on the side?), your likes/dislikes/opinions, your location and also your DNA. They also wants to know what you see and also track your eye movements within the screen and elsewhere. The Moto-X phone from Motorola/Google has its microphones on all the time reportedly to take voice commands. But it is also the new stark reality. In the name of convenience, people are enticed to give up their privacy.

  4. Tor onion router is one of the best guard against censorship and tracking. There are many ways to use Tor along with Firefox at the cost of a bit of latency. I like to use the OS Distribution called Tails on a USB stick when browsing from an internet cafe. Tails is a special GNU/Linux based distribution that can be installed on a USB stick, which has a bunch of privacy tools built in, including a special version of Firefox with Tor button enabled.

  5. Turn on the “Block pop-up” windows option to block the annoying popups.

  6. Install only those extensions that have their source code published. It is a bit hard to find that from the Firefox add-on page. One has to go to the specific page for an add on and look under “Version Information”. Chose only those extensions that is made available under a Free Software license. Remember that browser is a very critical piece of software used by anyone in their daily work flow and it is extremely important that we don’t leave it to others to decide on the issues related to privacy.

  7. YouTube has become as anoying as the regular Idiot Box these days with a lot of ads before and in-between the videos. I use YouTube Center to get rid of them and also give me a few other features like download the videos for offline viewing and so on. Not related to privacy per se, but helps in making YouTube video viewing, a better experience. It is highly likely that YouTube may do something to break this extension by changing their protocol, so that show the ads and the developer has to play a catchup game.

  8. There is another Firefox plugin called RequestPolicy that can catch cross site requests. It is recommended for security paranoids. It gives information on the connections made by a website into other domain names (eg: http://foobar.org making connections to Google Analytics website). These connections are reported and can be blocked as well.

  9. If you are concious about your privacy on the Internet (which every Internet user should), you should read the articles on the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Syndicated 2013-12-01 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

Finding the powerset of a set

Posted on November 25, 2013 by rkrishnan

PowerSet of a set S is a set of all subsets of S. For example, Powerset of {a, b, c} is { {}, {a}, {b}, {c}, {a, b}, {a, c}, {b, c}, {a, b, c} }. For any set of length n, the powerset will have a length of 2^n.

Writing a program to find the powerset is easy to write, if we can visualize powerset. A simple inductive way to think about it is that the subsets of the set S, either has an element in S or not. We recursively apply this rule, the base case being that the empty set is a subset of S. This can be visualized as a binary tree as shown below.

Members of the powersets are the leaves of this tree. You can now easily come up with a relation:

Powerset of S = (first element of S U x) U S’ where S’ = Powerset of {S - first element of S} and xS’

In other words, take the powerset of S without first element, let us call this set as S’. Now, for each of the element x in S’ find the union of the first element with x. This is the first part of the power set. The other part involves those that does not have the first element and this is S’ that we have already computed. The final answer is the set union of first part and second part.

This can be translated to the following racket program

  #lang racket

;; List -> ListOf List
(define (powerset s)
  (if (empty? s)
      (list empty)
      (let ([ps (powerset (rest s))])
        (append (map (λ(l) 
                       (cons (first s) l)) 
                     ps) 
                ps))))

Or even better, this version uses the Racket list comprehension functions and a more direct translation of our definition of the powerset function:

  #lang racket

;; List -> ListOf List
(define (powerset s)
  (if (empty? s)
      (list empty)
      (let ([ps (powerset (rest s))])
        (append ps (for/list ([x ps])
                     (cons (first s) x))))))

Here is an example:

  Welcome to DrRacket, version 5.3.6 [3m].
Language: racket; memory limit: 128 MB.
> (powerset '(a c))
'((a c) (a) (c) ())
> (powerset '(a b c))
'((a b c) (a b) (a c) (a) (b c) (b) (c) ())
> 

Syndicated 2013-11-25 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

Anatomy of a linux kernel bug

Posted on November 13, 2013 by rkrishnan

Compiling a C program on a GNU/Linux system involves a lot of magic under the hood. One of them, which is taken for granted is that the kernel version running on a system can be different from the version of kernel header files used to compile a program. The Linux kernel developers work really hard to give this guarantee to the userspace programs. Read on for a case where that guarantee got broken.

ioctl

ioctl(2) is the standard Unix way of controlling a device file from userspace. For example, let us say, for debugging, we want to read and write some registers from an i2c device. One of the ways to do this is to provide an experimental ioctl command to read/write the registers.

The ioctl call in the userspace has the following prototype:

  int ioctl(int fd, int cmd, ...);

The driver API is usually implemented using a table of function pointers. The ioctl function pointer API is a little different from that of the userspace API but for this discussion, that doesn’t matter. The key point is that the second parameter cmd is passed unchanged into the kernel ioctl function call.

What is cmd?

cmd is the ioctl command code. cmd can be thought of as a 32-bit bit-field derived from a few other things to make it unique. Here are some things used to define command codes:

  • a magic number (defined by the kernel for each subsystem in Documentation/ioctl/ioctl-number.txt.
  • a sequential number that the programmer assign for the code.
  • type of the command (is it a read or a write or a read-write command?)
  • size of the data being read/written.

These 4 sets of information is used to create the bitfield by the macro _IOC

As an aside, LXR is a great tool to browse through code quickly.

The bug

I am writing a video4linux driver for an HDMI input device. Unfortunately, this is suppose to work with a 2 year old kernel (v3.0) shipped with Android JellyBean release running on a TI OMAP4 device. For some reason, the kernel headers shipped with AOSP is a bit different from that in the kernel version 3.0.

The particular control code of interest to me is the VIDIOC_DQEVENT, which is defined as follows:

    #define VIDIOC_DQEVENT           _IOR('V', 89, struct v4l2_event)

I have the following code snippet in a simple userspace application (not showing the entire code here):

  ...
res = select(fd + 1, NULL, NULL, &fds, NULL);
if (res <= 0)
        fprintf(stderr, "%s: %s\n", argv[0], strerror(errno));

res = ioctl(fd, VIDIOC_DQEVENT, &ev);
...

I observed that the select is succeeding but the ioctl call with the command VIDIOC_DQEVENT was failing with an errno ENOTTY. A bit of grepping in the driver source revealed that the ENOTTY is coming from my own driver’s default handler. This means that the switch statement didn’t succeed with the command code we passed. That was strange! This clearly showed that VIDIOC_DQEVENT has different values in kernel and userspace! Printing its value made it clear that this was indeed the case.

A bit more printing revealed that struct v4l2_event which is used to calculate the control code VIDIOC_DQEVENT has a size different by exactly 8 bytes in userspace vs that in the kernel. This was very strange because this indeed means that kernel ABI guarantee is broken.

The kernel header file include/linux/videodev2.h has the struct v4l2_event defined as follows:

  ...
struct v4l2_event_vsync {
        /* Can be V4L2_FIELD_ANY, _NONE, _TOP or _BOTTOM */
        __u8 field;
} __attribute__ ((packed));

struct v4l2_event {
        __u32                           type;
        union {
                struct v4l2_event_vsync vsync;
                __u8                    data[64];
        } u;
        __u32                           pending;
        __u32                           sequence;
        struct timespec                 timestamp;
        __u32                           reserved[9];
};
...

… and the kernel headers shipped with the userspace had this version for the same structure:

  ...
struct v4l2_event_ctrl {
        __u32 changes;
        __u32 type;
        union {
                __s32 value;
                __s64 value64;
        };
        __u32 flags;
        __s32 minimum;
        __s32 maximum;
        __s32 step;
        __s32 default_value;
};

struct v4l2_event_frame_sync {
        __u32 frame_sequence;
};

struct v4l2_event {
        __u32                           type;
        union {
                struct v4l2_event_vsync         vsync;
                struct v4l2_event_ctrl          ctrl;
                struct v4l2_event_frame_sync    frame_sync;
                __u8                            data[64];
        } u;
        __u32                           pending;
        __u32                           sequence;
        struct timespec                 timestamp;
        __u32                           id;
        __u32                           reserved[8];
};
...

Now comes the interesting part. Notice the union u in the struct v4l2_event? The largest element in the union is a 64 byte array. If you do the math, you can see that no other element in the array exceeds this size, so even though userspace has some extra structures in the union, in theory, we are not going to exceed 64 bytes. But struct v4l2_event_ctrl has another union inside which has a 64-bit value.

The compiler decided to align this value at a 64 bit boundary and also align the reserved array by another 4 bytes, resulting in a struct v4l2_event_ctrl with size increase of 8 bytes and this exceeds 64 bytes, making it the largest element in the union.

Here is some quick and dirty test code to verify that this is indeed the case: https://gist.github.com/vu3rdd/7445863

The fix

I fixed it in my system by copying the relevant portion of the userspace header into the kernel header so that the struct v4l2_event definitions match. I could do that because I know that there is no other user of the Video4Linux events in my system.

Syndicated 2013-11-13 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

Neat hack to find offsets of C Structure members

Posted on November 13, 2013 by rkrishnan

Suppose we have a C structure with some elements like this:

  struct T {
    int foo;
    long bar;
    float baz;
};

C, being a portable assembler, arranges these data sequentially in the memory and aligns them appropriately. What if you want to find the offsets from the base of each of the element?

This macro does the trick. There are other more explicit ways to calculate it. But I found this macro very neat.

    #define OFFSET(x, y)  &((x *)0)->y

We use it this way:

    int offset;
  offset = OFFSET(struct T, bar);

How does this work? The idea is based on the fact that if the structure is put in memory starting from address 0, a pointer to the element inside the structure is also the same as the offset, since the base address is 0. So, we cast an integer (0 in this case) to a pointer pointing to the structure and just find the offset to the element whose offset we are interested in. The address of that element should be the same as offset, as the structure is assumed to be laid in the memory starting at address 0. That’s it.

The linux kernel defines a similar macro in the include/linux/stddef.h called offsetof:

  #ifdef __compiler_offsetof
#define offsetof(TYPE,MEMBER) __compiler_offsetof(TYPE,MEMBER)
#else
#define offsetof(TYPE, MEMBER) ((size_t) &((TYPE *)0)->MEMBER)
#endif

Syndicated 2013-11-13 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

Turning off from internet

Posted on November 7, 2013 by rkrishnan

I had been doing a few MOOC courses in the past few weeks. Given the fact that I have to juggle between family, work, commute and the courses, I decided to put some breaks on the information intake.

I turned myself off from email, news etc (well, not completely but perhaps ~90%) in the past few weeks by unsubscribing from mailing lists and also by closing browser tabs that I am unlikely to read or benefit from in short term. I consistently kept number of open tabs in the browser to <= 5. I also installed browser plugins to warn myself and block twitter/hackernews etc after 10 minutes of usage per day from 6 AM to 10 PM. (I didn’t put restrictions after 10pm). Overall my information intake was much less.

The result is that I was much happy and got a lot of things done which made me even more happy. I didn’t miss anything (that would have helped me). I had a lot of withdrawal symptoms initially when I unsubscribed from some of the mailing lists which I had been reading for the past ~4 years. But I really didn’t miss anything at all that is of immediate use to me.

I felt a big void when the course ended. For a day or two, I didn’t know what to do with the new found free time. But after that I quickly filled it with trivia. But I learnt a bit from those intense periods of learning. I now have closed down all those pdfs and tabs that I had open and am getting back to work. I had temptations to re-join mailing lists. But I deliberately decided not to do so.

Working on something every day and getting into the “flow” helped me greatly in getting something done and contributing to some happiness. There are many sources of unhappiness in my life which I cannot do much about. But there are a handful that I can do something about, I felt working on some interesting and mind-bending problem certainly was worth it.

Syndicated 2013-11-07 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

263 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!