Saturday, March 31, 2012

Wacom Pen & Touch CTH670 and Linux

I've just got a Wacom Pen & Touch tablet CTH670. I could not make it work straight away with Archlinux, but then found out that I had to follow the steps in this forum post , which was originally meant to be for the CTL-470/k.


In case the attachment in the linked forum post doesn't work, I am duplicating it here.


UPDATE: there seems to be a small issue with that version posted above. The version that works like a charm with my tablet is http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxwacom/files/xf86-input-wacom/input-wacom/

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Trying to read/write configuration files?

Loading, parsing and writing configuration files is generally not a trivial task. I found this amazing library recently, which does the job with a few C++ lines.

For example, if you have a configuration file such as:

Fields can be easily read with something as simple as:



A major advantage is that it is possible to define groups of configuration parameters, as well as arrays. The library is very well documented and it is very easy to adopt it to existing code.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Speeding up Matlab over X11 Forwarding

Running Matlab over ssh is handy. If one wants to use the GUI, X11 forwarding is possible, but it is painfully slow if both machines are not inside a local network.

I found information about how to speed it up after googling for a while. In the end I think it is worth it to summarize the steps here:
  • In the current folder where you are going to run matlab from, create a file name java.opts with the content 
                   "-Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false" (without the double commas).
  • Use compression with ssh, by connecting to the server with
                      ssh -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc -Y -C username@server

The speed up obtained is particularly noticeable when changing focus between different windows in the Matlab GUI.