I like Sonars. I like computers. I like science. I'm a geek

Yeah, I really should’ve realized it was just too easy.  I just tried installing MB-System, and I am getting a ton of errors because my c compiler is not recognizing simple math functions like sin, cos, sqrt, pow, etc.  I’m sure this is a really simple issue, and I’m just clueless about c in general.  But I really don’t know how to fix this.

Googling around, I did find some information – I think I’m missing a ‘-lm’ option somewhere (so that c links to the math library).  I found this conversation on an Ubuntu forum. Someone else was having the same problem, and part of the troubleshooting involved created a simple test program in C that uses some a math function (sin in this case). Here’s the little script that they use to create the test program. It’s called ‘test1.c’.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>
main()
{
float x,y;
printf("enter the value of x\n");
scanf("%f",&amp;x);
printf("Hello world\n");
y=sin(x);
printf("value of y is %f \n",y);
printf("\nEnd of program\n");
}

Then if I type gcc -o test1 -lm test1.c in the terminal window, it creates a compliled program test1 from the test1.c code. I was then able to run it by type ./test1. Now, this didn’t exactly solve my problem, but it was pretty cool, and it worked. Which is significant in its own right since it is, quite literally, my VERY FIRST C PROGRAM. Ever. Yup, I just skipped right over “Hello, world”.

So, eventually I did manage to get past the above problem. I had a typo in my install_makefiles script, so I had to re-run it:
./install_makefiles
then sudo make all.

I was then able to find and use the appropriate math library. But I was still getting a ton of ‘undefined reference’ errors for a bunch of GDAL files. Not sure how to fix that. I think it’ll have to wait until tomorrow…

We just got Netflix a couple of weeks ago, and can’t believe we didn’t have it sooner. We got the cheapest package – one disc at a time – but it’s fine because we can watch lots of movies and TV shows using our Playstation and online. Well, we can watch online using John’s Mac laptop, but currently it’s not possible using my Ubuntu netbook. boo! This is fine as long as John’s here, but soon he’ll be gone to Africa, and what will I do then?? Oh right, watch the movies on Playstation…but what if I have to travel and want to watch movies on my netbook? I took a quick look around, and discovered that there is currently no official support for streaming Netflix on linux. Apparently, watching Netflix requires Silverlight, a Microsoft product. There is an open-source version of Silverlight called Moonlight, but I have not read any success stories with Moonlight and Netflix. I guess there’s also the possibility of using Wine. I also read somewhere that Boxee supports Netflix viewing, and I know that Boxee is available for Linux, so maybe that will work. But the more I read, the more I think there’s not much hope for Netflix in Ubuntu right now. Boo!

The Playstation works well for me, although it’s annoying that you can’t search for titles. I’m not sure how much I like their setup for browsing either – you need to go through the lists of movies within a category one at a time. So even if you know there’s a movie you want to see in, say, the “violent war movies” category, you have to click through every single title before it. Obviously not a showstopper, but also sort of annoying.

I love the foreign films section. We just watched a really great Italian movie called “Amarcord”. It’s set in a small coastal village in Italy in the 1930′s, full of larger-than-life characters with huge personalities. The village reminded us of the small towns we visited when working in Calabria. One scene, on the night of a bonfire, with crowds of people dancing and music playing, reminded us of the Tarantella festival that we went to in the mountains.