2013-11-12



Yesterday, I've talked about Performance at ChaosSeminar  of  CCC
Ulm.  [0] It's been a nice talk without much ``action'', which  I
appreciated.  I  think  this  talk  is  one  of  the better ones,
although the beginning  wasn't  smooth  enough.  I  was  able  to
transfer some major points of my view.

In the afterthought, it occured to me that a part of the audience
needed  quite  some  time  to realize that I'm not really talking
about what is usually meant with ``performance'' and it's optimi-
zation. This was quite a surprise for me, but, of course, if they
don't know me well enough yet and the talk is titled ``On Perfor-
mance'', what else should they expect?

The talk is a collection of various thoughts, brought together to
become  one  topic,  one  talk.   I'm  satisfied with the result,
although I needed to rearrange things until just before the talk.
Other talks had straight forward story lines, this one is clearly
a collection. I think, I like both kinds. The next one is  likely
to  be  a  straight forward topic again. That means less work and
less uncertainty.

The recordings are already online, thanks to Bjoern's  incredible
work.  [1]



For the first time, the announcement poster [2] included the  CCC
Ulm  logo.   I've  included  it into with the Heirloom -mpictures
troff macros:


          Further more, I've generalized the poster template. The next step
          would be to add a frontend to it in order to allow others to
          create posters too.



          When I've formated my (troff) slides, I needed to manually add
          a BoundingBox to the PostScript sources, to crop the A4/Letter
          pages to the screen format. In the troff pipeline, just before I
          write the PS to disk:

               awk 'NR==2 {print "%%BoundingBox: 0 0 600 450"} 1'

          Ghostview (gv) displayed the slides then per-
          fectly, but xpdf didn't respect it. In conse-
          quence, I've switched to gv for the presenta-
          tions.   This  was  quite  okay,  because  it
          displays a small  slide  list  on  the  left.
          Nonetheless,  I  wanted  to have 4:3-formated
          PDFs.

          Today, I was able to solve the  problem.  The
          BoundingBox  was  only  part of the necessary
          addition, without a correkt EPS header  line,
          the   BoundingBox  was  ignored  because  the
          header told that the file is plain PS.  A  PS
          header (first line) looks like this:

               %!PS-Adobe-3.0

          The EPS variant looks like this:

               %!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-0.0
          [3]

          Hence, the new BoundingBox-insertion  command
          is this one:

               sed '1s,$$, EPSF-0.0\n%%BoundingBox: 0 0 600 450,'

          (The  `$$'  expands  to  a  single   `$'   in
          makefiles. Maybe I should rather use:
               sed '1s,.*,& EPSF-0.0\n%%BoundingBox: 0 0 600 450,'
          to remove the need to  care  for  the  dollar
          sign.  )

          I've also switched to sed(1), because it felt
          more appropriate.

          The makefile action reads:

               foo.pdf: foo.ps
                       ps2pdf -dEPSCrop -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress $<

          [0]  http://marmaro.de/docs/chaosseminar/on-performance/
          [1]  http://ulm.ccc.de/ChaosSeminar/2013/11_performance
          [2]  http://marmaro.de/docs/chaosseminar/on-performance/poster/
          [3]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>