CMake and assembly sources

I've been trying to figure out how to "nicely" integrate building assembler sources with CMake. After some digging around, I found a nice recipe recently posted to CMake mailing list:

set_property(SOURCE cputorture.s PROPERTY LANGUAGE C)

This works because the C compiler, at least on UNIX, recognizes .s as assembler source extension and invokes the proper assembler command.

NetBSD 4 dissapointment

Well, I installed 32-bit NetBSD 4.0.1 in virtualbox. Then I attempted to install subversion through the pkgsrc system, and.. became thoroughly dissapointed. It pulled not only subversion, but also full apache (although it needs only the apache portable runtime, APR), perl 5.8, ruby 1.8, and who knows what else. I got tired of ruby compiling its "RI", whatever that is, and just deleted the VM. I think I'm going for some desktop ubuntu install now. Or maybe Fedora 10.

Acrobat Reader 9 annoying accessibility feature

The annoying feature being accessibility which turns itself on, and there's no option to turn it off. Sure, there are a bunch of accessibility preferences, but no "disable" option. So every time I opened a document, I got an annoying dialog that the "document is being prepared...".

Solution: find "Accessibility.api" and "ReadOutLoud.api" files in Acrobat's installation directory (under plugins) and rename them to something else. I have created directory named "disabled" and moved the files there. Works like a charm.

R

Recently, I had to process and plot a significant amount of data. Previously, I used to use gnuplot for that, but I've discovered two shortcomings: 1) gnuplot has limited data manipulation facilities, so I had to do data processing with perl scripts, 2) it has very arcane syntax and it's rather hard to make it do what you want, especially when you have slightly complex requirements (eg. bar charts of several nested data sets).

I have resisted learning R for a long time, because it also uses a rather arcane language with many complex and rather badly documented data structures. However, a week ago, I remembered my last experience with gnuplot, and I gave R a try. I'm glad I did even though it took me some time to get used to its data manipulation capabilities since the learning curve is rather steep. However, once you get used to it, it's so much easier and faster to manipulate data than with custom-made scripts, and much simpler to produce well-looking plots. Visit its homepage and take a look.