Happy New Year!

I have had quite the year... On a personal level, 2017 was rough, but not as terrible as 2016; but from a world events perspective, 2017 was a emotionally crippling dumpster fire of horribleness. It has been very busy the past few weeks (so much so, that I forgot I had updated about my recent trip to Asia until I scanned my recent posts... ugh). I am going to finally get to go to CERN at the end of January (a DAQ workshop for the sTGC detector, which is part of the New Small Wheel muon detection/triggering upgrade for ATLAS experiment due to be installed in the next while), and maybe again mid-February for the ATLAS ITk upgrade project work I'm doing (for installation in 2025 or some such). I had initially hoped to visit my friend in Germany between the two, but I am starting to take courses towards my master's degree in physics this semester and being away for three weeks would probably be fatal from an academic perspective. I am taking the class "à la carte" as a special student at Carleton University, but I can take two classes and have them applied to my master's programme when I enter it officially. Since it's the course work that flattens me like a filbert on a highway, the fewer courses I have to take when I'm in the program, the more successful I will be. Fyi, the course is an introduction to particle physics, which is a subject I'm relatively comfortable with (no pun intended), having grown up reading about it as the Standard Model came of age, and is being taught by one of the best lecturers in the department (I am so looking forward to it).

Many of my posts are going to be about technical issues this year because I need to keep a log that exists outside of my office so I can use it wherever I am. It is also in hope that it can be of use to others. I will tag those entries appropriately for anyone wishing to avoid them :).

Grievous annoyances

I am back to wrangling with Mentor Graphics' HDL Designer (version 2015.1 so I am aligned with the group in the UK I'm supposed to be working with) and Xilinx's FPGA tools (I'm building a bare-bones DAQ/ASIC test system with nothing but stone knives and bear skins, a PSoC board, and an FPGA development system). Step 1: access the HDL Designer documentation. Seems simple, right? PDF? Just open the files? Nope. Not simple at all. Nearly impossible, in fact, and requiring a poor opinion of software developers to figure out. There is a facility in the program to associate file types (e.g. PDF) with a "task" (e.g. launching a PDF reader); however, this only applies to files associated with projects and not the built-in documentation for the program (i.e. any context Help button, the built-in manuals, etc.). That, it seems, is hardcoded in the binary to use "acroread" to launch. How did I guess this? I ran "strings hdldesigner | grep acroread" because it was the stupidest thing I could have imagined the developers doing. Yup... there is was... so I wrote a little script called "acroread" that just invoked "evince" and put it in /usr/local/bin, restarted HDL Designer and I have access to the program's documentation. I have nothing polite to say. The script, is simply:

#/bin/bash
/usr/bin/evince $*
exit $?

I also have nothing polite to say about how Adobe failed to offer support for Linux platforms with their tools, forcing us to turn to half-baked solutions like Evince to read PDFs (I have no end of grief with this program, but it comes with most Linux distros... I'm running CentOS 7, which has a raft of other issues, because it is the officially supported distro at CERN that much of my work is directed toward). And don't get me started on the "built in" PDF viewers in browsers and their hostility to the Adobe plugins. I agree on some levels that there were serious issues with having a commercial product being so important to accessing information on the Internet, but give me the choice of what I want to use and I can decide on my very own thank you very much.

Anyway, finding a workaround for the HDL Designer decisions around PDFs shot down pretty much any productivity I had hoped to have this afternoon at work. Perhaps tomorrow, I can do something productive (although it is going to be testing the integration between HDL Designer and Xilinx ISE, so something tells me I'll be pounding my head on the desk repeatedly seeking relief from the pain I will be putting myself through with the tools... heh).