Author Archives: Nuno Morgadinho

How to make a C library

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Suposse you want to create a library called ‘libhello’ that provides an ‘hello’ function to include in your program ‘main.c’.

Start by writing ‘hello.c’, e.g.: 

void hello ();

int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  hello ();
}

And the ‘main.c’,e.g.: 

#include

void
hello ()
{
  printf ("Hello!n");
}

Compile ‘hello.c’ into an object with the ‘-c’ option to ‘gcc’: 

$ gcc -c hello.c

Create the library using ar(1) e ranlib(1): 

$ ar cru libhello.a hello.o
$ ranlib libhello.a

And finally compile your program using the new library you’ve created: 

$ gcc -o hello main.c libhello.a
$ ./hello
Hello

References:

  • The Goat Book - Freely available book describing how to use GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool.
  • The ar(1) e ranlib(1) manpages.

iCon Steve Jobs

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Did you read this review on the book "iCon"?

I also recently finished this book and agree with Prla when he says:

> That’s an awful lot of dollars and it goes around in Silicon Valley the same way you and I buy chewing gum.

While reading the book, I frequently skipped the numbers because I always had to think twice before understanding how much money was at stake.

Later on reading I realized what at first had puzzled my mind, why was it an unauthorized biography? Obviously Jobs couldn’t authorize such a bad prospect of himself being publish with his blessing.

What more can I say? I don’t know.. it’s very interesting to see his concern with the design of things.. to say “the next Apple computer can’t be any larger than this phone list!” and leave the meeting is top-notch among many other things that go by in this book.

His strong attitude and persistency, according to the book, are incredible! The first job interview at Atari in which he refuses to abandon the room until he gets a job there or the DoS (Denial of Service) he did to the marketing firm he wanted to Apple, etc. are perfect examples. That’s the profile we associate with entrepreneurs these but while I try to be that way, for him it just seems to be his Tao (nature).

To ask workers in the elevator: “Why should we pay you?” is also incredible..

His interest on Zen Buddhism is also quite interesting. In Zen Buddhism there’s a search for emptyness and non-attachment (each person is one and doesn’t depend on anyone or anything to be happy). He is really detached and does what he think best without any fear of what other people will think or say.

The life of Steve Jobs is inspiring and to know it better gives me will to create new things, beautiful designed and capable of changing the world to a better place. And the book well transmits that inspiration.

YouOS Web Operating System

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Via Jeremy Zawodny Blog - The guys at YouOS are pulling up a web operating-system. It’s still wayyyy alpha, as they say, but the about page is already funny :).

More seriously, I recommend everyone trying it. It already has many applications like chat, mail, browser (browser inside browser!), etc.. but what really made my eyes came out was the app IDE (web-based they have). Really cool, guys, congratulations. Things like that make Web 2.0 mean something.

Trying out Basecamp

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After listening to the Web 2.0 episode 9 podcast, I went over to Basecamp, a web-based application to manage collaborative projects, and decided to give it a try.

My review is: It’s nice, clean and simple. No feature overflow, just what the casual user will need. Recommended.

Just as the podcast tell us, the history behind Basecamp is really interesting. David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried started a web design firm called 37signals that was focused on clean, fast and usable designs. David Hansson later started worked on Basecamp that later became the foundation for Ruby on Rails, the well-known open source web application framework. They soon became a product company.

As Jason says in this O’Reilly interview:

Jason: We built Basecamp because we needed it. I’m a big believer in investing in what you know and what you need. We invested our time, energy, and focus into building a product that we knew we needed to run our own business. When you build what you know, and when you use what you build, you’ve got a head start on delivering a breakout product.

Good thinking, right?

“Basecamp’s success as a bootstrapped web-based application has made it a favorite of web designers and also a model for would-be entrepreneurs.”