Busy work: pasane and syscall extractor
Today, I wrote a load of Python and a load of C to work around pretty insane problems in Linux, my choice of OS for development.
pasane is a command-line volume control that doesn't mess up channel balance. This makes it unlike all of the other volume control tools I've tried that you can reasonably drive from the command line.
It's necessary to change volume from the command line as
I launch commands in response to hotkeys
(e.g. to implement the volume+ button on my keyboard). It's also
occasionally useful to change the volume via. SSH. Maybe there's another
option? Maybe something works via. dbus? This seemed to make the most
sense at the time, and isn't too awful.
Am I insane?
Next up: Some code to parse the list of syscalls from the Linux source tree.
It turns out that it's useful to have these numbers available in other languages, such that you can pass them to tools, so that you can decode raw syscall numbers you've seen, or simply so that you can make the syscalls.
Anyway, they are not available in the Linux source. What? Yes, for most
architectures, this table is not available. It's there on i386, amd64,
and arm (32-bit), but not for anything else. You have to.. uh.. build
a kernel for one of those architectures, then compile C code to get the
values. Um. What?
This is insane.
The Python code (linked above) does a reasonably good job of extracting them from this insanity, and generating the tables for a couple more arches.
I needed to do this so I can copy a file efficiently. I think. I've kind of lost track. Maybe I am insane.
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