Scientific Computing

AutoCAD 2-D libre alternatives are available for Linux, macOS and Windows. They generally require retraining for users coming from AutoCAD. Libre 2-D AutoCAD-like choices include FreeCAD, QCAD and LibreCAD.

FreeCAD is 3-D parametric modeling akin to SolidWorks that can import DXF or DWG. QCAD has distinct paid vs. Community Edition features include DWG and DXF read / write. LibreCAD can read / write DXF and read DWG.

The no-cost ODA File Converter converts DXF to / from DWG.

The free-to-use Nvidia HPC SDK offers possible speed improvements and CUDA Fortran. A typical reason for using Nvidia HPC SDK is the Cuda GPU features. Nvidia HPC compilers support C11, C++23, and partial Fortran 2008 including submodule and error stop.

Download and install Nvidia HPC SDK. Create a script nvidia.sh:

To use NVIDIA HPC SDK, source the script:

source ~/nvidia.sh

CMake

In CMake, set NVIDIA HPC compiler-specific options in CMakeLists.txt like:

if(CMAKE_Fortran_COMPILER_ID STREQUAL "NVHPC")
  add_compile_options($<$<COMPILE_LANGUAGE:Fortran>:-Mdclchk;-Munixlogical>)
endif()

To use newer languages standard features ensure the underlying GCC toolchain is set to a new-enough compiler as per Nvidia HPC SDK documentation. The compiler path can be determined on RHEL-like Linux distros like:

scl enable gcc-toolset-12 "dirname $(which g++)"

If using a CMake toolchain file, instead of CXXFLAGS environment variable, one can set

set(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_EXTERNAL_TOOLCHAIN "/opt/rh/gcc-toolset-12/root/usr/")

The MSVC compiler needs the /utf-8 flag when UTF-8 strings are in the source file. If not specified, too many bytes are assigned to each character, leading to incorrect string lengths. This will lead to failures with string width conversions such as WideCharToMultiByte.

Windows Intel oneAPI compiler didn’t need the /utf-8 flag when tested.

In CMake, apply the /utf-8 flag like:

add_compile_options($<$<AND:$<COMPILE_LANGUAGE:CXX>,$<CXX_COMPILER_ID:MSVC>>:/utf-8>)

In Meson, the /utf-8 flag is applied automatically to C++ source files with MSVC compilers.

Generating a range of datetime data is a common data analysis and simulation task across programming languages. Matlab and GNU Octave can also generate datetime vectors.

Matlab datetime deprecates datenum. Generate a sequence of datetime like:

t0 = datetime('2020-01-05 12:30:00');
t1 = datetime('2020-01-06 18:15:10');
dt = hours(5.5);

t = t0:dt:t1;

disp(t)

GNU Octave can use many datetime features via the tablicious package.

pkg install -forge tablicious

Load in Octave prompt:

pkg load tablicious

Then use the same Matlab code above.

Downloading the latest release of CMake is usually easy. Admin / sudo is not required.

• Linux: snap install cmake
• macOS: brew install cmake
• Windows: winget install Kitware.CMake
• PyPI CMake package: python -m pip install cmake

For platforms where CMake binaries aren’t easily available, build CMake using scripts/build_cmake.cmake.

To see the merge requests for a certain release, use a URL like: https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/-/merge_requests?milestone_title=3.32.0&scope=all&state=all

CMake 3.32 enables CMAKE_LINK_WARNING_AS_ERROR boolean option sets most compilers to error if a compile warning occurs, which is generally a good setting for CI systems. target_link_libraries() can use a LINKER: prefix to abstract options. CTest –interactive-debug-mode is particularly useful on Windows to enable debug dumps and error popup windows.

CMake 3.31 warns if cmake_minimum_required() is < 3.10. TLS ≥ 1.2 is required by default for internet operations e.g. file(DOWNLOAD), ExternalProject, FetchContent, and similar. file(ARCHIVE_CREATE) gained a long-needed WORKING_DIRECTORY parameter that is essentially necessary to avoid machine-specific paths being embedded in the archive. CMAKE_LINK_LIBRARIES_STRATEGY allows specifying a strategy for ordering target direct link dependencies.

CMake 3.30 adds C++26 support. CMAKE_TLS_VERIFY environment variable was added to set TLS verification (true, false). CMake 3.31 defaults CMAKE_TLS_VERIFY to on, where previously it was off.

CMake 3.29 adds cmake_language(EXIT code) to exit CMake script mode with a specific return code. This is useful when using CMake as a platform-agnostic scripting language instead of shell script.

Environment variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX is used to set the default install prefix across projects–it can be overridden as typical by cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX= option.

Target property TEST_LAUNCHER allows specifying a test launcher. For MPI program this allows deduplicating or making more programmatic test runner scripts.

Linker information variables including CMAKE__COMPILER_LINKER_ID have been added to allow programmatic logic like setting target_link_options() based on the particular linker.

ctest --parallel without a number or 0 will use unbounded test run parallelism.

CMake 3.28 changes PATH behavior for Windows find_{library,path,file}() to no longer search PATH. This may break some projects that rely on PATH for finding libraries. The MSYS2-distributed CMake is patched to include PATH like earlier CMake, which can be confusing for CI etc. not using MSYS CMake with that patch. Windows CI/user may need to specify CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH like

cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$Env:SYSTEMDRIVE/msys64/ucrt64/lib -B build

Support for C++20 modules is considerably improved and most users will want at least CMake 3.28 to make C++ modules usable. Generator expressions $<IF> $<AND> $<OR> now short circuit. Test properties now have a DIRECTORY parameter, useful for setting test parameters from the project’s top level CMakeLists.txt. CMake 3.28.4 fixed a long-standing bug in Ninja Fortran targets that use include statements.

CMake 3.27 emits warning for cmake_minimum_required(VERSION) < 3.5. CTest test properties TIMEOUT_SIGNAL_NAME and TIMEOUT_SIGNAL_GRACE_PERIOD specify a POSIX signal to send to a timed out test process. Interactive CMake debugger added by cmake --debugger is used with an IDE such as Visual Studio. CMake script command cmake_file_api() allows querying CMake File API from within CMake.

ℹ️ Note

Fortran + Ninja was broken for OBJECT libraries in CMake 3.27.0..3.27.8 and fixed in 3.27.9.

Older CMake changelog

Optimizing compilers may enable strict aliasing. For a wide variety of existing projects, strict aliasing provides additional optimization. For some projects, such as MUMPS, memory leaks have been observed that are resolved by disabling strict aliasing using GCC flag “-fno-strict-aliasing”.

Compilers with ability to switch on / off strict aliasing include:

• GCC
• Clang LLVM
• Intel oneAPI

libuv recommends -fno-strict-aliasing due to type punning.

References:

• discussion
• presentation
• Red Hat: “The joys and perils of C and C++ aliasing” Part 1 & Part 2

Zstd is an open file compression standard. Zstd has become widely used and is incorporated in the Linux kernel and GCC. We use Zstd for data archiving particularly for large files where size and speed are a concern. CMake supports Zstd compression throughout, including file(ARCHIVE_CREATE) and file(ARCHIVE_EXTRACT). Zstd is vendored into CMake, so there is no need to worry about system shared libraries for Zstd.

file(ARCHIVE_CREATE ... WORKING_DIRECTORY ...) is necessary to avoid system-specific relative path issues.

set(archive "example.zst")
set(in_dir "data/")

file(ARCHIVE_CREATE
  OUTPUT ${archive}
  PATHS ${in_dir}
  COMPRESSION Zstd
  COMPRESSION_LEVEL 3
  WORKING_DIRECTORY ${in_dir}
  )

COMPRESSION_LEVEL

arbitrary, bigger value is more compressed.

FORMAT

not used for Zstd.

The Wouxun KG-S72C is a modern CB radio with AM and FM capabilities, which are recommended for anyone buying a new CB radio. The KG-S72C has CTCSS and DCS coded squelch, which allows hearing only parties with the same subaudible code. Only a few other models of CB radio have this capability, so most users might only occasionally use coded squelch. An important point to note is that no one sells the KG-S72C factory antenna replacement, so be very careful not to lose or damage the factory antenna. Since the KG-S72C receives an SMA female antenna (the radio has SMA female connector), using long replacement antennas are mechanically fragile and could break the antenna jack.

The sound quality on receive and transmit is good, especially in FM mode as for most AM / FM CB radios.

Cons

The KG-S72C has a few cons, which are tolerable.

1. Lack of RF gain control, which is a fundamental requirement for any CB radio to make listening tolerable in AM mode. Using the KG-S72C as a mobile radio with an appropriate SMA adapter to the mobile antenna coax is OK, but the lack of RF gain control can be fatiguing and is the second con.
2. The squelch mode seems to be noise squelch only, which can be frustrating as it closes intermittently on loud AM modulation. It would benefit from a signal strength squelch as traditional CB radios use.

tl;dr: When connected to a captive portal, try visiting http://neverssl.com to trigger the portal.

Public WiFi often has captive portal login. Portals may coerce users to accept terms and conditions and absolution of liability before accessing the Internet. The portals may be worked around by DNS tunneling, MAC spoofing, etc. Many users just tolerate the portals.

Web browsers may try to trigger captive portals by checking servers, in case the OS hasn’t already triggered the captive portal. Sometimes captive portals aren’t triggered. HSTS blocks HTTP captive portal redirects. Try visiting a deliberately non-HTTPS portal-triggering site like http://neverssl.com

Devices on networks that block the platform’s automatic network checking may indicate like:

Connected, no Internet

If there’s not a captive sign-in webpage, the network connection may still work to non-Google sites.

Check connectivity manually using curl like:

curl -I -w "%{response_code}" http://neverssl.com

-I

show header only

-w "%{response_code}"

write the HTTP response code to console

Use cURL to check connectivity through captive portals

Return code 200:

• Firefox

  curl -I -w "%{response_code}" http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt

• Windows

  curl -I -w "%{response_code}" http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt

• macOS

  curl -I -w "%{response_code}" http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html

• Fedora

  curl -I -w "%{response_code}" http://fedoraproject.org/static/hotspot.txt

Return code 204:

• Google

  curl -I -w "%{response_code}" http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204

• Android

  curl -I -w "%{response_code}" http://connectivitycheck.android.com/generate_204

• Ubuntu

  curl -I -w "%{response_code}" http://connectivity-check.ubuntu.com/generate_204

Python script to check connectivity through captive portals

Using Python requests, one can script testing of URLs with friendly feedback.

python ./captive_portal.py

Firefox: http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt returned 200 ✅

Windows: http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt returned 200 ✅

macOS: http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html returned 200 ✅

Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/static/hotspot.txt returned 200 ✅

Google: http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204 returned 204 ✅

Android: http://connectivitycheck.android.com/generate_204 returned 204 ✅

Ubuntu: http://connectivity-check.ubuntu.com/generate_204 returned 204 ✅

The Cobra 19 Ultra 6 appears to be a relabeled AnyTone Smart II. While previous Cobra 19 models had significant features missing, the Cobra 19 Ultra 6 has the necessary features to be a good choice in entry-level very compact CB radio.

From practical in-vehicle use, the speaker is adequately loud. Both AM and FM mode work well on transmit and receive. There is no “dual watch” channel capability, but this may not be a requirement for many users.

RF Gain is essential on any CB radio and the RF gain adjustment range of the Cobra 19 Ultra 6 is good. Typically RF gain between 24 and 39 is useful.

The radio appears to use audio compandoring, which helps improve apparent audio SNR. The radio has a traditional signal squelch as well as “auto” noise squelch. The general problem with noise squelch across CB radios is that overmodulated AM signals can close the squelch regardless of how strong the signal is.

Setting the RF Gain and Squelch on an AM CB radio is best done by opening the squelch – static is heard. Then set the RF Gain so that only very faint static is heard. Then set the signal squelch just closed.

Channel Scan

On firmware version 1.1, entering scan mode is different than the manual states. To enter channel scan, press and hold the microphone “up” or “down” button until the radio goes once through all 40 channels, then the radio beeps and release the button. The radio then scans all 40 channels repeatedly. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to skip channels in scan mode. This means the radio will often stop on channels 6, 11, etc. with high power stations that may not be what the user wants to listen to.