Month: September 2019

4800 pages of basic physics notes for $88 USD

September 29, 2019 math and physics play , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Over the last 8 years I took most of the interesting 4th year undergraduate physics courses, and some graduate physics and engineering courses.

Well, my notes for much of that work are now available on amazon.com (or .ca), or for free as PDF.  For the bargain price of $88, leveraging the time and money that I spent, you can get very comprehensive paperback notes for these subjects.  These notes aren’t textbook quality, but generally contain detailed expositions of the subjects and many worked problems.

Here’s what’s available:

Title Professor Year of study Format Price (USD) Pages
Quantum Mechanics I: Notes and problems for UofT PHY356 2010 Prof. Vatche Deyirmenjian Fall 2010 PDF $0.00 263
Quantum Mechanics II: Notes and problems for UofT PHY456 2011 Prof. John E. Sipe Fall 2011 PDF $0.00 320
Relativistic Electrodynamics: Notes and problems from 2011 PHY450H1S Prof. Erich Poppitz Winter  2011 Black and white $11.00 387
Classical Mechanics Prof. Erich Poppitz, + self-study Winter 2012 PDF $0.00 475
Advanced Classical Optics: Notes and problems from UofT PHY485H1F 2012 Prof. Joseph H. Thywissen Fall 2012 Black and white $11.00 382
Continuum Mechanics: Notes and problems from UofT PHY454H1S 2012 Prof. Kausik S. Das Winter 2012 Black and white $10.00 358
Basic Statistical Mechanics: Notes and problems from 2013 UofT PHY452H1S Prof. Arun Paramekanti Winter 2013 Black and white $11.00 399
Condensed Matter Physics: Notes and problems from UofT PHY487H1F 2013 Prof. Stephen Julian Fall 2013 Black and white $10.00 329
Modelling of Multiphysics Systems.  Notes and problems for UofT ECE1254 Prof. Piero Triverio Fall 2014 PDF $0.00 300
Graduate Quantum Mechanics: Notes and problems from 2015 UofT PHY1520H Prof. Arun Paramekanti Winter 2015 Black and white $12.00 435
Antenna Theory: Notes and problems for UofT ECE1229 Prof G. V. Eleftheriades Winter 2015 PDF $0.00 207
Electromagnetic Theory: Notes and problems for UofT ECE1228 Prof. M. Mojahedi Fall 2016 PDF $0.00 256
Geometric Algebra for Electrical Engineers: Multivector electromagnetism self-study 2016,2017 Colour $40.00 280
Geometric Algebra for Electrical Engineers: Multivector electromagnetism self-study 2016,2017 Black and white $12.00 280
Quantum Field Theory I: Notes and problems from UofT PHY2403 2018 Prof. Erich Poppitz Fall 2018 Black and white $11.00 423

 

That’s 4814 pages of notes for 0-$USD 88, depending on whether you want a PDF or paper copy (if available).  My cost per page is about $4.7 CAD, factoring in total tuition costs of ~$23000 CAD (most of which was for my M.Eng), but does not factor in the opportunity cost associated with the 20% paycut (w/ a switch to 80% hours) that I also took to find the time to fit in the study.

If you compare my cost of $4.7/page for these notes to FREE – $0.024/page, then I think you would agree that my offering is a pretty good deal!  While I have built in a $1 (+/- $0.50) royalty for the book formats, the chances of me recovering my costs are infinitesimal.

A few of the courses and/or collections of notes are not worth the effort of making print ready copies, and those notes are available only in PDF form.  An exception are my notes for Multiphyiscs Modelling, which was an excellent course, and I have excellent notes for, but I’ve been asked not to make those notes available for purchase in any form (even w/ $0 royalty.)

 

Continuum mechanics notes now in book format at amazon.com

September 26, 2019 math and physics play , , , , , ,

My notes from the 2012 UofT session of phy454, Continuum mechanics (aka fluid mechanics), are now available in book form on amazon.com for $10 (black and white, softcover, 6×9″ format, 358 pages), as well as in PDF and latex formats as before.

I took that course as a non-degree student.  It was taught by Prof. Kausik S. Das, and had the official course description:

The theory of continuous matter, including solid and fluid mechanics. Topics include the continuum approximation, dimensional analysis, stress, strain, the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations, vorticity, waves, instabilities, convection and turbulence.

It was really only about fluid dynamics. Anything related to solids was really just to introduce the stress and strain tensors as lead up to expressing the Navier-Stokes equation. There was nothing in this course about beam deformation, Euler stability, or similar topics that one might have expected from the course description.

If you download the free PDF, compile the latex version, or buy a paper copy and feel undercharged, feel free to send some bitcoin my way.

Ugg, COBOL is so horrible.

September 23, 2019 Mainframe , , ,

If you don’t know COBOL (and I clearly don’t know it well enough), you probably won’t spot that there’s a syntax error here:

       IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
       PROGRAM-ID. BLAH.
       ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
       CONFIGURATION SECTION.
       DATA DIVISION.
       WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
       LINKAGE SECTION.

       PROCEDURE DIVISION.

           DISPLAY 'BLAH.' UPON CONSOLE.

           STOP-RUN.

The C equivalent to this program is:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
  printf("BLAH.\n");
}

but it is meant to have an exit(0), so we want:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
  printf("BLAH.\n");
  return 0;
}

Translating that back into COBOL, we need the STOP-RUN statement to say STOP RUN (no dash).  With the -, this gets interpreted as a paragraph label (i.e. STOP-RUN delimits a new function) with no statements in it. What I did was something akin to:

#include <stdio.h>
void STOPRUN(){
}
int main(){
  printf("BLAH.\n");
  STOPRUN();
}

The final program doesn’t have the required ‘return 0’ or ‘exit(0)’ and blows up with a “No stop run nor go back” error condition.  Logically, what I really wanted was:

 

       IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
       PROGRAM-ID. BLAH.
       ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
       CONFIGURATION SECTION.
       DATA DIVISION.
       WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
       LINKAGE SECTION.

       PROCEDURE DIVISION.

           DISPLAY 'BLAH.' UPON CONSOLE

           STOP RUN

           .

 

This time I’ve left off the period that I had after CONSOLE (which was superfluous and should really only be used at the end of the paragraph (end of “function”)), and also fixes the STOP-RUN -> STOP RUN typo.

This is not the first time I’ve gotten mixed up on when to use DASHES or not.  For example, even above, I’d not expect a programmer to know or remember that you need to know to use dashes for WORKING-STORAGE and PROGRAM-ID but not for PROCEDURE DIVISION, nor some of the other space delimited fields.

My eyes are burning, and I left my COBOL programmer safety gear at home.

An example of Linux/glibc symbol versioning.

September 20, 2019 C/C++ development and debugging. , , , , , , ,

Here’s a little introduction to Linux/glibc symbol versioning.  The sources, linker version scripts, and makefile from this post can be found here in github.

The definitive reference for this topic is Ulrich Drepper’s dsohowto document.

Linux symbol versioning is a very logical way to construct a definitive API for your product.  If you are careful, you can have a single version of your shared library that is binary compatible with all previous versions of code that have linked it, and additionally hide all symbols that you don’t want your API consumer to be able to use (as if all non-exported symbols have a “static” like scope within the library itself).

That visibility hiding can be done in other ways (such as using static, or special compiler options), but utilizing a symbol version linker script to do so also has all the additional binary compatibility related benefits.

Suppose that we have a “v1.1” API with the following implementation:

#include <stdio.h>

void internal_function_is_not_visible()
{
   printf( "You can't call me directly.\n" );
}

void foo( int x )
{
   internal_function_is_not_visible();

   printf( "foo@@V1: %d\n", x );
}

and we build this into a shared library like so:

$ make libfoo.1.so
rm -f libfoo.1.so
cc foo.c -g -Wl,--version-script=symver.map -fpic -o libfoo.1.so -Wl,-soname,libfoo.so -shared
rm -f libfoo.so
ln -s libfoo.1.so libfoo.so

Everything here is standard for building a shared library except for the –version-script option that is passed into the linker with -Wl,. That version script file has the following contents:

$ cat symver.map
MYSTUFF_1.1 {
	  global:
foo;
	  local: *;
	};

This defines a “V1.1” API where all the symbols that are exported with a symbol version @@MYSTUFF_1.1. Note that internal_function_is_not_visible is not in that list. It’s covered in the local: catch-all portion of the symbol version file. Code that calls foo does not look out of the ordinary:

void foo(int);

int main()
{
   foo(1);

   return 0;
}

Compiling and linking that code is also business as usual:

$ make caller1
cc caller.c -g -Wl,-rpath,`pwd` -o caller1 -lfoo -L.

However, look at the foo symbol reference that we have for this program:

$ nm caller1 | grep foo
                 U foo@@MYSTUFF_1.1

If we run this, we get:

$ ./caller1
You can't call me directly.
foo@@V1: 1

If you add in a call to internal_function_is_not_visible() you’ll see that compilation fails:

void foo(int);
void internal_function_is_not_visible();

int main()
{
   foo(1);
   internal_function_is_not_visible();

   return 0;
}

$ make caller1
cc caller.c -g -Wl,-rpath,`pwd` -o caller1 -lfoo -L.
/run/user/1002/ccqEPYcu.o: In function `main':
/home/pjoot/symbolversioning/caller.c:7: undefined reference to `internal_function_is_not_visible'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [caller1] Error 1

This is because internal_function_is_not_visible is not a visible symbol. Cool. We now have versioned symbols and symbol hiding. Suppose that we now want to introduce a new binary incompatible change too our foo API, but want all existing binaries to still work unchanged. We can do so by introducing a symbol alias, and implementations for both the new and the OLD API.

#include <stdio.h>

void internal_function_is_not_visible()
{
   printf( "You can't call me directly.\n" );
}

void foo2( int x, int y )
{
   if ( y < 2 )
   {
      internal_function_is_not_visible();
   }
   printf( "foo@@V2: %d %d\n", x, y );
}

void foo1( int x )
{
   internal_function_is_not_visible();
   printf( "foo@@V1: %d\n", x );
}

This is all standard C up to this point, but we now add in a little bit of platform specific assembler directives (using gcc specific compiler sneaks) :

#define V_1_2 "MYSTUFF_1.2"
#define V_1_1 "MYSTUFF_1.1"

#define SYMVER( s ) \
    __asm__(".symver " s )

SYMVER( "foo1,foo@" V_1_1 );
SYMVER( "foo2,foo@@" V_1_2 );

We’ve added a symbol versioning alias for foo@@MYSTUFF_1.2 and foo@MYSTUFF_1.1. The @@ one means that it applies to new code, whereas the @MYSTUFF_1.1 is a load only function, and no new code can use that symbol. In the symbol version script we now introduce a new version stanza:

$ cat symver.2.map
MYSTUFF_1.2 {
	  global:
foo;
};
MYSTUFF_1.1 {
	  global:
foo;
	  local: *;
};

$ make libfoo.2.so
rm -f libfoo.2.so
cc foo.2.c -g -Wl,--version-script=symver.2.map -fpic -o libfoo.2.so -Wl,-soname,libfoo.so -shared
rm -f libfoo.so
ln -s libfoo.2.so libfoo.so

If we call the new V1.2 API program, like so:

void foo(int, int);
int main()
{
   foo(1, 2);
   return 0;
}

our output is now:

$ ./caller2
foo@@V2: 1 2

Our “binary incompatible changes” are two fold. We don’t call internal_function_is_not_visible if our new parameter is >= 2, and we print a different message.

If you look at the symbols that are referenced by the new binary, you’ll see that it now explicitly has a v1.2 dependency:

$ nm caller2 | grep foo
                 U foo@@MYSTUFF_1.2

Book sales stats: slow and steady

September 2, 2019 Incoherent ramblings

I don’t have full stats for all my kindle-direct sales, but am surprised how steady the sales for the GA book have been

Jan 1- March 31 2019 April 1 – June 30, 2019 June 4 – Sept 1, 2019

Geometric Algebra for Electrical Engineers

24 24 26

Statistical Mechanics

3 2

Relativistic Electrodynamics

2

Classical Optics

4

Quantum Field Theory

2 2

Condensed Matter

1

Graduate Quantum Mechanics

1

Some of the earlier sales were to family members who wanted copies, but the rest are legitimate.