Film: Un Flic Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067900/

Book read: Captain Cook by Frank Mclynn

Since visiting Australia I've wanted to read more about Captain Cook.  I bought this book as a Christmas present which I then got lent to read.  At first I was daunted by the size of the book ~400 pages of very small print.

But it is very readable, despite the mixed reviews on Amazon over accuracy.   It goes through all of Cook's voyages and seems to have a balanced view of the effects of western contact with the remote island societies (on balance not beneficial - despite Cook's good intentions).

The feats of navigation stand out, in the late 1700s before longitude could be measured accurately.  There is some discussion about Cook being "lucky" never to have truly seen harsh 100ft waves but that seems a little unfair.  However the author lists other such loses that may have been due to these waves and that they are more common that originally thought - being powerful enough to take out a modern cruise liner.

Film: Biutiful Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1164999/

Building GDB for debugging on ARM

I needed a way to run a remote gdb session on an ARM system from an Linux PC.

Useful link:

https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/BuildingCrossGDBandGDBserver

Building gdb from source, configure with:

./configure --target=arm-linux-gnueabi

make 

This leads to a gdb binary that runs on the host Linux PC but has an ARM target 

architecture.

Similarly a gdbserver can be built for the target machine with:

./configure --host=arm-linux-gnueabi

make 

On the target system we run gdbserver:

gdbserver :8888 

Note this can be a stripped binary.

On the host PC we run gdb:

file 

target remote :port

cont

Book read: Harrier by Johnathan Glancey