Friday, November 30, 2007

GCC Traffic Week of 30th November

Michael Meissner continued where he left off at the summit regarding Function Specific optimizations. The basic idea is to be able to control the target options initially on the function being compiled and be able to generate different code for the same functions. The idea seems to allow for dynamic dispatch of function versions of very hot functions that could result in better performance on architectures that supported it. The wiki proposal is available here and the mailing list discussion can be found here.

Mark sent out the 4.3 status report and noted that we are still 34 bugs away from a release branch . The full details of the thread can be found here.

The 2 other major topics of discussion this week were regarding improving debug information from GCC and the contentious plugins project with the overall consensus being that plugins are good for quick prototyping and so on but might not be maintainable in the long run given that API stability is not a given with GCC. So, it appears as though productizing a plugin with GCC might not work in the long term given the pace at which things change but might be good enough for a researcher to do a quick prototype. Ofcourse the legal angle is different and it would be interesting to see what the FSF thinks of this project vis-a-vis the GPL. There's more to come surely on this. I didn't quite follow the debug information thread - so no reports on that.

You can find the discussion on debug information here and the discussion on plugins starting here.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

GCC proposals.

The last few days I've been figuring out that there's a lot of stuff new that's being proposed in GCC . However reading mailing lists for keeping track of all this is rather painful . So I shall endeavour to publish on my blog regularly the new kinds of topics that are being discussed in the GCC community pretty regularly. Ofcourse there have been many attempts like this including the one on the GCC wiki , though I am sceptical of my own discipline on doing this.

But then ... lets see how we go at this.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

The IT guys jargon

Don't know where to stay in Timbucktoo - what's the problem - google it. Don't know this client visiting us - what's the big deal lets google him. There's an ICE in GCC - no problem lets google it in gcc.gnu.org . Its become such a tool in one's life that I now hear my mom using google for all her copy editing work . Oh I don't know what Schrodinger's cat in the box means, let me google for it and figure out if the book has it used in the right context.

The other useful app that Patan pointed out to me was Google Reader and a one stop solution for collecting feeds from all the blogs that I manage to read once in a blue moon. I did try and use the standard gnome applications for it but then opening and closing it everytime proves to be too much of a strain on my ancient workhorse with a couple of builds running in parallel. However one does have google open most of the time in a browser window and a tab having the blogs isn't too much overhead.

But then google has this tendency to figure out that the user in his web experience definitely wants more tools on the web and they've gone around filling that gap rather beautifully. Hmmm the mind boggles.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

0x2b || !0x2b

Thank you Manas Alekar for that mathematical formula. A geek would automatically understand this as a consistent source of boredom and the time when too many questions about things which one has no control of puts your mind in an inevitable state of flux.

Dinner with parents and my cousins led to the inevitable Indian questions of settling down, getting married, starting a family etc. etc. The specific requirement for my sis-in-law was the fact that she'd get good food, my niece in the middle of her current nightmare in life (10th grade board exams) could buy herself a ghagra choli and it would allow both her husband (my esteemed bro) to point a finger at me and laugh evilly before welcoming me to the married club ( yaam petra inbam perugavae vaiyyagam) - When informed that such a matrimonial union with some female of the species was definitely not on the cards - everyone started sulking at the very loss of being able to do this again this year.

Does one go looking for relationships ? Now the arranged marriage concept among us tambrahms is rather amazing. Any lallu punju [1] thanks to our booming IT economy prefers to sit in the U.S. and evokes dreams of a fancy life in the U.S. chasing a dollar dream and forgetting that one can get one's clothes pressed for a mere 3 bucks (now what is that in cents ? ) and hand delivered. This evokes dollar dreams among the female of the species and a passport is procured even before they find a guy of their dreams. This works to the extent that families say that they are only looking for guys in the U.S. In some sense this is a whole load of education wasted - The majority of the females who travel to the U.S. only are glorified housewives atleast in the TamBrahm community (ofcourse there are others staying in the U.S. who are married and have wives who are in pretty high posts - So apologies to their sentiments ) . To get there they are among the toppers in their schools , colleges and professional courses and have fought their way up the rat race the way life in India usually is.

If nothing else this is one of the causes for what is hitting India today in terms of its growth story - serious lack of talent. Ofcourse it is important that a family be raised and that the mother is the centre of the family , but just going abroad to show off is just not done without having done anything to justify your education at maybe the state's expense is plain ridiculous.

Coming back to the relationships bit - it comes back to the basic fact that the two should first be friends and share some common interests atleast . Something which is very difficult to judge by just meeting someone online or through an arranged marriage. But then you need green colored money and green colored cards for that ..














References .

[1] (No offences to the Punjabi readers of this blog - especially a certain Sardar with the tendency to fly like a bird)

Monday, November 19, 2007

My top 4 places to visit and reasons.

Well if I had the time these would a few of the places that I'd love to visit and spend time on the list.

1. The top one would be the Iguazu falls on the Iguazu river in Argentina and Brazil. Its amazing and apparently has 275 waterfalls in 2.7 km. Would be a photographer's delight.

2. Ladakh in the North of India . After seeing some shots in the movie Lakshya especially where they do a mountain climbing stunt this is one place that I shall visit sooner rather than later.

3. Darjeeling, Nathula, Gangtok, Kalimpong and the entire North East. For sheer virgin forests, breathtaking beauty (in the literal sense at Nathula) the wonderful Himalayas.
This is another place that has to be visited during my existence on planet earth.

4. Wrykyn (for Mike), Blandings Castle (for the Empress, Ms. Haliday and ) , Ickenham (for the Lord) , Brinkley Court (for Aunt Dahlia) , The Drones Club (Dover Street London), Market Snodsbury Grammar School (for Bertie and Fink-Nottle) , New York and the offices of Cosy Moments (for Psmith) .

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The new fangled software application space.

Over the last few days , my interest has been piqued by the variety of new applications that are showing up all over the web. I created my profile at Facebook and the variety of options that it has with the fact that folks can write their own plugins on top of it. I do login to orkut but Facebook really appears slicker, gives more privacy, apparently has an SDK for folks to write their own plugins and so on and so forth.

One of the other interesting releases in the last couple of weeks for me was Android , the Google mobile phone SDK - like most Google products, its slick , neatly packaged and eminently usable. The interesting bit about Android is that its all in Java and hearing all that one does about Java run time implementations is the performance downside to all the other gains of writing apps in a sandboxed environment. I'd however like to try it out on a 200MHz ARM and see the effects it has on performance of basic scrolling etc . I am not sure about what happens with the open handset alliance given that it has so many cooks, but it would be worth watching Google's next move in that space.

The last application that I laid my hands on this morning was Enso , the demo of which can be viewed here. (Thanks to Muthu for pointing it out) . Looks very very slick and neat and worth giving a go with . A demo version is available for trial and it looks rather rather neat. It improves productivity while working on Windows for a Linux user like me since I can type out commands instead of using the mouse to navigate menus and submenus and what not.

Monday, November 12, 2007

The joys of Diwali Weekend.

Diwali the festival of lights here was spent amidst the usual noise of crackers, pestilent kids bursting crackers and also using my car to draw art that would put an MF Hussain to shame. The noise levels and the pollution levels were pretty high in my area thanks to the amazingly high number of kids present there. Diwali is great to celebrate thanks to a long weekend, amazing food - mom being present at home ensured good home cooked food instead of having to resort to food from restaurants and outside.

The only pain however was an amazing argument one today had to endure for nearly 45 minutes with parents of an impudent kid who had decided to use the side of my car as a canvas to his artistic ambitions substituting a nail for a paint brush. The usual arguments of who said my kid this did this were applied succintly by the opposing party to which yours truly brandished eye witnesses who were Maharashtrian by nature. The accused was a pesky 6 year old kid with a naughty glint in his eye who was sleeping initially through all these deliberations. I had to spend time explaining to his parents and his grandmother who seemed to have a deliberate prejudice against non-Maharashtrian tenants - their claim being that being a Maharashtrian and owning a house in the society gave their kid rights to do whatever he wanted . The petulant bit was them going on in chaste Marathi in which case I fought back telling them that they were in India and reminding them that basic decency meant that they would be talking to me in Hindi or English. Ofcourse to this one heard stunning remarks like you are in Maharashtra, better learn Marathi . Also heard was that the society would be asked to change rules so that no tenants could own any vehicles. Pretty stunning start to a Monday morning if you ask me .

The end result - finally the neighbours in the society realized that someone lived in flat 21 and was not going to take crap in any form lying down.