Older blog entries for rcastro (starting at number 16)

On Thursday 10th, date of my last post, my grandmother died at 9h10 PM in the hospital. I didn't work on Friday due to the funeral and burial, and mainly because I was (and still am) very sad.

Since Thursday, it is very cold here in Sao Paulo. We have a dry winter, so, even though the mininum temperatures are not that low, we end up suffering a lot with them. And our houses are not prepared for winter (no heater and window sealing, for example), so it is a tough time. Fortunately we don't have many days like these ones in a year.

Now I am trying to clear out my mind to move on. First task, I have to scan many old photos I found out at my gradma's room.

Very interesting the GRAMPS program to build a family tree. It is a very good alternative to Windows program, although there are some points to improve. I build one from some data I had already collected, and made it available at here. I still want to get data like missing birth dates and, maybe, pictures from most living people.

New performance statistics are available on compressed caching website. They include:

• Linux kernel compilation
• MUMmer (scientific program for genome alignment)
• Open Source Database Benchmark
• piGIMP
• Matlab (fractal dimension computation)
• httperf

I will add some info about problems with Sort, PostMark and Contest that made us implement some features like clean page suspension, or even made us realize that there were some scheduling effect when using compressed caching. Probably by the weekend I will have it done on the site.

Compressed caching website updated (homepage). It has links to a paper in English that I submitted to a famous conference on operating systems and my master's dissertation, but in Portuguese. Now I can't delay publishing latest performance results from compressed caching, because it's the last step before getting back to real programming on the kernel code :-) Wait for news.

My personal website has been updated too, but only minor updates, like showing that I finished my master's degree and my current job as development analyst at Convergys. Most of website is in Portuguese, but you can download my curriculum vitae in English if you feel like knowing a little bit of my life.

Yuppie, I am finally free to work on the project. I finished the final version of my dissertation and now my spare time will be actually mostly spent working on the compressed caching project :-))

Now it is time to update the performance statistics available on the project web site and to make my dissertation available on my web site. Oh, and I can't forget to upload of my papers to the web site, it may be worthwhile for people interested in more information.

On Friday I submitted the paper to the Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC). Now fingers crossed (notifications by July 28th).

I checked the types of available diplomas I can get, and the free one is done with regular paper. There is a special version, which is done with sheep's skin, but it is expensive. I am still thinking which one I will pick.

Nothing very interesting so far. I couldn't work on any project, but I am almost done with what is hindering from that.

The guilty: master dissertation. But it is almost done. I waiting for some comments from my advisor, but I don't think there will be much work to do (if actually any). One reason to not have much work is that I have to deliver the final version of it this week.

Today I also had to fill out a form from a federal foundation (CAPES), which I intend to deliver on Tuesday. But the most important feeling this time: freedom by the end of this week! :-)

SBAC paper is done. Now waiting for a review, but I don't think I will spend much more time on it. Thanks God!

Only the minor changes must be implemented for the final version of my dissertation. This time I have to fix the errors found and pointed out by other member of the committee. Well, I actually just tried to fix these errors and in 15 minutes it was done. Very quick. Only some suggestions left from the first committee member and we are done with this dissertation. Next week I will be finally free from my latex programming job, and will be able to code again.

Tomorrow I guess I will work on XSL stuff at my job. In particular, Xalan and Saxon implementations of XSLT specifications. I hope it will be fun.

Now working on the final version of my dissertation, fixing typos, graphics and a few corrections. I am eager to get finally rid of it in order to keep implementing the compressed cache. I guess I will end up spending most of my time this week on the modifications suggested by the committee. Besides finishing the dissertation, I intend to publish the latest performance results on the compressed caching website this week. (Note: next Thursday is a catholic holiday in Brazil).

This weekend I started reading The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, a great book. It is the second time I read this novel, and I think it will be worth reading it one more time, although I will have to leave my LOTR reading for a while.

First draft of my 8 page paper for SBAC (Simpósio Brasileiro de Arquitetura de Computadores, or, the English name, Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing) is ready. Now I have to review it before sending it to my advisor for comments.

Unfortunatelly couldn't manage to find time to finish the new statistics for compressed caching website.

Debian installation with PPPoE connection
Just out of curiosity, a friend of mine wanted to install Debian in a laptop connected to a PPPoE ADSL internet connection, which isn't possible with the default boot floppies. He asked for help tonight, and I ended up finding out that this website has special floppies for this case. I have to give it a try in the future (hopefully Debian will be released soon, and this option will be available in the next stable release).

The defense of my master's dissertation on compressed caching took place on Jun 06th at Jacy Monteiro Amphitheater of University of Sao Paulo, at 2PM BRT. The audience wasn't very large, but it was composed of high quality people :-). I guess the presentation was pretty fine, but it took a little longer than I expected. The questions about the project were clever, but no surprise. All the committee members liked the dissertation and my master was approved. After the defense, some close friends and I celebrated it going to a pizzeria, where we ate a lot. Now I have to fix some mistakes and check some suggestions in order to deliver the final version of my text and make it available on my web site (the text is in Portuguese).

Besides this task, I am spending some time on two paper submissions (in English). I intend to do (a brazilian symposium and an american workshop), that is why my code development isn't going very well. Oh, gosh, I guess I have to stop working at my job (would there be anyone out there willing to sponsor my work? ;-).

Time to update compressed caching website with new performance statistics.

Finished all the OSDL DBT1 tests, and noticed that compressed caching does not help this scenario. It does not access disk so much, and disk is not its bottleneck. That is a pity, because such an application would be nice to have a performance gain.

I also could run OSDB, the Open Source Database Benchmark. I mean, I had already run it, but now I could run in the multithreaded disabling the creation of hash indexes in Postgres. Tiny performance gains. Not a good day for my new performance tests.

In the night I left the computer running the complete test suite with a compressed cache which used WK4x4 compression algorithm (download here), the algorithm from Wilson-Kaplan compression algorithm family for process data segment.

I still have to run some tests for a meeting with my advisor today. I guess we are pretty close to finishing all the tests and we should put a great effort into making the dissertation good enough for submission. It is a pain in the ass to be stuck with this, unable to spend time developing interesting stuff.

For people who does not love hot weather like me, check the weather forecast in Sao Paulo. It is 27 degrees Celsius (81F) at 9h AM. In the room I am now, probably it is over 30C (86F).