Older blog entries for riscgrl (starting at number 8)

well, my friends have been bugging me about using a blog, instead of yammering on on IRC, so here goes!

I've stopped hacking Gnu Gift at the moment. decided i needed OpenMosix to accomplish any real Big Jobs. just in time to watch moshe bar kill OpenMosix. without even consulting the dev team, on IRC, who was working hard at the time! needless to say, this disheartening development stopped us cold. nothing like the luminary of your project giving speeches and interviews about why your product is useless, and saying some opinion based / factually incorrect reasons. (there, wasn't that politically correct?). I'm continuing on, first writing a commentary of each patch from the last 2.6 based tree. you can see my work at my "homepage", which is really just a trac wiki. i've concentrated on documentation, due to the wise saying "if you cannot explain it, you do not understand it.". i want to understand what i'm doing, before i run around trying to fix the last grevious bugs. the source tree really isn't in that bad of a shape, its just that moshe wasn't performing linus' job of "project managment" during the 2.6 cycle, and the patches show it.

there are a couple of developers other than myself associated with the project, but after moshe's actions, we're looking to rename it. take our "luminary"'s name from the project. not that we have any good ideas, as "transparent process migration" conflicts with the trusted computing module, and "In Kernel Process Migration Infrastructure" conflicts with some power managment thingie. all the good acronyms are taken.

We're still alive, on irc, waiting for more developers, or someone with a good name! :)

This month's round of patches took a while longer. basically, AMD64 porting issues, making gift build where $(builddir) != $(top_srcdir), and a few insignificant bug fixes.

Nothing too exciting, for 29(!) patches.

Not yet comitting, due to a bit of a slowdown in both the 32bit and 64bit versions. i'm thinking the sizes of my datatypes changing is killing it...

More catching up on gift's patches.

I've now sped gift up from 1.9 seconds per image, to .8. (on a P4 2.2Ghz)

The next steps of optimization have more to do with multi-tasking the extraction process, and re-using the extraction program for more than one image at a time. I'm thinking of converting the program into a tool that accepts absolute file paths of all the files to be converted on stdin, and writing to stdout the name of the file dropped to. wolfram's idea, basically. between that, and running multiple feature extraction processes at once, i should speed things up quite a bit more.

Things have been very quiet on the mailing list, I suppose it has to do with the darpa urban challenge having closed last week, and everyone being way too busy to audit my patches. Not that it matters much anyways, as I have commit access, but a second set of eyes is always a good thing.

I really wish there was more than me programming on this, especially because gift is written in C, Perl, and C++, and I normally don't touch C++ or Perl with a ten foot pole.

But, what needs done needs done. *reads O'reilly perl books/Bjarne's C++ book*

Yaay! caught up in patches to gnu gift, and in work.

I've sped gift up from 1.9 seconds per image to 1.3 seconds per image, and i still have major changes in my tree to filter upstream.

I've had to do some ugly stuff, like reverse the image in memory, and my next set will be to swap X and Y while storing back into the array, which is still in reverse order.

Optimization is ugly.

My personal tree runs in .85. Concidering i'm not the only person who runs this stuff 160,000 times in an import, i'm proud to be saving people days of their computational time. :)

falling behind in patches, falling behind at work..

it could be worse.

at least no-ones bugging me about it yet.

gosh it's been ages since my last advogato-diary-post. ;)

working for a bank, and a wal-mart contractor. both at once, wheee.

been pushing patches to gnu gift recently, as well as tintin++, and FAI (the fully automatic installer for debian).

linux4tv never shipped any hardware. so, no contest, no nothing. other than that? dead busy.

i hope advogato dosent go away.

Well, a month without a diary, god i'm lazy.

I've got all the hardware to get wireless internet access in my area, unfortunately, my apartment is in just the wrong spot. *sigh*.

look forward to moving, so that i can finally have internet, and be completely lazy in the comfort of home.

I still havent registered for my linux4tv device, or beat on my ide controller. overloaded isnt the word. getting grub, fai, and me all speaking well together is being very painful.

at least my katie packages are now lintian clean, so as soon as i've got my grub/FAI stuff ironed out, its time to take the plunge, and become a debian maintainer.

other than that, i'm supposed to get a new engine for my car any(!) time now. then i've got even more work to do.

busy busy busy.

Things are looking really up, as my water, and gas are back on; phone was turned on and off again, got over zealous at paying old debts off. halfway out. :)

Haven't had time to mess with the IDE bridge or ISA bridge, but I have gotten katie working on my server, ubercool. Now I can treat my personal server exactly like the debian servers, becasue its running the same software.

looking forward to payday on thursday. :)

Yay! found my password!

seriously, things get difficult when you change passwords to a completely random set every month.

hmm. well, updating things, nowadays i'm doing cluster administration, and network grunting. wheee.

Things are looking up, even tho i have no gas, or water, or phone ATM. (just went from 20 hours a week to 50+ with higher pay. waiting on that first paycheck. :)

I've got so much on my to-do list, with an IDE bridge to finish, an ISA bridge to roll, I need to do some major admin work on my boxes(trying to setup katie, the debian archive multi-tool), and things are starting to backlog at work.

but, at least i'm back on advogato. things are looking up. :)