Older blog entries for rmathew (starting at number 122)

FOSS.in 2005
Andrew Cowie has bullied me into attending FOSS.in 2005 after all. He made me realise what a shame it would be to miss this once-a-year opportunity to meet like-minded Free Software hackers from all over the place when it is happening right here in Bangalore. Of course it also helps to have supportive bosses to grant you leave from work for the period. So here's looking forward to meeting kindred souls. Thanks Andrew!

Subversion, Old Dog, New Tricks
It turns out that I do not need too much of extra disc space for working on trunk and gcjx-branch using SVN compared to CVS after all. This is because I used to always create a snapshot of GCC sources and use it as a working copy for fear of messing up my checked-out sources. Since SVN always keeps a copy of the pristine sources around (which is the major cause of the increased disc space usage) and it is easy and fast to use svn diff to figure out the damage and to use svn revert to restore sanity, I no longer need to continue with my weird model of development. It is also quite simple to just ignore everything from the GCC SVN repository except for the interesting stuff - for the gcjx-branch, my checkout only has the bare minimum stuff needed to bootstrap C, C++ and Java and run the libjava testsuite, while for trunk I have removed all the Ada stuff since I can't build Ada anyways. Of course, all this would probably have been possible with CVS as well, but there weren't nice instructions in the GCC Wiki for lazy souls like me for doing this with CVS.

Videos of SICP Lectures
Most of the coders who have read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) would agree that it is a profoundly insightful book that teaches you a whole new way of coding. So when I found out that the videos of the SICP lectures given by Abelson and Sussman are now available for download, I was excited. However, my excitement turned to dismay when I found out that the videos were huge - even a single DivX-compressed video of a lecture would bring me perilously close to my monthly broadband download quota, not to mention take an awful amount of time.

So if any of you out there have all these videos already downloaded, would you be willing to burn it to a DVD-R and send it to me? I am of course willing to pay for the cost of the media, package, postage and reasonable labour charges. Drop a message to rmathew AT gmail DOT com if you can. I would prefer the DivX-compressed versions. I had already written to Hal Abelson to know if they provided such a service and they indicated that they don't.

Back From Vacation
I am back from a wonderful vacation in Ooty and the Deepawali holidays. Before going on vacation, I discovered that my Creative 52x CD-ROM drive had gone completely bonkers, randomly opening and closing by itself under any operating system. Apparently, this is not uncommon for these drives from Creative. In any case, I have taken it out and have put in a hard disc that I had lying around in the IDE slot that was thus freed. This was a remarkable coincidence as GCC also moved to Subversion in the interim and I was looking for extra space to fit the bloated copies of the SVN repositories. However, I must first take a backup of the existing stuff on the hard disc onto CDs and that is a painful process I am not really looking forward to.

FOSS.in 2005
There are so many talks I would like to attend in FOSS.in 2005, but it happens to fall bang in the middle of a work week, that too at a time when I cannot afford to take too many days off work. Uggghhh!

OpenOffice.org v2.0
I have been waiting for this release for quite some time now, so as soon as it came out, I downloaded the Linux tarball. To my horror, I find that unlike previous releases it does not contain a simple installer but many RPMs! Why did they have to do this? It is so silly. An alternative for me is to build it from sources, but I do not have the energy or the enthusiasm to do it. Sheesh!

SPAM
I made the mistake of inadvertently posting a single message to comp.compilers using my office email address and within a day I was being spammed hard! That account had remained SPAM free for almost three years and it is rather painful to see it in the hands of these idiots. Thankfully, Thunderbird is getting better and better every day at detecting this SPAM, so there is some relief.

Subversion and GCC
GCC would be moving to Subversion around this weekend. In general, I feel this is a good move and will probably help our prolific developers a lot. I do have concerns about its alarming usage of disc space relative to CVS though. As it is, my home PC is under a bit of a strain trying to squeeze in GCC mainline and gcjx-branch copies, not to mention snapshots of these that I actually use as working copies, on the hard disc partitions that I have provided to Linux. After the move to Subversion, I will have to make some adjustments to the disc partitions to fit all this stuff in.

However, this will probably have to wait as I would be on vacation in Ooty most of next week.

Dumping Parse Trees
GCJX now accepts an "-fdump-tree" option that prints out the abstract syntax tree of a Java source file to stdout.

A Walk Among The Trees
I implemented a simple pretty-printer for the AST used in GCJX over this weekend. It works just like the debug_tree() function in GCC and is accessed by using the dump_tree() function in GCJX. For convenience, I just change "-fdump-methods" to call dump_tree() instead of dump_method(). That way I can easily see the ASTs created for various Java source files. For someone like me who is new to GCJX in particular and compiler construction in general, this can be quite enlightening.

While debugging the GCJ front-end, I have found debug_tree() to be an immensely useful tool. I hope dump_tree() proves similarly useful for GCJX.

By the way, I added a small page to the GCC Wiki describing how to go about debugging GCJX.

The American Prophet
When the leader of the most powerful nation on this planet talks like this, you desperately wish it is not true.

Digital Nirvana
Apple, Google and Microsoft want to liberate us from the tyranny of folders and file names. You would never have to remember the name of a file or the folder in which you put it in to retrieve it. In a way, this is already how a lot of us use the Internet - I for one, just Google for a page rather than bookmark it and try to locate it within my labyrinthine bookmarks folder. This is good and I appreciate it. However, unlike the World Wide Web, your desktop PC would some time run out of disc space. When that happens, you can either just buy another hard disc or try to clean your existing hard disc. If you choose the latter, how do you find stuff you do not want? These tools make it easy for you to find stuff you want but not what you do not want.

IBM has created a Universal Virtual Computer to solve the problem of digital decay. Does any one else think this is an overkill? Is using well-documented document or image formats with portable reference reader implementations not good enough? What is to stop subtle errors in porting the UVC to new platforms from preventing the documents to be displayed as originally intended?

Madness
After "7/7", Britain seems to have gone bonkers just like the US did after "9/11". If you have access to the latest issue of The Economist, also read "Conference kick-out" in the "Britain" section. Sheesh!

Mauled in ICFPC 2005
Our entry in ICFPC 2005 was mauled by just the judges' cops! Looking at the playback of the robber's performance, I want to hide my head in shame.

Bangalore Computer Graphics Group
Anirban Deb, who is a colleague of mine, has started the Bangalore Computer Graphics Group along with like-minded enthusiasts, which aims to bring together people in Bangalore who are interested in computer graphics (not the Photoshop or Maya stuff). If you are interested in such things, or know of someone who is, spread the word. Their initial plan is to meet at least once a month to discuss interesting stuff and to get to know like-minded people and to eventually become the local SIGGRAPH chapter.

In other news, look who's blogging! Now that Andrew and Tom are blogging, Bryce is the only one in the Red Hat GCJ Triumvirate who doesn't. Who wants to persuade him to blog?