Older blog entries for rmathew (starting at number 51)

A Tinkertoy Computer That Plays Tic-Tac-Toe
I came across this reproduction of an article by A. K. Dewdney in his "Computer Recreations" series in Scientific American. I am not exaggerrating when I say that this was the series that fundamentally altered the way I looked at computers and programming. I long to read such articles now... ~sigh~

Of course, I already own copies of "Armchair Universe" and "The Computational Beauty of Nature", but a regular series like this would be quite welcome.

Making Room for Linux
Without ntfsresize to help us out, we could not have made room for a Linux installation on an unfortunate PC that had a complete Windows 2000 infestation on its entire hard disc. All hail Free software!

Hosting Zero
For some reason, the guys at Hosting Zero suddenly offered to host my site for free! So I moved my web site there. They seem to have far more facilities than Tripod where I used to host my site and have no irritating advertisements and popup windows.

Let us see how this works out. A big thanks to the guys at Hosting Zero - do check them out.

The Great GCJ Binary Compatibility Merge
Tom merged in the GCJ Binary Compatibility branch. Time to explore this with the help of the paper by Tom and Andrew.

S5
As a standards-based slide presentation framework for browsers, S5 is quite impressive!

Reality Bytes
While trying to help a friend's Mom with sending emails, I realised how much we programmers assume of the ordinary user's ability to think of computers the way we do and how unhelpful computers really are even today. It also provided me with a couple of amusing exchanges that I thought I'd share.

I asked her if she uses Netscape to check her mail. She said: "No, I use VSNL to check mails!" (VSNL is the ISP she uses and the corresponding Dial-up connection icon has the same name.)

She said: "Who is this 'SMTP' and why is he bothering me?" After a while, I figured out that she was saying this because her mail client used to show an error message like "smtp.vsnl.net responded: Please enter your correct username/password". For someone who only knows about "The Internet" and nothing of mail protocols or server hostnames, I think her indignation was somewhat justified. ;-)

Running Kernel's Image
Can anyone tell me of a reliable way of finding out the actual image (program file) that was used to launch the currently running Linux kernel?

Linux Kernel Headers
Hey, I didn't know that you were no longer supposed to maintain a "/usr/src/linux" symlink for the kernel headers!

New GCC C Parser
Lesser mortals take significantly longer than the mere week that Joseph Myers took to write a new recursive-descent C parser for GCC that accepts the same C language plus GNU extensions (a.k.a. "GNU C") as the existing one that uses Bison. :-/

QEMU Rocks!
At work, we needed to test out our project on as many machines as possible, but we could not get access to enough machines that we could maul as and when we pleased. VMWare would have helped, but we didn't have enough licenses. Bochs was good but was too slow for practical purposes. Fortunately for us, we found QEMU and it fit the bill quite well. It has been written primarily by Fabrice Bellard and is quite fast and works surprisingly well - we could get an entire installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Advanced Server running under QEMU without any problems!

For the adventurous, quite a few QEMU-ready images can be found at FreeOSZoo. QEMU also comes with a utility to convert VMWare disc images to the raw disc images used by both QEMU and Bochs. Very cool stuff and highly recommended! Thanks Fabrice!

Jacks Migrated
Jacks has migrated to its new home within Mauve! Thank you Tom and Mark.

Jacks
Tom thinks that Jacks should be forked since development on it has stalled and no one seems to respond to any mails. Anyone checking out the Jacks CVS repository regularly or taking a look at the Jacks mailing list archives would also come to the same conclusion. Jacks is a fantastic testsuite but sadly has not kept up with the language constructs introduced in JDK 1.5 (or "Java 2 Version 5" or "Java 5" or whatever) and patches to fix this have been mostly ignored for some reason.

In fact, there seems to be a proposal to merge Jacks with Mauve. That would be really neat. I hope it is kept as a separate module within the Mauve CVS repository though, as compiler and runtime testsuites ought to be kept separate, in my opinion.

As an aside, I found that GCJX gives different results (as is to be expected) when run against Jacks and different values for the --source option. For example, the construct Object foo = 1; now seems to be valid due to automatic boxing. Perhaps Jacks should be modified to tailor the status of testcase executions based on the language level targetted by the compiler being tested. Or perhaps it can just target the latest language specification.

Talking of GCJX, a simple clarification I asked for on the GCC mailing list resulted in a big thread - thankfully, the patch I suggested to work around the issue was approved, so that the part of GCC used by GCJX can now be compiled by a C++ compiler once again.

GCJX
Tom has been having great sucesses with GCJX lately. He announced his intentions to start a branch on gcc.gnu.org to continue with its development. He also wanted to take suggestions for an alternative name for this project. The straightforward one in the grand hacker tradition of recursive acronyms would perhaps be "GING" for "GING Is Not GCJ" or maybe "GRAG" for "GCJ Rewritten As GRAG". Or perhaps "JAC4J" for "Just Another Compiler For Java", though that one almost looks like it has come from a marketroid.

Corrupt RAM Modules
Once again, I have been bitten by bad RAM modules, this time in the Dell Optiplex GX270 machine I use at work. Memtest-86 was able to diagnose the problem after I spent almost a month wondering why programs randomly crashed on me and trying out all sorts of software updates.