Older blog entries for rmathew (starting at number 97)

Projects for GCJ
Here are some random projects for GCJ of varying complexity that I would personally like to see implemented as soon as possible:

• Generics - Although Ken Arnold says generics are a mistake, they are still very useful in my personal opinion and GCJ should be able to handle them. Of course, it would mean fixing PR9861 first.

• Assembler - a Java assembler is a very useful tool to have, especially when you want to create invalid class files to test bytecode verification. We should either get Jasmin integrated into Classpath Tools, or create one ourselves. The latter option would be eased if we could get ASM integrated into Classpath Tools via Archit Shah's work on a new RMI compiler (which is still waiting to be checked in for some reason).

• JIT Interpreter - I think QEMU's portable dynamic translation is a really nifty idea and it seems to work rather well judging by the speed at which QEMU emulates a guest operating system. This can perhaps be used by gij to implement a "real" JIT.

GCC Developers' Summit
The proceedings of the 2005 GCC Developers' Summit are now available (PDF). As usual, they make for very interesting reading. I was particularly interested in reading Vladimir Makarov's paper on the new register allocator infrastructure that he is working on since register allocation, especially for register-starved architectures like x86-32, is GCC's Achille's Heel. It seems that the new Tree-SSA infrastructure particularly aggravates the register pressure.

Dan Kegel also maintained a diary of his visit to the summit.

ICFP 2005 Programming Contest
Yumpee and I participated in the ICFP 2005 programming contest over this weekend. The problem was quite interesting and quite open-ended in that one could keep trying different strategies and play them against each other to see how they fare. In the end however, we ran out of time and we could only submit rather rudimentary cops and robbers - a cop that walks about randomly on the map hoping to catch a robber by serendipity rather than by design, a robber that just tries to rob the nearest bank while trying to avoid cops with a two-level lookup and a robber that walks about randomly on the map merely avoiding running into cops.

In terms of the implementation choice, the only middle-ground for the two of us turned out to be C++. I wasted much of the time debugging silly problems that arose mainly because C++ and the STL do not seem to have been designed with comprehension for lesser mortals like me in mind. Oh and we leaked memory with a perverse and gleeful abandon! (And our memory footprint at the end of any match was still less than the default no-op cop written in PLT Scheme that came with the BDK.)

I really enjoyed the coding binge and it was funky trying to coordinate rapid coding with a fellow hacker in a timezone that was 12 hours behind. At the risk of forfeiting the judges' prize, we still have two weeks to tweak our code and implement better strategies before the other half of the problem is announced. However, I'll be bang in the middle of my vacation during that period so it will entirely be up to Yumpee alone.

JumpDrive: Reprise
Today I received a replacement for the dead JumpDrive USB drive from Lexar Media. I am happy with the wonderful customer support service from Lexar Media.

"BSA or just BS?"
Some time back The Economist published a small article titled "BSA or just BS?" (subscription required) that questioned the rather dubious statistical method used by IDC on behalf of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) to come up with an estimate of lost revenues due to pirated software and use that to lobby for even more draconian legislation.

In short, they asked a small group of users for the number of applications installed on their computer (ignoring free applications like Firefox, WinAmp, etc.), used the average number of applications per PC thus obtained to extrapolate to get the number of applications installed on all PCs bought in the country and subtracted the actual sales of applications to get their figure for the revenue lost due to piracy. Very bad and rather disingenious use of statistics that doesn't even stand up to common sensical analysis. So The Economist naturally called it a load of crap.

This apparently enraged the BSA which promptly wrote a gem of a letter that appears in the latest issue and that is worth quoting in its entirety:

SIR - Your article on software piracy was extreme, misleading and irresponsible (``BSA or just BS?'', May 21st). The headline was particularly offensive. The implication that an industry would purposely inflate the rate of piracy and its impact to suit its political aims is ridiculous. The problem is real and needs no exaggeration.
 
Beth Scott
Business Software Alliance
London

I found the deadpan assertion of the penultimate line rather funny.

The Economist also had an article on the recently released OECD report questioning the music industry's dubious assertions that the loss of sales of music CDs is entirely due to file sharing via P2P applications (and not at all due to the alarming lack of quality of the "music" churned out by the industry) which it then uses to convince legislators to come up with draconian laws limiting file sharing.

Sudoku Mania
The first time I read or heard of Sudoku puzzles was in an article in The Economist. A little over a fortnight later, The Times of India's Bangalore edition started publishing regular Sudoku puzzles of moderate difficulty and I have been hooked to them ever since. For those who can't get enough of them, there is also a GPL-ed Sudoku solver and generator.

Dumb's Up
It seems to me that either the manufacturers of cosmetic brands like Garnier, Dove, Fa, Biotique, etc. think their female customers are rather dumb or women willingly ignore the dumb and sometimes condescending text on the labels of many cosmetic products and happily continue to buy them. Perusing my wife's cosmetics collection, I am quite amused by gems of silliness like:

• a moisturising cream claiming to include the mysterious "Acqua" and "Sodium Chloride" among its ingredients.

• a skin cream showing off the thoroughness of the manufacturers in certifying it to be "dermatologically tested".

• a moisturising lotion claiming to contain the cool "HydrOxygen Complex" (peroxide? water?).

• a herbal shampoo claiming to have "Bio Henna".

Et Cetera.

I guess women would not really get worried about these things till these vile manufacturers start sneaking in Dihydrogen Monoxide into their cosmetics!

Advogato Abuse
richym, otomoto, smb, accord, dbit, sixtyk, gauss, jmors, greenj, odinv, etc. seem to be dummy accounts created just so that someone could play with Advogato's ranking system and perhaps use it to inflate their own certification.

Judy Arrays
A single data structure that allows ultra-fast searching, takes very little space and is also cache-friendly? "Judy Arrays" could to be the answer.

Government Bonds
Be careful when you buy that government bond.

Profound Statement of the Day
"One man's beard is another man's velcro."
Thus spake Lola Kutty.

Havoc in Bangalore
The past week was terrible for people in Bangalore. Almost every day of the week, the weather would follow the same pattern - it would get very hot during the day and then the evening would arrive with very strong winds, heavy rain and lots of lightning and thunder. Apart from the usual flooding of roads as well as the houses of some unfortunate folks and consequent traffic snarls, this time many more (at least 150, by most estimates) than the usual number of trees were uprooted. Most of these were Gulmohar (Royal Poinciana) trees that line many of Bangalore's roads and that look beautiful when in bloom. These trees seem to have awfully shallow roots for their size and they fell over electric wires, telephone wires, cable TV wires, vehicles, houses, etc.

So we have had intermittent power, noisy telephone lines, now you see it, now you don't cable TV, no internet connectivity, etc. in our house. Many people were much worse off. I hope this week would bring better weather.

As if this was not enough, the software engineers of Bangalore now have their lives made even worse by robbers. In the last few months, quite a few techies have been increasingly becoming the targets of robbers and muggers who perceive them to be "soft targets" with loads of money and offering little by way of resistance. In the last month alone, two people from my office were mugged in two separate incidents in the vicinity of our building in the night. Call centre and BPO workers have also been hit similarly. To make matters worse, the police commisioner thinks Bangalore has actually become safer in the last few years and quotes some questionable statistics to prove his point. We have already given up on our government which seems more eager to cling on to power by appeasing its coalition partners than bother to develop the state and the city.

Sort Your Environment Variables for Win32
It seems that the CreateProcess() Win32 API expects the explicitly-passed environment variables, if any, to be in alphabetically sorted order. It is documented in passing in the API description, but you have to really look out for it to notice it. Without doing this, you might find that the spawned process is not able to retrieve some of the environment variables you are passing to it. This also seems to affect programs spawned using Runtime.exec() in Java, so even if you do not work on Windows yourself, you might want to keep this in mind for your hapless users.

Thanks to Saju for the explanation and to Rahul for bringing it to my attention.