Sound works now out of the box, and compiles native libraries for whatever (i.e. ALSA, Esd) backends it finds automatically. So does the automatical java.math implementation picking: if GNU mp is found, then kaffe uses its own native implementation. If no GNU mp is found, it now uses a pure java implementation from GNU Classpath. That's good news for Jython. Now I need to fix the remaining bugs Kaffe shows with their installer, and we're set.

Kaffe now interprets -classpath like JDK 1.2 and above, adding the parameter to the bootstrap classpath. Someone should write a -bootstrap option to set the bootstrap classpath as well, but its use is rather limited.

Dmalloc support is also working now. So I could spend some time debugging the memory management. Except that I can hardly find any bugs in kaffe, but I find memory errors for some stuff in libc ...

ia64-linux works again. I dropped a change to configure.in when I merged it in, and noone noticed until recently. There are still some bugs with this one, about a quarter of the regression tests fail.

Kaffe got support for user defined clas library profiles. Now you can tailor-suit the Java class libraries to the needs of your application. Don't need JAXP or RMI for your embedded Java app? Just edit an ASCII class library profile file to leave it out and watch your rt.jar shrink.

There was also some work on the build system, and we're getting closer to being able to run 'make distcheck' again. Seems like I've been hacking and breaking the build system for too long if I can get excited about that. Hero of the week for putting a lot of work into improving the build system and catching my mistakes almost before they happen is Tim Stack.

Cygwin remains subtly broken, but given that the KaffeCE README files talk about brokenness of ZipFile access (and implemented fixes), I'll check that out for ideas. Windows CE is close enough to Cygwin that it might work ;)

Transatlanic Strong Talk Championship

It is like wrestling. We all know it's all show, and the blows don't really happen, but it looks very spectacular on TV.

By the way, Michael Moore's 'Stupid White Men' is selling like sliced bread in Germany. If "I'm Afraid Of Americans" was re-re-released, it would probably get quite high in the charts here in '.de'.

I personally prefer Atari Teenage Riot, though. But they'll never get into charts. It's music for cleaning spaces from people. When I saw them play on Big Day Out three years ago, it went like this: they came on stage, shouted something about revolution, and then produced a massive wall of electronic noise and screams for about an hour. Almost everybody went away to do whatever one does when a crappy band occupies the stage. I stayed, and enjoyed them very much, though.

Yugoslavia

is now officialy gone.

I wonder if the "Commonwealth of Serbia and Montenegro" (I'm not sure what the real translation is) will get a new top level domain, or if they'll keep .yu for a while, or if they'll get two top level domains, one for Serbia, the other for Montenegro.

Death

My grandfather died two weeks ago. I've lived 12 years with him and my grandmother, who died in 2000. He was an awesome man. Fought the Nazis, raised four kids, and stayed agile and focused into high age. He fell and cracked his skull around new year, and never really recovered, despite being hospitalized for about two weeks. He died peacefully at home, with his kids around him, fully aware what's happening. I think that's a nice way to pass away.