I got a while back this ASUS eeePC 901, with a 1.6ghz Atom and 20GB of SSD. When I first got it I upgraded the RAM to 2GB, and installed Windows XP. It wasn't that great, so then I tried Win7 pro on it, which almost worked, but would just freeze for lengths of time for no apparent reason. The keyboard is tiny and has a very different arrangement from what I'm used to. It sat idle for a while, and since I have been developing on Linux (hello, SWELL/generic), I decided to install Ubuntu on it. The new verdict:

I love it. It's reasonably fast for compiling, installing new stuff is easy (apt-get ftw), Firefox w/ flash is fine, Xchat is decent enough, the stock mail client is very usable. The best part is that the battery life is fantastic, the screen is bright, there are very little moving parts, and it feels really solid. Yes, a bit like a toy, but I'm not worried about breaking it. Anyway, I'm fully on board with the netbook thing. Maybe next time I'd get one with a slightly larger keyboard, though...

Oh yeah and the other part of what I'm saying is: I'm definitely appreciating where Linux distributions for the desktop have gotten. Almost there... ;)

which reminds me: strict aliasing

I get that the "strict aliasing" optimization of recent C/C++ standards allow for great optimization. And I get that gcc has some anciently-designed optimizing, but at any rate, it annoys me that gcc will detect strict-aliasing violating code, and still go ahead and generate code that is obviously wrong -- i.e. when it knows that two pointers ARE in fact pointing to the same memory, it assumes that they can't possibly, and optimizes as if they don't. LLVM probably doesn't have the same problem, heh. Oh well I'll use -fno-strict-aliasing and meanwhile go through and use unions (and occasionally C++ templates) to make our stuff compatible with strict aliasing optimizations.

Of course, on performance sensitive code this is a huge time sink -- I ended up (on our anti-denormal code) looking at the output of many iterations of the same code on gcc i686, x86_64, vc6+icc10, vc2005+icc10, icc11 on osx, gcc ppc, etc, to try to find source code that worked properly and produced decent assembly code. The variety of code produced by each combination is staggering. Also, I found that often the code I thought would be fastest was not, when benchmarked. Oh well.

A better delivered post of something I've been telling people for years -- that execution is way, WAY more important than ideas. Yes, the ideas still need to be reasonable, but beyond that, it's how you do what you do that counts.

After seeing a slashdot post about people running OS X on the Nokia n900, I read some more info about the n900. It seemed like great hardware, and was debian-linux based, so it seemed like a good platform to play with. Enticed, I found it on Nokia's site, complete with a 14 day return policy.

I should mention, I have/use an iPhone 3GS. Apple ends up pissing me off to no end, but I really end up liking the 3GS. It's a great phone/browser/apprunner/notetaker/calendar/ipod/etc. If it wasn't locked down so tight, I would like it even more. So really I end up disliking the idea of the iPhone, but liking it in reality.

The n900 is pretty much the opposite -- the idea is great. Having a phone I can ssh into and install g++ and make on and build stuff and run on, is great. On paper, everything's there. This is what I found:

• Screen: the screen looks good. It's high resolution, but the touch sensitivity of it isn't great, it ends up feeling clunky.
• Storage: on paper it has 32GB of flash. This is great. What's stupid is that the root fs is only 256mb of NAND memory, and while you can install extra packages via apt-get etc, if those packages aren't carefully designed, it ends up filling your root filesystem. Even the obvious things like making /var/cache/apt point to the big disk, they could do, but haven't. So basically you have to do one of many hacks if you wish to install much. The biggest thing I found was moving various /usr/[share|lib|bin]/xxx directories -- all stuff nonessential to booting -- to the bigger disk and symlinking them. Anyway, it's dumb that you should have to do this. Complete pain in the ass. I eventually got everything I wanted installed, but if the point is to have an open extensible phone, you gotta make it do that out of the box.
• WiFi: support seems solid. When the phone is sleeping, you can still ssh to the phone (if you installed OpenSSH, which is easy). RAD.
• SSH: awesome. Fast, the thing really feels quick. It is 600mhz, and for command line linux that is super fast. I remember my P133 being quick, too.
• Web: the browser is pretty solid, and flash support kinda works (wasn't really fast enough for YouTube, but there seems to be an app for this).
• Keyboard is usable. Better than the iphone's, for me, but not fantastic either.
• No AT&T 3G support. I don't care whose fault it is, but come on?!.
• Camera: quality was decent. The video recording was pretty good, sound seemed better than the iPhone 3GS's. Here's a youtube video we did as a test (apologies for the content).
• General UI: Some things are super fancy (nice blurs, transitions), but other things are not even half baked. There's a nice standard for "close window" or "go back" button locations, but 90% of the time the buttons for those are not visible, yet if you click them they are there. Silly stuff.
• Multitasking. Mmmm. so good. I like. Hear that, Apple? It's not even a pad...

Thanks to a user on the REAPER forums: 1000s of ways to die: Greateful Bed.

Doesn't seem like a show I'd watch, but amusing to see REAPER on it, at any rate. Now if only it ended up on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Then we would have made it.

Some people picked through them for a bit... Then poof, they all disappeared. Nobody took the sign, though.

CRTs, MHz, megabytes, and Linux. Making usable boxes from junk, to donate.

(after spending much of the day banging my head against the wall)

#include <stdio.h>
struct test1 {  double b; };
struct test2 { int a; test1 b; };
test2 foo;
int main() 
{
  printf("%d\n",(int)&foo.b.b - (int)&foo);
  return 0;
}

Woohoo! Recommended listening/viewing (apologies for so much Jason Lytle fanaticism).

On 28th street and 6th, fall 2009

I wish I could provide as good a present to the world this Christmas as this:

Jason Lytle's "Merry Xmas 2009" :)

I'm listening now, very happily.

Edit: updated the URL. mmm I cant wait for his next album too.

My previously mentioned new program, SnapEase, is now available with source!

england, earlier this year

I took this in 2000, on slide film.. but here it is, processed and uploaded with snapease heh (testing it)

I spent the better part of this week working on a new program called "SnapEase" (credit to Al for the name).

I've found myself having a bunch of digital photos and wanting to post them online. SnapEase lets you import your photos (or folders), then nondestructively (and very quickly) crop, rotate, desaturate, rename, and/or remove the images from the list. Once you have your list the way you like it, you can have it automatically resize and save the images to disk or upload to the web. In this initial version the upload is just a generic HTTP POST thingy (with example script), but I'm intending to add support for Flickr and F***B***.

Updated: Released w/ source, link is www.cockos.com/snapease!

P.S. thanks to WhiteTie for the artwork and logo!

Dungen!!!

Video was taken using an iPhone 3GS, and the audio using a Zoom H2, then I stuck em together, mmm. There's another video on the YT from the same show, too...

Speaking of other people I love and would likely stalk if I wasn't lazy/busy/shy:

Jason Lytle

I saw you at The Independent last month, and while I was disappointed that you were opening (rather than the main), I was completely enchanted with your set. Even without the full band you had previously at Cafe du Nord. As my friend Dave and I were leaving to walk home while the main act was playing, we saw you outside, and I resisted the urge to give you a hug and all of the money I had in my pocket. ***** redacted for my own good***** ok I've made enough of a fool out of myself.

Stumptown, mmm. I still miss Blue Bottle when I'm in NY.
(that's the Empire State Building in the reflection)

First off, I'm still waiting for my jetpack. Ahem! Any day now...

We write a lot of code, and when we find parts that are sensible to reuse, we tend to make them part of WDL (pronounced W-D-L or "whittle"). WDL includes a bunch of stuff, but what we strive for is to make it easy to just use a little bit of (aka get hooked on) WDL. One of my favorite parts of WDL is LICE, the Lightweight Image Composition Engine.

I've made available a simple Jetpack game that I made a couple of years ago for Allison's nephew. The source is included. Download here (win32), and it'll need the latest WDL to compile if you wish to compile it. Rob[o[tron]] of Underhill Amps made the music.

I usually just complain here, which isn't really good for me, or the 5 people who read it. Here is the first (of hopefully a few) somewhat constructive update:

OS X: If you use NSMenu and NSMenuItem...

This one took a bit to track down. Here is a crash trace, so that if anybody out there googles for it, they will find this post:

0   com.apple.CoreFoundation      	0x94563084 CFRetain + 36
1   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x90e99438 RetainEventParamData + 90
2   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x90e991cb SetEventParameter + 233
3   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x90edff75 SendMenuPopulate + 189
4   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x90edfe73 PopulateMenu + 63
5   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x90eebcd6 SearchCacheEntries + 348
6   com.apple.HIToolbox           	0x90eeb86c SearchCache + 316

If you use NSMenuItem directly and assign a submenu to it using [parentMenu setSubmenu:forItem:], be sure to use [parentMenu setSubmenu:nil forItem:...] before releasing the NSMenuItem or parentMenu.

It appears that there's some internal system cache of NSMenuItems (for keyboard shortcuts etc), and simply removing the menu item doesnt invalidate that cache, which can cause random crashes on some systems, though it might be fixed for 10.6.

OS X, continued.

I know I said I wasn't going to complain, and it's moot anyway since we use ICC on OS X now, but why can't you target 10.4 with GCC-LLVM? *cry*.

I've spent so much time on getting everything nice on OS X, for REAPER v3.13. I think it's paying off. Schwa says "it is like walking through mud." I tend to agree -- it's 95% "ugh" and 5% "woot". To be fair I'm sure Win32 was similar for me, back in the day, but I guess I didn't have much of an alternative (before that I had done some Xlib stuff that was not particularly enjoyable).

Windows 7

I'm not one to shill, I try to avoid wearing t-shirts with logos on them (except maybe when patching my roof).. And I know Microsoft is doing some strange things in marketing, but I have to say that Windows 7 is really awesome. On newer, decent multicore systems, I am finding it vastly superior to XP. Congrats, MS. I found installing it on the my eeepc (upgraded ram to 2gb) worked. Only (?) took about 10gb of disk.

If you have a ReadyNAS, you might need to set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa LmCompatibilityLevel = 2 to let you access it via SMB.

This should work:

[menuitem setKeyEquivalentModifierMask:(NSAlternateKeyMask|NSCommandKeyMask)];
[menuitem setKeyEquivalent:@"t"];

Edit: ahh, a system item added to the edit menu takes it. bleh.