July 20, 2005

Movement

I'm super busy wrapping up the sale of my place and packing up everything, so I haven't had much time for non-commercial hacking lately. I've got a VPN and have been working remotely for my new job, so that has been working out well. My place cleaned up real nice, I'm taking pictures of all the staging that got done so I have good ideas for things to do with my stuff once I move in down south. I found a cool apartment in Sunnyvale, I'm right near a shopping complex with grocery stores, restaurants, etc, etc. Should be pretty swanky.

I'll be flying back and forth for training and then leaving town the first week of August, driving down to California in my car. The only stuff I won't let the movers pack up are my computers, so they will be packed away in my trunk. I'm debating whether or not to do a one day drive straight down (which is doable if I leave Seattle at 4am), or to do a two night drive. I kind of don't want to stop, but I won't be driving if I get exhausted. I'm setting up a little iPod mount for my dash, so I'm looking forward to having lots of tunes ready, I'm creating a special 24 hour long playlist for the drive.

Posted by djb at 12:10 PM | Comments (1)

June 25, 2005

No more GC loops

I fixed the cycles in the sweep phase. I had a few bugs in my changes where the mark table (what I'm calling the hashtable that holds the list of marked node addresses) wasn't getting updated properly, so certain nodes were being continually marked in a runaway loop.

It was interesting to fix, since I couldn't tickle the problem with simple test scripts. I had to use the miniruby build calls used when compiling ruby from source. Debugging was difficult as well, since the cycle didn't occur immediately and it was hard to tell how much work had been done when cycles occurred. So, I added extensive logging statements to watch all the state changes and see what addresses were being marked in what order. I then wrote a small script to parse the GC debug logs and find the cycle nodes. It ended up working pretty well!

I still have some bugs to fix on the sweep phase, but the mark phase is looking relatively complete.

I've also got to put together a few small slides for the seattle.rb meeting on Tuesday night, since I'm giving a progress report on the GC fixes. I'm not sure if I will have the fixes working by Tuesday, but at least I'll be able to explain the design and implementation of the changes.

As an aside, it's been a while since I wrote bare C, so this project has been fun to work on. I don't miss C's tedious memory management when I'm working in Java, but there are times where I miss the terseness and flexibility of pointers, and being able to tightly control and keep track of allocated memory. Don't worry though, it doesn't take a lot of C to make me want to start doing Java and Ruby code again. It's just that having lots of constraints and steps can be oddly liberating sometimes.

Posted by djb at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2005

GC update

I've been doing lots of move-related stuff, but I've been able to make progress on the ruby GC work in the evenings. I'd say the work is 70% done, there are a few unintended cycles that I need to close, but I've got lots of printfs in there and I've spent a lot of time in the debugger. I bunded all my changes with CPP logic, so I can flip a switch and run the old or new code as desired.

I'm hoping to have it in beta form for the seattle.rb meeting at the end of the month, it will be my second-to-last meeting.

While doing some packing in my office this week, I found an old handout from a GC tutorial I took at OOPSLA 2000. I had forgotten all about it, but reading through the slides, I realized it was full of useful hints and improvements to make with the mark/sweep family of garbage collectors. The handout is 130+ pages long and full of diagrams, plus handwritten notes I made while taking the tutorial, so it was a bit of a find. And very timely, considering the GC stuff I'm doing this month.

This upcoming week is mostly going to be spent going through all my unpacked boxes in the garage, and all the papers and books in my office, and deciding what I'm going to take with me. I aim to only take 30% of what I have now, just to keep the clutter down. It should be fun!

Posted by djb at 02:16 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2005

OS X Intel builds

Well, Apple announced today that they're moving to Intel. Wild!

I'm pretty pleased with this development, especially because now all the player haters get to eat crow. There were so many people saying that it couldn't be done, that the porting would be too tough, that Apple would lose market share... Well, the market share part is yet to be determined, but I think a move to Intel can only spell good news for Apple.

And one can only hope that as time goes on, OS X gains more market share. It's my favorite development platform, both for the ease of development, and wide range of features developers can use to build their apps. I don't know if Apple would ever just sell the OS and let it run on any type of x86 hardware, but pretty soon, developers will have the luxury of a single architecture that can more or less run Windows or OS X. How many people will stick with Windows, given the glut of spyware and viruses? I'm hoping there are more cheap Mac Mini-like machines coming down the road as well.

The other great upside is that video cards should speed up again. I don't think the drivers will be swappable, but at least we won't need separate video cards for our Macs anymore. You never know on the driver front though, FreeBSD 6 has support for using binary windows network drivers, so maybe there's some magic glue that will let OS X take advantage of the tuned windows video card drivers. Either way, I'm hoping that Leopard will be spending time on OpenGL performance, since Tiger is fast on the UI side, but not as fast as it could be when crunching OpenGL for things like video or image servers.

Posted by djb at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2005

I've got a new job...

Well, this is exciting news... I'm moving to the Silicon Valley in a couple months. I'll be living somewhere around San Jose, but I'm not quite sure exactly where yet. Well, that, and I'm also looking at living in San Francisco and taking mass transit south for my daily commute.

So the next couple months are going to be very busy for me. I'll be going through all my stuff, and trying to only take 25% of it down with me, with the rest going to Goodwill and the local dump. I'll be finding a new home for my Sony WEGA tv, because there's no way in hell I'm getting movers to carry that 350lb behemoth into my new place, the last two times I moved it was two times too many. I've had people move that tv into four residences in the past five years. I'll also be preparing my condo for sale, which should be fun, I'll end up making all the little improvements I wanted to do over the past couple years but didn't have time to do yet. Optimally, I wouldn't be selling it this summer but instead in early fall, but we'll see what kind of interest there is. I have a great view of Lake Union from my deck, so I'm thinking it will go pretty quickly.

I've worked out a budget for air travel, so barring any global crash in the oil market, I'll be able to fly back to Seattle every couple months and for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm really looking forward to exploring San Francisco's food options, and hoping that I'll be able to find a relatively urban place that has character. I wouldn't be happy in the suburban developments.

It's sad to leave Seattle, but I've never lived anywhere but here, so moving somewhere more cosmopolitan is very appealing to me. The next few months are going to be pretty wild.

Posted by djb at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)