S5

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

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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?

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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. ;-)

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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. :-/

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Jacks Migrated

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

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)