Well, some progress has been made in the wedding planning, including the tentative selection of date: 15 Sept 2007. First, though, we have to talk to the priest this weekend and consequently do a bit of acting as to the degree of our collective piousness. Here’s hoping we’re judged to be adequate.
Not much else going on this weekend, other than the Battle of Techs on the gridiron. May the worst team lose!
Most of the pirate stuff annoys the heck out of me on talk like a pirate day (that was yesterday by the way, yarr and so forth). But Linus’ kernel announcement yesterday was priceless, though he could stand to work on his piratese.
My next kernel contribution should ship with 2.6.19, w00t.
I saw a guy with a sticker on his backpack today that said “Rideing Durty.” Now, I know this has something to do with some song, and that it is also cool/trademarkable in some circles to spell things wrong (see Fabolous), but seriously, rideing? If you were the printer making said sticker, how could you let that one get through?
Also, Oscar Mayer is now making cooking hot dogs easier. Is this the state of culinary despair to which our society has sunk, that cooking hot dogs is too onerus? I love the write-up in the press release: “Preparation is easy, and there’s no cook top mess or boiling water!” Oh, heavens, that my prayers have been answered so fully! I fear I’ll be telling my future children how I remember it taking almost a minute to make a hot dog, and we had to open the buns ourselves! And grilled cheese, boy was that a sisyphean task…
I was messing around with Java bytecode today for no particular reason. It’s a fairly simple assembly language — stack based so it takes a little getting used to but not hard for anyone who has used an HP calculator. I installed a copy of jasmin from my apt repository and got to work.
I wanted to make a “Hello, world!” that wasn’t completely obvious at first blush, so the plan of attack was to just push all the ascii codes on the stack in reverse order then call System.out.print() on them in a loop. Each iteration checks the loop count, if ok then pop the next code and print it. Here is where the bytecode verifier is a pain in the ass: apparently, the instructions must be executed each time through a loop with the same stacksize, or else you are branded an evil hacker. Very annoying. I could’ve used an array instead but that also takes a bunch of pushes and stores, so I just unrolled the loop. It works, I guess. Code after the jump.
Continue reading “Hello, java!”
Philly didn’t happen, again because of rain. I saw on their website that the game went on anyway. Bah.
My ubuntu install is doing a bit better after a week of various customizations. Now the Fn key and all of the special laptop keys do things (more than I ever had working on my Dell), and tap-to-click is going on the touchpad. I’m still having a strange problem with HAL, however, and negotiating its maze of XML config files isn’t the best. While looking for help, I saw this: Ubuntu bug #1. Silly, but I like the feedback, especially the “it’s a feature!” post.
