IA64, PowerPC and the irony of life

I've never expected to work on Intel's IA64, or never imagined even logging into an IA64 box. Ditto for PowerPC (although slightly less so).

However, I must have incurred some wrath from God (or put your favorite deity here) - otherwise I wouldn't be logged onto an IA64 box and a PowerPC box, trying to bootstrap a branch of gcc on them. Talk about ironies...

Yet another open sourced C compiler

I've just read this article in The Register:

 Sun furthermore re-stated its commitment
to open source Java - something IBM was
particularly vocal in calling for two years ago.
The Java HotSpot micro virtual machine,
the C compiler and the "majority" of
Java Standard Edition (Java SE) will
be open sourced by the end of this year.

Sounds like my former project is finally going to be open-sourced :)

Ever heard of...Encyclopedia of spam ?

One day I came to the office, and found this huge book sitting on the desk of my officemate, with his own name on the cover. Certainly I can not complain I have a boring officemate :) - if you want to know more about this unlikely-to-exist tome, you can read about a rather interesting history of it.

Creative or crazy ?

Naver, and core competency

According to the report, Naver, one of the largest internet portal and search site in South Korea, had a service interruption of almost 6 hours. Well, 6-hour outage is outrageous itself, but that's not why I'm flabbergasted. I just learned from the same news report that Naver is "outsourcing" its IT infrastructure to IBM. And it gets even better. Apparently Naver doesn't take care of their domain either - they "outsource" their DNS management to www.gabia.com.

An internet portal/search site that doesn't know how to take care of its IT infrastructure and domain ? Somebody needs to have a better grip on their core competencies...

At last, Solaris libm source is available

I knew this was coming but finally it happened:

http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/devpro/
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/devpro/downloads/current/

This is arguably one of the best generic implementation of libm that supports C99. Sun's math library folks are, among the best - if you're interested in more detail, try reading Sun's numerical computation guide.

Too bad CDDL vs GPL schism will probably make it not as widely adopted :(

OT: quote of the day

I collect interesting quotes in my diary, and today I added a new one:

...a very rich person should leave his kids
enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.

Who else would say this but Warrent Buffett, the world's second richest man ?
20 years after saying this on an interview with Fortune magazine, he kept his word - here's the article about the estimated $40 billion charitable donation and the conversation with him about it.


You can say that my admiration for Mr. Buffett went up a couple notches today. Maybe it's time for you to pick up some Berkshire Hathaway shares - that is, if you can afford. If you're not familiar with the Berkshire Hathaway share prices, take a look at BRK.A or BRK.B.

Seeing the world in assembly

Most typical programmers, when encountered a buggy behavior in their code, often try to diagnose it assuming the compiler is correct (as least intially). That should be the right approach for most programmers. However, being a compiler writer, I very often look at the assembly and start from there - and that helps me spot problems faster than others.

Today was no different - some user had a problem, and it turned out to be a compiler bug but everybody was trying to diagnose it from the higher-level. Given enough time, I have no doubt they would have found the same problem, but different perspective certainly helps (and saves time too!).

This "seeing-everything-through-assembly" approach is fairly robust (at least you won't get mislead by the compiler errors - IMNSHO "being mislead" is the biggest time killer in any debugging effort) but not fool-proof - sometimes, every once in a while, a hardware bug or a kernel bug can bite you :( Even then, you're well equipped to diagnose such a bug if you're looking at the assembly level.

I know, the assembly programmers are a dying breed - I often hear that nowadays some CS students don't even know the assembly. But let me tell you that it could be very useful to know your assembly (whichever processor you're using). At least that was the case for me today :)

Google Groups and typo

Typo can be embarrasing. Especially when you mistyped your homepage URL, sending people to some squatter site. Worse if you do that in a USENET posting. *sigh*. I cancelled the post but USENET being what it is, it's already too late. (My apology to those of you who clicked that link).

I blame it to Google Groups for not picking up up my signature from the Gmail setting, nor providing any option to have a signature. I haven't figured out the company internal news server, and that's forcing me to use Google Groups instead of my usual client. Google Groups is fine for quick reading and searching, but not for everyday news reader (especially posting part). At least that's the case for me yet.

comp.arch internship anyone ?

Looks like Andy Glew of (now) Intel is looking for an intern (see the comp.arch posting).

If you're a graduate student who's interested in the computer architecture, I'm sure this would be a great opportunity to learn from one of the most interesting processor architects of our time. The profile he's looking for would have fit me perfectly, if I were still a graduate student. Too bad I'm not :)

My last day at the first job

Welcome to Seongbae's blog. Especially welcome to you folks who followed link from my old blog.

Today is 5/18/2006, and it's a very special day for me, cause it is my last day at my first job. Like all good things, my first job finally came to an end. I'm really proud of what I've accomplished, and happy for all things I've learned and all friends I made during that seven years.

Anyway, I don't know what will happen to my old blog at my company's blogging site - probably I'll lose the access although hopefully my postings won't be deleted. Regardless of what happens there, I'll continue to post here from now on.