rastplats

Today was the first day of the great vacationweek at work where everyone in my division is off cutting up the beach, leaving me alone with my boss to take care of business. We did kick off quite good today and things look bright though, pulling off next week and coming thru winning will at least boost my confidence a bit. Spent the evening eating a very nice sushidinner with a lovely girl, embodying everything I find attractive in a woman I missed her the moment I closed the door behind her. She is almost too perfect to be true. Theres just this one problem, I have no clue on her feelings and I havent got the guts to tell her about mine.. being afraid to scare her off and too shy to know what to do.. It sucks to be a loser.

The computer science link of today is an impressive summary of the top dogs in programming languages. This bibliography should take care of any having-nothing-to-read woes. My current readingproject is to dig down deep in the FreeBSD VM-system in order to find potential memory allocation optimizations and caveats.

I take pride in what I have achieved in my career so far, I’ve pulled off quite a few high-profile missions and have worked with a diverse enough range of things in the computer industry to know at least at little about most parts of it. I’ve soldered bugfixes to mainboards and written software to manage the advertising workflow on one of the largest newspapers in europe. There is however one position where I’ve failed miserably at every try, management. Knowing this it came as an interesting surprise at my current job when I got promoted to.. project management instead of the database hacking I was hired to do. Advancing on the ladder is of course always pleasant but the increased responsibility comes at a cost. Oh well, when the going gets tough..

To follow up on my last post, more exciting FreeBSD news was released today. Two dutch hackers have successfully ported FreeBSD to the XBOX gaming console which is incredibly cool. The fact that the patch weighs in at around 1000 lines is a good testament to the FreeBSD sourcecode base.

Another somewhat crappy weekend, I’m more or less totally unable to muster any energy to do things by myself.. being totally devoid of social skills is the plague of my life. One thing I did do was to find a direction in which to head my memory allocation research. It struck me while reading that almost no research is done on how a userspace memory allocator should interact with a kernelspace VM-system. Building a VM specific memory allocator would sacrifice portability but I really dont the point in having parts of libc being portable at any rate. More papers to read.

While slouching around my usual newssources on the internet I found two interesting articles on FreeBSD. The FreeBSD project has recently had somewhat of a media boost which is really nice, since installing it for the first time around 1998 I’ve never looked back. For the already initiated, the first is an interview with Colin Percival in which he discuss information security in general and his recent paper on the Hyperthreading vulnerability in particular. For those new to the world of BSD, the always brilliant developerworks site over at IBM hosts a worthwhile explanation on what it is and how it relates to UNIX and Linux.

By coincidence I stumbled over a recent paper by Dr. Emery Berger who is one of the foremost researchers on dynamic memory allocation. In the paper he discuss phkmalloc, which I did as well in my B.Sc thesis, and highlight some issues with fragmentation which I didnt go into (since my topic was multi-thread awareness). Reading his paper motivated me to pick up my research on dynamic memory allocation for multi-threaded applications using lock-free synchronization. By using some of his findings for aiding fragmentation together with my chunk allocation scheme I think a good compromise between processing and fragmentation overhead can be reached. Another improvement over my B.Sc thesis will be to incorporate skiplists instead of linked lists to close in on logarithmic complexity when traversing free blocks in adress order. Presenting an updated paper at the next B.Sc thesis seminar this fall when the rest of my former classmates will present their first essays would be fun. I also picked up looking at my paper on dynamic database implementation tonight, I seem to have a busy summer/fall coming.. if I can muster the energy for it..

I dont know who I’ve offended to deserve all the shit that keeps raining down but judging by the magnitude it must’ve been someone influential. As some of you know I resigned from the board of my tenants-owners association a few weeks back after three years of service without ever getting any gratitude for all the hard work. Unfortunately, the new board is populated by retards (one of them at least) that keep harassing me with questions, accusations and threats.. his lack of knowledge and manners is amazing. This has been a daily treat for the past week. As if this wasnt enough, when I came back from work today my insanely crappy ISP, Bredbandsbolaget, had managed to disconnect my phonelineagain. Given that tomorrow is friday I will probably be without a telephone for the entire weekend. The level of incompetence at this company is astounding, they have managed to screw up precisely everything related to my connection, they didnt even get the billing straight. Oh, and a few days back I received the labresults of my recent health-examination which showed that I have a chronic blood-disease which I’ll spend the rest of my life eating medication for. Finding it is a good thing though, without the medication it will wreak havoc with my nervous system, further examinations will show if the damage already has been done.. Life is like a box of dirty needles, you never know on what you will get stung next or what crap it will drag along..

On the brighter side, an old friend will be hitting my hood this weekend, the ghetto will come alive!

Once again I was cut off from the net by my crappy internet supplier. Since they bought my previous supplier and thus the ownership of my connection I’ve had more breakage in 6 months than I had for the past five years. Since I neither have a TV nor a newspaper I get somewhat isolated when my connection hits the floor.

Things have been pretty slow all around, work isn’t picking up in speed the way I would like it too and I’ve been to lazy lately to do any research. The immense heat is draining all energy. Hopefully things will be picking up speed soon.

Having spent roughly a week (my first) working in MS Excel I must admit that it is a nice application in a business setting. The cool thing about Excel is that:

• You can do nearly anything in it

I’ve seen quite a few impressive hacks over these days from people without programming skills and even heard reports elsewhere of people implementing bugtracking and similar applications in it. Personally I’ve gone from not knowing anything about it at all a few days ago to doing some quite hefty data mining today, obviously I’ve been able to profit on my prior knowledge in Visual Basic 6 and have written most stuff in VBA instead of writing formulas for it but still. This being the cool part there is a really crappy part as well:

• You can do nearly anything in it

… being this versatile is of course nice but it just doesnt scale. When a critical mass of data is reached, you end up with a workbook too big to handle, inordinate amounts of time invested in it and with no way out but a complete redesign somewhere else. The next logical step being a database this is a big problem since the solution consist of (i) Professional developers, (ii) Infrastructural changes and (iii) Time and money. I wonder how many businesses that hit this wall just because it’s so easy to keep going in Excel instead of taking a scalable route at an earlier stage when breathing-room is still available.

While on the subject of Excel, I found my first serious bug in it today. When recording a macro to create a chart with secondary axes and datarepresentation with both columns and lines you get this code (at least in the swedish version of Excel 2003) :

Charts.AddActiveChart.ApplyCustomType ChartType:=xlBuiltIn, TypeName:="Name“ActiveChart.SetSourceDataSource:=Sheets(”Sheet1″).Range(”A1:A10,B1:B10″), PlotBy:=xlColumns

This will however yield an error when executing, the correct code (somewhat VB’ified using With) is:

Charts.AddWith ActiveChart    .SetSourceDataSource:=Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A1:A10,B1:B10"), PlotBy:=xlColumns	.ApplyCustomType ChartType:=xlBuiltIn, TypeName:="Name“End With

Being used to doing things the UNIX way I ended up hacking all macros by hand instead of clicking them up in the GUI, and reduced a 500 loc macro to a mere 80 loc in the process. If only they had implemented regular expressions in the formulas instead of the enormous quantities of bloatware features..

We presented the operating system assignment today and got approved thus ending that class. Since this class was the sole survivor I am now all done with my B.Sc in Software Engineering. Things are progressing at work too, although spending my days in Windows using Microsoft products really is frustrating, I wonder how everyone subjected to this crap on a daily basis manage?