That’s my ther­mo­meter from a couple minutes ago. I’ve been sick essen­tially since Sat­urday and it looks like it’s finally on the mend! For some reason the last couple times I’ve been sick I’ve got cold instead of fever. This morn­ing I was down to 35.6ºC (for you Amer­ic­ans, that’s 96ºF) and had to take a long bath just to keep warm. It looks like I’m finally get­ting back to health.

The upside to the sick­ness is I did do quite a bit of work today. The major rewrite of the bounds infer­ence for Pola accord­ing to the last paper is get­ting close. Only 4 or 5 screen­fuls of typ­ing errors to sort out and then test­ing, ha! I’m hop­ing I’ll get it fin­ished in the next couple days as it would be nice to have all the ducks in a row for my trip to Cal­gary next week to see my par­ents and work with Brian and Robin again!

That's my thermometer from a couple minutes ago. I've been sick essentially since Saturday and it looks like it's finally on the mend! For some reason the last couple times I've been sick I've got cold instead of fever. This morning I was down to 35.6ºC (for you Americans, that's 96ºF) and had to ...

Today marks the 3 year anniversary of Jasna and I! It sim­ul­tan­eously feels like a long period of time and a short period of time to me. Look­ing at a pic­ture of her from three years ago (to the left) it does seem espe­cially long. It feels like we’ve had a lot more than three years of love and joy and grow­ing fit into those three years.

That pic­ture, if the EXIF data is to be believed, was taken 3 days after we got together. We fell in love and built a shared life here in Lon­don — now we’re liv­ing together even — and before too long we’re both going to gradu­ate and hope­fully plan our future life together, forever.

I love her!

Today marks the 3 year anniversary of Jasna and I! It simultaneously feels like a long period of time and a short period of time to me. Looking at a picture of her from three years ago (to the left) it does seem especially long. It feels like we've had a lot more than ...

I recently rewrote the build sys­tem for Pola from ant to GNU make. Keep­ing things in ant was get­ting to be too much work, try­ing to be proper and writ­ing tasks (in Java) rather than just using the shell. I was ini­tially a little wor­ried about how much work it would be to redo the build sys­tem, but I was pleas­antly reminded by how simple it is. It took prob­ably about a quarter the amount of time to rewrite the entire build sys­tem from scratch in make than it would have taken to do a little incre­mental change to the ant sys­tem. As a bonus I man­aged to clean up the pro­ject a lot, redu­cing the build sys­tem down to just two files of a com­bined 70 lines. (more…)

I recently rewrote the build system for Pola from ant to GNU make. Keeping things in ant was getting to be too much work, trying to be proper and writing tasks (in Java) rather than just using the shell. I was initially a little worried about how much work it would be to redo ...

I des­per­ately miss the demo­scene. Towards the end of the 1990s when per­sonal com­puters got power­ful enough to do, well, just about any­thing, I star­ted turn­ing my interests else­where. It’s still alive, though, and pick­ing up some amaz­ing coders. The latest jaw-​​dropping demo to be released is a 256 byte demo from Řrřola, a coder in the Czech Repub­lic. Here’s the You­tube ver­sion of it for those of you that don’t have DOS installed:

This is one of the most tech­nic­ally impress­ive demos I’ve ever seen in my life. What he’s done should be flat-​​out impossible to do in 256 bytes. As a red­dit com­ment poin­ted out, tak­ing a single screen­shot of the demo in action will yield a file 96 times lar­ger than the demo itself. A simple “hello world!” writ­ten in SPARC assembly, as taught by our uni­ver­sity, is over 2.6 times as large than this demo (2.59 times as large if you’re clever about filling delay slots). Hell it takes over 1/​20 the size of this demo just to rep­res­ent the string “hello world!”. From an inform­a­tion the­ory it boggles the mind that that video can effect­ively be com­pressed down to 256 bytes.

Any­way, if all of this weren’t excit­ing enough, it gets even more excit­ing due to the fact that he’s released the source code. More excit­ing still is the fact that the com­ments are writ­ten in (very clear) Eng­lish instead of Czech. I don’t think it will be pos­sible for me to res­ist fig­ur­ing out how he did this. Parts like this:

  push 09FCEh   ;<aligns with the screen 
  pop  es
  mov  bh,56h   ; xyz addressing trick from neon_station
                ; vecNN = (words){[5600h+N] [5656h+N] [56ACh+N]}
;frame loop - prepare constants
;ax=key bx=5600h bp=dx=0 cx=3 si=100h di=-2 sp=-4 word[5700h]=T

are going to have me stumped for a long while, I think, but I’m pretty psyched about it. Tak­ing a quick 5-​​minute pass through the source code I under­stand a sur­pris­ingly large amount of it, just not the parts that really count. Tra­cing through it sort of brings me back to my demo­scene days, except now I have the lux­ury of going through source code instead of try­ing to deal with DOS Debug. One of my first thoughts read­ing through this was “he’s using float­ing point instruc­tions? That’s so cheat­ing. Who has the money for a math co-​​processor‽”

I desperately miss the demoscene. Towards the end of the 1990s when personal computers got powerful enough to do, well, just about anything, I started turning my interests elsewhere. It's still alive, though, and picking up some amazing coders. The latest jaw-dropping demo to be released is a 256 byte demo from Řrřola, a ...

The paper I sub­mit­ted to FOPARA, a work­shop in Eind­hover this Novem­ber, has been accep­ted! We got some really amaz­ing com­ments back from the ref­er­ees. The really evil part of the paper, near the back, didn’t get as many com­plaints as I was expect­ing. Maybe I need to present it bet­ter so people can fully appre­ci­ate what hor­rible things I’m doing, ha!

So yes, fix­ing up the FOPARA paper will hap­pen before long. I also need to make a trip to Cal­gary soon to work with Brian and Robin more. In the mean­time I’m work­ing on my thesis pro­posal which has been drag­ging on for too many months now and work­ing with my super­visor, Jamie, on a cleaner and — with no shame about being nerdy — more excit­ing for­mu­la­tion. It’s mak­ing us rethink about things we haven’t thought about in a long time, too, which is good.

And while this is all going on I’m still slowly work­ing on the imple­ment­a­tion where time per­mits. Pro­gress is being made on the bounds infer­ence. I’ve also put up some bin­ar­ies of the inter­preter — as it exis­ted a couple months ago. Not sur­pris­ingly no one’s down­load­ing any of them except for me (to test).

The paper I submitted to FOPARA, a workshop in Eindhover this November, has been accepted! We got some really amazing comments back from the referees. The really evil part of the paper, near the back, didn't get as many complaints as I was expecting. Maybe I need to present it better so people can ...