Every now and then I find some­thing that blows my mind at how awe­some the Inter­net is. The first mind-​​blowing exper­i­ence for me was more than 15 years ago, when I dis­covered the Future Crew’s home BBS in Hel­sinki, Met­ro­poli, was online, and I wouldn’t have to wait months to get the latest demos out of Fin­land anymore.

Today it was find­ing 360º pan­or­a­mas of the moon. Check it out right now. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to stand on a for­eign world. And yes, I’ve seen the movie Moon, but it didn’t quite do it for me. These pan­or­a­mas were really amaz­ing for me, though, prob­ably the closest I’ll ever get to stand­ing on the moon myself.

The Apollo 17 pan­or­ama is prob­ably my favour­ite due to the geo­graphy of the area, the boulders and “moun­tains”. The Apollo 12 pan­or­ama is nice just to appre­ci­ate how ghetto the lander was and how incred­ible it is that NASA was able to pull the mis­sions off so well given the tech­no­logy of the time.

Every now and then I find something that blows my mind at how awesome the Internet is. The first mind-blowing experience for me was more than 15 years ago, when I discovered the Future Crew's home BBS in Helsinki, Metropoli, was online, and I wouldn't have to wait months to get the latest demos ...

I’m going to be going to attend­ing FMCS 2010 in Kana­nas­kis — not far from Cal­gary — in a couple weeks. I’ll be giv­ing a talk on the imple­ment­a­tion of Pola in some capa­city, though I haven’t figured out how broadly scoped or what to focus on.

I’m get­ting pretty psyched about it. The con­fer­ence will be fun if it’s any­thing like I remem­ber FMCS 2004 to be. The loc­a­tion is amaz­ing. Plus after that I get to spend some time in Cal­gary with my par­ents and hanging out with Brian and, prob­ably most import­antly but least awe­somely, work­ing on my thesis.

I'm going to be going to attending FMCS 2010 in Kananaskis---not far from Calgary---in a couple weeks. I'll be giving a talk on the implementation of Pola in some capacity, though I haven't figured out how broadly scoped or what to focus on. I'm getting pretty psyched about it. The conference will be fun if ...

Today’s xkcd is so val­id­at­ing. I first stumbled across the GNU mani­festo prob­ably in 1996, when I was in high school. I wanted to teach myself C and a good way to do that was to use the DJGPP com­piler, which led me to GNU. I didn’t really think much of it at the time except that these “Free Soft­ware Found­a­tion” people took soft­ware way too ser­i­ously, but I was happy to have a free com­piler to play with.

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Today's xkcd is so validating. I first stumbled across the GNU manifesto probably in 1996, when I was in high school. I wanted to teach myself C and a good way to do that was to use the DJGPP compiler, which led me to GNU. I didn't really think much of it at the ...

I’ll make a research-​​oriented entry before long; I prom­ise. I’m start­ing to get towards writ­ing up some of the cool stuff in my thesis.

I’ve star­ted writ­ing an Itanium tutorial. That doc­u­ment will magic­ally update every now and then as I write more. On the one hand it’s slightly embar­rass­ing how much I’ve writ­ten — it’s almost half as much as I’ve writ­ten for my thesis so far — but it’s an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of writ­ing. There’s really no rigour at all to it. I don’t have to worry about prov­ing things or cit­ing things; I’ve never proofread any of it. I just write whatever pops into my head, which makes it very quick and easy. Primar­ily it’s for my bene­fit, so I don’t for­get any­thing and so that it forces me to fig­ure things out more con­cretely than I would otherwise.

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I'll make a research-oriented entry before long; I promise. I'm starting to get towards writing up some of the cool stuff in my thesis. I've started writing an Itanium tutorial. That document will magically update every now and then as I write more. On the one hand it's slightly embarrassing how much I've written---it's almost ...

This is a follow-​​up to this post. Mark was mag­nan­im­ously amaz­ing and bought an Itanium machine for “the lab”. It’s cur­rently sit­ting in my apart­ment. I’ll make another post tomor­row, I expect, where I actu­ally get to play with it prop­erly, but I thought at the very least I’d make a post about the head­aches of actu­ally get­ting it working.

Go through the pic­tures and read the run­ning com­ment­ary because I’m not going to repeat the pic­tures here.

Sadly the machine is noisy and relatedly prob­ably quite a power sucker. It’s in the corner of the liv­ing room, not far from where Jasna’s office is so I’m not going to be able to leave it on very often, I don’t think. The noise would prob­ably drive Jasna crazy.

I should say I still haven’t got a chance to really sit down and play with it — namely play with the assem­bler — like I planned because HP-​​UX needs so much more set­ting up. I’m going to have to install pretty well the entire GNU user­land because HP’s user­land is abso­lute garbage.

This is a follow-up to this post. Mark was magnanimously amazing and bought an Itanium machine for "the lab". It's currently sitting in my apartment. I'll make another post tomorrow, I expect, where I actually get to play with it properly, but I thought at the very least I'd make a post about the ...