Nodal Point: Archive

Museum of Endangered Sounds →

Hehe, this is truly amazing museum! The best I’ve seen lately.

Jun 3rd

New classes

I took three more classes (actually, I took a lot more this time, but they all fell off, still hope to at least watch the videos). So here’s the breakdown: Udacity CS212 - Design of Computer Programs - a bit boring for me, I usually do all the same stuff as my daily job. Might be interesting to people new in the craft. Udacity CS387 - Applied Cryptography - very interesting one,...

May 14th

Sending network packets

A little sidetrack into the world of PCI probing and NE2000 network card emulation. Wanted to have a taste of sending and receiving network packets inside my little OS, so I went and implemented PCI scanning (extremely simple) and NE2000 card driver (fairly simple too, their doc is quite good although misses some crucial points). So, after some fiddling I was able to send a packet and receive...

May 11th

5 tags

sjlj and exception handling

Of course, the clang’s implementation of setjmp is very generic and uses quite an abstraction of program state, which makes it hardly suitable for the ad-hoc local exception support I’m using. Since my requirements for setjmp were quite simple (just give me back my damn registers and stack frame), I went and implemented a very custom-tailored versions __sjljeh_setjmp and...

Apr 8th

3 tags

CS373 finished

I’m done with CS373, having implemented some quite nice algorithms that can be used to real-life robot navigation and after a surprisingly well done final exam (my hopes weren’t so high after the AI class, so I’m positively surprised). It was so fun I signed up for two more classes starting April 16. - Applied Cryptography and Design of Computer Programs. Can’t wait to...

Apr 8th

Bret Victor's Kill Math →

How to stop worrying and love your visualization tools.

Apr 2nd

1 note

1 tag

Education opportunities

One chat started talking about various online education opportunities. Here’s a short summary of the available options, for reference. First, of course, is http://www.khanacademy.org/ - a set of online lectures about many many many different subjects. A free, live machine learning course from Caltech in U.S.: http://www.work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html (thanks to Brad for pointing this...

Mar 25th

5 tags

Optimizations

The reason for not booting was simple - Clang, seeing that target is Pentium 4 and above, optimized some memmoves into SSE operations. Bochs didn’t expect that. Now everything boots up until exceptions, at which point I believe the __builtin_longjmp primitive fails. Debugging it.

Mar 25th

3 tags

CS373 homework 5

Homework 5 done. Don’t know the grades yet, but it was pretty fun practical experience. I love this course a lot more than introduction to AI, but credit where credit is due - Thrun and Norvig did an amazing job in Intro to AI to prepare me for this class, I certainly believe this is due to their previous class that I feel this class is so easy. With the material provided I’m...

Mar 24th

4 tags

Clanged now

Anyway, I’ve done doing the craziest port of recent times - at the same time GCC to Clang and from waf 1.5 to 1.6. Quite a bit of quirks to work around. waf has changed a lot internally, and from occasional backtraces I still see that I’m using compatibility mode somewhere. Oh well, one day when I’m bored… Clang is also full of quirks. First, I had to build a...

Mar 24th

1 tag

Thanks to @pussylequeer I have probably the most amazing tumblr feed to look at when I’m down. Thanks a lot!

Mar 24th

5 tags

Clangestine

Finally, Clang people have enabled C++11 lambda support in clang and I’m busy hurrying my buildsystem into clang support for everything. I’m tired of endlessly autoconfiguring and building crossgcc for a bunch of different targets. Adding a target with some include paths set up for my OS into the clang frontend seems like a much simpler idea.

Feb 28th

1 note

1 tag

Magic Ink →

Highly recommend this read to all programmers and designers. Very inspirational. It intersects with Metta’s ideas of supporting creativity freedom, and is written a lot better than I could ever dream to write myself.

Feb 5th

2 notes

Feb 3rd

46 notes

Nov 26th

981 notes

An iOS Developer Takes on Android

nfarina: Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps. We didn’t use one of these “Cross Platform!” tools like Titanium. We wrote it, from scratch, in Java, like you do in Android. We decided it was important to keep the native stuff native, and to respect each platform’s conventions as much as possible. Some conventions are...

Nov 21st

883 notes

Uncharted 3

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is so far the best game of the whole trilogy. With just enough puzzling, action, cinematics mixed in a very well measured proportion the game keeps player engaged from the first flashback to the last screenful of pixels. There’s love, horror, friendship and betrayals, like in a good novel. Amazing graphics will make you want stay around forever and look...

Nov 21st

assocfs note →

A little writeup on my assocfs, pretty small but I think I captured a few interesting points there.

Nov 16th

Font rasterization theory and techniques →

Oct 3rd

Spelt Number to Decimal (Updated)

arachneng: This post is last updated in 2011-07-11 13:20 UTC. I certainly like a code obfuscation and golfing: the recent example includes this and this. The today’s project is more like the former, where very short code takes much time to explain. Without further ado, here it is: (Gist) This little program reads a spelt number from the standard input and writes the corresponding number to the...

Jul 11th

17 notes

2 tags

Metta MMU module init

Since tumblr doesn’t properly support importing any texts I’ve done in Pages, I will just link to it here as a PDF: MMU init.

Jun 7th

17 notes

A historical moment

OMAP3 beagleboard.org # mmcinit OMAP3 beagleboard.org # fatload mmc 0 0x82000000 kernel.bin reading kernel.bin 640 bytes read OMAP3 beagleboard.org # go 0x8200024c ## Starting application at 0x8200024C ... hello, world! ## Application terminated, rc = 0x0

Apr 22nd

Steven Frank - Disable Flash in Safari 5 the good... →

stevenf: When I heard that the new MacBook Air models were shipping without any Flash plug-in installed, the first thing I did was check to see if one of my long-standing Safari annoyances was fixed. It was. It used to be that if you completely removed the Flash and Shockwave plug-ins, by deleting or…

Mar 15th

94 notes

Feb 28th

373 notes

Dec 20th

3,027 notes

Oct 27th

Jeff Rock: Down the Memory Hole →

jeffrock: During the Apple Fourth Quarter Results Conference Call, Steve Jobs made a rather curious redirection: Audience question: Any updates on your stance on Flash? Jobs: Flash memory? We love flash memory. The gentleman that asked that question was obviously referring to Adobe Flash…

Oct 23rd

148 notes

Oct 4th

33,286 notes

Dave Newman: Leaving .net →

whatupdave: The .net community operates in a non-collaborative vacuum. The community is sick, poisoned by the component vendors with closed source software “solutions” and stymied by Microsoft themselves who are so cleverly changing just fast enough to keep developers from solving problems themselves. [….] Tomorrow I start a new project in Ruby. I will have access to a massive and...

Sep 24th

179 notes

Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail →

In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.” Read more in the link above.

Aug 31st

583 notes

Aug 18th

Aug 13th

tumblrbot asked: WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?

Jul 24th

1 note

1 tag

Metta progress report one

I have cleaned up the booting mess more or less and now my loader is able to enter the root domain - the startup component, which initialises all other components in order and passes control on to userspace loader component, which is supposed to finish system initialisation by starting up all user interface services. Now there are pretty many loaders here already - there’s a first stage...

Jul 23rd

Jun 26th

Jun 25th

3 tags

The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet

I’ve just “invested” my hard earned €20 into something I believe is very remarkable. The Album. Leonard, known as “paniq” to some, is creating very fluent, vibrant music. You can download it at his site. “Neurons: Fire at Will” is recommended for listening, as well as other musical excercises. What makes it worth this investment is that I know Leonard CAN...

Jun 6th

Codex Seraphinianus →

Wonderful pictographic description of unknown forms of life, on unknown planet, in unknown language. Priceless.

May 31st

1 tag

Time to update

I did a little cleanup on my sites, so my private blog moves over to tumblr, which is excellent in all imaginable ways. Also means less load on my poor co-located server box in desperate need of an upgrade. Not promising any more often updates here, my blog updates are as rare as spice worm. More often you can see me chit-chatting on twitter. What I would like to promise is more in-depth...

May 30th

“330. It is better to live alone, there is no companionship with a fool; let a...”

– The Dhammapada

Dec 31st

1 note

2 tags

“To remain the web’s weavers and not its ensnared victims, we must merge with our...”

– James Hughen

Dec 30th