Posted in linux, python on December 22nd, 2006 23 Comments »
Since FC6 ships with Python 2.4, you’re a bit stuck if you want to play with the new features of Python 2.5. Here’s a quick and easy way to build and install a cleanly-packaged version of Python 2.5 for FC6. First, you must ensure that you have a sufficient development environment available. Fortunately, you can [...]
Posted in hardware on December 22nd, 2006 No Comments »
I’ve had a Sony Ericsson Z520a phone for a little under a year now, and as it’s still widely available through cellular carriers, I thought I’d write up my experiences with it. I’m writing in part as a reaction to the weakness of phone review web sites, which tend to publish reviews from people who’ve [...]
Posted in hardware, software on December 22nd, 2006 No Comments »
Jeremy and Muli remind me that x86-class CPUs refill a missed TLB entry in hardware. That’s what I get for rambling at midnight! On these CPUs, the hardware walks the page tables directly when a miss occurs. The operating system still gets involved during context switches, to keep the page tables and TLB consistent; and [...]
Posted in hardware, linux on December 21st, 2006 3 Comments »
In an earlier post, I briefly discussed the oprofile system profiler. I was going somewhere with that; here’s another step along the path. Modern CPUs that use virtual memory have to be able to turn virtual addresses into physical addresses efficiently. While a userspace process operates on virtual addresses, accessing any part of the memory [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on December 21st, 2006 No Comments »
I just read some notes from an entertaining talk (one that’s surprisignly accessible, even if you’re neither a computer scientist nor a string theorist) that Scott Aaronson recently gave at Stanford, and came across this gem: But what could NP-hardness possibly have to do with the Anthropic Principle? Well, when I talked before about computational [...]
Posted in reading on December 20th, 2006 1 Comment »
Inspired by a discussion on a mailing list, I dug up a copy of Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s Figments of Reality, to find the definition of the zombike. [...] We begin with a topic that has greatly excited many philosophers: along with Dennett, we think it is a complete red herring. We mention it [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on December 20th, 2006 No Comments »
“Uh oh. I’ve drawn the attention of the shetland pony riders of the apocalypse.”
Posted in slice-o-life on December 19th, 2006 No Comments »
Inspired by this Language Log article, a few newly minted words and fresh observations from home: Indispensable kid’s verb of the year: to “attackle”. Superman’s alter ego is Clark Dent. The protagonist of the past summer’s flaccid offering from Pixar is Lightning the Queen.
Posted in linux on December 17th, 2006 1 Comment »
If you’ve had to do much performance tuning on a Linux system, you may have come across the oprofile system profiler. It may sound like a great piece of software, but it’s got a name for being difficult to use. In this article, I’m going to try to show that oprofile is decidedly non-scary, and [...]
Posted in open source, web on December 14th, 2006 1 Comment »
If you use IRC to collaborate on a software project, chances are you’ve come across pastebin.com, a site where you can post snippets of code, program output, patches, and the like, and then give out the URL of the snippet to other people in the channel you’re working in. A similar site is paste.lisp.org, which [...]
