Month: August 2008
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Homeopathic Water Reclamation
The theory of homeopathy is that the adding something to pure water gives it a pattern of some sort. That pattern remains when more water is added. Thus diluting the solution does not change its effect. This is, of course, nonsense, although homeopathic remedies are sold in every drugstore and supermarket. If we believe the…
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GCC Inline Assembler
GCC’s inline assembler syntax is very powerful and is the best mechanism I know of to mix assembly code and optimized C/C++ code. It lets you take advantage of assembly features like add-with-carry or direct calls into the kernel without losing optimizations. I don’t know of any other approach which supports that. That said, the…
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Iraq
These are things I wonder about Iraq these days. Things are clearly improving in that fewer people are being killed. How much of that is due to completion of religious cleansing of neighborhoods? How many mixed neighborhoods remain? How many people are returning to Iraq from abroad? At one time millions of Iraqis had left.…
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The Golden Age
My father’s father bought a new car every year. He and my grandmother had two cars. Every year he traded in the older one and bought a new one. There were two car dealerships in town, and he alternated each year. One measure of the wealth of a society is what it can afford to…
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Multi Debugging
Many programs these days are written using multiple threads, multiple processes, and multiple languages. Our current debugging solutions don’t cope particularly well with any of those. gdb supports multiple threads. However, the interface is hard to work with. You have to select which thread you want to look at. Threads are referred to using numbers…