Of Programming and Animation

Some of you may know that I occasionally dabble in animation. My results are usually less then spectacular. I recently found an interesting modeling technique: first you make a rough outline with metaballs, then you convert it to a mesh and use sculpting tools to add details. My test has been more or less successful, though I'm still struggling with the head, as always. This was made with an SVN release of Blender, of course. Blender 2.46 is currently in release candidate, but has so much new awesome stuff over the current stable release (2.45) that I'm willing to up with file corruption. I'm still not very good, but this is a promising development for me.

On the programming front, I'm sure you've noticed towel-db. It's the first real (practical and not for a class) project that I've ever finished. I'm struggling with the stupid POSIX libraries for the C version of towel-db, since I decided not to use GLib. The C library is going to take time. Time that won't be coming until I finish my stupid math course on April 15th. I'm not going to do well in it; I'd be happy just to not flunk it >.<. In the Python library, I'm planning to make creating records faster and more intuitive for the developer by allowing dictionary assignment in records and databases.

towel-db

I love it. I love the name. I love the code. I love the concept. And I love how it's the first "real" project I've ever made that has met my design specifications.

towel-db

Basically, it's an extremely simple tabular database using a simple textual data storage format. I have finished the API documentation for version 0.8.1, but the API will change before 1.0 is released. I have the source, a Windoze installer, and an RPM package, available on the site. Currently it's only for Python, but I plan to create a C library soon enough.

VIA Isaiah

Some of you may know that I've always had a soft spot in my heart for VIA, a chipset, motherboard, and processor manufacturer. Their puny video cards notwithstanding, they have a knack for getting the best performance per watt ratio in the industry. Recently, while I was researching yet again their C7 processor with hopes of putting it in the computer I'm planning to build, I noticed a press release for the Isaiah core. I took a look at it, and was amazed.

First off, it's been totally rewritten from scratch. That's a very UNIX-y philosophy, which rather impresses me as Intel and AMD have, as of yet, refused to do this. As a result, they claim that it's cleaner and more elegant in design. What they say about it would seem to back that view up.

It's their first 64-bit processor, for one thing, allegedly with a more complete and reliable implementation of the AMD64 instruction set. They also implemented more SSE instructions, and switched to a 65nm manufacturing process. But I'm just beating around the bush here. VIA alleges that it's 2 to 4 times faster then the C7 with the same power usage and price. They also claim that it has the fastest FPU of any x86 CPU, which wouldn't shock me as it can handle 4 floating point additions and 4 subtractions per clock cycle.

But get this: it can automatically overclock itself when it's running cool, and you can manually set a desired temperature that it will attempt to reach.

If all this is true, then I might just have a new favorite processor manufacturer. I can't wait until it comes out this year to play with it.

Thoughts about mod-boot

I've been recently thinking about where to take mod-boot, and one thing that I decided was to look into using Python instead of C. C is plenty faster of course, but I'm not convinced that in this case it would be a big deal, but I do know that it'll increase maintenance quite a bit. Of course, bourne scripting might be the best option, but I really hate bash. Meh, I'll get more serious about mod-boot after my stupid math course stops sucking up all of my time.

Development paused

Development of mod-boot has paused (These words usually indicate the semi-death of one of my projects, dooming them to be forever in a state of almost-under-development-ness), to allow me to, foremost, get on track with my math assignments, but also so that I can rethink some design elements about mod-boot and to work on another project idea I had.

Design cleanup

Having partially read the first chapter of the excellent The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric S. Raymond, I've been thinking more about the design of mod-boot in terms of simplicity. One portion that called attention to itself was the blockList concept that I explored in an earlier post. It's an interesting concept I think, but it adds a lot of code that 99% of the time will only end up taking up more memory. It would be simpler and in most cases faster just to use either a standard array or a GArray or something.

Also, I've been thinking about the concept that if a program doesn't have anything helpful to say, it should just shut up. I'll have to work on this aspect, but it'll have to give what the user and other programs need; nothing more, nothing less (Good: Fedora. Bad: Debian. Worse: Slackware).

There's other matters I shall have to look in to as well to simplify the project.