tkh’s blog

Picnic

There was a picnic sponsored by the CSGSA(CS graduate student association) today. It was really nice chatting with fellow students and faculty. Meal was just american standard foods (hamburgers, hot dogs, and chips), but I already got used to them.

Simple RPC

I’m imlementing a simple RPC library for the second project of Advanced OS class. I’ve written client side code, but I still need to implement timeout and “at most once” semantics. I’m waiting for my peer student to implement the server side functions. Hope my code doesn’t have many bugs.

SIGGRAPH

I registered to SIGGRAPH in this morning. The fee has been raised, but it shrunk to 5 days and there will be only one reception. Maybe support from companies has been decreased. The good thing is that it will be held in San Diego. It is held in Los Angeles every other year, but this year is different and I really appreciate that the administration broke the tradition. Los Angeles is a boring city to me because I visited there too many times. I’ve never been to San Diego, but it seems to be really beautiful city.

Astronomy

We had dinner with Saori’s friend and her husband. He is astronomer, so I asked questions on what I’ve read in the Scientific American article. First he told me that this theory is a big question among astronomers, and he is skeptical about the existence of Multiverses and the parallel universes, but believe that there must exist at most 100 life forms. It may not be civilized to the point where they can communicate. Sounds reasonable number to me. He also told me that he used to work with people from SETI group. During that time, his research group found very unusual signals which were apparently “artificial”, and tried to narrow down where it had been emitted. It turned out to be within the solar system, but the funniest part was that it was from a Japanese sattelite which had not been reported to the authority. He also told me that he is trying to do a computer simulation using FORTRAN and MPI. I was amazed that he can write a code! He also tried to learn C++ and read several books, but it was too hard for him. I know C++ is too complicated for non CS people. Oh, I also asked him if it is really difficult to study quantum mechanics and it seems to not so hard, because we can avoid hard PDE stuff by ignoring time and it is still possible to study basic principles. The reason why I want to study quantum mechanics is that I’m interested in qutantum computation. After this semester finishes, I’ll go to the library and check out a book.

Parallel Universes

I read the article on parallel universes at Scientific American’s website. I didn’t follow all the details in this article, but grabbed a big picture. It basically says that there must be a Universe exactly the same as ours because there are infiniately many universes. Even if parallel universes exist, we can’t observe because we can’t get out of our Habble Space, the furtherest distance we can see from Earth. The distance between our universe and the corresponding parallel one is at least 10 to the 10 to the 28 meters. It’s too far away, so we can’t reach it… It’s quite interesting.

Web Browsers

Finally Safari beta2 is out! Tab browsing is so addictive and it’s so hard to live without it. The only request for Safari is the auto detection of language encodings.

BTW, I downloaded the source code for Mozilla 1.4a and compiled it on my Linux box, because I have been experiencing a problem that prevents me from entering Japanese text. It seems that the migration to gtk2 causes this problem and as I didn’t want to downgrade to 1.2, I compiled 1.4a with gtk1. It was a suprise that it took over 30 minutes with my dual AthlonMP box. Mozilla code must be bloated. The built binary works well. gtk1 doesn’t look good, but I can see antialiased text in the rendering window and enter Japanese with Wnn7.

OS X Update

Last night, I upgraded MacOS to 10.2.5. After I applied this update, the perforamce of smb file sharing has been greatly improved and I’m really glad that Apple finally fixed this issue.

Cg

In this weekend, I have been playing with nVidia’s Cg, a highlevel shader language. Actually I had taken a tutorial course at SIGGRAPH last year and experience a little bit coding there, so I knew how it looks like. I downloaded NVSDK from their CVS server and compiled demos. Besides windows, you can build demos on Linux as well. There are #ifdef macros for MacOS X, so OS X will be supported in the near future, I think. However, it’s too bad to not have NvEffectBrowser on Linux. It’s a browser for demos and the list of demos are arranged in a tree layout, so if you click on a demo, it will launch and the demo will run in the right pane, and vertex shader and fragment shader code are shown in the middle pane. So, it’s really handy to do some tweaks on demos. I also downloaded a chapter of “Cg Tutorial”, a tutorial book for Cg, and read it. It’s about writing shaders to simulate reflection, refraction, and Fresnel’s effect. It’s quite easy to follow, though it involves some physics. I need to get this book.

April Fool

Noticed that my gnome fish (desktop applet for gnome) was sick and the water was contaminated. It was April Fool joke! Now he is fine.

Makefile

I tried to use Makeifile to build binaries on MacOS X and got it. The trick is the -framework GCC compiler option (actually, it’s a linker option). When you compile an OpenGL program, you need to set “-framework GLUT -framework OpenGL -framework Cocoa.” Also, the locations of header files are different from other systems. You need to put the framework name as the subdirectory name. For example, <OpenGL/gl.h> includes the OpenGL header and <GLUT/glut.h> includes the GLUT header. Since frameworks contain both headers and shared libraries, you don’t have to use any other options. It’s an Apple extension, but it seems to be a really clever idea.