kvm switches

... tend to suck :-(
higher resolution, high refresh rate ... and you end up with a headache.

Depressing ...

I found out today, that some really really cool engineers and architects, have been RIF'ed from Sun. Some of whose work I have come to respect over the past 6 years I have been here ... I dont know many of them personally, but their work has resulted in me learning and understanding things better; steering not just future of Sun products, but also the domains they have been working in by authoring/influencing the specifications.

It is indeed depressing to go through this charade pretty much every other quarter ... this would be the problem with making profits by reducing operational margin I guess, you need to keep laying off people to make profit !
Last month, when I told dad about the impending RIF in september, he joked ... pretty soon, only senior management will be left in your company - and they will declare huge profit and heavy bonuses with every one else getting retrenched !

If I am not wrong, I just survived the 13th (yep, it is a friday today) RIF in my 6 year career at Sun.

goof up of the century ...

And I assumed that all dual core chips would fit the a same motherboard if it already runs one ... so stupid of me.
I ended up getting a amd 64 x2 6000 ... for the nearly 70% or so gain compared to my current chip (amd 64 x2 4200) - just change the chip me thought ! Now, have to buy the rest of the box ... will get a kvm switch, so that I dont end up buy the peripherals ...

Basic research should have settled things, however many times I an exposed to this lesson the hard way, I still dont learn !

Generator

A friend of mine mentioned about generator's in java.
I took a look at the infomancers-collections which claims to implement this for java.

Neat package - would love to play with it for passtime, not sure if I will ever touch it for production code.
The basic essential idea is simple :
a) use the bytecode instrumentation hooks in vm to modify the class loaded at runtime so as to inject code into subclasses of com.infomancers.collections.yield.Yielder.
b) Modify bytecode such that any call to 'yieldReturn' in yieldNextCore() is succeeded by:
b.1) record state.
b.2) return.
b.3) inject a label after this return.
c) Inject code in begining of yieldNextCode to essentially convert it into a large switch case - based on 'state', decide where to jump next.

So a simple pseudo example would be :

-- developer code start --
yieldNextCore() {

if (1 == count) {
// return some_a() if cond is satisfied.
yieldReturn(some_a());
}
// return some_b() as the generated value
return yieldReturn(some_b());
}

-- developer code end --

would be converted to -

-- generated code start --
int state = 0;

yieldNextCore() {

switch (state) {
case 0: goto label_0;
case 1: goto label_1;
}
label_0:
if (1 == count) {
yieldReturn(some_a());
state = 1;
return ;
}
label_1:
yieldReturn(some_b());
state = 2;
return ;
label_2:
}

-- generated code end --

To make sure that this will actually work, all the local variables within the method are pulled out as instance variables in the class.

Cute trick !

PS: I have not tried the code, or the package. So I cant answer questions of what happens if yieldReturn is called from outside yieldNextCore (might not work ?), conflicting names within different scopes in the yieldNextCore method (load error ?), etc.
As I said, I considered this as a nice solution to an interesting side problem ...

"Movie Compatibility Report"

Facebook has this application called movies (Flixster Movies) - and it has a "Movie Compatibility Report". Essentially asks your opinion about a bunch of movies on some scale, and compares it against your friends to find out how well the tastes match (the usual social networking thing).

What I found interesting about this was not the app itself - but about my bloody friends.
Some people whose suggestions I usually take about movies, apparently, have a totally different taste in movies as compared to me - /me wonders why I ask them, and more importantly what all I missed 'cos they diss'ed a movie ! :-D
Most of my friends though, seem to have a very similar taste as me ... /me wonders more !

Yep, some of these aspects of social networking are interesting - small data leading to higher aggregations which make up some interesting patterns - speaking of which, I think I should write a few scripts to do similar aggregation for the performance telemetry in our server ....

test post from mobile

This is a test post .... Could get removed later

Little Miss Sunshine

I missed this movie when it came to Bangalore (did it ?), bought the dvd with paramp recently, and just finished watching it.
It is a really good movie - and I am left with a mixed bag of feelings after watching it (not about the movie, due to the movie !).

That girl Abigail Breslin is really really awesome !