Random thoughts produced on the balcony
Terry Pratchett on the right to die : Pratchett is one my favorite authors. His books ooze hilarity. He seems an all around awesome person, all things considered, too. Recently, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and he seems brave(?) enough to wish to die before this treacherous disease disrupts his mental abilities.
Every single time I need to use Windows, it feels wrong in a profound way. Every single time.
Paypal now available for US Xbox Live Accounts : A great idea, I hope it wont be long before this option becomes available for everyone else, too. Dealing with Microsoft points is an often laborious, not to mention futile, process. You would think MSFT would make it easy for us to give them money.
Check out the water crisis article on wikipedia and HowStuffWorks's why can't manufacture water? topic.
I got to spend some more time on the SGL revision, mentioned in previous post. The Garbage Collector (initially a mark and sweep based facility with a single heap for objects allocation, but will experiment with tri-colour marking and generation based segmentation (i.e generational GC) later on ) is almost in place, the main runtime component seems to be operating as expected(values are stored in 'registers', no stack manipulation, will use thread dispatching using GCC's goto *pointer extension ). I went through the WebKit's JavascriptCore source code for ideas. Came up with lots of notes and concepts that I want to toy with, if time and motivation permits. I am looking forward to diving into Google's V8's source code next week. I am afraid I will have to freeze the project in 2 weeks though and switch gears to work on our new file system (PFS, for lack of a better name), based on design decisions applied on Gooogle's GFS and Amazon.com's Domino.
I am somewhat let down by myself; over 5 projects are left in a semi-complete state. I need to focus on one at a time, wrap it up and move to the next one. Its just that August is mostly about trying out new stuff and research. Its the least demanding month of the year for us, most of the folks at work are away on their much deserved vacations. Little to no sound is produced ( I can't deal with sound, laughter, yelling, phone calls, you name it ) and that does wonders for my (currently degraded, due to Summer) productivity.