Older blog entries for pphaneuf (starting at number 59)

11 Jun 2002 (updated 11 Jun 2002 at 15:42 UTC) »
raph : I have found that it is hard to interest people in simpler technology. For example, my XPLC project, a component system, frequently get negative impressions because it doesn't support distributed (out of process) objects, method interceptions or a slew of other features that systems like COM/DCOM/.NET or CORBA have.

The funny thing is that the point of XPLC is that it doesn't have that ("XPLC" stands for "Cross-Platform Lightweight Components"), on the account that simpler is better, and that we'd see more component-based software if the overhead of turning a library into a component wouldn't be orders of magnitude worse than a regular library. XPLC doesn't do out-of-process objects or method interception so that it has bounded method invocation overhead (C++ virtual call level of performance), it doesn't have many other features so that it is really easy to make an application that uses components or to make new components.

There is also a similar phenomenon with multithreading, where making an application (often a network I/O-bound one) multithreaded instantly makes it "better". As alan said: "A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't program state machines."

It seems that people want technology that has sex appeal, a simple technology that do what they want easily and quickly just isn't enough.

But nobody can tell me of a really popular distributed application beside the Sun NFS/NIS family.

XPLC

A new release, on a converging path toward a generic dynamic loader...

Life

The OLS starts on the 26th, which is the day right after my significant other's birthday, for which I absolutely want to be there. And there is this PILS talk about pluggable components right at the very beginning. I'll have to race to Ottawa on that morning it seems!

28 May 2002 (updated 28 May 2002 at 22:26 UTC) »
XPLC

I really wonder what this PILS thingy that will be talked about at the OLS is. From what I can tell, it's pretty close to XPLC (save for the fact that automake is crazy). We'll see.

Star Wars

I went to see Attack of the Clones with some friends the other day.

When I saw the scene where they have they giant sheeps and Padmé is walking down the hill, I started singing "the hills are alive with the sound of music", not so quietly. Pretty much everyone within earshot of me in the theater laughed.

Ottawa Linux Symposium

I have been going more and more to work on bike, and I just noticed that the OLS is going to have a "Hacker Bike Ride" at the end. This is nice!

Modern C++ Design

Pretty good book. This guy is going to go crazy soon, doing template magics the way he's doing so.

Please reply by e-mail, thanks!

I played the Atari 2600 Space War this weekend on an Intellivision with the Atari 2600 attachment. This is such a good game!

I tried finding a good one for Linux, but the only one I found, KSpaceDuel, is way too complicated and it got a few gameplay issues compared to the original one (the energy and damages are displayed as numbers rather than some visual widget, please!).

If you know of a good Space War for Linux, write me at pp@ludusdesign.com.

XPLC

Got a new release prepared, with monikers and other things coming together. I'm actually getting paid to work on this now, which I find really cool (thanks apenwarr!).

XPLC

This is really weird. In my last diary entry, I was wondering where all of the people that wanted a lightweight component system went when I gave them XPLC. Maybe they went to Korelib, which is so close to XPLC (and also seemed to appear 8 month after XPLC came out) that I wonder if they didn't read my article and went their way? I just fired off an e-mail to the project lead.

It's pretty nice, from what I can see, doing things slightly differently: very Qt/KDE oriented (but still independent), more complicated to use (but is more featureful than the current XPLC release) and uses strings instead of UUIDs for identifying components (potential for collisions, but easier to use), etc...

11 Feb 2002 (updated 11 Feb 2002 at 17:51 UTC) »
Life

Undergoing massive psychological review of myself. Fear not, I'm still very much a hacker at heart, but I feel some parts of myself are very much broken, and I wish to heal them.

XPLC

I have set a goal for XPLC. I should have a usable release and deliver a paper or a talk about it sometime in the coming year and a half. I would have aimed at this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium, but this is pretty short and I'd like to see it in some actual use before going and making a fool of myself. The "and a half" part is to keep in mind next year's OLS.

But I might still try for this year. ;-)

My big question nowadays is this: where did all those people that kept asking for an "XPCOM Lite" go when I came and gave them XPLC? Oh well.

I might write another Advogato article on XPLC soon, if I get the time.

Makefiles Wizardry

Anyone knows the Right Thing to do so you can get automatic dependencies that work with an IDL compiler generating headers?

E-mail me if you got the faintest idea.

Work

I work for Net Integration Technologies now, which is apenwarr's company. I'm hacking WvPrint at the moment.

Looking into an SLR film camera? Check out my Canon EOS-300 (Rebel 2000) review on photo.net!

One dead childhood friend, stumbled upon my old highschool crush, geeks are psychologically broken, I do gross overgeneralization, film at 11.

13 Dec 2001 (updated 8 Dec 2004 at 18:26 UTC) »
AlanShutko, welisc: I work with a number of physicists and meteorologists that do Fortran programs on shared memory vector supercomputers for weather forecasting.

They are somehow convinced that having multiple MPI processes on each supercomputer node is faster than having a single MPI process per node (which would use threads to use the multiple CPUs available instead). How they manage to think that transferring gigabyte-sized buffers between MPI processes (incurring two copies) is better than passing an 8 byte pointer around totally escapes me.

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