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<viric>
I don't have a big success rate in bios updates
<wpwrak>
i try to ignore them. not having to figure out what to do with bios_updater_win_xp.zip is much better for my blood pressure ;-)
<whitequark>
well, this one is pretty good
<whitequark>
first, it *actually* can read the flash from a 32GB USB flash drive formatted to vfat
<whitequark>
and it doesn't require any windows bullshit
<whitequark>
as you can see it also can successfully flash the chip, which is also an achievement
<wpwrak>
wow. didn't know it was christmas again ;-)
<whitequark>
wpwrak: christmas?
<wpwrak>
when you get gifts :)
<whitequark>
heh
<whitequark>
it also has a nasty habit of making first power-up after flashing last for half a second
<whitequark>
after which the machine simply goes black
<whitequark>
I hope the engineer who designed that will wake up monthly to see a serial killer place his knife next to his neck and then silently flee
<whitequark>
aaaand no, of course these morons did not actually fix any of the actual BIOS bugs.
<wpwrak>
i take the christmas back :) but it's nice to see my "don't worry about BIOS updates" policy validated
<whitequark>
well, they did add windows 8 support
<wpwrak>
tiles, here we come ! ;-)
* whitequark
was going to add something sarcastic, but just "windows 8" is enough
<whitequark>
in unrelated news, my language slowly turns into something like C++, but without all the insane "oh we accidentally turing-completed templates"
<whitequark>
the turing-completeness in my system is very much intended.
<wpwrak>
well, tiles date back to the bronze age. so that sounds about right for windows :)
<wpwrak>
templates, the ultimate achievement in obfuscation
<whitequark>
wpwrak: if you want a compile-time loop, you just write a fucking loop. that's how I do it :)
<whitequark>
or, if you for some weird reason want to parse some pngs at compile-time, then convert it to 2-bit grayscale and store as constants--why not.
<wpwrak>
yeah, never underestimate the combined power of make and #include
<whitequark>
or compute a trigonometric function table taking into account endianness or word width of your target
<whitequark>
or...
<whitequark>
wpwrak: you can't do the latter without some really heavyweight magic.
<whitequark>
and then you have a target which has non-IEEE-compliant floats, and you need to generate something for them
<whitequark>
and then you begin to despise your desire to stay with make and #include ;)
<whitequark>
not portable, because see above: you have a target with weird floats.
<wpwrak>
so ? sin.inc has them in ASCII
<whitequark>
and from what I know, ARM floats and x86 floats do behave differently.
<wpwrak>
the ASCII to weird conversion happens in the cross-compiler
<wpwrak>
the one that #includes sin.inc
<wpwrak>
you're just bloating the language instead of using the potential of the tools already available to you. of course, that's the C++ way ;-)
<whitequark>
you also cannot precisely represent floats in decimal notation, you know, right? :)
<whitequark>
this is why e.g. LLVM assembly has float literals in hex.
<wpwrak>
well, i can make a worst-case estimate of epsilon and just pump out enough digits
<whitequark>
oh, I don't bloat anything, nor I require the programmer to use third-party tools for the stuff the compiler *already knows*
<whitequark>
it is aware of all target semantics, and of the precise configuration this code is being compiled with
<whitequark>
perl is not
<wpwrak>
perl doesn't need to since you can intelligently divide the task :)
<whitequark>
meh
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<whitequark>
oh nice, that bios update actually broke the battery meter
<wpwrak>
hmm, anti-christmas ?
<whitequark>
through I'm not sure how exactly because ACPI reports correct values. but my status widget displays inf%
<whitequark>
i guess i got coal :)
<wpwrak>
better be careful what you wish for ... things like uncommanded overheating do exist
<whitequark>
it's called "oh this website has flash"
<wpwrak>
interesting. "uncommanded" isn't in the dictionary. such a useful word.
<wpwrak>
yeah, that's a good predicator
<whitequark>
the damn thing goes 100% on one of my cpu cores each time I wake the machine up
<whitequark>
something with alsa I guess
<wpwrak>
that confirmation came quickly ;-)
<whitequark>
well it isn't quite bios-related. but still annoying.
<wpwrak>
going from christmas to christmas cancelled to anti-christmas to antichrist-mas :)
<whitequark>
I only use it because russian facebook clone vk.com is easily the world's biggest archive of pirated mp3s
<whitequark>
which is, well, not very nice, I admit, but nothing else I know has an interface when you type the band name, hit "play" and forget about it.
<whitequark>
it'll just go on for hours. only needs manual intervention when someone hijacks the name with a dubstep remix.
<whitequark>
btw, did you know how C++ handles exceptions?
<whitequark>
it strcmp()s the class name and names of all its parents with all the classes in catch clauses
<whitequark>
and does it twice on the entire callstack
<whitequark>
and to walk the callstack, it uses DWARF debug info
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<whitequark>
as in my runtime the caller is responsible for allocating stack space for the result, I think I'll just use the 'regular' return value for 'stack unwinding'
<whitequark>
i.e. basically translate error handling with stack unwinding to error handling with error codes.
<whitequark>
combine the best! :)
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<whitequark>
all the things you can do when you get to design your own ABI.
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<wpwrak>
(C++ exceptions) nice. if Morgan Spurlock was a hacker, "Super Size Me" would have been about C++
<wpwrak>
works on linux with a reasonably recent chromium and chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra
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<whitequark>
wpwrak: (music) thanks, I do!
<whitequark>
hmm, this is a very interesting experiment
<whitequark>
but unfortunately not good enoough to listen to it for an extended time :/
<whitequark>
plus, "Sorry, cannot play music properly in the background".
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<wpwrak>
whitequark: yeah, works best if you have an extra screen. it seems to want to be visible.
<wpwrak>
whitequark: some songs work amazingly well, e.g., "Blue Monday"
<wpwrak>
whitequark: in some you can also see how lazy their makers really were :)
<larsc>
hm, if I select one of the loops it jumps back?
<whitequark>
wpwrak: one of the most seamless ones is the "Nyan Cat"
<whitequark>
which somehow doesn't surprise me at all
<wpwrak>
i'm not entirely sure about that part. when you click on it, it becomes red and is ignored on the next encounter. when you click again it becomes green (and stays green when you mouse away), in which case it may be taken the next time. not entirely sure if it works like this, though, since you're often not fast enough
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<wpwrak>
whitequark: an, need to try that one once i get tired of blue monday :)
<whitequark>
wpwrak: well you kinda can just listen to it in a regular loop
<whitequark>
I'm not sure what point the creators of the jukebox tried to prove by including it
<wpwrak>
also need to see how "bad apple" and "last jungle" go. they could be fun.
<wpwrak>
(nyan cat) ah ;-) never quite got that meme
<whitequark>
neither did I
<wpwrak>
they have a few oddities there. and i think they don't "include" anything (or at least they don't say). it's all based on user uploads and statistics
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<wpwrak>
hmm, it doesn't recognize "last jungle" :( "bad apple" works well, as expected
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<LunaVorax>
Hi!
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<larsc>
oh, that's interesting there seem to be some samsung notebooks, which, if you boot linux, brick themself.
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<wpwrak>
whitequark: "bug powder dust" works almost perfectly, with a nice mix of loop lengths. there are some small pops but they seem to come mainly from deficiencies of the algorithm.
<whitequark>
wpwrak: hm, thanks
<wpwrak>
whitequark: also 3 am eternal works pretty well.
<whitequark>
talking about bugs, remember we talked about a faulty circuit breaker?
<whitequark>
you were right: the colder it is outside, the better it works
<wpwrak>
hmm. my comment about temperature was about holes (and cold) increasing the power consumption.
<whitequark>
oh.
<wpwrak>
so ... "the better it works" was a) ironic or b) a conclusion about the validity of your fix ?
<whitequark>
no, the frequency of malfunction events actually decreases with the temperature outside.
<whitequark>
or at least I have this impression
<wpwrak>
you'd enjoy the water problem we have here at the moment :) the mechanism that's supposed to control a pump that fills a water tank sometimes "sticks". fun ensues ...
<wpwrak>
(circuit breaker) could be. frozen water is probably less conductive than the liquid variant.
<wpwrak>
(water problem) so i've successfully applied the concept of "water hammer" to get it unstuck. not sure if i should explain the find points of it to anyone, though ;-)
<whitequark>
oooh
<whitequark>
that is a rather radical way of solving problems
<wpwrak>
well, the domestic variant. the speed at which i can close those valves is limited. but still :)
<wpwrak>
the nasty bit about that tank control is that the problem only shows up at night, because the frequency of normal activation decreases to a point where it can stay stuck long enough to overflow
<wpwrak>
so the first encounter was one day at 2:30 am. i think i've heard part of it some days before, but didn't realize it was actually a problem.
<wpwrak>
at least this gave me an opportunity to remind our administrator that she had (foolishly, IMHO) promised to be available 24/7 :)
<hellekin>
talking about translation, I'd be really glad to read http://www.premium-cola.de/betriebssystem and the links in English. I think it has a lot of potential for Free sw/hw business approaches
<wpwrak>
google translate ?
<wpwrak>
hmm, seems confusing
<wpwrak>
but guessable, i guess
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<hellekin>
wpwrak: yes, that can serve as a first step, but a proper translation would be nice, so that it can be reused :)
<wpwrak>
pick out the idea, apply them to the respective new context :) a 1:1 copy rarely work. well, unless you adjust all four dimensions. but then, the language wouldn't be an issue :)
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<hellekin>
yes, you're right. A reminiscence of my hate of the awful German language ;o)
<wpwrak>
once you crack the grammar, the rest is almost easy :)
<hellekin>
hehe
<whitequark>
hm interesting
<whitequark>
(that'd be re: exceptions)
<whitequark>
llvm codebase has a nice feature called ErrorOr<ty>, i.e. ErrorOr<int32_t>
<whitequark>
which holds either an error code and a human-readable description, or an arbitrary value
<whitequark>
looks like it's better than exceptions, although it is quite loquacious.
<larsc>
what does it do?
<larsc>
ah
<larsc>
the value can either be an error condition or of type ty
<whitequark>
exactly
<whitequark>
what I want is to add such a construct as a language builtin, add it to the ABI and then simply map it to exceptions
<whitequark>
it has a cost of 1 cycle per non-inlined function call on the common case. I consider this reasonable.
<whitequark>
(1 cycle on pipelined CPUs, i.e. everything.)
<larsc>
why the extra cost?
<whitequark>
larsc: checking of the return value after the call
<whitequark>
see, the implementation of exceptions with unwinder is zero-cost in the common case
<whitequark>
i.e. non-exceptional control flow
<whitequark>
there are two problems however. first, ruby has to implement certain `break's and `return's, which cause nonlocal control flow (i.e. breaks/returns from closures), effectively as exceptions
<larsc>
and how would you use it?
<whitequark>
second, the unwinder is really really unwieldy (pun intended) on the uncommon case
<whitequark>
the latency is thousands of cycles if you're lucky
<whitequark>
not to mention bloating the binary with all the tables, etc.
<whitequark>
of course, C++ doesn't have another option, as it has to support C interoperability, and even link with different languages. I'd have to translate them back and forth on FFI boundaries.
<whitequark>
larsc: (how to use it) you just raise exceptions. from the programmers' point of view, nothing has changed.
<whitequark>
the code, instead of invoking an external unwinder, then unwinds itself
<whitequark>
just as you'd do "if(!fd) return 1;" manually, but with 100% less boilerplate.
<whitequark>
thoughts?
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<larsc>
so you basically only jump one stackframe up instead of multiple
<whitequark>
the C++ unwinder still jumps stackframes one by one
<whitequark>
because it has to invoke destructors in each
<whitequark>
and, in fact, if it has *some* kind of catch/finally, including implicit, it *must* pass the control to the landing pad, because it's the code at landing pad which determines if the handlers will be ran
<whitequark>
and if the unwinding has to stop
<whitequark>
also, it actually searches the entire stack twice; "phase 1" verifies that there's a handler, and if not, calls abort()
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<larsc>
hm
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