If you have not seen yet the animated cartoons from Mark Fiore, I suggest you go and watch them now.

They are Flash-based.

New site for tracking GNOME: www.gnomedesktop.com. Beautiful.

Funny cartoons

Funny flash-based cartoons Here

On E-Mexico, I spoke to Graham Gory from the NY Times, and it just got published

Ingo Rammer

Today I had a little chat with Ingo about OpenOffice. He tried it out after a while. I left to walk around Boston in one nice day, and found this on my logs:

*Ingo* ok. I tried OpenOffice
*Ingo* I'm impressed
*Ingo* I could open a chapter from my book and everything
 (including "track changes") worked. WOW!
*Ingo* I then created an XLS which would interface with my 
SQL server and should be able to refresh the data
*Ingo* it also worked
*Ingo* hmmm ...
*Ingo* this makes me think

I hope Ingo does not mind the quote.

Open Office

Great news about Open Office 1.0: They do have a pre-compiled setup for people who want to focus only on improving a little part of it. Now, rather than having to build the entire beast, you can just compile and hack on a tiny portion!

Today Duncan and I went to see Changing Lanes. We were not too excited at the beginning, but the movie turned out to be pretty good.

Today I went to Viviane's birthday party.

Chris Lahey got us tickets to watch the midnight show of Attack of the Clones.

A great interview at the Washington Post with Ali Abunimah, creator of the Electronic Intifada.

Pictures

I found finally some pictures of the conflict. The army that receives 3 billion dollars in US tax payer money vs the rocks.

Davos

Last year I went to Davos, and had a chance to see the debate between Peres and Arafat. I did not know much about the story of Israel and Palestine at the time.

Arafat was supposed to go first, and Peres second. But Arafat had a technical problem (his translator I believe was not there). Peres went first, and delivered his speech. Not knowing much about the situation back then, I only concluded that Peres was just another politician delivering a regular speach: no content, but a lot of promises. I noticed immediately this, being a mexican. Being a mexican and living in Mexico makes you very sensitive to this particular kind of speaches: content free and promises that make you look good, but with no intentions to deliver.

I figured `This is Davos, probably every speach is just like this'. Politicians at their core.

The turn came to Arafat to speak. I do not remember the content of his speach (and I wish the speach was available on-line somewhere; Update: found a transcript), but it was a very sad thing to listen to, and it touched a nerve to listen to the story this man was telling.

Arafat was trembling, and you could see that he was a man that had a lot of pain.

Klaus Schwab closed this debate on peace, by asking each leader to say what they wished for the other country. Peres answer was exactly what you would expect from a mexican politician. I know this because I can not remember anything interesting about it.

But Arafat's reply said something that immediately caught my attention: `I wish to the Israeli people, and the Israeli children that they do not ever have to live the lives that the Palestinian people and the Palestinian children'.

This was a translation, and I do not remember the exact words, as that happened more than a year ago, and transcripts of the closing remarks are not to be found.

The Destruction of Culture

I guess children were hiding weapons of mass destruction in their paintings.

Some Real Audio about Israel Channel 2 Broadcast. About the ambulance that could not pick her wife up: `Its a mistake'. The Israel Occupation Forces must be really dumb to make 1,500 mistakes like this, either that, or they are confident that the world is stupid.

The good news is that 50,000 to 100,000 Israeli citizens (depending on your source) protested in Tel Aviv the government policy of occupation of Palestine.

The best way to fight terror is through humiliating the civil population. This is what the Israeli Defense Forces did at the Palestine Ministry of Culture. Check the details of modern warfare.

This week has been interesting.

We have been considering using a new intermediate representation for the JIT compiler in Mono because it was hard with the current framework to implement register allocation.

Dietmar has been researching the various options to move the JIT compiler to: a new intermediate representation was something we considered. Or a new "instruction scheduling" interface that would perform register allocation on "nodes" that would be semantically annotated.

This week, Dietmar had a massive breakthrough: he figured how to add spill/reloads to our current framework and flag the register usage, which allowed us to free registers (two currently) for other purposes. There was no noticeable performance degradation after this change (even without using those two registers).

Now work is moving along the lines of implementing linear register allocation (which is very fast to do, and is almost as good as register coloring).

Benchmarks

Some friends came by the office to check out how Mono was doing, and I showed them the Mono C# compiler recompiling itself on Linux. My Linux machine runs at 650Mhz and my Windows desktop runs at 800Mhz.

Timing both compiles took the same ammount of time! It had been a while since I had compared both systems, but my Linux machine was just as fast as the Windows compile.

This is not really a scientific benchmark, as both systems are loaded (Evolution, Nautilus, Galeon with 20 or so web sites open, Gaim, 20 gnome-terminals in Linux; Media Player playing, 5 copies of IE, Gui .NET Debugger, Cygwin with bunch of remote sessions and Word Viewer on the C# spec).

Paolo points out that it might be related to the fact that our Reflection.Emit library is heavily optimized (he optimized this). Also, keep in mind that in the last few weeks a lot of improvements have been done to the Mono runtime by everyone. Ever since Paolo gave us profiling in the JIT, people have been going crazy tuning their code.

Still, the major speed boost for computation intensive code will likely come from deploying linear register allocation; Paolo's CMOV patches plus Sergey's CPU-detection code.

Patrik (totte) wants to contribute 64-bit specific support for PIII machines (now that he is working for Intel).

All in all, things are looking very bright for Mono.

ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Gtk# and Windows.Forms.

Gonzalo reworked his ASP.NET parser this week to be a top-down predictive parser rather than the jay hack he used (I hever liked that approach anyways ;-). And we have some code generation going on now for ASP.NET pages.

Also Mike Kestner got some more demoable features in Gtk# this week, an interesting acomplishment because it will be our foundation for the System.Windows.Form implementation.

The hackers working on System.Data have gone crazy this week: Daniel Morgan, Duncan Mak, Rodrigo Moya and Tim Coleman have the Postgress backend for the Sql classes working (with nice test suite included ;-). Rodrigo and Gonzalo also got libGDA to be CORBA-free, so it is easier to use now as a wrappable library to implement the OleDB interfaces. So it is all very cool.

Mono on Windows

Thanks to Johannes, many people have been able to get Windows pre-compiled versions of Mono. This is pretty useful, as they can give it a try without having to download all the source code and all the development tools before they can use it (Cygwin mostly ;-).

A few people are very happy with what we have right now, and a lot of people are sad because we dont have more.

If you want to finance a particular area of Mono, get in touch with me ;-)