Yeeee hawww!

Happy 4th all of my American friends. I just want to say that I genuinely believe nationalism is a terrible concept. It encourages a separation of people, and competition. In fact, Albert Einstein, whom I admire in many aspects, was against nationalism. Sure, competition is not always bad, but as a society, we should look beyond our geographical differences. The internet has made us one giant pulsating organism. But, if you are in America, blow something up for me! :-)

-Matt

Graffiti

Soooo there are more pics available at my flickr page. I found some awesome graffiti the other night will lurking around Fitzroy with a friend. We ran into this piece, and I totally flipped. While, I am sure most of you know I'm a metal head. I do like some old school rap too. This, my friends, is some epic awesome art.

I have more (and a larger version) at the URL posted earlier in this post.

-Matt

A Letter to non-Melbourninians...

This city is not pronounced Melburn, or Mel-born, rather MelBUN. Like cinnamon bun, but with mel.

A bit of insight...

Not more than a minute or two ago, talking to a good friend of mine, Aaron, I had some insight. So how do you choose a programming language to use? Never choose a language because it is what everyone else is using. Every language has a use/purpose. Rather, the concept should be thought of from a different angle, and this is the insight: "Every problem has a language." Ultimately that is what you do when you code, you are solving a problem.

-Matt

Things I Like to do... to not be an Ass...

If I have to call a institution for information, whether it's merely correcting something on a banking statement, or whatever. If the result of my inquiry is positive, I like to ask to speak to the attendant's manager. I'm sure their first reaction is like, "ohh shh crap," but then I say, "I just want to complement you" and when I speak with their supervisor, I give kudos to the attendant. Even for online "live chats" where you irc/text with a attendant, I will give them kudos on the site survey. Yeah, it feels good to not be an ass sometimes. I'm still waiting for that drawing of a unicorn riding a waffle and playing a ukulele I asked the live attendant on the website to draw for me. I need to assure myself that I have not laid any notion that the Turing test has succeeded in this case.

-Matt

SpaaaAAAHHHH... Spa

So I decided to take a break from my research to hang out with a bud at the Spa, who also happen to have known Julian Assange. It was a nice hour-and-a-half away, east of Melbourne. Near the ocean. A beautiful hot spring with man made pools and a real-life cave. It cost some to go in, but it was nice. The springs were about 35-40+ in temperature (that's 90-104+ for all the Fahrenheit-ers out there or 308.15-313.15+ for all the Kelvin-ers). Anyways, it was pretty nice, just great to get out and see more of this beautiful country. Alas, I am back home now, had two showers already, and clothes are in the washing machine. Sure, it feels kinda gross when you think about it, kinda like bathing with a bunch of strangers. I did get to sport my awesome sexxyness. Ohh yeah, it was doubly cool because some individuals believe today is the Rapture, and yeah, I was hanging out on a fault-line. Apparently their god is so evil that it is gonna kill a bunch of people by an earthquake sometime today.


UPDATE: No, it's not on a fault line. But anyways, the idea was there.


-Matt

Bottle 'o Rum and a Yo Ho Ho... and Go!

Wow, last night was a blast! Went to the Corner Hotel in Richmond (an inner-city suburb of Melbourne) to catch some Alestorm! Pirate metal, from Scotland. It was a blast. Not to mention, the line getting into the club was pretty dodgy. Lot's of drunk people pretending to be pirates, yelling at female passer-bys calling them "Wenches!" Funny, but, I'm not sure one of the girls knew what was really going on. The openers were great too, H.M.A.S Vendetta and prog-metal band Voyager. I got a ride home with some friends after the show. It was pretty late, and trams at that hour are not run to the most frequent of schedules.

Ohh yeah, and research. Well, I have decided to move most of the region based memory management concepts to the middle-end of gcc, and not the frontend. In this light, I get to work with the traditional gcc API, and write things as a plugin. GCC plugins are really nice, since you have access to all of the typical API that you would, if you were to write a traditional compiler-pass. Not to mention, you can reorder where in the pass-chain the plugin gets executed, and build times are fast, since I don't have to rebuild a stage-1 gcc each time I want to test my changes. Also, I'm sure there will be some runtime hack's I'll need to toss in, especially for Go, which is my primary target. But, working on the middle-end can aid all languages that gcc can consume. That is of course my modifications/optimization is at all beneficial.

-Matt