Troll

Last night was frikkin' awesome. After I did some research towards my PhD, I went to two Ruxmon lectures given by some people I know, Silvio and Laurent. Great talks. After that, I went to Billboards to catch Finntroll's first tour down here in Australia. They played Brisbane last night. And one word ARRRRRRRRGgggGGGHHHHHH. It was frikkin' nuts. Hummpa/folk/black metal from Finnland mostly sung in Sweedish! Lots-o fun, and the two opening acts, the local Obsidieth provided some nice modern thrash with some folkiness to it, while the Perth-based Claim the Throne played some great battle metal/folk metal.

It was the first time I had ever been to a concert, whereby I first give the venue my ticket, a crappy-printed out ticket, and after the gig they hand out true-printed-out tickets, as if you were to have bought the tickets via mail-order... great memorabilia!

-Matt

Region Based Memory Management

Aside from listening and witnessing some of the most righteous of music (I'm listening to Gogol Bordello right now), and caught some Iron Maiden, Primus, and Slayer at Soundwave last week, what have I been researching, is a question one might be asking themselves. Ok yeah that is one nasty grammatically incorrect piece of English. Well what have I been researching?

Region Based Memory Management! That's right, that is what my PhD is focused on. Sure RBMM is not fresh, but my goal is to implement it for Google's Go language. What I think will be the real unique pieces of research will be how we allocate our regions, dealing with parallization (a'la goroutines) and carrying information across multiple modules (cross-module analysis).

Backup just one second cowboy, neee hawwww! What in the name of doo dah is a region? Region based memory management is a way of managing memory at compile time, one might think of it as compile-time garabage collection. However, that is just not correct at all. At compile-time, via static analysis, dynamic memory allocation calls are located. The compiler can then emit code that will allocate objects that have the same lifetime into regions of contiguous memory. So its a neat little tango between compile-time and run-time communication. Anyways, this grouping of objects with similar lifetimes can benefit cache locality, as well as provide a fast way of deallocating objects, all at once, by just killing the region. That is fast. No need to visit each object individually and free it.

Since Go utilizes a garbage collector, we would like to leave it in place for dealing with cases where regions would live for a long, if not infinite time. Such a case would be when a global object aliases something that is dynamically allocated (in Go that would be via a call to 'new' or 'make'). Garbage collection is traditionally a "slow" process. In addition, collectors can be a burden to real-time systems, as they can slow the program's execution (or even stop it) allowing the collector time to clean-up objects that are no longer being used. Of course, there are parallel garbage collectors, which should not require a stop-the-world approach that traditional collectors implement. But, I am unaware of their actual processing capabilities/limitations.

TL;DR my thesis at this time poses to provide an elusive seductive dance between garbage collection and region based memory management. OhhhhHhh yeaaa mmmmmm mm that sounds like the sexxy.

-Matt

That's a weiner!

Soooooo, I felt like I needed to score a new pair of pants, so I went to the closeout-store and got some cheap-o black corduroys. I need to get rid of my other pants that I do not wear too often, to keep things simple. I'm not a fan of acquiring new possessions. Anyways, so after I scored some pants, I decided to go to the little market store deal. As I made my way to the store, I heard some people cheering. Then.... yes.... then.... I saw two dudes pants-less riding their bicycles. Well, ya know, this is Melbourne, so I didn't think too much of it, other than, right on dude! All this craziness while I'm carrying my new pants, because I do not see the need for the store to waste a plastic bag on me. Then... more... a whole parade, women, men, some with pants, some without, frikkin' naked just riding their bikes down the road. I kinda cheered and waved my pants at them. Welcome to Melbourne. Turns out, today is Melbourne's World Naked Bike Ride. Way-cool. I guess it takes some balls to ride a bike in public.

-Matt

I went to church yesterday, SLAYERRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRR (Soundwave was my church)

Being a music fan, and a lover of attending concerts, I often check the music schedules of places when I travel. When I got to Melbourne I soon learned of the most-awesomest musical orgy in this area, the Soundwave music festival. Well, that was my holy-land, and I proclaimed my pilgrimage would start on March the 4th. Well, yesterday, I was successful. For I have witnessed/experienced once more the love of Primus, Slayer, Iron Maiden, and some Rob Zombie. I didn't see all the shows I wanted to see, heck, there were 6 stages, but I had a blast. Note: Soundwave was one way of forcing myself to stay here in Melbs, even if I didn't like it (I scored my ticket pre-sale). So, my bud Mark picked me up at my house, we then picked up our other friend Ian, and made the pilgrimage. While things were already kickin' (the shows started at noon, we arrived at 2PM), we basically saw: DevilDriver, All that Remains, Primus, High on Fire, Murderdolls, Ill Nino, Slayer, Rob Zombie (very little of it), Queens of the Stone Age, and Kylesa.... ohhh yeah almost forgot... Iron Maiden!!!!!!!!!!! Some of the shows I have listed we did not see in entirety. But it was a blast! When Slayer hit the stage, awe man, it was crushing! The likes of data compression would have been impressed on how much space was compressed in so little time. People cover big area, slayer, people now in tightly packed area. Like one giant pulsating organism. Slayer is magic.

Much love

-Matt