Gettin' Devo

Bought a plunger today.

-Matt

R2D2 in a Blender of Awesomesauce

So whattaya get when you combine some heavy bass, low bit quality sound (such as 8-bit Nintendo, commodores, amigas), and some creativity?  Chiptunes!  After really enjoying some of the chiptunes I heard at the Syntax 2011 demoparty.  Myself and a few friends met up at Wah Wah Lounge in the city.  Needless to say, the music was quite entertaining and very creative.  One of the artists had two Game Boys going to add on some sound.  Anyways, here is a flyer for the event:

-Matt

ANSI and RBMM

For some reason I really enjoy running the testsuite I have been putting together for my research into region based memory management (RBMM).  Maybe it's the awesome color, maybe it's the satisfaction it is reporting 100% success rate.  But either way, I must not mislead myself.  The pass/fail check the testrig checks is the number of region creations minus the number of region deletions.  Those values should balance at the end of the each test-program execution.  This, is not testing all of the features of region merging and region variable passing.  But creation-deletion is a rough metric, but good for a base test.  This isn't at full resolution, but you get the idea, let your brain do the interpolation.

-Matt

Ruxcon 2011 and GOAT-Plugs

This weekend has been totally crazy.  I loved it.  Oh, why you ask?  Ummmmmm..... Ruxcon 2011.  Great conference, lots of fantastic talks.  And just hanging out and making friends.  I must give a shout-out to all the Ruxcon crew for accepting my talk, and letting me speak, and putting together an awesome con!  The after parties were great too!  My discourse on GCC plugins, I think, went well.  Sorry for the pretty poor structure here in this post, but I think information was conveyed.  Weekend (including Friday) was awesome.

And now a shameless plug.  The slides for my talk are here:
http://users.757.org/~enferex/enferex_ruxcon2011.pdf

And the source code for GOAT-Plugs are here (GCC Obfuscation Augmentation Tools).  Sweet capra aegagrus hircus Batman! What?!  This is a set of GCC plugins (primarily proof of concept and example code I wrote so people can play with plugins).  The site has more information on what the individual plugins can do.
https://github.com/enferex/GOAT-Plugs

-Matt

Syntax 2011 Demoscene Party

Last night I, with some Ruxcon friends, ventured to the Melbourne High School in South Yarra (near the Lamborghini dealership) where the Syntax 2011 demoscene party was being hosted.  It is awesome to see the scene still fertile, even though I had never really gotten into demos when I was younger.  On the note of the High School, I will mention that this event was no where affiliated with a high school, other than it was just a place to host the geek-out.  The high school, which apparently is pretty posh was like a prison!  I'm not sure if the high wall and barbed wire is to keep kids out or crazies out.  But it doesn't help when the buildings look like guard shacks in a penitentiary.  The art and music at the show was great.  Chiptunes, ansi art, demos, oh my!  Not to mention ... I saw someone rocking some QBasic.

-Matt

Kernel and vDSO cookery...

A while back, I wrote an article on how to create a "virtual dynamic shared object" in the Linux kernel.  Anyways, I sent this to LinuxJournal, and they accepted it.  The November 2011 edition has the article "Creating a vDSO: the Colonel's Other Chicken"

-Matt

I just got bit....

... by the Noam Chomsky.  Yes! Father of CNF (Chomsky Normal Form) and linguistics guru, was speaking here at the Melbourne Convention Exhibition Center.  The Professor gave a wonderful lecture titled "Changing Contours of Global Order" in which he discussed global power, primarily driven by politics and finances.  It was so warming to hear someone, with such a down-to-earth non-conspiracy-theory tone, talk on this topic and not be a sensationalist.  He then gave a brief question and answer session.  This bad boy can speak!  For 2.5 hours!  It was way awesome.  I have been Chomskyinated.  And the tickets were gone in one day, 5000 seats!  So, how did me, el Matto, score such awesomesauce?  Well, my mega awesome friend Dale scored 'em!  I suppose if you email the wizard personally he has contacts that can get tickets, and that is what Dale did, email the Chom.

-Matt