The Wall

So! I went to the Roger Waters show last night at the Rod Laver Arena. Awesome show, he played the Wall, and well, built the Wall. Nice special effects on their projections. What really flipped me out was his relating the story of the Wall to the modern social situation of the world (capitalism, modern war). The faces of war victims were projected on the wall. This leads me to the Wall itself. As the Wall was being constructed during the show, every brick must have been made from some phosphorous material. When each brick was placed, it was not immediately "active" with the projection. It took a few seconds for the brick to become fully illuminated. Really cool effect. Oh yeah, and there were indoor fireworks, awesome music, and of course Waters! -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

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

Hoo Woo!

Sweet momma-mojo of crazy swing + talent + gypsy-styled awesomeness. I caught the Woo Hoo Review tonight at Bar Open by muh-self. I must say, patting-myself-on-the back, awesome choice. I was feeling kinda sleepy/tired/meh. Then ... then the music kicked in. So much so, they had me jigging around, bouncing around is more like it. I'm sold. I think I want to get a RV, Gypsie-styled, and become a nomad of FOSS. Please plplplplpplleeeassee check this band out.

-Matt