LuaJIT

I have been playing around with the just in time compiler for Lua. I was excited to see there was a JIT compiler because as a purely interpreted language Lua s the fastest out there. Took me a bit to write up a working ebuild to install it on my gentoo box but it was well worth it.

I've run two benchmarks so far (CPU time)

• n-body [20,000,000] : 109.297s



• binary-trees [16] : 30.003s

To give you a comparison here are the results listed for n-body on the shootout

• Python: 2925.45



• Ruby: 5561.54



• PHP: 2665.16



• Perl: 1905.44



• Lua (nonjit): 538.00

Now, Java JDK is still way better coming in at 16.07 but still it seems LuaJIT is on the right track! Granted this is just two small tests and no one should take that as a defacto victory of luajit over perl/php/etc.

Linux becka 2.6.16-gentoo-r9 #2 PREEMPT Sun Jun 18 16:40:00 EDT 2006 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.20GHz GNU/Linux

MemTotal: 514832 kB

MemFree: 14312 kB

Google Talk embraces world

I got on this morning to see a system wide message from the owner of my jabber server stating the google talk servers are receiving IM and presence data now! I just tested it, he was right, I can im my gmail name from the server. All you gtalk users out there shoot me a im: esavior@ursine.ca

Dapper Drake

Recently I wiped my box and installed Dapper Drake. Which is Ubuntu's next major release. It is currently in heavy development so I can't recommend it to anyone who cant debug problems. The three most major problems I had to overcome are as follows (listed in order of easiest to hardest to fix):

1. The installer did not pick up my ethernet card. All I had to do was ctrl-alt-F* and modprobe the module for my card. Luckily I knew what it was.

2. Gksudo would freeze X. This was annoying because all the adminstration tool use gksudo. I found the answer to this one on the ubuntu forums. I had to downgrade libgksu to 1.2-0_1.3.1-1ubuntu6.

3. When using nvidia as my display driver, my entire machine would crash when I logged out. It did not respond to any key sequences. I think I must have done 30 hard reboots trying to fix this one. I had to completely remove any traces of the nvidia packages that ubuntu ships, then download the kernel source and headers and gcc and make and compile the kernel (no need to install it, just compile it) then get the driver package from nvidia and install it. The nvidia install will run only if X is not running and since you cant actually stop X (because that would crash your machine) if you just reboot after removing all traces of nvidia X will fail to start leaving you with a command console. Whew.

So that was my experience with installing Dapper Drake. Its also nice that ubuntu as a Xgl package in their repos. I have Xgl running at the moment. Over all its a pretty nice distro, tho I must say I miss gentoo.

Lets not forget the obligatory destop screenshot:

Nintendo flexes

A couple weeks ago Nintendo revlealed the new controller that will be shipping with the Nintendo Revolution (which I will hence forth be calling NR). You can read all about it at 1up.

I am going to admit I hated it when I first saw it. In general I hate TV and with TV comes remotes. Thus remotes are evil. Plus I have grown up holding a piece of plastic with two hands not one. But....

I have spent some time looking into the controller and just plain thinking about it and it actually has grown on me. In fact it has grown on me so much that I believe now NR will be my system of choice for gen7. There seems to be a lot of misunderstandings of what the controller can do so I wanted to post my findings and predictions and hope maybe I can convince a gamer or two along the way that just maybe the new controller doesn't completely suck.

First of all its important to understand the expander port at the bottom of the controller. In many of the pictures you see a analog stick attached to a small white box then a wire running to the controller itself. This can be removed. That is the whole point of the controller, to be able to change the controller design very easily. Nintendo has gotten the custom controller business lately. More and more games seem to be shipping with custom controllers. The extender port allows Nintendo to continue this trend in a big way. If you never have tried a game with a custom controller than I suggest going and getting Donkey Konga for Gamecube. Custom controllers are very fun and allow you to interact with a video game that has been previously impossible.

Lets say you hate the remote and everything that it represents. Well, because of the expander port you do not have to deal with it. It would be very easy for Nintendo to release a standard controller that had a Dreamcast-ish slot in the top you could plug the remote into. The remote would only stick out a inch or two. This way all of us who miss two handing it can pick up one of those (for a very cheap price).

Getting passed the extender port brings us too the postition and tilt sensors. This allows so many new ways to interact with games. I believe this will allow many genres of games to feel more "real". The most recent issue of EGM talks about the experience of playing some of the Demos. The one that stood out in my mind the most is for metroid. The analog stick was used for movement and the remote was used for looking and aiming. Imagine that for a second. Imagine how amazing a fps would be. There is a trigger on the bottom of the remote, and a rumble pack installed inside it.

Your moving down a hallway when a bad guy pops out you point your gun(remote) at him and pull the trigger. When you pulled the trigger the gun in your hand gives a hard push back. On the screen your player fires a plasma ball which is traveling in the same direction you just fired.

Its the Time crisis arcade machine mixed with Doom 3. Personally I think this way of interacting with games is much more emersive than just pounding circle. The NR controller will revolutionize how we interact with games, and will open up hundreds of possibilities for games that could have only existed in our imaginations. I can't wait.