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

Filelight

Tonight's application is Filelight. Filelight is a way to view the structure of your files. Here is a screenshot of layout of my personal computer:



The size of each block represents the percent of the space that folder or file takes up. It is a great tool for knowing where all your space is going to. Also you dont have to just scan / you can narrow it down to a single folder and even tell it specific directories to ignore.

Gnash

After the 8 billionth konqueror crash caused by flash I decided to try out Gnash the gpl flash player. It is close to being useable. Current problems:

• If a flash animation requires user input such as a "start" button it wont work. To start a movie you need to right click it and press "Play Movie". So movies basically work without issue, but if you want to play a game you are out of luck. It seems that if you actually download a movie that pressing buttons inside a movie actually works (under gnash), but it doesnt work under Klash the embedded konqueror player.
  • If you use firefox buttons also work. I think this problem only exists in klash.


• What really kills it is there is no sound support. I hear there is "some sound support" but I can't actually find a flash movie out there that plays sound under gnash.

Here are the sites I tested at and their general workiness under gnash/klash:

Site	Gnash (Firefox)	Klash (Konqueror)
YouTube	Nothing displayed.	Sorta loads but wont play and screen filled with garbage.
Google Video	Nothing displayed.	Large black square.
Albino Blacksheep	Video works perfectly but no sound.	Video will play if you right click and press "Play Movie". No sound.

Gnash/Klash 0.7.1; Kernel 2.6.16-gentoo-r9

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:

Sony caught with pants down

The craziness with the Sony DRM infested CDs just keeps getting more and more crazy. First of all the patch that Sony released did something very interesting. It allows any webpage the infected pc visits to run code. Yes I know very cute.

"CodeSupport remains on your system after you leave Sony�s site, and it is marked as safe for scripting, so any Web page can ask CodeSupport to do things. One thing CodeSupport can be told to do is download and install code from an Internet site.

You can see a picture here that shows the spread of Sony's software.

Now if all this wasn't bad enough already, people are digging into the contents of the CDs and are finding that the DRM is shipping with LGPL software hidden behind .DAT files. You can read all about that on the link I provided. You would think that since Sony has taken such a strong stance against copyright infringement they would be more careful who they license to develop code. Hopefully someone who has contributed code to lame (one of the open source projects who's license is not being complied with) sues the pants of Sony. I doubt it will happen, but I can dream.

The Freedom to Tinker people are doing a very good job of covering this mess, so check there for a more in depth look at everything that has happened.

So Sony I am officially giving you a single digit salute, get your act together!

Turner leaves LinuxWorld

We are approaching a week since the O'Gara article and this story just keeps getting more crazy. The latest twist is Faut the CEO of sys-con posted a interview at the free software magazine. The article leaves you with the impression that it was not the complaints from readers or the calls from advertisers that brought down the article, it was a massive DOS attack on the servers.

Mr Faut says he sees nothing wrong with the article, well to put it in his words:

>We ran a story entitled �Who is Pamela Jones?� The facts in the story were accurate. There was nothing in the story we thought factually, professionally, ethically or legally wrong.

So there you have it, there was nothing wrong with O'Gara's article. Now the next twist is James Turner is leaving LinuxWorld. LinuxWorld is owned by sys-con. Apparently hes been fighting with sys-con for quite some time about getting O'Gara's articles removed. I don't blame him for leaving, it shows he has alot of integrity. Infact it seems when mud gets flung, thats when peoples true characters come forth. Open Source fans are vast and far between, maybe one works at a tech mag? You can read his resignation letter here.

**Update:**
Two more resignation letters
Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Steve Suehring