Pierre Phaneuf's Diary

So I went for a weekend in San Francisco... I was planning on that already, so I had packed a light raincoat and a few long-sleeved shirts, so I wouldn't look like a tourist, but as it turned out, I forgot them in Mountain View and looked like a tourist anyway! After obtaining a lender bike for the weekend (thanks Noé!) and deciding to leave my laptop at the office so I could travel light, I hopped on the Google shuttle and managed to get the wireless Internet they have onboard working on my iPod touch. This was already kind of cool, but I was totally amazed when I thought I would consult the map and I pressed the "go to my location" button, just for the heck of it, and it actually got it! I was then further amazed at how it seemed to do a kind of pseudo-tracking, updating my position every ten seconds or so... So I didn't feel quite as lost as I did the last time.

After getting together with morethanreal, dropping off my stuff at her place and inflating the bike's tires (I quickly found out that the brakes were not working well at all either, which was a bit worrying, considering how hilly San Francisco is!), we headed to some show she had heard was recommended that night. It was in a small but pretty cool art gallery, where they had a good number (maybe a hundred or so?) of speakers embedded in wooden sculptures, hanging by wires from the ceiling. The curator later told us that this is an art installation and that they are actually operational, seemed like this could be pretty cool in itself, but as it turns out, the main attraction of the night was a DJ. He was pretty competent, I have to say, and enjoyed his set, despite the fact that we had just missed a part of his performance where he donned a dinosaur suit and hugged everyone in the audience, I was a bit disappointed having missed that! It's funny how people recognize my accent, including in particular the bartender, whom I was asking for a beer. He pointed me at the menu with just two beers available (this was a temporary setup), and I told him that, well, I had no idea what either of those were. So he apologized quickly, asked me if I knew about Unibroue, to which I responded in the affirmative, and he then told me that I would find the first one horrible, and that the other one, well, wasn't nearly as good as Unibroue, but would probably not offend me too much. Heh!

After getting back to morethanreal's place, there was some inevitable discussion about music, of course, and I introduced her to the new Apple Remote application for her iPhone. She fell in love at first sight, it would seem, she even moved her iPhone dock to put it beside her bed! We were pretty tired, but she had put on Black Eyes's eponymous album, and it is quite good, we just had to finish it before going to sleep.

The next day, I wasn't feeling too sore from sleeping her couch, which was good, because we were heading out to Tour de Fat! There was a brief stop for chocolatines and cappuccinos, of course, it wouldn't have been civilized otherwise. There were crazy bikes, crazy bands, and crazy beer! Much fun was had, including bouncing around with (very) limited success on a pogo-stick. I then accompanied morethanreal to a tattooing session (hers, not mine!), which was pretty cool, including a pretty classic Californian laid back surfer artist. I then headed back with her to pick up my stuff, had some (spicy!) burrito on 16th, then headed to jbdeboer's place, where I elected to stay that night (thanks, by the way!). That place is up. Very, very up. Like, on top. Yowzer. I had some idea of taking a cab from there to the DNA Lounge, but I was too wiped and gave up (fail!).

On the upside of being at the top is the good view (hmm, there's the view to Lafayette Park, which can be interesting according to the "near here" feature of some random iPod Flickr app!), although it was a bit cloudy. Biking down Gough was mental, though! I realized at some point that with the intersections being flat, that I couldn't see past them! All of that while going upward of 40 kph, of course. That led me eventually to a nice breakfast at Cafe Petra, since there was too many people at Ritual (and I don't think they have food either). I biked around the Mission, dropped by Good Vibrations (got myself a book), then back up around Market and Stockton, where I resisted the siren call of the Apple Store. I managed to get some excellent coffee at Bluebottle Coffee, once more, and then eventually got lost in the Tenderloin without realizing it, while I was taking photos. It was very sketchy, especially with my big SLR camera hanging from my neck.

Monday, the excitement level was much lower as I went to Barefoot Coffee Roasters with a team-mate who is a fan of good coffee. It is also very good, although I preferred Bluebottle's. As it is customary in Mountain View, we were back home before 10pm.

The next day, we went for dinner on Castro (in Mountain View) at an Italian restaurant with a very colourful owner, who seems to be a big George Michael fan. Excellent service, though, setting up a table just for us (my other team-mates are known there, it would seem), and of course, singing at the table by the owner. There was some ice cream after, and some of us were rebellious and went home past 11pm!

Now, I'm about to be taken out to In-N-Out, which I'm told I just have to go to. Sounds questionable, but hey, I've done worse.

We moved into our new office this week (photos courtesy of MAD, thanks!), and it's pretty damned awesome! Considering the small size of the office (in number of people), it is extremely nice, the food is great, and so is the view (we had a nice view from the 24th floor, but now we're more "in the action", I like that better). Plus, we can easily reach the wifi from the pub nearby, hehe!

While the move was ongoing, we had an off-site activity on Île-Ste-Hélène that was pretty cool, involving, among other things, geo-caching, which I had never done before and is a lot of fun. It can be surprisingly difficult to find a small item, even when given the location within 10 feet! I bike there from home, and it was particularly nice, hitting 40 kph for fairly long stretches and all. On the return trip I was pretty confident that I'd get to the dinner's location first, but when I found out that the likely reason for my swift arrival was a wicked strong headwind, I wasn't so confident anymore. I did arrive first anyway, but I'm told they took a brief detour in a sketchy St-Henri bar first. Crazy people!

Today, we also obtained a vacuum cleaner at home. You're probably thinking that this doesn't really sound all that exciting, and normally, I'd agree with you, but that was before I met the Dyson DC20. As far as box-opening experience goes, relatively speaking (let's face it, it's still just a vacuum cleaner), they're taking lessons from Apple, it looks like. One of the selling points is how it can fit into a small space, and when I got the box, I was a bit worried that it'd be missing, you know, maybe the whole thing?!? But no, it was all in there, and even when assembled, it packs into almost no space, and is very cleverly engineered.

Tomorrow, a rather late in the making haircut.

Uh, there was a traffic jam on my small street today when I left for work?!? Complete with no less than two city buses, trying to work around the cranes and other construction equipment currently cluttering the street... Weird.

Oh, man, I've been meaning to post for exactly two weeks, yet didn't. I did this thing where I thought about hypothetical posts that I'd be writing while on the metro and biking, then forgot to actually post it.

It helps that there has been a fair deal of biking going on, beginning with what I called the Weekend of Doomed Awesomeness for a bit (if only in my head). This started by going to Mutek's Nocturne 3 with tygrbabe on the Friday. Then, went to the Mondial de la bière with azrhey in the afternoon, after which tygrbabe joined us to go to Mutek's Nocturne 4. How to follow this best? Sunday, I showed up at cpirate's place almost in time (9am-ish, after going to bed at 5am!) for, you know, a little Tour de l'Île (with scjody as well), after which we stopped for well-deserved poutine at La Banquise (and a coffee, so I could stay conscious). Then (the same day!), azrhey and I met with rezendi for a quick pint before catching Le Salaire de la peur at Cinéma du Parc. In case I might have survived, tygrbabe invited me to see She Wants Revenge for my birthday (got me brownies too, woot!), on the Monday evening (we were joined by fuzzyilla too, ahoy!).

While I thought Nocturne 3 was quite excellent (Millimetrik and Modeselektor were awesome, Kid Koala very good, although I've seen better sets from him, and the other bands were quite fun too), Nocturne 4 let me a little bit down. Most of the bands didn't "click" with me much, and the whole programme was running late, which combined with the act I wanted to see most (Deadbeat, was excellent!) played last, made for leaving the place extremely late. Still, it was nice too, I just wish I could have slept in the next day!

I'll have to agree with tygrbabe, She Wants Revenge was good, but they'd have to put out a killer album for me to go to their next show. Some of their opening bands were really wacky and not all that good either, including a "punk" band that sounded like Avril Lavigne on speed.

So after that, I, uh, didn't do much for the two last weeks, as you might have guessed. I did bike to work a lot (for which there was tremendously good weather!), played with my own early birthday gift to myself (a new top-end 24" iMac, Core 2 Duo 3.06 GHz and GeForce 8800 GS, smokin'!) and coded (mostly on Quadra, more than 20 commits just this weekend!). There was a visit from musicdieu and cpirate, watching of Euro Cup games, and Munchkins.

azrhey and I went out on the city last Saturday, was quite nice, and I got myself a nice watch (Danish design and titanium? sign me up!). We ended up going to the cinema and watching You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Yes, I know, I know, but it's actually pretty funny, mostly due to the weird cultural references (fizzy bubbles and hummus, baby!), and was saved because I have a small idea of what's going on in that culture, and would probably have been even funnier if I was actually part of it. I don't really expect it to do well, although there's a fair share of stuff that a lot of North American would find funny (silly fight scenes, sexual jokes), but I laughed really hard at the hacky sack, fish and hummus jokes, myself.

On a closing note, I've had a weird email recently from OkCupid (which I do find entertaining, for various reasons). I often get the "come back to our site so you can see and click ads" emails, but this one was different, telling me that there was one particular user I should message where there was some sort of category 5 crazy outlier match. Apparently, the love of my life is in New York state, which is too bad, because I'm not, ha! It then showed the usual "you might be interested in those people" bunch of people, but as opposed to the usual, this morning it was a bunch of my friends, so, well, I guess it sorts of works? I do like my friends, they're nice and everything. :-P

Ok, so after going to Festival Kinetik last week (where I nearly snapped my neck ogling!), I booked up this weekend pretty solid: going to Mutek Nocturne 3 and 4 (Friday and Saturday), the Beer Fest on Saturday, the Tour de l'île on Sunday and She Wants Revenge on Monday. It will be both intense and awesome, I think!

Gifted myself with an iMac 24" this weekend (the big one with the GeForce!), ostensibly for my birthday, and managed to play some Battlefield 2142, for, uh, "testing". The testing is pretty conclusive, and it's quite awesome. And, oh, so silent, yet so powerful! I will also be looking forward faster compiling on my old laptop through Xgrid.

I've also come up with a design in my head for doing zero-overdraw overlapping windows with support for alpha transparency. I'm dreaming of a "Quadra HD", and while I don't really know what it'd look like, I know that according to historical figures for development speed, we should release that around 2012 or so! I also got a "pre-opened" gamepad last week, which will allow for adding support for it in Quadra, which has been requested since more or less forever. That could be here as soon as 2009! ;-)

Being the end of the world and all, I figure I should go into a bit more details, especially as omnifarious went as far as commenting on this life-altering situation.

He's unfortunately correct about a shared-everything concurrency model being too hard for most people, mainly because the average programmer has a lizard's brain. There's not much I can do about that, unfortunately. We might be having an issue of operating systems here, rather than languages, for that aspect. We can fake it in our Erlang and Newsqueak runtimes, but really, we can only pile so many schedulers up on each others and convince ourselves that we still make sense. That theme comes back later in this post...

omnifarious's other complaint about threads is that they introduce latency, but I think he's got it backward. Communication introduces latency. Threads let the operating system reduce the overall latency by letting other runs whenever it's possible, instead of being stuck. But if you want to avoid the latency of a specific request, then you have to avoid communication, not threads. Now, that's the thing with a shared-everything model, is that it's kind of promiscuous, and not only is it tempting to poke around in memory that you shouldn't, but sometimes you even do it by accident, when multiple threads touch things that are on the same cache line (better allocators help with that, but you have to be careful still). More points in the "too hard for most people" column.

His analogy of memcached with NUMA is also to the point. While memcached is at the cluster end of the spectrum, at the other end, there is a similar phenomenon with SMP systems that aren't all that symmetrical, multi-cores add another layer, and hyper-threading yet another. All of this should emphasize how complicated writing a scheduler that will do a good job of using this properly is, and that I'm not particularly thrilled at the idea of having to do it myself, when there's a number of rather clever people trying to do it in the kernel.

What really won me over to threading is the implicit I/O. I got screwed over by paging, so I fought back (wasn't going to let myself be pushed around like that!), summoning the evil powers of mlockall(). That's where it struck me that I was forfeiting virtual memory, at this point, and figured that there had to be some way that sucked less. To use multiple cores, I was already going to have to use threads (assuming workloads that need a higher level of integration than processes), so I was already exposed to sharing and synchronization, and as I was working things out, it got clearer that this was one of those things where the worst is getting from one thread to more than one. I was already in it, why not go all the way?

One of the things that didn't appeal to me in threads was getting preempted. It turns out that when you're not too greedy, you get rewarded! A single-threaded, event-driven program is very busy, because it always finds something interesting to do, and when it's really busy, it tends to exhaust its time slice. With a blocking I/O, thread-per-request design, most servers do not overrun their time slice before running into another blocking point. So in practice, the state machine that I tried so hard to implement in user-space works itself out, if I don't eat all the virtual memory space with huge stacks. With futexes, synchronization is really only expensive in case of contention, so that on a single-processor machine, it's actually just fine too! Seems ironic, but none of it would be useful without futexes and a good scheduler, both of which we only recently got.

There's still the case of CPU intensive work, which could introduce trashing between threads and reduced throughput. I haven't figured out the best way to do this yet, but it could be kept under control with something like a semaphore, perhaps? Have it set to the maximum number of CPU intensive tasks you want going, have them wait on it before doing work, post it when they're done (or when there's a good moment to yield)...

omnifarious is right about being careful about learning from what others have done. Clever use of shared_ptr and immutable data can be used as a form of RCU, and immutable data in general tends to make good friends with being replicated (safely) in many places.

One of the great ironies of this, in my opinion, is that Java got NIO almost just in time for it to it to be obsolete, while we were doing this in C and C++ since, well, almost forever. Sun has this trick for being right, yet do it wrong, it's amazing!

It was extremely brief, and you had to pay very close attention, but the sugar season's passed now, and thankfully, azrhey and I managed to catch some sugar shack action, thanks to my dad inviting us over to his annual thing (which went better than the last time, as I wasn't dying this time!). It was what, azrhey's third time in a sugar shack in her life? How do they manage over there? ;-)

I went for a lightning trip to New York City, where I thought it'd be a good idea to get a room at the Hotel Chelsea, since, you know, the office is in Chelsea, that'd be convenient, no? I did listen to punk music, but I don't remember stabbing anyone. I didn't write a novel either, but I did write a small piece of code, related to my most recent ranting, where my hack gets similar latency on event handling as busy waiting on the event queue, while using less CPU (and much lower latency, by multiple frames!) than SDL's built-in SDL_WaitEvent.

This last item results in myself restraining myself very hard from going off and making a high-performance game library. Add it to the list of things I could do very well, but that I shouldn't be doing because it's useless. Argh.

azrhey and I went to see Iron Man, which was pretty damned good, I think. I think that it was a good introduction, although the battle at the end was a bit contrived and short on time. I think Justin Hammer might have been a better choice, with multiple supporting bad guys, but Iron Monger does make for big badaboom. I liked the hints at War Machine, and the small (in that movie, at least) involvement of S.H.I.E.L.D..

I'm now about to register for the Bike Fest, which inconveniently overlaps with MUTEK. The day ride doesn't pose a problem, but I really like the night ride, and that will obviously mean that I'll be missing out on something else... We'll see.

It's been sort of a busy week, but in a good way, for the most part.

There was an unusually high amount of the tygrbabe this week, having been to her DJing night at the Katacombes, her visiting us at home, then her birthday, then more of her birthday (which involved a bunch of hot people hanging out at my place, so yay!)... That's cool, I think. We've got bait for more visits, in the form of tons of Torchwood and the Dieux du Stade DVD (which might also work very well with archdiva, hehehe!).

In her most recent visit, she left me some computer hardware to fix up, which is kind of amusing, because we're currently being invaded by electronic equipment already! I got a new television delivered Wednesday, got all sorts of cabling to hook my computers to it (gotta be able to watch the Torchwood!), and we got a PVR cable box (I'd do without broadcast television myself, but azrhey is a fan, and there's got to be something on?). This means that the place is a bit of a disaster area at the moment, while I try to put all this together in a sensible way.

For anyone looking to get some audio/video cabling, I'd like to point out something rather weird. As you may know (well, if you're still reading past the previous sentence), there's some serious price-gouging going on with A/V cabling. In some cases, it can be understood (analog signals are sensitive to interferences of all sorts, better shielding and conductors do make a difference), but in the modern world of fully-digital HDMI cables, WTF? Unless you have a freakin' ion storm in your living room, the very cheapest digital cable will get you the best possible quality (unless it doesn't, in which case it'll either be very obviously horrible, or outright won't work). Stores liked to sell high-margins cabling, though, so they're still at it anyway. So, I set out to find the cheapest digital cabling possible.

You'd think that Apple would be in on the price gouging, no? Well, apparently, Apple is a bit schizophrenic in that regard. Future Shop had this 4 feet HDMI to DVI cable, which is the cheapest of that type they had (there were some cheaper HDMI-DVI adapters, but with the cable, came out more expensive). At the Apple Store, they have this 2 metre (6.56 feet) HDMI to DVI cable. As I said, as long as they'll work, the image quality will be identical, and the one at the Apple Store is longer. The Apple Store one is also only $19.95, compared to $70.99 for the (shorter) one at Future Shop. That's less than a third the price!

So, less than a third of the price for better stuff? Uh, a bit out of character for Apple, but keep it up, I could use more of that (if only as an "inspiration" for other stores)!

Explored New York a bit yesterday with some of my hosts, which was pretty cool and impressive. Already, from the apartment, there is a view on the Manhattan skyline, and getting there, there's a definite feeling of being in a Big Place. That's why I took my 14mm/f2.8 super-wide-angle lens as my only lens, which was a bit of a weird choice. I was glad I had it for some stuff, but other times, the thing I wanted to photography as so small and far away! A cool lens, but I'll need to get used to it, for sure.

andukar and a_chatterbox took me out for a late breakfast first, at Max Brenner on 2nd Avenue (they wanted to take me to some other place, but it was full). They're pretty serious about their chocolate, and while the breakfast was nothing too special, the included cappuccino was actually pretty good, while they didn't let me upgrade to a mocha, it came with two small chunks of chocolate, which I promptly threw in the coffee. Tasty!

We then headed to the Grand Central Terminal, where some photos were taken, and the acoustics of the archway next to the lower concourse was tried out.

We walked up 5th Avenue, seeing a vast penny collection set up at the Rockefeller Center, onward to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. While the store itself is nothing all that special (it's just larger than the one I had seen before, but not huge either), the architecture of it is indeed pretty damned cool. I took advantage of the almost-collapsing US economy to buy a few items, saving something like 30% over the price in Canada. Haha, chumps!

We then walked through Central Park for a bit. This is such a great idea, dropping a huge park in the centre of a city! Definitely the hallmark of an awesome city (check!).

After a while there, a_chatterbox announced that hot chocolate was called for, as it was a bit chilly, which I could only concur with. So we headed to the Chocolate Bar, where I had a nice hazelnut-flavoured hot chocolate with a chipotle/cinnamon brownie to go with it. Oh yeah.

After a quick visit to the Google office (I walked in front of ze_dinosaur's office, heh!) to figure out where we'd eat, we set our (metro) sails for Times Square. Wow! The people! The lights! At that point, I was glad I had my super-wide-angle lens, because this place is very big. Like, a lot. And there are people. And lights.

Dinner time being the time, we went to a Thai place not very far from their apartment, where we were joined by caffeinemonkey, for maximum classiness (first question to him: "was it you or mrwise who pooped in the shower?"). Had some pretty good garlic and pepper beef, with a good helping of wine (especially as I had uncovered a plot to get me drunk the following night!).

We went back and watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which was quite hilarious. I had never even heard of it, but I definitely recommend it!

Good thing that we did some good walking yesterday, because this morning, the weather is pretty crappy (rainy).

apenwarr: No kidding. Ohh, C++ is so complicated and messy... This is so much easier... Except... Yaaaarrrrghhhhh!

People, if Perl, of all bloody languages/runtimes can do it in a less complicated way (pure reference counting with weak references, deterministic finalization), you're doomed.

Perl. Simpler. Think about that.