/proc/self

Summer

2009-06-12T22:34:00.003-04:00

Here comes summer, a season of departures, when the Welly lads are setting out for Hong Kong and New York; and a start of adventures, when two dear friends have just got married and are leaving Beijing for the South. Wish you all good luck!

Congrats to Zhenyu

2009-05-04T03:09:00.003-04:00

... who has successfully and completely turned into a family man!

It seems that everyone is getting married in 2009...

maxrss

2009-03-01T05:07:00.012-05:00

The ru_maxrss field in struct rusage provides a convenient way to measure peak memory usage of a program (via getrusage, wait4, or simply `/usr/bin/time -p') on BSD systems, including Mac OS X. According the man page, ru_maxrss represents `the maximum resident set size utilized (in kilobytes)'.

Let's try it on Mac OS X (Leopard, 10.5.6).

$ /usr/bin/time -l uname -v
Darwin Kernel Version 9.6.0: Mon Nov 24 17:37:00 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.9.59~1/RELEASE_I386
        0.00 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys
    385024  maximum resident set size
...

Do you really think the simple `uname' could take 385,024 KB (376 MB) memory ? It also reports 282624 maxrss for a small C program that only contains an empty main and is compiled by `gcc -O2'.

Here is a comparison.

FreeBSD 7.1, kern_clock.c

 527 rss = pgtok(vmspace_resident_count(vm));
 528 if (ru->ru_maxrss < rss)
 529   ru->ru_maxrss = rss;

Note pgtok is often defined as follows.
#define pgtok(x) ((unsigned long)(x) * (PAGE_SIZE / 1024))

Mac OS X 10.5.6, kern_exit.c

 612 p->p_ru->ru_maxrss = tinfo.resident_size;

task.c

1205 if (flavor == TASK_BASIC2_INFO_32) {
       ...
1210   basic_info->resident_size = pmap_resident_max(...);
1211 } else {
1212   basic_info->resident_size = pmap_resident_count(...);
1213 }
1214 basic_info->resident_size *= PAGE_SIZE;

Does Apple forget `/ 1024' or something? Hope Linux would not give a strange number.

Washington, D.C.

2008-11-29T00:53:00.009-05:00

I visited the turbo couple at Silver Spring, MD for thanksgiving (zig happened to be there, too). After enjoying a perfect homemade hot pot, we went to Washington, D.C. the next day. It was so crowded everywhere, from metro stations to museums. It made me feel even sicker when facing crazy drivers and policemen carrying guns...

The Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool, as well as the Capitol Hill far behind and the National Museum of Natural History on the left (where we had lunch).

Another shoot.

The Lincoln Memorial and the National World War II Memorial.

The names of the States in the entablature of the Lincoln Memorial. Here goes Massachusetts, MDCCLXXXVIII (1788), when it became the sixth state to ratify the Constitution.

Squirrels everywhere. Here is one near the Reflecting Pool.

The White House and a Christmas tree.

Another Christmas tree in the Reagan airport.

One Day Off

2008-11-17T01:14:00.005-05:00

Ah, take a breath of fresh air around Boston and Cambridge (with a visitor, amber) after the deadline, more to come though. It is getting so old in Boston. (but why 20 °C yesterday!)

Harvard Memorial Church (bird's eye).

The harbor (near the Maverick station, blue line).

Pity that I have missed shooting the colorful fall...

When You Believe

2008-10-16T23:02:00.004-04:00

Just can't believe some boy can sing the Oscar-winning song "When You Believe" (the main theme of the film "The Prince of Egypt") so well.

David Archuleta

Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey

He has this incredible voice. Enjoy more in Heaven and his new single Crush.

Time for the 90's.

Mad World

2008-10-12T01:05:00.004-04:00

This is actually a pretty old song. I like the version performed by Gary Jules.

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places
Worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going no where
Going no where

Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression
No expression
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow
No tomorrow
No tomorrow

And I find I kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very very
Mad world
Mad world

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday
Happy birthday
And I feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen
Sit and listen

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me
No one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson
Look right through me
Look right through me

And I find I kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very very
Mad world
Mad world
Enlarging your world
Mad world

Can't believe being a nearly 30-year-old, rotten guy, he is eating rubbish, taking classes, and even doing homework every day!

Gloucester

2008-09-23T00:42:00.008-04:00

Had a nice day for the CSAIL Student Workshop at Gloucester, MA, though pity bad weather again. Thanks to the organizers!

The workshop was held here, pretty cold even inside!

Some CSAILers.

Birds in fall.

Last but not least, the lobster dinner!

It was also great to see several 9#ers there: justin, sola, theorist, and zig.

Newbury

2008-09-12T22:40:00.013-04:00

Here's the group outing today, at Newbury, NH, about two hours drive from Boston. Thanks to Silas for driving! Thanks to Frans for inviting us!

Lake Sunapee, pity the bad weather though. Actually that's just an island faraway in the photo; the lake is pretty large.

Aleksey was sailing.

Tubing is absolutely an awesome sport! Frans drove his motorboat and one tuber grabbed a tube behind it. Jeremy, Neha, I, Yandong, and Aleksey enjoyed it in turn, reeeeally cool! Besides advising students the almighty Frans was so good at cycling and making waves to throw them off!

Newport

2008-08-16T22:06:00.006-04:00

Just enjoyed a nice weekend at Newport, Rhode Island with mystery and riki. Many thanks to mystery for driving.

We took the Cliff Walk, which starts from Memorial Blvd. We exited around Marine Ave. There are many beautiful mansions along the way.

BTW, we even saw a rainbow on the way back to Boston. :-)

The Longest Day

2008-08-09T23:06:00.004-04:00

36 hours for the Saturday: 12:00 pm at Beijing, 9:00 am at San Francisco, 8:00 pm at Boston.

On the way to SF, i saw the second sunrise today.

Haikou Bay

2008-08-02T11:59:00.003-04:00

A walk along the shore with my family.

I love sunsets. :-)

Replay

2008-07-29T23:25:00.007-04:00

It's so perfect that our replay work R2 finishes with an OSDI acceptance. Just got the news right before saying goodbye to my friends at MSR Asia. Awesome the past two years!

Silas's paper on multicore OS was also accepted. Congratulations!

Welly: Rethink the BBS

2008-07-29T01:41:00.013-04:00

In the past month I have been hacking the Welly BBS term client while waiting for the visa approval. I was fortunate to work with some amazing people: aqua, gtCarrera, and KOed, who are nice, young, and smart. I envy them. :-)

The project was initially a fork of Nally, which was developed by yllan and now is maintained by jjgod. It uses Core Text for rendering, much faster than state-of-the-art (ATSUI based) BBS terms on Mac OS X. Nevertheless, we don't want a general terminal application; there are enough good ones. Welly is tailored for exploring BBS, where we can also try fancy stuff for fun, such as Cover Flow and Quick Look integration that I finished recently.

One day Geoff asked me why Chinese prefer such old-fashioned term BBS sites. Yes, this is a little bit weird. It seems that most people, particularly on-campus students, prefer telnet access and the terminal way to present and exchange ideas. Some even spend hours there every day, as I did. We are using terminal emulators that have a history of more than 20 years, though they may be implemented via modern technology. Many term BBS sites also provide Web access and may use AJAX extensively, however, the core parts are derived from aged systems, mostly either Firebird or Maple.

I can still remember the days in 2005, which consequently drove me to get down to preparing for GRE and brought me two awesome years at MSR Asia as well. It changed anything, as least to myself --- I once had a dream of having a good job and a stable life in the city but gave up after the hard time. Thanks to better who stood with me. The immediate issue of Sci-Fi World, the most popular Chinese sci-fi magazine, came up with a Ma Boyong's novel titled The City of Silence, which quoted from the famous song by Paul Simon:

People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

I guess I might be overacted at that time, but there is no turning back.

Here is the move within a couple of weeks: Beijing => Haikou => Beijing => San Francisco => Boston.

Apologize

2008-06-01T11:07:00.003-04:00

Apologize, a song.

I'm holding on your rope
Got me ten feet off the ground
And I'm hearing what you say
But I just can't make a sound

You tell me that you need me
Then you go and cut me down, but wait
You tell me that you're sorry
Didn't think I'd turn around, and say

That it's too late to apologize, it's too late
I said it's too late to apologize, it's too late

I'd take another chance, take a fall
Take a shot for you
And I need you like a heart needs a beat
But it's nothing new

I loved you with the fire red
Now it's turning blue, and you say
Sorry like the angel
Heaven let me think was you, but I'm afraid

Once

2008-05-22T10:31:00.007-04:00

May 19-21 is the mourning period for quake victims, who speak the same dialect as I do. I was born there and sometimes lived in Chengdu during childhood. My cousins there have been telling me all about the horrible days. I wish them the best of luck.

Btw, got a nice birthday gift this morning, the music CD and DVD of the film Once including the song Falling Slowly. Thank you, my friend.

Falling Slowly

2008-04-17T14:42:00.012-04:00

Falling Slowly, performed by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová in the movie Once, is the recent Oscar winner, the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

I don't know you
But I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me
And always fool me
And I can't react
And games that never amount
To more than they're meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You've made it now

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can't go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I'm painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It's time that you won

Falling slowly sing your melody
I'll sing along

The second sleepless night this week, after listening to such amazing movie songs. Smile with tears, and sing with thanks and hope.

Building CIL on Leopard

2008-04-11T05:51:00.007-04:00

Following the standard configure/make approach to build CIL on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), one may encounter the following error:

Compiling           obj/x86_DARWIN/feature_config.ml to bytecode 
File "obj/x86_DARWIN/feature_config.ml", line 4, characters 1-2:
Unbound value n
make: *** [obj/x86_DARWIN/feature_config.cmo] Error 2

It is due to the echo command in the file Makefile.in (around line 230):
echo -n " (* EXTRAFEATURES: *)" >> $@
Because Leopard follows the UNIX specification more strictly, the syntax echo -n is no longer supported by /bin/sh.

To fix it, replace echo -n with printf, or use /bin/echo, or just omit the -n option.

See #1940018.

Gong Qi

2008-04-07T10:32:00.006-04:00

Some pictures shot on Feb 10 during the Chinese new year, at Baoluo, Wenchang, Hainan. It's my friend Feng's hometown; I went there with him to see the famous "Gong Qi" ceremony.

"Gong" (literally, "lord") may refer to a chief or a leader of the early migrates to the Hainan island from the Mainland (one thousand years ago? not sure), as some people tell. If so, I guess the purpose of the ceremony may be similar to the thanksgiving. But some other people say it is related to Xian Furen (Madam Xian), a leader of the Yue peoples in southern China (in the 6th century), and the Feng family is her descendants.

Every year a lot of people come back from cities and share the time.

Fireworks after the ceremony.

Feng's little boy. Cute? :-)

The quiet village.

New Labels

2008-03-19T07:21:00.009-04:00

To be consistent with the name of this blog that embraces a filesystem naming style, I am introducing the following labels for my posts.

/dev/random, replaces "code", which is inspired by the homonymous column in the USENIX magazine ;login:.

/media, replaces "movies" and "music" for entertainment.

/mnt, for mount points, replaces "travel". Of course it includes trips more than those to mountains.

/usr/X11R7, where the X Window System resides, replaces "photos". When will it be replaced by "/usr/X11R8"?

/var, replaces "uncategorized" for scribblings, e.g., the current post.

Small Patch for bddbddb

2008-03-02T04:44:00.004-05:00

Here's a small bug for bddbddb. If there is a small sized domain (e.g., only 2 functions in the Domain F), and some constant strings in a Datalog file (e.g., 4 additional function names used in the rules), the resulting size of the domain will be out of range (e.g., the size of F is 6 rather than 2, which requires a different bit size) and an exception is raised (e.g., Exception in thread "main" net.sf.javabdd.BDDException: 6 is out of range).

Usually this doesn't hurt because the size of a domain is large enough and it's unlikely to cross the boundary of the BDD size. Though it would fail to compute a call graph for a simple hello-world program.

A possible patch for the method namedConstant in net/sf/bddbddb/Domain.java.

Index: Domain.java
===================================================================
--- Domain.java (revision 654)
+++ Domain.java (working copy)
@@ -114,6 +114,8 @@
        if (false && map == null) throw new
IllegalArgumentException("No constant map for Domain " + name + " in
which to look up constant " + constant);
        if (map == null) map = new IndexMap(name);
        if (!map.contains(constant)) System.err.println("Warning:
Constant " + constant + " not found in map for relation " + name);
-        return map.get(constant);
+        int index = map.get(constant);
+        size = BigInteger.valueOf(index + 1L).max(size);
+        return index;
    }
 }

New Macbook Pro

2008-02-27T04:07:00.006-05:00

I was told by fishy yesterday that the new Macbook Pro was out, 15-inch screen, clocked at 2.4GHz, with 2G memory and 200G hard drive. Cool. Say goodbye to my 4-year-old PowerBook, which has been crashing since last September. It's time to get in and code on a new laptop. :-)

Another Acceptance

2008-01-28T07:18:00.000-05:00

My paper on region safety has been accepted to PLDI 2008. Many thanks to sunnymonkey!

A Little Confused

2008-01-10T07:52:00.000-05:00

I caught cold two days ago, which makes me feel extremely bad the whole day. Frans gave an overview on his recent research projects this afternoon, and later we had a talk. He's really really a smart and amazing guy. Some random thoughts.

What can be done in systems research? A new language, a new library, or a new virtual machine, well, I'm afraid it doesn't matter. What are the "right" programming abstractions for systems? Just to build and gain experience? We all agree that MapReduce is perfect, because it is simple, expressive, practical, say, it works! Dynamo and GFS are great, but they are lessons taught by the industry and cannot be cloned by research institutes. I also think Sinfonia is a nice research project; the minitransaction thing is cool and general. What else? DHT? Yet another file system? Another D³S? What lessons can be learned after building prototype systems on campus and what would it contribute to the community?

Analysis, though sometimes like bug-finding "evil" on the other hand, would at least have a formal model, which is really interesting to apply some algorithms on. Furthermore, they could provide some insights on computer systems (though not always), i.e. what's the right/wrong thing. I'm still trying to figure out whether they are useful for building systems. Exploring these abstractions is fun, but I'm afraid building is as important as analysis. Anyway, I don't feel good.

Vacation

2007-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

Now I'm the only one in the cubicle. I have to come to Sigma because my laptop has been down for months.

riki arrived at Beijing on Friday from New York. He should be enjoying sunshine at Haikou. Have a good time, dude. :-) nowhereman said he would be back in Jan or Feb for vacation, after his visit to Stanford.

I have to wait for a while and further plan my vacation for the Chinese New Year in Feb. Frankly speaking, I don't feel good about the CCTV New Year's Gala. They would usually say that "we Chinese would eat Jiaozi at Chinese New Year eve; we Chinese would bla bla bla...", but I'm afraid it's nothing for a southerner. It's even worse for the ridiculous words and artificial smiles that pervade.

Some wild thoughts.

While writing some text processing scripts in Python, I was again annoyed by the poor performance due to the stupid global interpreter lock on a multi-core server. The threading problem is painful for scripting languages like Python and Ruby. I cannot believe that scripts could only be executed in such an inefficient way, just for compatibility with C libraries, even if it's claimed by some famous language designer. If it would not be, why not make something to be?

I have been trying to dive into program analysis for some time, only getting some initial ideas. It looks to me that graph reachability presents a general framework in reasoning about program behaviors, while modelling and solving the constraints in a graph would be fun. Maybe I should focus on mining the high-level systems semantics that can be manifested from the constraints. It has been a fairly long time since I shot photos. I didn't even take any photo this fall, the best season in Beijing, instead busy with coding, debugging, writing, which never ends.

Two Papers Accepted

2007-12-21T23:26:00.000-05:00

Both my hang analysis paper submitted to EuroSys 2008 and the online predicate checking paper submitted to NSDI 2008 have been accepted. I'm so grateful for my friends and colleagues at Tsinghua and Microsoft. Bin and Lex's VOD work has also been accepted to EuroSys. Congrats!

What gold saint are you?

2007-12-11T10:53:00.000-05:00

Well, sometimes it works...

What gold saint are you? Your Result: Gemini Saga You are the golden saint of Gemini. Very powerful but inwardly perturbed. You seek to do the right thing but your inner ambitions will often get the best of you. You are always two minds about everything but always do the right thing in the end.
Aries Mu
Aquarius Kamus
Virgo Shaka
Aiolia Leo
Libra Dohko
Scorpio Milo
Capricorn Shura
What gold saint are you? Create MySpace Quizzes

Break Changes in VC9

2007-12-08T04:15:00.000-05:00

I've been using VC9 (Orcas, or 2008) for a couple of weeks. Well, let's just say maybe newer is better. Here lists some break changes in VC CRT. The list is not complete, at least in my experience of building a number of open source packages. VC CRT misses a bundle of POSIX headers (e.g. stdint.h) and functions (too many!), and it's likely sticking to this tradition. Er, I'd rather say it's also improving. Some packages using libxml may fail to compile on VC9 due to one of the improvements: libxml defines a macro vsnprintf to _vsnprintf for VC (why adding the underscore!), but VC9 provides both functions while previous versions only provide the latter. So the macro redefinition would cause trouble on VC9.

It's said that the next VC release will start using Phoenix as the backend engine. That's good news. But I don't really feel good about the Phoenix IR. Why is it so complicated as most other Microsoft products are? It's ugly. It's hard to analyze and understand. It's even not complete; much important information remains missing in current release. Though it might be a better choice to evaluate analysis algorithms on Java code, I'd rather take C/C++ code as the first choice because most systems are still written in C/C++. I just wish next release of Phoenix SDK targeting on VC9 backend would come up soon, though I could build it from scratch myself.

VCBuild on x64

2007-11-02T08:04:00.000-04:00

I was making my static analysis programs as an easy-to-use tool. It's a little weird that VCBuild seemed not work on x64: it did not take the right include/lib path. Even using the /u option, it might fail to link, and the unicode set did not function (it tried to link with the ANSI version of Windows API). So now I use the x86 version rather than the native x64 version. Someone got the similar problem long ago.

Another headache was about Phoenix. I tried to integrate it with Orcas, and finally it worked (VS 2008 beta 2 frontend with a nightly build Phoenix backend) with my own plug-ins. But the compiling performance was really terrific. No idea what was going, it was rolled back to VS 2005.

Visual Studio 2008 Shell

2007-09-07T01:50:00.000-04:00

It seems to be alternative RCP solution to Eclipse: Visual Studio IDE serves as a general platform for building client applications. Maybe I'll try it for my next toy:-)

When can we use Ribbon GUI that appears in Office 2007?

Dandong

2007-08-03T02:40:00.000-04:00

It took about two-hour drive from Shenyang to Dandong, a small and quiet city. Maybe it's most famous for the Yalu River and the Korean War.

There is a new bridge on the river, and an old bridge bombed by the US in the Korean War.

There are people in a faraway country we never know.

Changbai Mountain

2007-08-03T02:16:00.000-04:00

Since we always went wrong way, it took me almost a whole day's drive to the Changbai Mountain from Shenyang. Heaven Lake is so splendid, so are the valleys, the falls, the rivers, the springs and the flowers. It's really really a great place to enjoy.

Shenyang

2007-08-01T22:23:00.002-04:00

Shenyang is not far from Beijing, only four-hour train or one-four flight. Since it is not a big city, I mobbed the city last Friday just as planned, starting from Wulihe and ending at Mukden Palace. Later I took a drive to Liutiaohu and Beiling (the tomb of Huang Taji). The next day I visited Yongling (tombs of Ancestors of Nurhaci) in Fushun, a nearby city.

There are many amazing Manchu characteristics. For example, the Mukden palace resembles Manchu tents, rather a different style from that of the Forbidden City.

Besides, loongs/dragons are usually flying in Chinese culture. However, I saw some sitting loongs in Yongling, which were said to have evolved from dogs.

Here are some snapshots.

APR 1.2.9 on Vista

2007-07-26T06:25:00.000-04:00

It fails to compile on Vista again due to inappropriate orders of Windows headers.

Open misc/win32/rand.c, and change


#include <windows.h>
#include <wincrypt.h>
#include "apr.h"
#include "apr_private.h"
#include "apr_general.h"
#include "apr_portable.h"
#include "apr_arch_misc.h"


#include "apr.h"
#include "apr_private.h"
#include "apr_general.h"
#include "apr_portable.h"
#include "apr_arch_misc.h"
#include <windows.h>
#include <wincrypt.h>

Transformers

2007-07-20T22:36:00.000-04:00

It's been out for over a week in Beijing. Got some time to watch it this Saturday morning. It's gorgeous, really really amazing, especially the awesome animation that recalls childhood memories of the cartoon: friendship, power, speed, whatever we were looking for years ago. Bumblebee is pretty cool that I love most in the movie:-) Though the plot was as confusing as most Hollywood movies. Anyway, it's good for the weekend. There's a bunch of things to do.

Btw, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been released. It seems not bad.

China Map

2007-07-18T11:52:00.000-04:00

It is a web page to generate a map of areas that you've been in China. Pretty cool!

Here's my status.

I'm planning a trip to Jilin or Hunan in late July or early August. I wish I could fill more in the map before graduation:-)

The Same Deep Water As You

2007-07-02T12:16:00.000-04:00

Got some time to watch the first episode of Season 4 of One Tree Hill. I just like the words that Lucas was typing on his laptop at the end of the episode.

Tree Hill is just a place somewhere in the world. Maybe it's not like your world. Maybe it's nothing like it. But if you look closer, you might see someone like it.

Someone trying to find their way.

Someone trying to find their place.

Someone trying to find their self.

mystery is now at Boston. superhog's home and preparing his new life at Los Angeles. riki's leaving for Tibet. For me, maybe it'll get a little busier than expected this month.

Stanford T-Shirts

2007-06-23T08:34:00.000-04:00

riki is back again. He's just graduated from Stanford and will continue his happy life in New York this autumn. He bought me a Stanford T-shirt, but I really didn't know if I dare to wear it...

Recursive Destruction and Stack Overflow

2007-06-15T09:26:00.000-04:00

Here's something stupid for C++. I was testing an algorithm using a trie implemented by std::list on some data today, which resulted in a very deep tree. At exit the program crashed, due to recursive destruction: std::list destroyed all its elements, which were also tries. There is a similar vulnerability in PHP, though they use C rather than C++. I'm still wondering how to do this in C++. Pool design may be much better in such cases, especially for parse trees. I think I have discussed this with Nirvana when we were implementing a bencode parser several months ago.

Building PCRE on Windows

2007-06-03T00:10:00.001-04:00

My environment is Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista for PCRE 7.1. Since PCRE is written in ANSI C, just follow instructions in the doc NON-UNIX-USE. Remember to turn off some macros in config.h such as HAVE_UNISTD_H.

Two weird things here:

1. Define macro NO_RECURSE in config.h if necessary; otherwise running test on data "testinput2" would fail with stack overflow. The current GnuWin32 PCRE 7.0 suffers from this problem.

2. Add a call to _set_printf_count_output(1) at the beginning of main in pcregrep.c; by default VC CRT does not support the format "%n" and the program pcregrep.exe using such format would crash.

Google Map's Street View

2007-05-30T04:20:00.000-04:00

It's awesome! It looks much cooler than Virtual Earth. See how Google Campus looks. Enjoy exploring the street view of the bay area, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami and the New York city. Maybe some day we could construct such virtual environments to play Counter-Strike in.

Program Analysis using Phoenix

2007-05-28T09:04:00.000-04:00

For C/C++, writing a C2 phase plug-in may be the best choice. I prefer to put the analysis phase after the "Type Checker" phase. On the other hand, reading from PE executables requires .pdb (linking with /debug and /profile). A more serious problem is that LIR cannot be raised to HIR in such case, which makes it hard for further analysis. Besides, the alias algorithm seems too conservative, and the SSA algorithm is sometimes a little confusing.

For C#/.NET, writing an analysis tool (stand-alone .exe) is quite simple: set FunctionUnit.HighLevelIRFunctionUnitState for RaisePhase in the generated code. Remember to skip function units with !functionUnit.AliasInfo.IsComplete since they are unmanaged code.

Missing information in Phoenix IR is still a headache, as well as not-so-canonical IR forms. There's a talk with Open64 guys on Wednesday. I'm wondering if Open64 IR or LLVM IR would be better for program analysis. However, Visual C++ is always the ultimate front-end on Windows: other compilers could even hardly parse Windows.h as Microsoft-specific grammars keep growing.

Ray War

2007-05-26T21:18:00.000-04:00

Ray war is some kind of Counter-Strike in real, using laser guns and wearing military uniforms with sensors. We played the game in a hotel near Badaling (Google Map, taking the break at Shuiguan on the Badaling Expressway) on Friday morning, an hour drive north of Beijing. It's organized by the system research group, about 25 people divided into two teams: Fox of Desert and Hunter. We had 4 battles, in all of which the defender fell. Maybe it's because of the rules. Well, the game is pretty cool. However, even leaves could block the laser so we cannot enjoy it in jungles.

25

2007-05-22T01:38:00.000-04:00

Niobe: I remember. I remember when you used to dance. I remember you were... pretty good.
Morpheus: There are some things in this world, Captain Niobe, that will never change.
Commander Lock: Niobe.
Morpheus: Some things do change.

Towers in Beijing

2007-04-08T02:22:00.000-04:00

Bicycling around the city of Beijing is always a nice sport:-) It's a pity that only a few gates and almost none walls have survived, leaving only ugly concrete jungles.

I passed by the archery tower at Deshengmen (Google Maps) on the way to Houhai. Yu Qian defended the city in 1449 against the Mongol army here, though he failed to defend himself against slander after the triumph.
Deshengmen Archery Tower / 德胜门箭楼

Jingshan (Google Maps), where the last emperor of Ming Dynasty, Chongzhen, hanged himself, is a symbol of the fall of a dynasty and the end of an era.
Jingshan / 景山

There are four gorgeous corner towers of the Forbidden City, one tower at each corner.
Northwest Corner Tower / 紫禁城西北角楼
Northeast Corner Tower / 紫禁城东北角楼
I didn't bring a tripod yesterday since I was alone, so it's really hard to shoot at night. Two boys nearby were quite happy with their equipments, talking and laughing, which reminded me of one evening at Wangfujing last year with TuotuoXP and Weidog.

Here is my route for yesterday.

Houhai Again

2007-04-08T01:52:00.000-04:00

I bicycled to Houhai from campus yesterday afternoon. It was really a good day to walk around.

Green and Gray
Prunus triloba / 榆叶梅
Thanks to Jack again for helping with recognizing flowers.

The Weekend in Wuhan

2007-04-03T03:51:00.001-04:00

This was my third time to Wuhan. Arriving on last Friday morning, fishy met me at the railway station. Then we enjoyed our breakfast, re gan mian, my favorite. Later we took a short walk on the beautiful campus of Wuhan University, which is famous for its cherry blossoms. More photos can be found at fishy's blog.

In the afternoon we bought some cat food for Fuwa (fishy's cat) in Hankou, then hung around the East Lake in Wuchang, the largest lake in a city in China.

It's quite amazing to sit along the lake (right on the path in the middle of the map) and watch the sunset.

We had supper in Jianghan Lu in Hankou. The photo below was shot right here.

I left for Beijing the next day, and hurried to prepare my slides for a whole day on Sunday. That's the end of the story. Many thanks to fishy!

Secret

2007-03-22T08:23:00.000-04:00

It's Ayumi Hamasaki's latest album. The defining song of the album is also called `secret', as the ending theme for the movie Confession of Pain. I quite agree with this review. It is so emotional and beautiful. Many thanks to admire for explaining the lyric since I've no idea about Japanese:-)

それ违う少女达眩しくて目をそらした
无邪気なままの子供のような
自由な羽を持っていた

暗暗の向こう侧光射す场所を求め
ひとつ残った翼広げても
真実にだけ届かない

そこから见る私の姿は
どんな风に映っていますか
こんなこんないつわりだらけの
日々を笑い飞ばして下さい
手迟れになるその前に

飞ぶ事に疲れても羽下ろす勇気もない
もしも愿いがひとつ也叶うなら
いっそここから连れ出して

今もここで私は変わらず
居场所をずっと探しています
どうかどうかあなたにだけは
この想いが伝わりますように
欲しいものなど他にない

As what Ayu's singing,

Even now, I am as always
Searching for a place to be
I wish at least
You could feel my feelings
There is nothing else I'd rather have

Wrap Vararg Functions

2007-03-19T05:01:00.000-04:00

In my mind to wrap a vararg function I have to call its corresponding v-function (e.g. printf and vprintf). For those functions that do not have such counterparts, I intended to use Zhenyu's assembly code to inspect the stack. Last weekend when looking into cURL's source code, I found out that using the va_arg macro and passing the resulting pointer directly to vararg functions worked quite well. It's so easy! Phew!

Beyond

2007-03-12T12:07:00.000-04:00

Two rejections in one week, isn't it perfect?

At least I can listen to Beyond, the band I've been loving since I was a kid. Even Ka-Kui has passed for over ten years, their songs are still uniquely encouraging, inspiring and giving hope to us.

Some things never change, but some things do.

Hook Unexported Functions

2007-03-01T09:12:00.000-05:00

PDB files provide a simple approach to locate and hook unexported functions, especially for those static-linked functions, and usually they can be easily obtained in addition to pre-built release files (e.g. Apache, PHP, Subversion). Moreover, I'm lazy and do not want to modify and recompile a large project such as Subversion to export some internal API functions just for instrumentation. DIA provides a group of convenient interfaces though it is COM:-)

There are some pitfalls as well. First, remember to call the method ISession::put_loadAddress to set the base address of a module before any other invocation, otherwise retrieved function addresses would be invalid. Besides, the documentation of GetModuleInformation which can be used to get the base address of a module is wrong: providing NULL for the first parameter hProcess for current calling process, as is described in MSDN, leads to unexpected failure. Use INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE(-1) or GetCurrentProcess() instead.

Build Apache on Vista

2007-02-22T08:05:00.000-05:00

It's reported that APR fails to compile on Vista with the latest SDK. This is due to the new macro MCAST_JOIN_SOURCE_GROUP in Vista. The workaround is quite simple:
1. open the generated apr.h;
2. set _WIN32_WINNT to 0x0600;
3. set APR_HAVE_IPV6 to 1 (or there would be a link error with the function find_if_index).

Btw, just got back to Beijing this morning. Well, there's rather a lot of work to do.

Update1: ASF Bugzilla Bug 40398
Update2: APR 1.2.9 on Vista

Chinese New Year

2007-02-21T09:50:00.000-05:00

Wow, this is my boy. Why is he always that cute:-)

Lanterns everywhere.

The skyline of Haikou (Google Maps).

Mercury

2007-02-14T07:26:00.000-05:00

There is no messenger service in Vista, and I cannot get notifications from the SVN server by "net send". So I use the HTTP Server API in Vista to build a lightweight message delivery service called "Mercury" for receiving notifications (by cURL, for example) and popping up message boxes. It's quite simple, only about 150 lines C++ code. Here are some notes.

1. ATL is of great help for building Windows services.

2. The model of HTTP Server API 2.0 is more flexible, which requires binding handles to URL groups. Notably, HttpAddUrlToUrlGroup returns the error "access is denied" when running as a basic user.

4. I/O cancellation in Vista simplifies the development of asynchronous programs. I've successfully used CancelIoEx to cancel blocking HttpReceiveHttpRequest in another thread; However, CancelSynchronousIo does not work. I'm still trying to figure out why.

4. Services in Vista are running in a separate session so that MessageBox has no effect for user sessions; use WTSSendMessage instead for notifications.

5. The security model in Vista is interesting and sometimes a little boring; set the appropriate privilege level when registering services or attaching processes in Visual Studio.

The Vista Era Begins

2007-02-09T06:29:00.000-05:00

I'm on Windows Vista Now. It took me the whole afternoon to migrate all my files from XP to Vista. All applications run well, and my current code also works on Vista: at least the TLS implementation does not change and even low-level instrumentation is fine. It's awesome. Maybe I'll try the new system features later, especially some I/O improvements.

Orcas Sucks

2007-01-21T07:34:00.000-05:00

It crashed my Visual Studio 2005 and took me another afternoon to restore the system. So maybe that's why it's suggested to install on a virtual machine. The shipped SDK headers seemed not up-to-date with Vista, for there're quite a lot of annotations missed as far as I've looked into.

By the way, the program of NSDI '07 is out, where waikok published a paper titled WiDS Checker: Combating Bugs in Distributed Systems. Congrats!

Orcas

2007-01-20T09:33:00.000-05:00

Orcas (the next generation Visual Studio) January CTP was just released. It took me the whole afternoon to download and find more disk space to install it. I've got little interest in .NET 3.0 development right now, though the new C# features such as LINQ might be attractive. I wish it could be better integrated with Phoenix, especially for the "lost" type information in HIR.

Start Over

2007-01-07T07:27:00.000-05:00

So here is the year 2007.

For the last three months, it is busy and enjoyable. I quite look forward to the subsequent work, which is really challenging and exciting.

I got some time last weekend to review the show One Tree Hill. I've been loving the songs in this show for quite a long time, such as I Don't Want to Be from Gavin DeGraw (the theme song), Overdue from Get Up Kids and The First Cut Is The Deepest from Sheryl Crow, many of which are performed in Karen's Cafe. It is also fascinating that most episode titles are named after titles of songs. I love songs:-)

Well, it is hard to comment about the characters. I do understand Lucas's decision to leave the town and start over at the end of Season 1. In my mind the story ends there. From Lucas's eyes, I can see tiredness: maybe because of either Haley's new life with Nathan or the things messed up with Peyton and Brooke. I cannot really accept some stories in the following seasons such as his disease or Keith's death; their short starting over and immediate coming back is somewhat ridiculous. But it's life, unpredictable and messing.

We're at the Top of the World

2006-12-25T12:48:00.000-05:00

It's the ending song of recent American Pie 5: The Naked Mile, released in 2000 by The Juliana Theory.

We're at the top of the world, you and I
We've got a lot of time and it sure feels right
Cause you reached in your pocket and pulled out a pass
Says you can take me anywhere

Sha la la la sha la la la sha la la la la la la

We're on the top of the world, here tonight
We've got a lot of time and it sure feels right
Cause I'm up here running behind you
I'm up here running in repeat

iPod nano

2006-12-18T10:25:00.000-05:00

The vacation is coming, and friends in the States are getting back. This Sunday afternoon superhog and I met riki at the airport, who was back from Stanford. It's said that in an hour beckwo also arrived from Pittsburgh. The nowhereman couple are currently having fun in the southwest. Ho, partita will be back from Hong Kong soon.

Thanks to riki that I've got my iPod nano with an armband, and my Froogle wish list comes to empty. It's really cute and cool, though a black body with white in-ear headphones is a little weird. superhog has got a green iPod nano and fishy prefers a red one. Anyway, just enjoy.

Flood for Win32

2006-12-07T03:57:00.000-05:00

Flood is an HTTP load tester provided by Apache. It's built on APR that should be portable across platforms. Here are some instructions that I figured out this afternoon on how to build it on Win32.

First check out the code from its repository. Remember to get APR ready. You can find a VC project file for flood. Just open it and compile, and it fails. That's OK.

1. Copy config.h.in to config.h. Comment or fill macro definitions as you wish.

2. In flood_round_robin.c there's an include for regex.h. Look for any POSIX compatible regex library for Win32, such as GNU regex or PCRE. Refer to GnuWin32 if you don't want to compile from the source. I used the pre-compiled PCRE from GnuWin32.

3. Flood now should be compiled sucessfully. Try the shipped examples. If it crashes, look into "farmer_worker" function in flood_farm.c and uncomment the call to apr_thread_exit at the end due to some cleanup mess with apr_thread_join/apr_thread_exit on Win32.

One more word: if sample bash scripts cannot run in cygwin, replace all "\r\n" by "\n" in them. That's it. Enjoy!

Nirvana

2006-12-05T08:01:00.000-05:00

After all the messy debugging stuff, I spent two amazing hours this afternoon in Nirvana with mystery and spiderman, a popular health club located quite near our campus. It's my first time to enjoy those equipments. Just running on a treadmill and seeing the sun getting down, wow, that's really cool. Usually I'd like to take a run in the evening on the Stadium. However, in winters and springs of Beijing it sucks due to bad weather, especially the well-known sandstorms that are so perfect to enjoy. I'm still considering whether to join them now, for it's really busy with projects this month.

Walk On

2006-11-30T11:14:00.000-05:00

I was charging the cell phone, a little boring, so I started to review Friends again (and again). At the end of Episode 18 of Season 10, U2's Walk On turned on. It's an amazing and striking song, also Record of the Year at Grammy 2002. I do love those "all that ..." and have used them in my BBS signatures for a long time.

November's gone and another year comes to close. The question rose again today "why are you staying for another year". It's actually what I should pay. Taking the road less traveled by, just walk on.

And love is not the easy thing
The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can't leave behind

And if the darkness is to keep us apart
And if the daylight feels like it's a long way off
And if your glass heart should crack
And for one second you turn back
Oh no, be strong

Walk on, walk on
What you got they can't steal it
No, they can't even feel it
Walk on, walk on
Stay safe tonight

You're packing a suitcase for a place none of has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen
You could have flown away
A singing bird in an open cage
Who will only fly, only fly for freedom

Walk on, walk on
What you've got they can't deny it
Can't sell it or buy it
Walk on, walk on
You stay safe tonight

And I know it aches, how your heart it breaks
You can only take so much
Walk on, walk on

Home, hard to know what it is if you've never had one
Home, I can't say where it is but I know I'm going home
That's where the hurt is

And I know it aches and your heart it breaks
And you can only take so much
Walk on

Leave it behind
You've got to leave it behind
All that you fashion
All that you make
All that you build
All that you break
All that you measure
All that you feel
All this you can leave behind
All that you reason
It's only time
All that you bear
No more than a feeling on my mind
All that you see
All that you wear
All that you sense
All that you scheme
All you dress up
All that you've seen
All you create
And all that you wreck
All that you hate

Timestamp

2006-11-26T20:28:00.000-05:00

Last weekend the BBS system was updated to Fedora Core 6 by COMMAN. Many thanks! Well, it's been two years since the first installation in 2004. It's really hard at that time: two harddisks were damaged and sources were lost. With some luck there were backup data on nowhereman's machine, which actually was borrowed from my advisor. I can still remember the rainy day that parrot and I rushed for a new SCSI harddisk, experiencing feelings of anxiety and helplessness. Later we got further financial support from Trend Micro with the help of Jackie, and COMMAN gave hands to get things ready for a new machine.

We had even no display card then, so we just "borrowed" one from lfan's machine. It's the first 64-bit machine I had ever used. Getting the operating system OK, we printed sizeof(long) and sizeof(void *) to see "8" and grinned. After this, better worked hard to port SMTH code and got it running successfully. Only a few months later another storm came and the story became ridiculous. I've no interest in politics but I really hate those full of ambition. So better and I chose to quit at the April Fool. Stupid, huh?

Last night a few reports showed that the system failed to deal with the timestamp of comments of blogs. As COMMAN figured out, the blogs were stored in an old version of MySQL and the timestamp format was YYYYMMDDHHMMSS while newer MySQL uses YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. A minor fix works, and it's said to add "+0" in the column name in SQL statements would also be OK to retain the old timestamp format.

V for thanksgiVing

2006-11-23T08:17:00.000-05:00

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

Winston S. Churchill

Yeah, not V for Vendetta. Another Thanksgiving.

I was so depressed one year ago when I wrote on my MSN space with the words "thanks to those who hurt me". Well, blow it off. In fact it's always oneself hurting himself.

Thanks to the nice guys who have cared about me and helped me a lot enjoy the amazing days on campus, especially to V, the optimist who is cute and nice, a gesture for victory, or a symbol for courage and hope. Viva la V!

By the way, I come to the new domain for my blog, procfs, which is technical and short that makes it a good one.

scons.vim

2006-11-15T11:16:00.000-05:00

I've just uploaded a vim syntax file for SConscript, configuration files of the build tool SCons. Comments are welcome.

We Can Go Anywhere

2006-11-12T00:51:00.000-05:00

I'm so attracted to Jesse McCartney. Beautiful Soul and Because You Live in his last album Beautiful Soul of 2004 are that amazing.

We Can Go Anywhere is my favorite song in his new album Right Where You Want Me this year. Gorgeous! Other songs are also great, such as Right Where You Want Me, Just So You Know, Right Back in the Water.

Slow down
Things have been a little crazy
Right now
It's time to get away
You can find out
What it is you're really after
Time is on our side
C'mon we're leaving everything behind

You know that sun is shining
We'll keep driving
Doesn't matter where
'Cause we got that open highway
Leading our way
As long as you are there
We can go anywhere

Breakdown
All the pressure that surrounds you
Allow it all to fade away
We can move on
Looking in the rear view mirror
Wave goodbye
C'mon we're leaving everything behind

We're gonna be so far gone
Some place we ain't never been before
Find a new favourite song
We'll end up right where we belong

Come with me everything will be alright
Movin' on 'cause we're leaving it all behind

Beyond Grand Canyon

2006-11-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Madsen for helping me find Beyond Grand Canyon, the fourth album from Nicholas Gunn on the Grand Canyon.

The Boneyard demonstrates the impressive power of Gunn's flute once again, addressing the topic of death, in my mind. In a bleak wind bones disperse all over. In the circle of life, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. On the contrary, Bridal Falls is extremely sweet. Violin, piano and flute together create a beautiful view of rocks and water, where the sun is shining while drips are falling and reflecting. I like the two songs most in the album.

Well, the album is quite serious, at least not as springy as the previous albums. I'm afraid it's not good to enjoy it while working so that it would easily make me low in spirits.

Windy

2006-11-06T08:14:00.000-05:00

It's so windy since the weekend, while the temperature went down below zero degree centigrade. Keeping blowing, the air became extremely fresh and the sky was really cute with the skyline of the Western Hills.

Over a month ago I got a shot of sunset at the same place, on the 14th floor of Zijing 14#. I was somewhat depressed at that time. Anyway, the October's gone.

Fall Color

2006-11-01T06:38:00.000-05:00

Leaves of ginkgo trees turn golden, which is my favorite color of the season. There are many ginkgo trees on campus, especially around Building 6# and the Old Gate.

Behind the 1st Teaching Building there are also many trees of different colors. I was expecting to meet some squirrels there yesterday afternoon, however, out of luck.

gtemplate 0.1

2006-10-26T11:34:00.000-04:00

Gtemplate 0.1 is available, which is the first release. The user's guide may be a good start. Comments are welcome.

missing

2006-10-15T10:03:00.000-04:00

Since Python 2.5, dict types provide a hook __missing__ method, to be called when a key is not found. It can be used to implement some fancy dictionary types. However, sometimes it's error-prone that only mydict[key] may trigger this method while mydict.get(key) will NOT, which leads to inconsistent semantics.

Xidi and Hongcun

2006-09-27T10:34:00.000-04:00

This Tuesday I visited Xidi and Hongcun, two famous ancient villages in southern Anhui, honored by UNESCO. Traditional houses in southern Anhui were fascinating that no windows were on walls at all, left only some skylights for ventilating. Usually there was one skylight on the roof in front of the hall and maybe some on the roof of bedrooms. This made the house wet and cold.

About 80 percent of the residents of Xidi are of the Hu family. It's recorded that one son of Li Ye (867 - 904, the 19th emperor of the Tang dynasty) was sheltered secretly. Later the emperor and most of the royal family was murdered by Zhu Wen except this son, brought up safely by a nanny whose husband was of the Hu family. His descendants took Hu as the family name rather than Li, and that's the origin of the village.

The villagers were rather friendly.
Hongcun was nearby. About 70 percent of the residents are of the Wang family. Hongcun was arranged in the shape of an ox, two trees (one pagoda tree and one ginkgo tree) as its horns, streams as intestines and lakes as the stomachs. It's because the village were burned down several times that they designed so many streams and lakes around houses. The two trees were also interesting that I thought it was something about yin-yang balance in Chinese culture.

The journey ended in Tuesday evening, at the Xin'an river.

I took a flight back to Beijing and got to the campus late at night. Though not tired, nothing had changed except more work was left. It's time to move on.

Jade Valley

2006-09-25T10:15:00.000-04:00

After getting down of Mt. Huangshan, I visited nearby Feicun Valley, or Jade Valley, where the Oscar winning movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was casted. But there were little water in Autumn.

Jade valley was also known as Lovers' Valley, where couples showed up everywhere except me alone. I didn't finish the journey, for it's not a place should I travel all by myself.

Mt. Huangshan

2006-09-25T09:26:00.000-04:00

Mt. Huangshan is famous for its fantastic pines, grotesque rocks, sea of clouds, hot springs and snow of winter. However, the weather was too good when I was there that there were few clouds, and no time to enjoy springs. Of course, it's not the right season to see snow. Maybe they could be left for next time.

The most famous pine tree on Mt. Huangshan should be the Welcoming Pine.

The Farewell Tree was also well-known. The former one died last year.

There were many beautiful pine trees. Their shapes were quite special and amazing, often growing in stocks.

The Lotus Peak was the highest peak, with a height of 6116 feet (1864 meters).

The Brightness Apex was only a little lower, with a height of 6102 feet (1860 meters). It's said to be a great place to see sunrise.

Thanks to these porters.

Jingdezhen

2006-09-24T09:17:00.000-04:00

It's only two hours drive on highway from Jiujiang to Jingdezhen, well known as the "Porcelain Capital". Though I didn't buy any, just watching was also enjoyable.

Jiujiang

2006-09-23T10:17:00.000-04:00

After 12 hours train I arrived at Jiujiang of Jiangxi Province from Beijing on Friday morning. The city, quite and small, lay along the Yangtze River, adjacent Hubei and Anhui. It's centered around two lakes: Nanmen ("southern gate") Lake and Gantang ("birchleaf pear") Lake. Every morning and evening there were many citizens walking or running, as well as a beautiful fountain with colorful lights.

Here's a shot of the Yangtze River near the Anti-blood Square in memory of those heroes in the year 1998.

Mt. Lushan were considered to be a great place but it was not. Bad weather, bad mood, crowds, leaders' visit, too many villas and disappointing scenes made it uncomfortable at all. There's nothing impressive, I'm afraid I have to say that. Maybe next time I should come again to stay several days around Lake Poyang, the largest freshwater lake in China, only one hour drive from Jiujiang city. Here's shot of the Sandie ("three steps") Fall, the largest fall in Mt. Lushan, though in my opinion it's quite small.

I also visited the White Deer Grotto Academy at the foot of Mt. Lushan, revived by Zhu Xi, a great neo-Confucian. I thought this place was more like a symbol of his philosophy that dominated Chinese culture for several centuries.

Draft R6RS

2006-09-18T12:17:00.000-04:00

Actually it's called R^5.91RS: Revised^5.91 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme. As far as I was concerned, some long desired features were addressed, such as library, Unicode, hash-table, etc. I do prefer a small language with extensible libraries, however, interoperability of different Scheme implementations remains a significant problem. Besides, I've seen a new I/O library but still no plan for networking and some other facilities, though they may not be the targets right now.

9.18

2006-09-17T12:34:00.000-04:00

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

George Bernard Shaw

The Mukden Incident of September 18, 1931.

Dalian

2006-09-15T10:58:00.001-04:00

The story began when blink registered his GRE test in Dalian rather than in Beijing. He'd take it this Wednesday there, accompanied by TuotuoXP and me. We departed from Beijing at 6 o'clock Tuesday afternoon by train, which was really a twelve-hour nightmare: crowd, stupid air condition, lights that never dimmed all night, rude and savage conductors that woke all passengers at least 4 times for tickets, and even did a baby pee on me!

It's a pity that blink had to hurry back on Wednesday evening. TuotuoXP and me stayed in Dalian for about 36 hours and took a plane back to Beijing on Thursday evening.

Dalian that said to be the "Hong Kong of the North" was far smaller than expected. Walking would be a nice way for tourists most of the time. Transportation in Dalian was convenient, especially trolley cars. Dalian was famous for its sea view and squares. However, the weather was too foggy in the two days that we could hardly see anything from the sea.

Dalian was also well-known for its marine shipping. Here's a sculpture on the campus of Dalian Maritime University, a university of a good reputation all over the world.

Dalian at night was beautiful, such as a scene at Xinghai Square, the most famous square of Dalian.

The dock was not open for visitors.

Lovely sea birds played on a rock near the Tiger Beach.

Beaches in Dalian seemed not well protected. Skyscrapers could easily destroy the outline of the city, as seen at the Tiger Beach.

In Dalian University of Technology, newbies were taking the military training course.

And another view of the tennis court on campus, like a dream.

External links by TuotuoXP: 1 2 3 4.

Clouds in Weiming Lake

2006-09-10T00:05:00.001-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I fell asleep with bending over on the bench of MSRA, which made my hands and legs tingled. So I decided to go to the campus of Peking University for a walk. I always like to be alone around Weiming Lake to try to relax these years.

The Boya Tower.

Clouds and the mirrors.

A tadpole?

The sun went down and it's time to get back home.

Sunset at Summer Palace

2006-09-09T22:19:00.000-04:00

The day before yesterday (Friday), TuotuoXP and I took a bus to the Summer Palace, near to our campus. As soon as we arrived at the lakeside, oh, so many photographers that it's easy to tell how perfect the weather was!

Kunming Lake was rather big, which made the view quite open and comfortable. A big block of could lay on the top of the west hills and the sun went down between them.

The sun disappeared, with lights spewing, which reminded me of Mordor:-)

TuotuoXP had taken far more beautiful photos.

After that his dad drove us home. With weidog, a really kind and professional guy, we took the metro to the Tian'anmen Square and Wangfujing, to enjoy an amazing night. We got back TuotuoXP's home at about 2 o'clock in the morning. I took his bed, and he slept in a sofa. Sorry, buddy:-)

IronPython 1.0

2006-09-08T23:45:00.000-04:00

IronPython finally comes to its 1.0 release. Great! Thanks to Jim Hugunin, creator of Jython and IronPython, and his team. I do think there should be an alternative scripting language for .NET beside C# for prototype development, just like Groovy for Java. In fact VB ought to have taken this responsibility but it seems on an aberrant way.

I've tried to run some of my previous Python code under IronPython. A simple online monitor program for our BBS ran quite well, except the logging module failed to load due to the lack of implementation of sys._getframe (some workaround could be applied though not perfect). Another blog crawler using Python 2.5 features (mostly because of using elementtree for XPath) ran after a few minor modifications of the source code of IronPython (and of course, a recompilation). Actually, the source code is very clear and suitable for reading. I'm quite looking forward to the next release.

Flight of the Condor

2006-09-06T10:31:00.000-04:00

I was chatting with riki today on traveling across America. What a dream! His parents would like to make it true next year after his graduation from Stanford. I suggested to start from San Francisco, pass Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Omaha, Chicago, and end at New York. Hoo, the route must go through the Grand Canyon, about which Nicholas Gunn has several famous New Age music albums. In The Music Of The Grand Canyon [1995] "Entering Twin Falls" is pretty good. In the sequel album Return to the Grand Canyon [1999] "Flight of the Condor" favors me most. They are both included in The Great Southwest [2001].

The most impressive highlight of the song "Flight of the Condor" is the alternation of Gunn's gentle flute and Karen Briggs's (the fabulous lady in red at Yanni's "Live at the Acropolis" concert) passionate violin, that makes feel like hovering over the Grand Canyon to enjoy an amazing birds eye view of the landscape while wind blows off. Besides, the gorgeous drumbeats are also as exciting as in most Gunn's songs. By the way, Gunn's new album Beyond Grand Canyon was put on sale this July, his fourth album on the Canyon. I'm wondering where I could find it now in Beijing.

Fragrant Hills

2006-09-05T04:07:00.000-04:00

After the call I headed back to our campus to meet TuotuoXP. Leaving at about 11 o'clock yesterday morning, we bicycled along the Qinghe River and the 5th Ring Road on the north of our campus. Riding on such a nice path was really comfortable, enjoying sunshine and breezes.

Fragrant Hills, or Xiangshan, is to the northeast of the Beijing city, most famous for its red smoke tree leaves in late autumn and snow scenery in winter. The trip from the campus was about 12 miles (20 kilometers). We didn't hurry and photoed wherever, so it took us about 2 hours to get there.

After having lunch, we started to climb. The Xianglu Peak was about 1400 feet (400 meters) in height. On the way along we saw quite a lot of old men enjoying climbing. The Fragrant Hills seemed to be a public garden for citizens rather than for tourists. Good! At about 3 o'clock in the afternoon we got to the top of Xianglu Peak. Wow, a birds eye view of Beijing that lies to the east, that's it!

Then we chatted to wait for sunset for about 2 hours. Damn! The battery of my camera soon ran out! And I missed the chance to take photos of the sunset. Remember to charge next time! Luckily, there are far more beautiful photos and a nice blog from TuotuoXP.

After the sun went down, we got down the hill, had our supper and headed back to campus. Mum called to tell me that my pet dog got another four children!

What a nice trip! We're planning to explore here again in late autumn, when leaves turn red or yellow in a colorful world.

Morning Glory

2006-09-05T02:25:00.000-04:00

After a whole day's skiing and snowboarding, I got up with aching all over on the Monday morning. Getting everything ready I headed for MSRA. The gorgeous blue sky with clouds of all shapes stroke me when passing by the main building on campus. I looked around and got excited. So I buzzed TuotuoXP immediately for an outing but nobody answered the call.

I had no choice but kept on going south. Buildings in such a great day seemed much more amazing and lofty, such as the Yin'gu Building on the 4th Ring Road. Bicycling across it, the west hills that were so clear indicated the charming autumn, my favorite season in Beijing, already fell in the city. Hooray!

I was taking photos of morning glory flowers along the avenue when TuotuoXP called back. It would be a pity to stay in doors in such a day. So we decided to bicycle for Xiangshan, the Fragrant Hills, one of the most famous parks in Beijing.

Skiing and Snowboarding

2006-09-03T11:32:00.000-04:00

It's my first time skiing/snowboarding, so fascinating! The activity was organized by some nice guys from the SKI board of SMTH BBS. It cost 120 RMB for a whole day skiing and 30 RMB for round-trip bus to Qiaobo Ice & Snow World, a great indoor ski/snowboarding resort in Shunyi (a district in the east of Beijing).

So many guys from our department turned up: Barbary, bluewhales, dreamer, eNigMa and his girlfriend, gb, King, sheven and his girlfriend, superhog, taurus, wolf, xray, Yulai and his sister, that might be a half of all participants. We departed at about 8 o'clock in the morning and arrived there in an hour by bus. After changing for ski wear and taking ski equipments (skis, boots and poles) I started my whole day's tumble. First we were taught how to fall down and get up by an expert. Well, believe me that's not easy to do it. Then we learned snowplow, the downhill technique for beginners. And we practised. I didn't fall down at my third try and tried to learn turning. It's so great that I could turn slightly before lunch.

After lunch I skied for a while and began to experience snowboarding, which was really cool but much harder to start. That's a far longer story of falling down again and again but really amazing to jump and rotate in all attractive actions. Also at my third try I didn't fall down on a snowboard. However, there's not enough time to practise more. At about 5:30 in the afternoon we left. Snowboarding would be enjoyed next time, I'm pretty sure.

Distance

2006-08-31T08:24:00.000-04:00

I'm still not sure whether moving out would be a good decision. Nevertheless, it made me realize more about the longest distance that you face your love every day but cannot say it out. OK, move on, buddy. Just get over it.

At last I met Jian, the director this afternoon. Before entering his office I felt a little nervous. He's nice and conversational so most of the time I was just listening. The goal of the data-driven system is gorgeous and attractive, as he described, a chance with cost and challenges, where Google's already a pacemaker. Benyu and Weizhu also encouraged me a lot. I really appreciate it. Well, it's fascinating that six-month coding is worth nothing but a report of two-hour debugging works effectively.

Then I hurried back to campus for a talk given by David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL. At first I even ran into a wrong room until the words such as "exon" and "gene" drove me out. There were not many audience, and very few questions were proposed as in classes of Tsinghua, which always made the speaker disappointed. David sighed that might be why there were few open source projects in China. Passion and curiosity may be the best drive powers, but neither could live easily. Besides, there would be a story about a Triton among the minnows.

Life as a Debugger

2006-08-29T08:50:00.000-04:00

What a day!

A DFS (distributed file system) suffered from a network problem and my mentor asked me to solve it, which took most of my afternoon. In fact the problem was rather old: when sending or receiving large blocks of data (10M – 70M on different machines), calls to send/recv probably fail with error code WSAENOBUFS (10055). I believe that the problem is due to running out of kernel memory for sending or receiving data. More powerful a machine is, the bigger the threshold buffer size could be.

As KB201213 suggests, following workarounds could be applied:

Use the socket in non-blocking or asynchronous mode.
Break large-size data blocks into small ones and specify a relatively small buffer in send for blocking sockets, preferably no larger than 64K.
Set the SO_SNDBUF socket option to 0 (zero) to allow the stack to send from your application buffer directly.

However, asynchronous I/O does not always work for this problem. Neither could setting SQ_SNDBUF option get over it.

In my opinion, overlapped I/O locks the memory that would be sent or received to avoid page switching. When the size of locked memory goes too large, the kernel would think that there’s no sufficient memory and WSAENOBUFS is returned.

The basic idea is to break large blocks into smaller ones. Using for-loops for send/recv on smaller buffers may be the simplest solution. An alternative is to use scatter/gather I/O by WSASend/WSARecv. First, a large buffer can also be allocated at once as usual, however, pass in an array of WSABUF that contains pointers to different sections of the buffer, where each section has a smaller size (16K - 1M, for example). This approach might be faster though more bug-prone.

I had reproduced the problem on a desktop and solved it using the proposed approach. Further test would be taken on the original source code to verify it. By the way, note that a recent API TransmitPackets is likely to fail without any error code reported.

Later I turned to a memory exception problem when using IT++ to do SVD on a 30,000*30,000 matrix on a server with an AMD Opteron 254 (daul-core) and 16G physical memory. Such a matrix takes slightly less than 8G memory and a SVD would consume about 24G memory for 3 matrices. However, someone set the maximum virtual memory size to only 2G which would definitely trigger the memory exception. Adjust it and everything is OK.

After supper, I got a message from the physics guy on GTalk asking me to help with compile another two libraries...

Life as a Compiler

2006-08-28T08:01:00.000-04:00

I spent the whole afternoon helping a PhD student from Physics Department with compiling the PARATEC library (a Fortran library of some quantum stuff that I've no idea at all) on ChinaGrid, where each node has dual Itanium CPUs, using Intel Fortran and C/C++ compilers. The configurations on the grid were a little confusing that ScalaPack, fftw, MKL, gcc, icc, BLAS, etc. all exist but no MPI versions. However, everything went quite well linking against MKL cluster edition though the library was designed to be compiled by pgf compiler. Remember that the functions "derf" and "derfc" should be renamed to "vderf" and "vderfc" when using Intel Fortran compiler, respectively, and don't mix gcc and icc.

The physics guy said that they had spent over a year on compiling this on ChinaGrid, gosh! Currently he's testing the program and checking the results. I agree with my boss that they do need something similar to nanoHUB to simplify scientific computing, or too much time would be wasted on getting over these meaningless obstacles.

While compiling the library I was talking to Sunny and tension on GTalk. They just went to Redondo Beach near Los Angeles with mingkong, waicha, etc., enjoying the sea, playing football and taking a lot of beautiful photos. Wow, I'm thinking about hanging around to take some photos of the rail on the east of the campus. That might be cool.

Flowers around Houhai

2006-08-26T12:11:00.000-04:00

Here're some photos of flowers I encountered around Houhai. Autumn in Beijing will be far more amazing and attractive that I'm so looking forward to. By the way, I'm not good at telling plants and Jack helped me. Thanks.

Chinese hibiscus / 朱槿

Sorbaria kirilowii / 珍珠梅

Kerria / 棣棠

Houhai

2006-08-26T05:14:00.000-04:00

The day before yesterday I bicycled to Houhai from campus with TuotuoXP. However the weather was very very bad, no blue sky, no cloud, no fresh air, only a gray world that you can see from the photo on the right and another by TuotuoXP.

After night fell, bars and coffee houses lit and became so crowded as usual. With water, willow trees, lights, music, etc., it's really a perfect place for friends and lovers, maybe also appropriate for losers to be alone.

We left for the Forbidden City, which was only a few blocks away. However, there was no lights that we failed to take some photos. Leave it to next time.

Some historical stuff. Hai, meaning "sea" in Chinese , sometimes refers to "big lake". There're several famous "hais" or lakes in the city of Beijing next to the Forbidden city, as shown in the map provided by Google Earth. The 2nd Ring Road is very clear, as well as the Tian'anmen square marked. From north to south, the six hais are Xihai (Jishuitan), Houhai, Qianhai, Beihai, Zhonghai and Nanhai, which literally mean west lake, back lake, front lake, north lake, middle lake and south lake, respectively.

Wikipedia gives a detailed description of the history of Beijing, and that's also a history of these hais. Over a thousand years ago Beijing was wet and abundant of rivers and lakes. In 938 the Liao Dynasty set up a secondary capital around these natural hais and named it Nanjing ("southern captial", and "Beijing" means "northern capital", funny) for the captial then was far north. In 1125 the Jurchen Jing Dynasty took over Beijing and named it Zhongdu ("central capital"). In 1215 Mongol got Beijing as its captial and later named it Dadu ("grand capital") or Cambuluc in Marco Polo's account, when Xihai (Jishuitan) then was a very important commercial port.

In 1368 the Ming dynasty founded in Nanjing (this time it's not Beijing) and in 1403 the 3rd emperor moved the capital to Beijing. The Forbidden City started to be built soon after that, also these hais were well designed as imperial gardens. The Qing Dynasty replaced the Ming Dynasty in 1644 and lasted to 1911, when Beihai, Zhonghai and Nanhai continued to be refined. The last emperor was expelled from the Forbidden City later and this palace became national museum. Even since then Nanhai and Zhonghai have been resevered as where the central govenment resides; Beihai has been open as a public park; Xihai (Jishuitan), Houhai and Qianhai, also known as Shichahai, have been good places for citizens to walk and enjoy, famous for bars and coffee houses around the lakes recent years.

To Be or Not to Be

2006-08-24T21:34:00.000-04:00

To be or not to be, that is the question. As Neo said in the movie The Matrix Reloaded, the problem is choice. However, most of time we've already made the choice and the problem is to understand it.

Without question, Grigory Perelman has made his choice to turn down the 2006 Fields Medal, and is believed to live in St. Petersburg reclusively. He's made such great contributions to the Poincaré conjecture that maybe even another label pales. The New Yorker has published an interesting article on the topic of the Poincaré conjecture though it's more like a political novel messing with intrigues.

Meanwhile, Pluto has no opportunity to made its own choice: to be or not to be a planet. It is now out of our solar system as a planet in a recent vote by the International Astronomical Union and considered as a "dwarf planet". People always prefer labeling, and usually show little respect to inherency.

Sixth Teaching Building

2006-08-22T08:31:00.000-04:00

In fact I don't like the building for its sharp shape and vivid red, though most of my courses in Tsinghua were taken in this latest teaching building.

Here's a photo of the building of another aspect by Haijun Guo.

I took the photo just before sunset, when the sky was pretty lovely and many newbies passed by. See more photos of the sky from TuotuoXP.

Afterglow

2006-08-20T13:49:00.000-04:00

As soon as leaving the lab, a beautiful view of afterglow came up in the west. Then I quickly got back to my dorm, picked up my DC and headed for the north of the campus. On the seventh floor of Building Zijing 2# I took several photos.

It seemd a little late that the sun went down for quite a while and the clouds turned too dark. Besides, I should have brought a tripod, that reminded me of my tripod-carrier days with TuotuoXP. Here are some more photos from Jack and xinhuanet.com.

Truly, Madly, Deeply

2006-08-20T03:03:00.000-04:00

I was refining a report after lunch, which was rather boring and tedious. I decided to find some music, then Savage Garden's songs turned up and indeed helped, so nice and soft. Definitely, Truly, Madly, Deeply remained the favorite song.

I wanna stand with you on a mountain
I wanna bathe with you in the sea
I wanna lay like this forever
Until the sky falls down on me

Maybe I were on Mars and even did I miss the news that Darren Hayes, the former lead singer, got married in London this June. Congrats!