Google Map's Street View

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!