Andrew's Blog

I love my wifey

2011-05-12T16:27:00.000+09:00

So I haven't blogged in a while but, woop I got married in Sept 2010! I love her so much she is my whole world! All them other girls ain't got nothin on my wife! :)

New entry

2010-01-05T17:19:00.002+09:00

Wow. I have not posted in this blog for years. Lots of stuff has happened in my life in the past 2 years. The most major thing that happened to me was I was engaged but that is now behind me at least for now. This one thing has caused me to look at myself and get myself ready for a family. But really I was not ready and still not full ready. Maybe buying a house next year will show myself I am ready.

Random thoughts about trip day 1/2

2007-06-19T17:49:00.000+09:00

Day 1/2 Monday/Tuesday June 18/19, 2007
Today was a long plane ride, 9.5 hours. The time difference is 16 hours so we arrived in Nartia at 2:02 or there abouts. I flew next to new parents (10 month old), he was cute and good except for once right before falling asleep where he throw a small fit. Once he was asleep he was really quiet for the rest of the journey. Got out of customs and immigration around 2:40, waited a while to get my bag. Going through customs and immigration was a breeze. Took the limousine bus to the new otani hotel. It is around a 1.5 hour ride on the highway. Nartia airport is really outside the city of Tokyo (though technically Tokyo is at least 5 different cities with their own services and such).

Tomorrow's meeting starts at 10 am and ends around lunch time.

On the pointer plus front, I merged it into the FSF mainline last friday. I have iv-opts to fix really still. I sent a patch to richi but it did not bootstrap because of problems with respect of other parts of iv-opts/address need to be fixed up. I had a full patch in the office which actually implements that but I forgot to sent it to myself to send it to richi. Anyways when I get back state side, I will be able to finish it up and test it and add a testcase or two to make sure we optimize the cases again. The problem with iv-opts right now, is that it does not rewrite pointer plus. So if we fix that, we need to also fix a couple of other parts trying to do the rewrite. Not doing the rewrite causes gzip and a couple other benchmarks to be slower. I think right now, not rewriting pointer plus, causes us to produce too many IVs.

Yes, IV-OPTs itself needs a rewrite to deal with auto-increment (load/store with update, etc.) but I am not doing to do that rewrite.

This week is going to be a busy one with meetings all day.
If I have time tonight, I will go see camel (LLVM guy studying in Tokyo). Maybe I will bring Trevor and Russ along, I will talk to them once I talk with camel.

I also hope richi and others are able to fix up the bug reports while I am in Tokyo. Most of the problems are obvious issues (except when it comes to scev but then again that was a latent bug and pointer plus just put in obvious checks to make sure we were not doing anything stupid). I still have data reference to fix up. One problem with it currently is that I need to figure out what is the real definition of affine multivariate. I would have liked the data-ref people to fix this bug as I don't understand this area of GCC that well. I did file the bug reports about these data-ref issues before doing the merge. I guess that pointer plus improves forwprop too much :).

Wow I did not think I would write this much for this blog entry but I guess I did.

PS Cassandra, the girl who I was going after, now has a boyfriend (and it is not me).

Sony/Job

2007-04-05T00:53:00.000+09:00

It turns out I got a nice raise this year so I am happy.

Next entry will definitely be about the girl issue but I just wantted to make sure everyone know I am now happy with my job.

Long time

2007-03-23T17:27:00.000+09:00

It has been a long time since I last wrote here but here goes some ideas for the next few blog entries:
1) GCC work
a) Pointer Plus expression
b) other work
2) Girls
a) What I did wrong and why I keep on just getting friends

GCC Summit part 1.25

2006-07-28T11:30:00.000+09:00

Pictures from the GCC Summit from LXO:
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/images/pictures/2006-06-GPLv3-Barcelona-Zurich-GCCSummit-Ottawa/

Japan Part 3, the end

2006-07-24T01:04:00.000+09:00

So I am back home now in Foster City where it got to 108F (42C) yesterday. Man it was hot. But that is not what this posting is about. Anyways Japan was fun, I wish I did not have trouble sleeping. I also wished I was not preoccupied with other stuff unrelated to work or even this trip, I would have enjoyed it even more.

The SCEI building was a couple buildings down from the Honda HQ, I have pictures. On Monday the holiday, I took a walk from Shibuya subway station to the office, well I did not know where I was going but I ended up at my office. This walk was nice because I went by places where hardly anyone was and it was quiet which meant I could think about the things troubling me, which I am not going to say them here at least not yet. It is a long and weird story and I don't want to tell it just yet until I find out more (the story will be called GCC summit part 2 when I get around to writting it down). Anyways so I took this walk, it got me thinking, am I ready to settle down and have a family. I don't know, I don't think I am ready just yet; work just takes too much time out of me currently. Plus working with GCC's bugs takes the other part of my spare time but then again having a girl-friend would be useful so I could have some spare time and actually get away from GCC sometime. Ok, maybe I gave part of the long story up but oh well.

On Tuesday night, the whole toolchain group went out drinking. It was fun, though I did drink the most as it was a welcome party for me. Thursday for lunch, we had Indian, one of the best Indian food I had in years. One of the dishes was spicy, though not much, it was good. We had to wait an half an hour to get seated. Friday, I spend most of the day at the airport waiting for the plane. Well that is not fully true as I had two Fridays. My plane left at 6pm JST (Tokyo time) and got in around 11am PDT (California TIme). I went into work to have lunch with Alex and we talked for about an hour and an half and then he had to leave to go. I went home from lunch and decided to sleep at 4pm, god I was tried, I had got less than an hour on the plane ride and that was 9 hours itself so I was up almost 24hours, it was crazy. So I woke up around 11pm that same night. I could not sleep for another 3 hours and then I forced myself to go to bed and get some more sleep. I woke up at some early time on Saturday, I had enough sleep for the day.

I am running into bugs or maybe mis-features in the GCC code about reload. I wish reload would just die. Anyways I am thinking about seeing about the infrastructure which was added for 4.2.0 which might help fix this issue but that would mean I need to backport the patch and the fixes related to it to 4.1.1 which I am regreating doing. Also on the plane ride back, I remembered that the code I was writting would only work for targets that set strict alignment. Also from look at the code gen because I need to add splats, it might get funny looking but it still does gets rid of the load hit store reload issue which is much worse than the other code gen. I might even figure out a way of not needing the splats but the splats make it easy to store stuff to memory on a strict alignment target as you just use stvewx instead of having to do a load and then a perm and then a store of the whole vector.

Japan part 2

2006-07-15T13:13:00.000+09:00

So here I am in Japan on a Friday night in the hotel. Well I have Saturday night and Sunday night to part as Monday is a holiday. So I was going to meet a friend of the OZ labs but I missed him because the subway station was layed out stupidly. Anyways I was trying to get to the JR south exit but I went through a gate to get a train and could not get out so I had to take a train and then try to get back, hoping I was not going to get lost. So I got on the first train out and made it to a different station (the line which I took did not exist on the map too which was fun). It took an hour to get back to the correct station. He left after the half an hour mark. OH well.

On Thursday I did meet camel from #llvm, and we had okonomiyaki. It was nice.

Tonight (since it is now Saturday at 1pm), I might go out on the town but I am not really awake yet and I don't feel that good.

Work has been good, I am finally getting stuff done but running into bugs which people have not run into before which sucks. First it was BIT_FIELD_REF on the left hand side, and then vec_set was not being used and then an ICE due to BIT_FIELD_REF < VIEW_CONVERT_EXPR uses the wrong mode (and even the fix I came for that is incorrect as it produces horible code in some cases, well a simple one of a+b or two way different modes).

Japan part 1

2006-07-13T14:46:00.000+09:00

So far Tokyo has been fun. Though I have not eaten dinner at all because I have not been able to decide what to eat. It is hot and humid here. Even sometimes it gets hot in the office so much I decide to head home which means going in an even hotter and more humid walk.

I have been working on an interesting optimization for GCC but I have ran into a couple of other optimizations[1] that need to be done before this one actually starts working. The optimization is to work around a hazard with the Cell processor. The idea is just like doing the floating point in the SSE unit but instead doing it in the VMX unit on the Cell. This optimization allows for the compiler to do some scalar computation in vectors instead of storing it off to the stack.

A co-work has suggested a new type but that seems to defet the propose of the optimization in that the code should not need to be changed

[1]http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-07/msg00215.html

GCC summit part 1

2006-07-04T05:10:00.000+09:00

Ok, this post is going to be a bit weird but here it goes.

What was I thinking during Friday night? What did I do correct and why?

Anyways the GCC summit was good. Most of the talks were boring but getting to know people and their faces is always good.

The flight out to Ottawa sucked, it took about 14 hours longer than excepted. With an overnight stay in Chicago which I had to pay which is crap. And then during the next lag of the flight in Chicago, it took an extra two hours because the plane was delayed.

GCC 4.0.0 is released

2005-04-24T21:26:00.000+09:00

GCC 4.0.0 was released just this past week, what does not mean for the normal computer user. Nothing, really nothing. As people should not be compiling their OS with the newest compiler. Now they can compile their own scientific program with the new compiler to try it out and see if it is faster than the old one.

Every time a release happens and there are still regressions which are not fixed, I know that those bugs will the most duplicated bugs for the first couple weeks. Though the number of new regressions except for i386 SSE/MMX problems due to the rewrite, RTH is handling all of them which is good. Most of the SSE/MMX bugs have been stupid mistakes, wrong constraint on an instruction or we don't want to do a transformation on the RTL level. The only other new regression is tree-ssa-pre copying only part of an instruction which eliminated. Hopefully we can fix these couple of problems and release 4.0.1 within a month (Mark, the RM, said two/three months but I feel we should release often).

Well on 4.1.0 news, well VRP has been finding some latent bugs in fold which is good but looks like VRP and the tcb branch was not as tested as I had hoped for, oh well. Ada does not bootstrap right now because of VRP miscompiling the front-end so it ends up in infinite loop which is bad. There are also some other regressions on the mainline due either to TCB or Jeff's new jump threader. There is a major regression which causes GCC on ppc-darwin not to be able to compile it self and Honza has not fixed it yet, oh well.

3rd person to die

2005-04-06T16:10:00.000+09:00

Since every time people die, there are three people who die in a short time. So the people who died are:
Lord Callaghan
Pope John Paul II
Prince Rainier III

So nobody else will famous die for a while now since people die in 3s.

Pray for all three deaths as they were all good people.

RIP Pope John Paul II

2005-04-03T05:13:00.000+09:00

We will miss you, you have been such a great Pope and a great leader. Leading us from pain and suffering from the devil and evil.

We will miss you.

Religion and people

2005-03-28T01:54:00.000+09:00

Well another easter has come and almost gone now but people forget sometimes what Easter is about and why it is importrant. First Jesus gave up his own life (well technicially he is GOD but that is for another story) so that we can life regular lives and not worry too much about the devil coming and getting us.
Yes there are still a lot of sins which we need to repay for but how do we repay for them is a different story.
I as a Catholic believe that everyone is good, until they don't repay for their sins.
Repenting a sin is only one way to repay for some sins. Another way is giving up something for a while (not something you need to live though, food and water). In fact giving up food and water for getting skiny is part of a sin (one of the deadly seven, lust and envy). Yes this is the opposite of gluttony as you are consuming less but you want to become someone else (envy) and you want to change your body (lust).

PS Sorry for this blog but I needed to do it, oh, there might be some more in the future like this.

Trolls

2005-03-24T12:39:00.000+09:00

Yes I like people to troll my blog some more. I am tried of not getting any comments.

Yes GCC is a good compiler, I just need to fix 106 more bugs and 4.0.0 will be the best release ever.

Matt Austern left Apple

2005-03-19T14:34:00.000+09:00

Today I found out that Matt Austern left Apple. I wondering if I could get at Apple because of this or they waiting for the "right" person to replace Matt.

Well I should write Ron this weekend to find out (but not mention Matt).

Brothers and road trip

2005-03-19T07:35:00.000+09:00

Well my brothers left me in Cincy as they go out on a road trip to New Mexico to watch a soccer game. Well that just means one more night in the dorm.

Well at least now I have a promise from someone to help me move back to my house from the dorm which is good.

15 years in the making

2005-03-18T07:13:00.000+09:00

It has been 15 years since UC has played UK. This is going to be the biggest games of the year.

My picks

2005-03-17T10:27:00.000+09:00

Illinois, Wake Forest, Minnesota, and Duke with Minnesota and Illinois in the final and Minnesota winning it.

Tonight (late night)

2005-03-15T17:31:00.000+09:00

Okay, this is not going into another entry because I am too lazy to create one but here it goes.

Why the fuck can people not understand C89/C99/C++ aliasing rules, they are simple and easy to understand. Basically you cannot access (and be defined) the memory location via two different types (signed/unsigned are considered same types) but you can access it via a char (signed or unsigned) and still be fine. Using unions is the correct way of doing this access.

GCC and bug reports

2005-03-14T00:31:00.000+09:00

I am going to start a normal "gcc bug report" blog entry starting today. Hopefully non-GCC people don't mind.
--- cut ----

I still cannot figure out why people cannot read the bug reporting page, it is not hard and it takes only a minute or two. Reading it right before reporting a bug report would be very useful. Also doing a quick search for a duplicated bug would not hurt. and if you know it is a regression, well limit you search a little further so you don't have to look through all ~2600 bugs.

Maybe I am just ranting because I am tried of closing bugs as invalid, putting them in WAITING, or closing them as duplicates.

A great name in rock DJ died last Sunday

2005-03-12T06:11:00.000+09:00

A greate name in rock DJ died last Sunday, Tommy Vance.
http://www.radiorewind.co.uk/tommy_vance_page.htm
http://www.deep-purple.net/othernews/tommy-vance.htm
http://www.offshoreradio.co.uk/tommy.htm

We will miss you Tommy.

WTF - need more information about this

2005-03-09T17:40:00.000+09:00

Yes, I get a lot of spam, but this tops the cake. I don't know if this is legit or not. I am thinkig it is not because I cannot find any infromation about the company at all with google. I would like someone to figure out what this is about. Note the only edit I did to this email was remove the email address, if someone wants the email address, I can give it to them.

Dear Andrew:

   I am writing to you to let you know about some exciting summer internship opportunities that currently available with my firm.

   If you are considering pursuing a career in business, general management, public relations / communications, engineering, consulting, or perhaps running your own dental practice we may have a position for you.

   Our internship program is quite unique. At N.A.C.P. we give you the opportunity to participate in a business from the inside out. During your tenure with the firm you will gain valuable experience in all aspects of the business environment (human resources, marketing, sales, finance, project estimation and customer service just to name a few).

Unlike a lot of other internships this one is paid. All first year interns receive a salary of $400 per week and are eligible for our profit sharing plan.

If this sounds like something that would help you in building your skills / resume please email me back at ------email-----. I will be on campus next week and would be happy to meet and provide you with more information in person. I look forward to hearing from you and meeting with you on campus.

Sincerely,
Paul Evans
Founder & CEO
N.A.C.P.
Developing Tomorrow's Leaders Today

Physics

2005-03-02T13:37:00.001+09:00

Well it is not really Physics, it is quatumn mechanics which is a branch of physics which is still going on. Also it is one of the branches which goes between Linear Algebra and Calculus a lot.

Today's junk and begins

2005-02-23T12:09:00.000+09:00

Well today marks the begining and the end for me. I thought blogging never get me to write things down but here I am writting in my new blog.

Drinking is really only fun when drinking with people but when you cannot find other people to drink, it is fun to drink alone (well as long as you thinking you are with people you are fine).

iTunes/Pepsi promotion

2005-02-23T11:56:00.000+09:00

Well I think it is official after six Pepsis in three weeks, the promotion is rigged against me.
Why does 1 in 3 sounds good when it comes to a promotion when I will never be that one in three,
Really this sucks because my iTunes account is also broken in that I registered 5 machines but I got rid of them and/or wiped out their harddrive and started over. Now I cannot use my iTunes account.

Update, now I am getting buy one and get one free.

Update, now all I can get is free music so I am happy.