Freakin’ Sunny

Well it’s about time. I think Old Man Winter has finally retreated for the year, hurrah! It’s currently sunny (and cloudless), and at 20C (68F), the warmest it’s been all year. The quad was full of people playing catch, people sunbathing, reading, and generally enjoying the weather. It’s kind of humourous to see a person sunbathing, and in the background see what’s left of the snow.

It’s good for me, because exams have been very stressful, but I’m glad it’s almost over. In closing, here’s a picture of what it looks like outside my window:

Edit: It’s a nice change from the random weather we’ve had the past couple days. We’ve gone from snow to rain to freezing rain to snow to rain all in one day. Yikes!

Vortex: Massively Parrallel?

With the growing trend of multi-core processors, I saw it only fitting that Vortex be optimized for working with multiple processors.

It does this by creating a seperate thread for each appliction that it’s running. Each thread has a “MailBox” object. It checks this mailbox for a message, then deals with it. Each mailbox is managed by a reporting “PostOffice.” When a thread sends a message, it calls up the local mailbox, which routes the message through the postoffice (locking several mutexes at the same time, until it gets to the destination thread, where it locks that mutex, it then deposits the message, and backs out. The destination mailbox now holds the message.

In essence, the PostOffice object just handes the routing off the messages, and the postoffice is always called though the sending thread’s thread. I can see potential of a bottleneck, and I think I can optimize it so that only the two destinations, are locked, as well as modifications to the routing table. I’m also thinking of creating a “keyed access” to the postoffice, so that any thread with a key can do administrative commands on the postoffice. I would overload it like:

po->getList();
po->getList(authKey* key);
po->getList(keyperms* perms, authkey* myauth, authKey* destkey);

So that multiple keys can be issued with multiple security settings. To set the auth settings for a key, you’d insert your key, as well as the destination key. In terms of security, it would be rather easy to gain access to a key, but if I can figure out a way to randomize the key location in memory, or change it every few minutes, that would be good.

Wheeeeeeeee

Facebook Hacking

Yeah, don’t do it. It’s illegal.

Random you say? Not really. I’ve gotten a bunch of searches about hacking facebook as of late.

And searching google for it isn’t a really good idea either.

Vortex - Now and Then

I’m proud to say that I have some concepts that will work nice for the Vortex Engine.

Contact has been made with PNSoftware, vendor or the ancient MyOS “Desktop Environment.” Peter Nightingale, owner of PN Software, has given rights Vectec to produce software under the MyOS name with a very loose licence agreement.

The reason to emulate MyOS is clear. It’s already got a GUI to work from. Having Prior art makes it easy to work with. None of the orginal code will make it in the Vortex Engine. To be clear, Vortex refers to the engine that runs the MyOS interface. Unline earlier versions, Vortex is going back to the orginal idea of running from scripts. Using and extending Lua is key to this. I also plan on incorperating my intraprocess messenger.

But why call it MyOS?
Vortex has traditionally been kind of a test platform for new technologies. Indeed, the last functioning version of Vortex was 0.5, which did not feature any support for GUIs, it allowed for up to 5 running processes. This was a breakthrough at the time. Let me take this chance to summarize the history of Vortex:

History of Vortex

0.3: Written in QBasic, it featured a GUI, and “Twister Mail”. It also has an admit panel and a half implemented program registry to easily launch programs from. The GUI was a mix of graphical and text dos, and was very inflexible. Menus were navigated by a keyboard. Used star echoing password for multiuser support, a first in the Vortex/MyOS battle.

0.5: First to support multiple processes running. It used a custom language called ‘Vertex.’

0.6: Attempted to extend Vertex into a graphical interface. Attempting to use UGL overloaded the compiler, and support, and the QBasic language was abandoned.

VParse: Moving to C++, it extended Vertex to Vertex2, which was incompatible with Vertex (executions in 0.5/0.6 resulted in the program closing). Written for Linux, it could be ported to Win32 fairly easily. This is the last program to support Vertex2.

0.7: THis was a Linux Only release that didn’t actually do anything. I started work on the backend, but there was no actual programs or anything here.

0.8: A graphical version of Vortex written in Win32. It supported pre-compiled C/C++ code into DLL form. Support for this was dropped promptly.

0.8 marked the last offical release of Vortex, 2 years ago this month. Since then, a lot of knowledge has been gained, and the Project Deviation has been created. Hopefully I can make a new addition soon!

Ubuntu?

If you know me, you’ll know that I’m a linux fanboy. After my testing of Vista, I installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10.

Linux has come a long way since I first started to use it back on Mandrake 6 I think it was. A lot more programs and support are available now than ever before, and the community spirit and ease of use has grown.

I am by no means a Linux newbie. I used Linux as my primary desktop for 2 years running Slackware, compiling my kernels, installing programs from source, running servers, etc.

Linux is notorious for a couple reasons.
1. It’s hard for new users to use. This is false. When a friend of mine’s laptop crashed, we installed Ubuntu on it for her until her XP disk was shipped to her from England. She loved it, and liked how more hardware worked for her out of the box than it did on XP (which was a massive multi-day driver hunt).

2. It sucks on laptops. Well this is where I start to agree. Linux has a reputation to be sucky on proprietary hardware. Laptops are the apex of proprietary hardware. This being said, I think laptop vendors are starting to converge on a standard. This doesn’t keep Linux from now working, however.

Most of you know, my laptop is a Toshiba A100 PSAA9C-SK9E. Everything I’ve tested hardware wise has worked. My mouse works, my video card worked, and my sound works. Getting the nVidia drivers in Linux up is not too difficult, but not simple for a new user.

The main sticking point I’ve found so far, is that suspending does not work. That is suspending and hibernating. Most of the time, my laptop just hangs. After unsuccessfully suspending to disk a couple times, when I got to class and turned on my laptop, it refused to boot until I got home. I think it somehow was due to the fact that I wasn’t plugged in, forcing me to go back to WinXP.