Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Messina Hof

Well, today I went on the tour of Messina Hof, a local winery. My mom insists that it is famous, but I am going to have to take her word for it. After the tour, they had a wine tasting. The had four wines for us:

  • Chardonnay
  • Gewurztraminer
  • Merlot
  • Port

I had never heard of the Gewurztraminer before, but I have to say that I liked it. Their port was also good, but I knew from the previous wine tasting that I liked port in general. Anyway, the place was pretty and definitely worth going.


New Cell Phone

Well, I finally did it. I changed my cell phone provider. I switched to Sprint. There were a few reasons for this. One of the more notable is that they seem to cover my parents’ place the best, and thus they changed as well. After my previous experience with Verizon, there was no way I would go back to them. In addition, there is the fact that they like to cripple their phones so you have to use (and pay) for their services instead of being able to use the capabilities they phone is supposed to have in order to sync with the computer.


Spring Break

Well, I just got back from spring break, and so now it is picture time. When I connected the camera to the computer, I realized I had pictures on there from January which I had not taken off. These pictures were just of the kitties, but still, I thought they were cute enough to include here:

Missie_Sunning.jpg
Missie_Sunning.jpg
Hallie_Yawning.jpg
Hallie_Yawning.jpg
No, Hallie is not hissing or growling there, she is yawning, believe it or not.


Branchless Code

Apologies if this is technical, but since I learned something in this experiment, I thought I would write it up:

I remember going to a seminar a few weeks ago delivered by a faculty candidate which discussed the idea of how to get around the branch mis-prediction problem present in microprocessors. Anyway, her idea was to use predicated statements to make the instructions conditional on a comparison which may not have been completed yet. Essentially, when faced with a decision between two routes, the processor starts computation on both before it is even sure which it should take. Then, when the decision is known, it can proceed to throw out the results from the task it should not have started and only keep the results from the other. Her research mentioned using the processor’s internal register renaming system to prevent the results from the two colliding. There is a problem of both processor support as well as compiler support, as well as the fact that the active power in the processor is now increased. From the first two issues, I doubt we will ever see this come to light, especially when such things are already possible:


Fire's Death

Gee, a bunch happened at once. Maybe it is just that I have a little bit of time. Anyway, I have finally made the announcement on Fire’s death. This was a long time coming, but I had to wait for Adium 1.0 to come out since it contained the upgrade path from Fire. As is the case with many open source projects, there was developer turnover, but lately I had become the primary developer and most of the other devs moved on to other things. I didn’t want to go at it alone, so it was time to let go. Anyway, it is a bit sad to see it end. I have use the program since sometime in 2000, so it had become a part of my life, just don’t want it to become my life.