mark_undoio

7 ms·

91.
by mark_undoio 2y ago
We converted our product (which I'd say is medium-sized - it's not a sprawling enterprise codebase but it's the work of a team over many years) to use Meson for its C / C++ components and I've been very pleased with
92.
by mark_undoio 2y ago
EarthSiege 2 was amazing - many hours spent there. I used to multiplayer with a friend: one of us would steer the HERC's legs and one the turret.
93.
by mark_undoio 2y ago
When I bought Free space it was actually titled Descent: Freespace - The Great War. I wish the series had carried on, I really wanted to find out where the confusing plot threads of Freespace 2 went!
94.
by mark_undoio 2y ago
I remember hearing that it was Ninja in the rest of the world at some point as a child and being very confused by it. Some discussion on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TMNT/comments/11phg3p/did_anybo
95.
by mark_undoio 2y ago
I love that this is here! Let's Compute was a brilliant magazine and I loved it. I still feel sad when I remember getting the letter refunding my subscription because it was discontinued. Unlike other home microcomputer magazines at
96.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
It felt like a shame MD Data [1] didn't catch on - but with existing MO formats out there maybe there was no point. I was also reminded today of Floptical [2] drives, which I vaguely remember hearing about (but didn't catch on eit
97.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
I was excited about the LS-120 but I never quite convinced myself to stump up the money to pay for it. My recollection was that it was: - Slightly larger than the contemporary Zip disks. - Cheaper than a Zip drive. - Could just replace y
98.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, although they were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to be
99.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
On GCC , as far as I know, pointers will always cast to long and back ok. I'd expect the same from clang. No, that's not a portable behaviour but I can see that it's valid if you're targeting Linux. uintptr_t is more po
100.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
I once worked on an Optical Image Stabilisation system for mobile phones. I'd updated the stock Android camera app to show some icons from marketing for when the shake compensation was on / off. The icon for when compensation was
101.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
I'm a big fan of Turn the Ship Around! By L. David Marquet as fun read that shows what some good leadership can do by pushing responsibility to the lowest appropriate level in an organisation. https://davidmarquet.com/t
102.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
Yes - plus the original win of UML was also being able to run virtual instances on a kernel without proper virtualization capabilities. In the early 2000s people used to use UMLs as a hosting platform - they didn't have the same secu
103.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
I guess it insulates you against bugs in the VM implementation, plus against (transient) failures of the host system.
104.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
Our time travel debugger at undo.io also uses a similar approach. But the world is different for time travel debug, in that you can replay the whole history of the recorded execution (my understanding is that this is not required for Durabl
105.
I Debug Python Code with a Time Travel Debugger(undo.io)
5 points by mark_undoio 3y ago|1 comments
106.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
My guess is that this is useful when interacting with memory-mapped IO devices - individual accesses can have meaning at the device level, so you don't want the caches getting in the way (and e.g. removing / combining accesses or
107.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
> Remember: great is just good, but repeatable. Great advice. I wish it was listened to more in tech - there's a lot of effort spent trying to jump up to the next big level in commercial performance, at the cost of not just improvi
108.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
This is cool - time travel debugging is potentially really helpful in these flaky situations. Having tests fail unpredictably basically means you're not controlling the thing they test, which can be scary. But I find the most annoying
109.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
I had a very tiring Christmas day (mostly tiring for my dad, though) putting together boot floppies for various games. Eventually I got really good at it - selecting what drivers were required and packing them efficiently into base and exte
110.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
@chris-tsang My debugging anecdotes usually involve analysing subtle failures in C code. Those are typically days or weeks of staring and trying out different things, followed (eventually) by enlightenment. It's usually been kernel-le
111.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
> I was particularly impressed this year by a demonstration of debugging stack smashing I'm glad you liked it - and that's useful feedback for other demos we give! > I'm still waiting on the keyserver to be able to run
112.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
At lower optimisation levels there's a register allocated by the JVM to refer back to the bytecode, which makes things easy. In principle they could change that with a JVM revision - but in practice they don't, so it's an ea
113.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
Oh, and regarding how long - it depends how long it takes to fill the circular buffer of non deterministic behaviour. Serious compute bound workloads can run days with a gigabyte of non deterministic event log. Serious IO bound workloads b
114.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
(the result is that it's quite feasible to update to new JVMs and to support multiple at once)
115.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
The short answer is yes - but not as tightly as you'd think. We don't need a deep awareness of what the JVM is doing, e.g. its internal data structures are largely opaque to us. When we need to reconstruct state we always have th
116.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
Conceptually similar in that you can decide after-the-fact what state you want to see. But Time Travel Debugging applies that to everything in the program, not just log statements - all function calls, variables, memory locations, etc can
117.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
As byefruit says above - we (undo.io) sell a Java Time Travel Debugger. If anybody wants to try it, they should get in touch with us. Our Java tech is based on an underlying record/replay engine that works at the level of machine instr
118.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
At undo.io we're interested in using our time travel capability beyond conventional time travel debugging - a recording file contains everything the program did, without any advance knowledge of what you need to sample, so there's
119.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
I worked in a room in the new Computer Laboratory building, in which "can we throw out this random old coffee machine, or is it history?" was a real question. It definitely wasn't the first Trojan Room coffee machine but wh
120.
by mark_undoio 3y ago
I always thought it would be a good fit for the EEE - maybe I should dig mine out again!

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