Saturday, May 31, 2008

ClamAV Live CD back up

So, after my previous web host screwing me over and everything and me finding a new host, getting it setup again, losing all my backups from the old site, a recreating a lot of content, the ClamAV LiveCD is back up.

http://www.volatileminds.net/projects/clamav

Only like a month late, but this release is pretty nice. The previous releases were using Edgy, but with Hardy being an LTS release, I decided to upgrade the CD to Hardy until the next LTS release. It makes the CD about 20 megs bigger, but I think having the latest drivers and stability is worth it.

Grepping and Awking text

I have been working today on retrieving, formatting, and displaying text in a certain way and have learned a lot about grep and awk. For instance, grepping strings with hyphens isn't as easy as "grep -dev". What you need to do is "grep [\-\]dev". I was also needing to get every other line of output from one command, and I found a way to do that in awk:

command | awk 'NR > 2 && (NR % 2 == 0 ){ print} /^$/{NR=0}' | xargs other_command

This stuff is quite fun. Hopefully, pretty soon, I will have a bunch of scripts that get what hardware you have (as seen by linux) and get the Windows-driver counterpart among other things.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

The Bitch Album

:-)

Metallica - Ain't My Bitch
Buckcherry - Crazy Bitch
Alanis Morissette - Bitch
Ben Folds - Bitches Ain't Shit
HED PE - Bitches
Eminem - Bitch
Ludacris - Move Bitch
N.W.A. - One Less Bitch
Prodigy - Smack My Bitch up
Snoop Dogg - Bitch Please
N.W.A. - Bitch iz a Bitch
Jet - Cold Hard Bitch
Guns N' Roses - Back Off Bitch

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Programmer vs Pornstar: The Duel

1. We use our hands all day long.
2. Chances are the thing we are working on has been worked on by more than one person.
3. We can do it at home or at the office.
4. If you are sober, you might make things worse.
5. As long as you finish, who cares how you get there.
6. If you can't finish on time, you will probably get fired.
7. Your free time and work time don't differ very much.
8. The end result is all people care about. (related to 6, but not the same)
9. When you can't satisfy the other person, you call in backup.


From this logic, there isn't much of a difference. ;-)

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

A Happy Medium

I love programming. I also love being social, having friends over, etc... But the problem is that the two don't mix well at all. I could go on and not talk to people for days as long as I was in the middle of a good project or two. It has happened before, it will probably happen again. I could also stop programming in my free time and go hang out with people instead. This isn't optimal (at all). I have yet to find a happy medium of the two. Yes, I am a programmer by trade. Sometimes, work is a bit slow and I don't get much programming done, but other days it is all that I do (especially at the beginning of a project). I love it (outside of writing documentation). I really don't want to end up like a lot of (open-source) developers that spend their whole life programming, not starting any families, etc...

There is a happy medium out there, I just have yet to find it.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

FBench Redux: With Threads

DISCLAIMER: These aren't "professional" tests. These are just me running and giving you what I have found. Don't take these as cold, hard facts.

I added support for threads in FBench to see how Mono and .NET do compared to each other with threads. Most of the results weren't very surprising, but running them both threaded at the same time gave some very interesting results. I realised I was running an older version on Mono (just a couple minor build behind), so I updated it to the latest windows build on the Mono site. Pictures Below:

This is Mono and .NET running unthreaded. I first ran .NET, waited for it to finish, then ran Mono.

This is Mono and .NET running threaded (2 threads). Again, I ran .NET first and Mono second.

This is running both at the same time. This wasn't very surprising. (I clicked .NET, then Mono as fast as I could :-) ).
These are the results that surprised me. Running them both threaded at the same time (.NET, then Mono) resulted in Mono being considerably quicker (~7 seconds quicker).

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Top 10 people who annoy me

Ranked from most annoying to least annoying (though they are still really, really, overly annoying).

1. Carlos Mencia
2. Sarah Jessica Parker (I am sure she is nice/not annoying in person)
3. Steve Jobs
4. George Lopez (not nearly as bad as Carlos Mencia, I can at least watch him without wanting to kill myself)
5. Paris Hilton
6. Theo de Raadt (of OpenBSD fame)
7. Steve Ballmer (he has gotten better over the years, a couple years ago, he might have beat Carlos Mencia)
8. Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. (aka Perez Hilton)
9. Flava Flav
10. Bret Michaels

Monday, May 12, 2008

Summer project(s)

Mono has been part of the GSOC for the past couple of years now. This year, I wasn't sure if I was going to have time to do a project for them (it would be my first), so I am too late to formally join Mono's SOC. Although, I have talked to some of the guys in #mono and they said go for it anyway and if whatever you do is good, I doubt they will have a problem including you in the end. So, I have decided on what I will do. It will be a small cross-platform security suite
with antivirus/antispyware powered by ClamAV (it will have an option of scanning incoming webpages from all the mainstream web browsers for viruses or malicious code as well as phishing filter), an optional web filter for schools or parents who would like to filter their kids searching, and possibly some other things. This should be really fun. One disappointment I found is that the ClamAV bindings for C# haven't been updated since October of 2005 :-/. So, I will probably write my own.
I haven't decided on a name yet, but that isn't the most important thing right now.

Another thing I might start is the GIT# implementation needed for MonoDevelop.

Friday, May 9, 2008

John Walker's FBENCH: Mono vs .NET

I implemented John Walker's FBENCH today in C# to see how Mono did compared to MS.NET. I had always thought that Mono's integer arithmetic was faster than MS.NET, but these test results say differently.

This is the benchmark being run in .NET. The times were about as consistent as you can get.

This is Mono running the benchmark (again, times were extremely consistent).


The benchmark did 1000 iterations of John Walker's raytracing FBENCH. Source code can be found here. This is my first try at something like this, so if you see something I did wrong, please let me know. Thanks.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Party Hardy

Party this Saturday at my apartment. Games, music, and drinks a plenty. Just show up after like 7 or something. If you don't have my address, get a hold of me over Facebook or something.