Monthly Archives: April 2008

Breakonomics

Katalyst went against Snap2 in the popping finals. Snap2 (and basically everyone else) improved like crazy.

Fungus (NYC) came through too. Saw a bajillion old friends. Bop’n Andre was there. Shallow and Tron were the other judges.

They even had house battles this year. Sungmin almost made it to finals.

DJ Franco de Leon is sick. Fadayz is hot-headed as always, stirring up some crazy commotion toward the end. More police needed next year.

Back to the lab.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04

I have two Ubuntu 7.10 systems that I tried upgrading to 8.04. The first (x86_64) encountered a bunch of problems during the Clean-Up phase, causing a whole slew of package system complaints on reboot, while the second (x86) failed during the Installing/Upgrading Packages stage, leaving my system in an “unusable state” and leaving me unable to start Gnome.

More details are on Launchpad: the first system were all semi-automatically reported tickets using the new error reporting system (which sets the tickets to be private), and one ticket for the second system.

Last time I tried upgrading was from 7.04 to 7.10 on my Dell Latitude D600, which also failed and brought my system into an “unusable state.”

ECMAScript Implementations

  • started evaluating the engines in trying to run the JS beautifier
  • tamarin
    • JIT engine donated by Adobe to Mozilla
    • used in Flash 9
    • written in C++
    • separate compiler (asc) and executor (avmplus)
    • the shell module contains a number of system/IO facilities
      (toplevel.as)
    • “Tamarin was designed to do better with type annotations than without. This is
      why SpiderMonkey actually wins some of those benchmarks against Tamarin on untyped code.
      Our work with SpiderMonkey and Tamarin now in the ActionMonkey project aims to make it
      fast for untyped code as well.”
  • rhino
    • written in Java
  • spidermonkey
    • written in C++
    • help()
    • load() includes javascript files
    • readline() doesn’t really work that great, since it
    • arguments for command-line args
  • es4
    • reference implementation of ECMAScript 4 (Javascript 2)
    • written in SML
    • very slow; it actually times out when running the beautifier (I get “Alarm
      Clock”)