Yeah, I am not alright, I am even an ass, leaving you all (my dear readers, are there any left?) without saying a word for the second time. At the end of last year I was in South East Asia for 3 months, and now I am in South America for 3 months and counting… It is just that I really wish to keep this blog totally technological, but I guess we are all human after all. So yeah, I have been trekking alot in Chile and Argentina (mostly in Patagonia) and having a great time here, now in Buenos Aires. Good steaks and wines, ohhh and the girls. Say no more.
It is really cool that almost every shitty hostel you go, you will find a WiFi available for free use. So carrying an Ipod touch with me I can actually be online, but apparently not many web developers think about Mobile web pages and thus I couldnt write blog posts with Safari, because there is some problem with the text area object. For some reason, I guess some JS code, doesnt run well on the Ipod and I dont get that keyboard thingy up and cannot type in anything, wordpress…
I am always surprised again to see how many computers here, in coffee-shops or just Internet shops, are not really secured. You run as admin some of the times. And there are not anti virus, which I think are good for the average users. And if you plug in your camera to upload some pictures, the next time you will see some stupid new files on it, named: desktop.ini and autorun.inf, sounds familiar? And then I read some MS blog post about disabling AutoRun for removable storage devices..yipi, about time. What I am also trying to say, that one can easily create a zombies army so easily with all those computers… the ease of access and no protection drives me mad.
Anyhow, I had some free time, of course, I am on a vacation, sort of, after all. And I accidentally reached some amazing blog that I couldnt stopped reading for a few days. Meet NO EXECUTE! If you are low level freaks like me, you will really like it too, although Darek begins with hardware stuff, which will fill some gaps for most people I believe, he talks about virtualizations and emulators (his obsession), and I just read it like some fantasies book, eager to get already to the next chapter everytime. I learnt tons of stuff there, and I really like to see that even today some few people still measure and check optimizations in cycles per instructions rather than seconds or MS. One of the stuff I really liked there was a trick he pulled when the guest OS runs on little endian, for instance, and the host OS runs on big endian. Thus every access to memory has to be swapped when the size of the access is more than 2 bytes, of course. Therefore, in order to eliminate the byte swaps, which is expensive, he kinda turned all the memory of the guest OS upside down, and therefore the endianity changed as well. Now it might sound as a simple matter, but this is awesome, and the way he describes it, you can really feel the excitment behind the invention… He also talks about how lame Intel and AMD are to come up with new instruction sets every Monday, which I already mentioned also in the past.
Regarding diStorm now, I decided that I will discontinue the development of the current diStorm64 version. But hey, dont worry. I am going to open source diStorm3 and I still consider making it dual licensed. The benefits of diStorm3 are structure output, and believe me, the speed is amazing and like the good old days, the structure per instruction is unbelieable tiny in size (relative to other disassemblers I saw out there), and you guys are gonna like it.
Thing is, I have no idea when I am getting home…Now with this Swine Flu spreading like hell, I dont know where I will end up. The only great thing about this Swine Flu, so to speak, is that you can see the Evolution in Progress.
Salud