Ake's Blog

Right now I am working on my thesis which is “Specializing Operating System Kernels using a Scripting Language”. A part of my work is porting the LuaJIT compiler into the FreeBSD x86 kernel. When I was writing my thesis, I was asked to show modification information in the thesis. They are number of lines added, numbers of lines removed, number of lines changed. I know that diff exists. However, I need a summary of information produced by it.

There are times that I want to access to my computer in my laboratory remotely. However, it is inside the lab's internal network. Luckily, There is a gateway that I make a ssh connection to. The simplified scenario is shown below.

Assuming that you are using us.iso.kbd keymap, you can remap CAPSLOCK to CTRL by this simple following steps.

When I am working with a kernel module in FreeBSD, there are times that I want to see all functions available in man 9. I know that apropos is out there but I sometimes don't know the keyword. Because of this, I decided to write a simple zsh script to list all available pages in a section, not only in section 9.

New OpenBSD 5.6 has been released. It is time to give it a try.

When we want to send data across network, it involves either write()/writev() send()/sendto()/sendmsg() and sockets. To use write(), writev() and send(), the socket must be connected. On the other hand sendto() and sendmsg() can be used in both connected and unconnected connection. We normally can find the implementation of system calls in the kernel by adding ‘sys_’ prefix to the name of the system call except send(). In FreeBSD libc, send() is just a wrapper of sendto() with some default parameters.

First of all, I would like to apologize that I haven't updated this blog for a very long time. After I graduated in March, I took a little break and started a full-time job on April. I worked on a lot of interesting projects. I cannot share what I worked on because I feel like it is a company secret. In May, I got a notification of acceptance from the

David O Brien has produced a tutorial on using Quartz Composer to emulate Facebook Home. It is worth watching. Quartz Composer, to me, is another hidden gem that Apple provides for developers.

It has been for a while since my last post. I was enjoying with my senior project, “Accelerating Map Rendering with GPU”. In this project, my friend and I modified Mapnik, an opensource map rendering, to utilize Nvidia's Path Rendering. Path Rendering is an OpenGL extension provided by Nvidia for vector graphic rendering. Nvidia claims that its extensions aims to reduce overhead from traditional APIs when using them to draw vector graphics.

I do a lot of presentation particularly those class projects. To make my presentation looks more professional, I decide to buy Logitech Professional Presenter R800. It is very nice. I recommend you to have one if you have to give a lot of presentation. However, what bothers me is that not all buttons work with Apple Keynote, particularly Play button and Blank button. Well, the device is designed for Microsoft PowerPoint on Windows.