Archive for January, 2008

APNG

January 24, 2008

I received word recently from Brendan Sera-Shriar at Seneca College about this APNG portal site that he, along with folks from PHUG, got off the ground recently.  The site looks great and should help provide a wealth of information about a great new feature in Firefox 3 (and Opera 9.5 and other products to follow…).

They’ve got several cool samples up and I’m sure they’d love to add more if you’ve got them.

We seem to have introduced some flashing bug while the animations load.  I filed bug 413933.  Should get fixed soon I hope!

3d animating dolphin

Next William Hung?

January 17, 2008

jemalloc builds

January 12, 2008

Since just before the holidays, Jason and I have been working on getting jemalloc ported to Windows, Mac and Linux as well as integrated in to our build system.  Each platform has its own set of challenges, with Windows being the most exciting.  I tried several approaches including dynamically patching over the C runtime allocation functions (malloc, free, etc) in memory, but kept running in to issues with the allocations the CRT does during startup.  Things like putenv() realloc and free allocations that were done before we had the chance to patch in.  I talked to Benjamin about replacing the CRT and he did a bunch of work to get a CRT building with jemalloc.  It turned out not to be very difficult — Microsoft includes the source as part of Visual Studio Professional (sadly, you can’t redistribute it).  I had to make various changes to the init functions to make sure we could use CRITICAL_SETIONs and thread local storage during malloc initialization.  Was a bit of a pain to make sure the malloc initialization code didn’t call things that needed to allocate but eventually I got everything working.  The result: A Windows jemalloc build.  The sunspider JS test looks to run about 5% faster.  You’ll notice that these builds take up a bit more memory initially but they should level out around 80mb.  There is plenty of tuning left to do, but I’m curious to hear how these run for people after running for a long time.

Linux builds are stable but I don’t have one handy.  Mac builds run for a little while before they crash, but the crash looks like one I fixed on Windows so I expect to have those early next week.

Holiday Recap

January 3, 2008

Finally back home from the holidays.

I went back to Georgia to spend Christmas with my family. It is always great to see them and to have a chance to relax a bit. I got the chance to see both sets of grandparents which I always enjoy. Got my BBQ and Varsity fixes. You just can’t find good BBQ in California.

I flew back to California on the 30th and within a few hours of arriving, Vlad was driving us up to Tahoe. Spent New Year’s Eve with friends from hockey in Truckee. Only went snowboarding one day and only did one run — my ankle was killing me. Not sure what is wrong, but need to figure it out. Several of us went to Reno to play some craps. Alyssa Milano showed up at our table for a while. She was very pleasant and witty. She was beautiful but much shorter than I thought. She was rolling the dice for a long time and made everyone some money.  We saw her arrival as a good omen — Must have been as we all left with a lot more money than we started with. Not a bad way to start off the new year.

I’m rested up and ready to get back to normal. Should be an exciting year.