Another week, another linkpile.
- Here’s some old software. I’ve got something older sitting on my shelf here, though.
- A patch to DragonFly, taken from OpenBSD, submitted by Loganaden Velvindron and committed by Venkatesh Srinivas. The patch isn’t that exciting, but it makes me feel cool to namedrop non-Americanized names. If only I could pronounce them!
- Speaking of which, there isn’t always a lot of comments on this Digest (which is good; a long series of comments on the Internet tend to be the result of trolling or inanity.), but the recent strlen() story led to some juicy details.
- Man, I wish this NoteSlate device existed. There’s the BoogieBoard, but it’s not quite the same.
I’ll make up for my relatively low number of links by asking a question: Where do you go for your end of year gift giving? Where do you wish people would go to buy you gifts? I’m looking for suggestions for a gift guide.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Gun Show. This one and that one are my favorites.
I personally find picking a present is one of the most complicated tasks to accomplish. It is not that you do not know the person good enough, it something different. There are two main scenarios: Firstly the blessed (<- might not be the right word here, but writing out "the person, which one will give a present to" is so long… maybe you have a suggestion) person wants something super ueber hyper expensive thing, or secondly he simply does not want anything.
My solution to this problem usually is: For the first case just get together with some other people and together you buy him that expensive thing, or in second case: If he does not want anything, do not buy him anything. It is as simple as that. I mean: What is the point of giving a present, when it will not be used / thrown away anyways? (Besides polluting the planet of course.)
If you really need to _have_ a present, something funny/random will do it, or something self made. Self made things can have a lot of emotional value.
So, I know I am not the best writer on this earth, but I still hope this helps.
PS: I know this is kinda off-topic, but do you know if the Atheros 9285 wlan card has proper drivers under DragonFly? The linux ath9k driver is crap, but the card works flawlessly under PC-BSD.
I buy tea, damnit. Unless you live in Australia, a cuppa tea is always a great gift during a cold month.
ggl: I agree, tea is always a good idea.
Dominique: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=ath§ion=ANY – it looks like the answer is “… probably?” I only gave that page a cursory reading, but I know the wireless drivers in DragonFly were updated to match FreeBSD a little while ago, so it seems likely to work.
Regarding the strlen()-story; is there any work going on or will the C code stay?
As in, will a new version in assembly be added? Venkatesh is the one to ask.
Hi,
Wrt strlen — we should continue this discussion on list, rather than blog comments, but I have not been able to write an assembler version that is faster than the C version on both contemporary Intel and AMD CPUs, in particular the K8. I can outdo the C version pretty handily w/ the version posted in the comments on the original article, on Intel CPUs (Core2 and Nehalem, anyway), but that version is about the same speed as gcc’s take on the C version on K10 and is a ton slower on K8.
I’ve not tried the NetBSD versions linked there; they might be a good idea, but I’m not 100% sure that they’re okay per the C standard. They should do better though, since they work dword at a time-rather than byte-at-a-time (when possible).