Itkovian.net

Yesterday's run was longer than planned. I had not been running for over a week, to make sure my leg would be recovered. I also bought new shoes (Muzino Wave Inspire 4, I think (the box does not give any information)) at the Running Center in Brugge. After about 37 minutes, I felt like I could keep going for a while, so I took a right turn instead of a left (after about 7.5 km) and ran towards the dike. I had to keep convincing myself to not turn back home immediately at each crossroads, but I managed to hang in there.

Since four weeks, I've been running on a regular basis, i.e., about two-three times a week. I started out by doing 25-30 minutes runs, from my house to the dike, along the beach and then back home. After four of those, Veerle took me along for a longer run, with my father-in-law riding along, giving us directions on where to run. After 30 minutes, I thought I was finished, but then I found my pace, which was slightly faster than Veerle's pace. In the end, I ran 55 minutes on a 8.8 km route. It appears that once I manage to get past the 30-35 minutes boundary, I'm all set to go :-)

The hotel network seems to refuse passing through Adium connections. HTTP, ssh, SMTP, etc. all work, but Adium cannot make a connection to the jabber server or the msn server.

Anyway, I'm in Barcelona for the HiPEAC Computing Systems Week. I'm cutting it short, returning Thursday morning.

If you need to align the data from multiple files fast, Haskell is the way to go. For example, given a number of files, with an equal number of lines, each containing a number. How can we easily create a single file where each line contains items from each of the original files, separated by a separator of your choice?

Since a few years, there is quite good support for using performance counters on Linux machines. Examples are OProfile (which has been included in the kernel since 2.6, I think), Perfctr, and Perfmon (not to be confused with the other Perfmon, which is a SNMP based performance monitoring tool). I think Perfmon is destined to make it to the kernel source tree as well, or so I've heard. Yet, I have been using Perfctr since I started my research, so this post is only about that tool.

There has been talk on the Perfctr mailing list (which gets hopelessly spammed these days) for including support for multi-threaded processes, but thus far I've seen nothing that does what I want. So, without further ado, here's how to patch your kernel to support multi-threaded applications.

Two MTI students made a website where people can register the delays they incurred when traveling on the Belgian railroads. For now the website resides on the ELIS servers, and can be reached at http://trappist.elis.ugent.be/~kmillet/. The idea is that the commuters drive the content which should result in an accurate image of the actual delays, rather than the statistics the NMBS gives, as they tend to drop delays smaller than five minutes and prefer to give a more optimistic picture in general. So if you are a commuter, and you use the railroad in Belgium, register and start logging your delays. Spread the word.

Oh joy. After installing a bunch of sun protection screens on the building windows, they decided to turn the power breaker off. So, during what is probably going to be one of the warmer weeks this year, the entire installation is quite useless. So much for good planning.

We have an appointment. With the architect. Next Thursday.

Let's hope he has a plan, an affordable one, and one we like on top of that.

There's a cool video clip of NIN's song Only on the NIN website. Go check it out. It's not new, but I had not seen it before.

I've traded my old amplifier for an Airport Express with Kenneth. Yesterday he also provided me with a power plug, because the Airport comes from the USA, and thus came with the wrong power plug. And I cannot seem to locate mine that came with my PowerBook, nor the one that came with Veerle's MacBook. Sadly, I seem to misplace a lot of stuff lately ;-)