Bytecode for the Dalvik VM

http://git.source.android.com/?p=platform/dalvik.git;a=blob_plain;f=docs/dalvik-bytecode.html;h=fc3cf0b9b4d03b209dd65b3d107c0512ea24deb2;hb=master

Chrome under Windows 2003 Server

Chrome works well under Windows 2003 server except in one small case. When composing an email in Gmail when you press tab the "Send" button should highlight and it doesn't. This is because the Theme engine is using the Windows Classic style. In order to change this run the Theme service (Start>>Run>>services.msc>>find "Themes" and change it to "Automatic" startup type and press start). The Display Properties "Appearance" tab for "Windows and buttons" will now allow you to change it to "Windows XP style". This style shows the highlighted buttons.

What you can do when your browser is a lot faster

Well, Chrome has changed the landscape and TraceMonkey from the Firefox team is also making a dent in what is possible with browsers.

Here's a really cool demo that only works on the latest Firefox 3.1 builds and apparently Webkit nightlies.

Image Manipulation in browser

WinMerge in MKS Diff and Merge Tools

I've done this integration a number of times and I've always had to resort to creating a C# program to discover what the options really are:

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i++)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("[" + i + "]: " + args[i]);
            }
            Console.Read();
        }
    }

then I hook it up to the dialog and do a diff.

Here's the current options that I've put in:

C:\Program Files\WinMerge\WinMergeU.exe /maximize /e /x /ul /ur 
                  /dl "{1}" /dr "{2}" "{3}" "{4}"

Byte Array Debugger Visualizer

As part of a debugging session, I wanted to visualize a byte array as a string so I did a little googling for something that would display data in Visual Studio as a string. The following article: http://www.alexthissen.nl/blogs/main/archive/2006/01/21/debugger-visualizers-and-arrays.aspx claims it's not possible. I'll believe him.

What I did to workaround the problem was to inspect the MemoryStream (since that is where the byte array I'm interested is buried) then in the QuickWatch window I typed:
System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(ms._buffer)
where ms is my MemoryStream.

That displays a string that I can look at with the string visualizer. Problem sort of solved.

More exupery

In Bryce's documentation (see the bibliography that I wrote about in my last post), he mentions PICs but as far as I could see never expands that acronym, well, I think I know what it is after browsing the source code:
Polymorphic Inline Cache

Squeak - Exupery

Well, I've been on a squeak kick for a while now.... I've done some work getting seaside doing some displaying of pictures and now I'm really pumped about a project I just discovered called: Exupery: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3842
I've just read the articles in the bibliography section: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5792
and now I've downloaded the source code and got the image running. I'd like to see what Bryce Kampjes' has done here in this project.

What's cool about this project is that Bryce thinks that with a bit of work on a background compiler with some aggressive inlining of code and some SSA optimizations he can achieve C-level performance with squeak smalltalk! Solving one of the most persistent complaints about Smalltalk that it is slow (certainly no where as slow as MRI) Post a comment if you can tell me what MRI stands for.