Josef “Jeff” Sipek

During an experiment, I needed to install Fedora 12. I made a few mistakes:

1. I went with the netinstall. Unlike Debian’s netinstall, Fedora’s is very slow.
2. The installer was a bit sluggish under KVM, and so I accidentally clicked though the window that let me unselect Gnome. So it’s installing the whole shebang.
3. For whatever reason, it is installing CJK fonts. I do not speak either of those languages, and therefore they are useless to me. Furthermore, I’ve been told that something in the neighborhood of 20% of Fedora users make use of CJK. That just sounds wrong. Why install a package by default that only 20% of your userbase will benefit from? Aren’t there more useful packages?

Dear Flash,

You Suck.

Sincerely,

Josef ‘Jeff’ Sipek.

P.S. do I really have to justify this?

Earlier this year, I heard of a company that tried to make a product out of dynamic binary translation of x86 code to  z/Architecture. Recently, I decided to look at what they do.

The company is called Mantissa Corporation, and their binary translation product is called z/VOS.

Much like VMWARE, they cache the translated code, in z/VOS’s case it’s really a must otherwise I’d guess the cost of traslation would make the result unusable. I like how they used VNC (see the demo mentioned below) to give the virtual x86 box a display.

There is an official blog that has some interesting bits of information. For example, they hint at how they use multiple address spaces to give a the x86 code the illusion of virtual memory. I am not quite sure why they list  Decimal Floating Point facility as a requirement. Unfortunately, it has been a few months since the last update.

Their website also happens to have a demo of a small x86 assembly operating system starting up and running under z/VOS. I find this fascinating.

Dear Firefox,

You Suck.

Sincerely,

Josef ’Jeff’ Sipek.

P.S. xulrunner-stub using 4% CPU when the window is not visible and 36% when re-rendering parts of the page is a bit too excessive.