The end

I'm closing this blog until further, since I do not have much time to invest in writing coherent, meaningful posts. Longer, in-depth texts will from now on appear on my homepage at zvrba.net Commenting is disabled since a lot of spam has lately appeared.

Finally!

On thursday, 2009-11-26, I have finally defended my PhD! I'll be starting on the new job on tuesday...

Unpredictability of execution times

I have written an article on intrinsic randomness of modern CPUs that you can fetch here. Originally, I tried to publish it in LWN, but since I haven't heard from their editors in over a week, I'm publishing it this way.

A tricky bug

Today I debugged a piece of code that looked like this:

printf("foobar\n");
if(fork() == 0)
  exit(0);

When the program is run from the terminal, the output is as expected: a single line containing "foobar". However, when the output is sent to a pipe or redirected to a file, two lines appear in the output. (Actually, the problem was a bit more complicated: there were n fork() calls and there were exactly n additional copies of the output). After a bit of digging around and not finding any obvious fault, I asked about it on IRC.

It turned out that stdout is fully buffered when it is attached to a pipe or a file. What happened is that fork() duplicated also the internal I/O buffers, which got flushed after the child process exited, thus producing extra output. I solved the problem by inserting a fflush(NULL); statement before forking, which flushes buffers of all output streams.

Foxit PDF reader -- no go

Today I tested the Foxit PDF reader, version 3.1, since many people recommend it as a faster and lighter-weight alternative to Acrobat Reader. Well, its performance is disappointing: opening a 3MB PDF with Foxit takes 2-3 seconds before the first page is displayed. Opening the same PDF with Acrobat Reader (version 9.1) displays the document with no delay at all. I attempted to open few other PDFs with Foxit, with the same result: annoying pause before I could view the document, but with Acrobat Reader showing the document immediately.

So long Foxit, Acrobat Reader is still my favorite PDF reader.