Inkscape

I've been looking for a long time for some visio-like vector drawing program for Linux. Well, I've recently tried Inkscape, and, while still not a Visio replacement, it does its job pretty well even for technical diagrams.

MIPS CPU simulator, CMake

Today I've published the first version of a MIPS CPU simulator; you can read more about it here. Even though the version number is 0.9, the program is not in any case beta: it is quite stable, CPU torture tests pass in 32-bit and 64-bit environments, and there seems to be no open security holes, though error "reporting" is sometimes unfriendly: the simulator shall call abort() if the simulated program tries to access memory outside of its allocated range.. but I think that's still way better than doing random stuff to random memory. Work on better error handling is the top priority right now.

I'm also using this opportunity to learn about the CMake build system.

IT Underground 2008

I have again attended the IT Underground conference in Prague, where I gave a short lecture about PKI in practice. Soon I shall also upload the slides from the talk.

MIPS CPU

Things have been pretty hectic here, so I haven't had much time to post anything. Recently, I've begun a new personal project: writing a simulator for the MIPS I CPU arhcitecture. I chose this particular CPU because it's the simplest architecture for which gcc can generate code. There are many other MIPS CPU simulators out there, but all of them do more than I need, so I decided to write my own as simple as possible. The ELF loader and symbol lookup are finished, and now I'm working on developing test vectors for the simulator (a very boring part).

As for why I'm doing this - the answer will hopefully be clear soon :-)

Java leaks memory

Now, this is something to laugh at: when first launching Java, Sun boasted about garbage collector and that programmers will never again have to cope with memory-management problems. Fast-forward to 2008. to read Sun's presentation on avoiding memory leaks.