The version 2.0 of D will be released in sync with the classic book titled after the language, in this case, The D Programming Language, written by the Andrei Alexandrescu. You can follow the progress of the book looking at his home page, where a words and pages counter and a short term objective are regularly updated.

He posted a little introductory excerpt of the book a while ago and yesterday he published a larger excerpt, the whole chapter 4 about arrays, associative arrays and strings.

If you don't know much about D, it could be a good way to take a peek.

Subdownloader es otro gran invento para la gente que mirá TV en la compu. Como el nombre lo indica, este simpático programa facilita la tarea de bajar (y subir!) subtítulos utilizando un server que tenga una API compatible con opensubtitles.org.

Particularmente útil es que los subtítulos los busca calculando un hash del archivo, así que se pueden olvidar de los problemas de bajar un subtítulo para una versión que no corresponda.

Just in case you're not that well informed, Chris Lattner has just announced the release of LLVM 2.6. Enjoy!

Here are two very sad videos about wars.

The first is a representation of the battles in the last 1000 years as explosions in a world map. The size of the explosion is proportional to the number of deaths.

I guess it's missing a lot of small battles because you can't see any explosions in very big regions (like Africa, Latin America and India) until some empire tries to conquer them. I'm sorry if I depressed you too much.

The second video at least is cute if you forget what is it really about. Is an animation of food to represent several armed conflicts. Each country is represented by a regional food (you can see the cheat sheet if you get lost).

Found at No Puedo Creer. Lots of interesting stuff there (in Spanish though).

See this nice video.

This is the complete platform for indoor autonomous flight, developed under Nick Roy in the Robust Robotics Group at CSAIL.

This is the abstract of the paper describing KLEE, a new LLVM sub-project announced with the upcoming 2.6 release:

We present a new symbolic execution tool, KLEE, capable of automatically generating tests that achieve high coverage on a diverse set of complex and environmentally-intensive programs. We used KLEE to thoroughly check all 89 stand-alone programs in the GNU COREUTILS utility suite, which form the core user-level environment installed on millions of Unix systems, and arguably are the single most heavily tested set of open-source programs in existence. KLEE-generated tests achieve high line coverage — on average over 90% per tool (median: over 94%) — and significantly beat the coverage of the developers' own hand-written test suites. When we did the same for 75 equivalent tools in the BUSYBOX embedded system suite, results were even better, including 100% coverage on 31 of them. We also used KLEE as a bug finding tool, applying it to 452 applications (over 430K total lines of code), where it found 56 serious bugs, including three in COREUTILS that had been missed for over 15 years. Finally, we used KLEE to cross-check purportedly identical BUSYBOX and COREUTILS utilities, finding functional correctness errors and a myriad of inconsistencies.

I have to try this...

Abro un espacio para la difusión de música experimental, presentado a Ricardo Garmendia, más conocido como El Gaucho Sónico.

I always found fascinating the mixture of beauty and terror that The Beautiful South is capable of =P

For instance, read the lyrics from Something That You Said from the album 0898 Beautiful South. Here are some fragments of the lyrics:

The perfect love song it has no words it only has death threats

And you can tell a classic ballad by how threatening it gets

So if you walk into your house and she's cutting up your mother

She's only trying to tell you that she loves you like no other

No other, she loves you like no other.

[...]

The perfect love has no emotions, it only harbours doubt

And if she fears your intentions she will cut you out

So do not raise your voice and do not shake your fist

Just pass her the carving knife, if that's what she insists

[...]

The perfect kiss is dry as sand and doesn't take your breath

The perfect kiss is with the boy that you've just stabbed to death

But please, go and read the full lyrics first.

Now try to picture how this song would sound like (if you don't already know it, of course =). You might think it will sound like a creepy death metal band, but no. You can hear 30 seconds of the song at last.fm to know how it really sounds.

The song is awfully peaceful, and the voice is Briana Corrigan is incredibly beautiful. But what it makes this a great song for me is the contrast between music and lyrics. They have plenty of songs using this resource and a lot of irony (for example, the more popular Song For Whoever).

For those who don't know anything about this band, it was formed by two ex-members of The Housemartins (I hope you know them =).

Tired of the clumsy Bugzilla web interface? Meet pybugz, a command line interface for Bugzilla.

An example workflow from the README file:

$ bugz search "version bump" --assigned liquidx@gentoo.org

 * Using http://bugs.gentoo.org/ ..
 * Searching for "version bump" ordered by "number"
 101968 liquidx net-im/msnlib version bump
 125468 liquidx version bump for dev-libs/g-wrap-1.9.6
 130608 liquidx app-dicts/stardict version bump: 2.4.7

$ bugz get 101968

 * Using http://bugs.gentoo.org/ ..
 * Getting bug 130608 ..
Title : app-dicts/stardict version bump: 2.4.7
Assignee : liquidx@gentoo.org
Reported : 2006-04-20 07:36 PST
Updated : 2006-05-29 23:18:12 PST
Status : NEW
URL : http://stardict.sf.net
Severity : enhancement
Reporter : dushistov@mail.ru
Priority : P2
Comments : 3
Attachments : 1

[ATTACH] [87844] [stardict 2.4.7 ebuild]

[Comment #1] dushistov@----.ru : 2006-04-20 07:36 PST
...

$ bugz attachment 87844

 * Using http://bugs.gentoo.org/ ..
 * Getting attachment 87844
 * Saving attachment: "stardict-2.4.7.ebuild"

$ bugz modify 130608 --fixed -c "Thanks for the ebuild. Committed to
portage"

I'm very glad that yesterday DMD had the first releases (DMD 1.050 and DMD 2.035) with a decent revision history. It took some time to Walter Bright to understand how the open source development model works, and I think he still has a lot more to learn, but I have some hope now about the future of D.

Not much time ago, neither Phobos, DMD nor Druntime had revision control. Druntime didn't even exist, making D 1 split in two because of the Phobos vs Tango dichotomy. DMD back-end sources were not available either, and Walter Bright was the only person writing stuff (sometimes not because people didn't want to, but because he was too anal retentive to let them ;). It was almost impossible to make patches back then (your only chance was hacking GDC, which is pretty hard).

Now I can say that DMD, Phobos and Druntime have full source availability (DMD back-end is not free/libre though), almost all the parts of DMD have the sources published under a source control system. The core team has been expanded and even when Walter Bright is still in charge, at least 3 developers are now very committed to D: Andrei Alexandrescu (in charge of Phobos), Sean Kelly (in charge of Druntime) and Don Clugston (squashing DMD bugs at full speed, specially in the back-end). Other people are contributing patches in a regular basis. There were about 72 patches submitted to bugzilla before DMD was distributed with full source (72 patches in ~10 years) , since then, 206 patches were submitted (that is, 206 patches in less than 8 months).

But even with this great improvement, there is much left to do yet (and I'm talking only about the development model). This is a small list of what I think it's necessary to keep moving to a more open development model:

Chris Lattner announced that the videos for the last LLVM developer meeting are now available. They are usually very interesting, so I'd recommend to watch them if you have some time.

On Oct 15, 2009, at 8:29 AM, Anton Korobeynikov wrote:
[...]
> I'm a bit curious: is there any reason why are other slides / videos
> not available (it seems that the ones missing are from Apple folks)?

Unfortunately, we found out at the last minute that Apple has a rule
which prevents its engineers from giving video taped talks or
distributing slides.  We will hold onto the video and slide assets in
case this rule changes in the future.

-Chris

Did you ever wanted Mutt with NNTP support packed up for your Debian (or Debian-ish) box, but you are too lazy to do it yourself? Did you even tried to report a bug so the patch can be applied to the official Debian package but the maintainers told you they wont do it?

If so, this is a great day for you, because I did it and I'm giving it away with no charge in this one time only opportunity!!! =P

Seriously, I can understand why the maintainers don't want to support it officially, it a big patch and can be some work to fold it in. So I did it myself, and it turned out it's wasn't that bad.

I adjusted the patch maintained by Vsevolod Volkov to work on top of all the other patches included in the mutt-patched Debian package (the only conflicting patch is the sidebar patch and some files that doesn't exist because the patch should be applied after autotools files are generated and Debian apply the patches before that) and built the package using the latest Debian source (1.5.20-4).

You can find the source package and the binary packages for Debian unstable i386 here. You can find there the modified NNTP patch too.

If you have Ubuntu or other Debian based distribution, you can compile the binary package by downloading the files mutt_1.5.20-4luca1.diff.gz, mutt_1.5.20-4luca1.dsc and mutt_1.5.20.orig.tar.gz, then run:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep mutt
$ dpkg-source -x mutt_1.5.20-4luca1.dsc
$ cd mutt-1.5.20
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i mutt_1.5.20-4luca1_i386.deb \
        mutt-patched_1.5.20-4luca1_i386.deb

Now you can enjoy reading the D newsgroups and your favourite mailing lists via Gmane with Mutt without leaving the beauty of your packaging system. No need to thank me, I'm glad to be helpful ;)

No seas gil, que es Martes 13.

Lessfs is an open source data deduplication filesystem:

Data deduplication (often called "intelligent compression" or "single-instance storage") is a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating redundant data. [...] lessfs can determine if data is redundant by calculating an unique (192 bit) tiger hash of each block of data that is written. When lessfs has determined that a block of data needs to be stored it first compresses the block with LZO or QUICKLZ compression. The combination of these two techniques results in a very high overall compression rate for many types of data.

I'm not Ukrainian, I just like how weird foreign symbols looks like in my blog =P

Україна має талант means something like Ukraine's Got Talent and is where Kseniya Simonova fame comes from. It's indescribable what she does, you just have to see a video.

You might enjoy it (or understand it) a little more if you read about what's going on before actually seeing the videos.

Here is a fragment from a small article:

The appearance of a shy 24-year-old on a Ukrainian TV talent show this year has caused a nation to revisit its painful wartime past and is well on the way to becoming an international sensation.

About 13 million people watched Kseniya Simonova win Ukraine's Got Talent live with an extraordinary demonstration of "sand art". Most of them, according to reports, were weeping.

This VIM script should be part of the official VIM distribution:

When you open a file:line, for instance when copying and pasting from an error from your compiler VIM tries to open a file with a colon in its name. With this little script in your plugins folder if the stuff after the colon is a number and a file exists with the name specified before the colon VIM will open this file and take you to the line you wished in the first place.

The upcoming LLVM 2.6 will include a plug-in for Gold to implement Link Time Optimization (LTO) using LLVM's LibLTO. There is a similar project for GCC, merged into the main trunk about a week ago. It will be available in GCC 4.5.

This is all fairly new, and will be not enabled by default in LLVM (I don't know what about GCC), but it will add a lot of new optimization oportunities in the future.

So people using LDC and GDC will probably be able to enjoy LTO in a near future =)

Bueno, casi. Es una parodia dentro de otra serie, Curb your Enthusiasm, de Larry David, la otra cara de Seinfeld, la invisible, que salió a la luz hace 7 años con una serie en esencia muy parecida (el tipo básicamente también hace de sí mismo y la serie está planteada como un pseudo reality show de su vida).

La cosa es que para esta temporada, su séptima, planea hacer volver a Seinfeld, pero claro, dentro de la ficción de Curb your Enthusiasm nomás (algo es algo ;)

La serie no es tan buena como Seinfeld (así que si no la conocen tampoco se hagan tantas ilusiones), pero tiene momentos muy buenos y personajes muy graciosos (para mí el mejor es la malhablada Susie, por lejos).

Acá ya está pasado de moda, pero el tema parece empezar a tener auge en el hemisferio norte.

Campanas por la gripe A es un video tan interesante como bizarro. Se trata de una especie de Scully (es médica y habla de conspiraciones de dimensiones globales) pero catalana y monja (!).

Más allá del componente WTF, es muy interesante (y para nada delirante, como supongo que lo hice sonar). Habla de la gripe A/H1N1 con mucha data objetiva y comenta irregularidades ya denunciadas.

Por ejemplo explica por qué la gripe pudo considerarse pandemia (porque se cambió la definición para no incluir la alta mortalidad como requisito).

Sé que es difícil de convencer a alguien de mirar un video de una hora de una monja hablando, pero si pueden háganlo =P

Here are some graphs made from my D GC benchmarks using the Tango (0.99.8) basic collector, similar to the naive ones but using histograms for allocations (time and space):

Some comments:

• The Wasted space is the Uncommitted space (since the basic GC doesn't track the real size of the stored object).
• The Stop-the-world time is the time all the threads are stopped, which is almost the same as the time spent scanning the heap.
• The Collect time is the total time spent in a collection. The difference with the Stop-the-world time is almost the same as the time spent in the sweep phase, which is done after the threads have being resumed (except the thread that triggered the collection).

There are a few observations to do about the results:

• The stop the world time varies a lot. There are tests where is almost unnoticeable (tree), tests where it's almost equals to the total collection time (rnd_data, rnd_data_2, split) and test where it's in the middle (big_arrays). I can't see a pattern though (like heap occupancy).
• There are tests where it seems that collections are triggered for no reason; there is plenty of free space when it's triggered (tree and big_arrays). I haven't investigated this yet, so if you can see a reason, please let me know.

Vean The Wire.

Un comentario de Hernán Casciari que para mí resume a la perfección la serie:

García Márquez decía que admiraba a los compositores de boleros porque podían contar una historia de amor en tres minutos mientras que a él le llevaba seiscientas páginas. Bien. CSI es un bolero. The Wire es El amor en los tiempos del cólera.

Y eso que no leí El amor en los tiempos del cólera ni escucho boleros =P

Si quieren leer algo más desarrollado sobre el tema, pueden leer el post original de donde saqué esa cita, u otros posts al respecto.

Yo lo único que les voy a decir, es que para mí está entre las mejores series de todos los tiempos; afuera parece ser una serie de culto y acá tengo la sensación de que no la conoce nadie. Cada temporada le va tocando el culo a un sector de la sociedad distinto (calle, sindicatos, política, educación y periodismo respectivamente) bajo el hilo conductor de la droga (tráfico, distribución y consumo), y lo hace con una altura, estilo y realismo que da miedo. O placer, si sos masoquista =)

Meet Tucan:

Tucan is a free and open source application designed for automatic management of downloads and uploads at hosting sites like Rapidshare.

About a month ago, the GDC newsgroup started to get some activity when Michael P. and Vincenzo Ampolo started working on updating GCD. Yesterday they announced that they successfully merged the DMD frontend 1.038 and 2.015, and a new repository for GDC. They will be hanging on #d.gdc if you have any questions or want to help out.

So great news for the D ecosystem! Kudos for this two brave men! =)

YikeBike, an implementation of a mini-farthing. Too bad is a propietary design...

I've migrated the wiki pages about DGC from Redmine to Sphinx.

Para los que no tengan tele (como su seguro servidor, es decir, yo), si de vez en cuando extrañan un poco el zapping, sepan que existe Tivion. Ya le avisé al autor que agregue el streaming de Canal 7 para ver a Peter Capusotto [*] (aunque la calidad deja mucho que desear :S).