O-o-o-o-oprofile

Been playing with oprofile at work lately. Not sure if it's the fault of the EMT64 intel CPU that's on my work computer or the fact that I am using a 2.6.9 kernel, neither CPU events nor callgraph work. I am not sure if I am allowed to discuss the profile results, but let's just say the result suprised me a little. Too bad sysprof requires kernel 2.6.11 or later, and too bad that Centos 4.2 is only up to 2.6.9.

Installed oprofile on my powerbook that's running linux 2.6.15, and I am still limited to using timer interrupts. In this setup oprofile doesn't complain about callgraph though, but I am not able to decipher the result that opreport -c produces. I used it to get a profile dump of gaim starting up, but the result isn't too useful, I am guessing that's because timer-based profiling doesn't really work well for short running tasks.

Next thing I am going to do is try oprofile on my home desktop, which has a AMD 32bit CPU. Will also try sysprof on my powerbook and see if that can produce anything more useful.

by khc on Sat Apr 8 17:01:43 2006 Permlink

Final exams over! and Gaim beta!

Final exams are finally over, after I finished my last exam on Comparative Literature just a couple minutes ago. Many people have asked me what I feel about graduating, I never knew what to tell them. If someone asks me the same question now, I can only tell them that it is relieving to know that you are done. It's like after pulling a couple all nighters to finish an assignment, only difference is that I am concluding more than 15 years of my education, not including pre-school. More news about job hunt will be posted soon as it is finalized.

The first beta of Gaim 2.0.0 was released a couple days ago. My mailbox was flooded by mails from gaim's forum on sourceforge since I tell sourceforge to mail me whenever anyone post to the forum. 99% of the posts are about the absence of specific preferences. Some of them (idleness by gaim usage, showing of idle time on the buddy list, smooth scrolling, Ctrl-Enter to send, etc) will very likely come back according to the gaim developers. In fact some of them already have. Fortunately I don't use/care about any of the removed preferences, but it is good to see feedbacks from so many users at the same time.

Gaim 2.0.0 removed the concept of "Auto login" that has been present since as long as I remember. Instead of a checkbox for "Auto login", gaim will in the future (or now, if you use the beta) remember your status (online, away, invisible, offline, etc) when you quit gaim and restore them when gaim is restarted. This however presents two problems:

  1. When I go away, and then quit gaim without setting myself to be available, gaim will restore my away message next time I start gaim. Most of the time the away message would be irrelevant by that time.

  2. Someone mentioned on the forum that he may not always want to sign on to all the accounts. The ability to only sign on certain accounts without having them to sign on again next time gaim is started is nice to have.

I don't know if gaim will release a 2nd beta. Hopefully I will have time to finish multiple encoding option for ICQ before the final release, now that I am done with the finals.

by khc on Tue Dec 20 23:11:45 2005 Permlink
Tags: school pidgin