The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Nyan Koi

This is actually enjoyable.  Not ground-breaking, but fun.  The incipient harem is countered by the fact that our hero knows who he likes, and so do most of the girls.  And the cats are, well, cats.

It's only a 12 episode series, which is a good thing - the premise couldn't sustain much more (or at least, not without more inventive writing than we've seen so far).  Will keep watching this one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Spoiled For Choice

I'm rebuilding all my computers over the next few weeks - Haruhi, Yuri, Nagi and Tanarotte are all set the be backed up and reinstalled, and Potemayo to at least be upgraded.

Nagi and Potemayo will be going to Windows 7, that's pretty simple.

Haruhi most likely to Windows Server 2008 R2.  (It costs me nothing, and I want to play with SQL Server.)

Tanarotte will be going to CentOS 5.4.  It currently has 5.3, but the installation was done in something of a rush so I'm going to wipe it and reinstall with a little more care.  That will be my main development/test systems (and a 5TB file server as well), running OpenVZ to provide multiple virtual test
environments.

And Yurie will be going to...  Either Fedora 12 (though I haven't been too impressed with Fedora lately; the user interface has taken major steps backwards) or Kubuntu 9.10 (don't like Gnome) or openSUSE 11.2 (I haven't used SUSE in years, but I have a chameleon plushy here somewhere).  Leaning towards the lizard right now.

Oh, and I have a four-port DVI/USB KVM switch too.  Only the single monitor version; there's a dual-monitor version, but it costs $600...  And only one of the computers actually has dual-DVI out; the rest are DVI+VGA.

Update: Tanarotte is happily reinstalling now.  Since I can do that while preserving the 3.2TB of files I've already loaded up, it should be pretty quick and painless.

Update: Pretty much painless, except when I tried to add CentOS Extras during install and the installer dropped dead.  Up and running with the file share intact and OpenVZ installed and updated to the latest stable kernel.  Now I just need to refresh the backups of Haruhi and Yurie and I can attack them too.

Update: Yurie backed up.  Moving on to Haruhi.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sora No Otoshimono

Meh.

You seen one flock of rocket-propelled panties overtaking an SR-71 Blackbird, you seen them all.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:05 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Allure

Code

import lua
import time

N=100000

t0=time.time()

def timer(f,n):
  t0=time.time()
  f(n)
  print f.__name__, time.time()-t0

def pyinc(n):
  a=0
  for i in range(n):
    a+=1

def pyclassinc(n):
  a=myclass()
  for i in range(n):
    a.inc()

def luainc(n):
  lua.execute('a=0')
  for i in range(n):
    lua.execute('a=a+1')

def luabulkinc(n):
  lua.execute('a=0')
  lua.execute('n=%s' % n)
  lua.execute('for i = 1,n do a=a+1 end')

def luaclassinc(n):
  lua.execute('a=python.eval("myclass()")')
  for i in range(n):
    lua.execute('a.inc()')

def luabulkclassinc(n):
  lua.execute('a=python.eval("myclass()")')
  lua.execute('n=%s' % n)
  lua.execute('for i = 1,n do a.inc() end')

def luasandboxclassinc(n):
  lua.execute('a=python.eval("myclass()")')
  lua.execute('python=nil')
  lua.execute('require=nil')
  for i in range(n):
    lua.execute('a.inc()')

class myclass(object):
  def __init__(self):
    self.value = 0
  def inc(self):
    self.value+=1

timer(pyinc,N)
timer(luainc,N)
timer(luabulkinc,N)
timer(pyclassinc,N)
timer(luaclassinc,N)
timer(luabulkclassinc,N)
timer(luasandboxclassinc,N)

Results

pyinc 0.0194
luainc 0.5534
luabulkinc 0.013
pyclassinc 0.071
luaclassinc 0.7851
luabulkclassinc 0.2597
luasandboxclassinc 0.7885

What does this all mean?

Well, first, Minx is getting a real scripting language. You can program stuff using the template language (real programming as opposed to just doing data selection and layout) but it gets hairy pretty fast.

Second, the scripting language runs faster than the application language - or would, except that the application is run using a JIT compiler. There's a JIT compiler for the scripting language too, but I don't know how to get that working as an embedded environment.

Third, the work I'm doing to make the Minx code simpler and more efficient - via a set of "magical" classes that do lazy evaluation for all the database-to-template-tag translation - transfers directly to the coming scripting language. There is an overhead involved - about 2.5μs per cross-language method call - so you don't want to do anything insanely complicated in the scripting language (or at least, not without caching the data in native variables).  And the overhead of transferring execution into the scripting environment in the first place is on the order of 5μs, so a few tens of thousands of script calls and things will start to add up...

Update: It pays to read the descriptions of all the branches; someone's already done what I've spent the past two hours failing to do, i.e. localise the Lua state.

Update: Of course, the branch that does what I want doesn't actually compile.  However, the changes in the branch that compiles don't interfere with the changes in the branch that does what I want...  I think.

Update: A bit more hickory-hackery* and it compiles and installs correctly.  The installation of the previous version prevent it from running correctly unless the interface file is copied into the working directory, but that's a minor issue; I can hunt down the old libraries and killerise them.

There may still be a problem with Lua 5.0 vs. 5.1; I'll take a look for that, since that's fixed in the other version.  I'll also note that the guy who did the changes to localise the interpreter state has done a better job of it than my hackish attempts, so many thanks to him.

Update: Aaand...  Working?  Seems to be!  Test results:

pyinc 0.0196
luainc 0.5294
luabulkinc 0.0135
pyclassinc 0.0692
luaclassinc 0.7695
luabulkclassinc 0.2589
luasandboxclassinc 0.7672

Possibly even a little faster, though the difference isn't significant.

Now to test it out with many interpreters.

Update: Many interpreters work fine; no obvious memory leaks.  However, creating a new interpreter context takes about 170μs; the 5μs I mentioned earlier was running a script inside an already-created environment.  Since most pages will only need one context anyway, that doesn't matter a great deal.  170μs is slow in computer terms, but pretty fast in human terms (about 250 times faster than the shortest interval you can notice).

* Editing the code with an axe.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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