KernelTrap - Life

Simulator vs. Emulator (Simulation vs. Emulation)

Eus — Sat, 08 May 2010 06:36:02 +0000

The first question regarding the difference between simulator and emulator I encountered in my undergraduate class of computer organization and architecture. The lecturer gave the difference in the aspect of completeness. But, ever since I had been wondering about the difference. Therefore, today I decide to round up the difference based on my own life experience of using simulator and emulator.

My Undergraduate Thesis

Eus — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:55:40 +0000

Rather than letting my undergraduate thesis be buried in the shelf, I will just publish it here.

Paradigm Shift in Using Memory

Eus — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:31:25 +0000

As a C programmer I was told that I should use as little memory as possible. Unfortunately, that advise didn't come along with the fact that I should make a trade-off between software complexity, computing speed and memory usage: more malloc()s means more instructions to be executed, and therefore, the computing speed suffers and the software complexity increases (e.g., how about if malloc() fails?), and vice versa. I was aware about the trade-off but had not got the paradigm shift. Now I do get the shift.

Practicing Piano and Hacking

Eus — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:23:30 +0000

Last week my brother asked me to help him find the piano score of Final Fantasy VII's Those Who Fight. Well, since I had never heard the song before, I searched for one in YouTube and landed on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssGdJNe2PHE.

What is Special about Peterson's Mutex?

Eus — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:00:30 +0000

Reading the book on Principles of Model Checking by Christel Baier and Joost-Pieter Katoen, on page 43-45, I was reminded about a particular property of Peterson's mutual exclusion algorithm that I forgot from my undergraduate operating systems class, and therefore, I had pondered till I read the book. In particular, I was wondering why the need for the turn variable. Peterson's mutual exclusion algorithm is special in the way that it has the inclusion of a scheduling strategy to ensure the progress of the competing processes. Ha, I really forgot the obvious!

To Lock or not to Lock?

Eus — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:30:00 +0000

A basic problem that I encountered when I started to developed a stand-alone application involving the use of a DB, which is Service Publishing AP's service_list, as opposed to a web application is to decide whether I should employ locking or copying when using an iterator to iterate, for example, a shared linked list or a shared DB.