Thursday, February 28, 2019

Still churning, still very tired because of Christine's ongoing pain issues.

Conference on microarchitectures

Watched an interesting conference on microarchitectures and how optimizations can be exploited in a variety of ways.

Recommended watch if you are interested in security. A bit frightening too.

QEMU build failure on macOS

Bisecting QEMU kconfig branch to look for the build break on macOS.

Meetings

Another set of internal meetings. First time I'm in a meeting with Jon Masters. He's a funny guy, which you can judge by him asking questions all the time

Systems upgrade

Started the upgrade of my various machines to Fedora 29.

Hatari and Alpha-Waves

During a late meeting, started investigating why the colors were completely off for the second half of the screen when running Alpha Waves in 2-players mode. It turns out it's relatively simple, there was an error in the code that computes the "end of scan line" because it did not take overclocking into account. So the bug appeared when running the emulated ST at 16MHz or 32MHz. That will teach me.

Submitted pull request and notified Thomas Huth.

Sometimes, I need to remind myself that I can debug or code stuff. I've been doing to much non-code work lately

Also received "Replay" book by Tristan Donovan. I ordererd it because of a comment I saw on one of the Alpha Waves videos on YouTube, that said Alpha Waves was mentioned in it. It's actually mentioned twice, but really in passing. There is just a small quote from Frederick Raynal. In a 500 pages book, that's the "Mostly harmless" treatment