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Month: August 2020

Spinning Platform Choreography

Spinning Platform Choreography

Much like a past Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit that I attended that had a tilting stage, this dance performance from Yoann Bourgeois, (famous for deeply integrating scenery into his choreography), utilizes a moving stage.

This footage is from the 2016 performance Celui Qui tombe and features six talented dancers as they move and balance to stay upright on a rapidly-spinning platform.

Here’s a sampling of his other works if you’re curious

TP-Link OneMesh Network configuration and speed testing

TP-Link OneMesh Network configuration and speed testing

I recently bought the highly recommend TP-Link AC1750 Smart WiFi Router when my old one started acting up and generally being horribly out of date. Modern routers have some great features.

I also have some TP-Link RE220 range extenders (repeaters). The question was – how should one set these up? There’s a lot of different configuration options.

Turns out that Behfor’s channel on YouTube has answered my questions with some excellent testing. The first video covers the RE220, the second video covers the different ways to set these up using OneMesh – and which are the best for both connectivity and for throughput.

Fordite

Fordite

Matt Nielsen @forditefix

Starting in the 1920s, auto manufacturers began painting car bodies using a hand-spraying technique to speed up the painting process, and overspray would accumulate in the paint bays. Over time, layer upon colorful layer built up.

The pieces of enamel paint slag were repeatedly hardened in the ovens in which the cars went to cure the paint. Now, they’re often collected, polished, and formed into jewelry. Fordite.com can help you learn more about this fascinating material.

Godbolt Compiler Explorer

Godbolt Compiler Explorer

Ever want to see what assembly code your compiler is really generating?

There are a few reasons to want to know this. Firstly is correctness. Sometimes obscure bugs can crop up when you switch from one compiler to another, from one set of optimization settings to another, from debug to release, or even from one compiler version to another.

The second is optimization. What addressing mode(s) are being used, are there data hazards that are slowing things, are simd instructions being used? Game and high performance compute companies still spend time pulling every cycle they can out of a routine.

It used to be you had to compile and then pull the executable into a debugger and examine the code. Now, there’s an online tool that can quickly do the same. Enter the Godbolt compiler explorer.

It allows you to type in C/C++ code, select from a whole host of compilers, enter custom compiler flags, then show you the generated output.

In the case above, I wanted to verify C/C++ short-circuit comparison behavior of a variable against NULL and then dereference in the same conditional. If the compare against NULL doesn’t execute and exit before the dereference, a NULL pointer exception/segfault will result. According to C/C++ rules, there should be an early out after the comparison against NULL – and sure enough – on line 8 and 9 we see the test and exit.

Anyway – it’s a neat online tool you might give a try to learn more about the assembly your C/C++ code turns into.