Vector64 Blog


Here you'll find some stuff that interests me that's generally unrelated to the Mozilla stuff. This is a low-budget blog in that it's just a plain HTML file and isn't interactive. There is a one-click blog program with this web server but I haven't had the time to look into turning it on yet. Maybe someday in the future.

May 3, 2008

I'm still having sleep problems and sleeping on the floor doesn't help. I should buy a bed one of these days. There's a cough going around the office and maybe I have that. Halls does seem to help.

I had a chat with someone that's leaving our company and it was an interesting chat. I think that I can sum up the reasons as the problems with working in a big company. A lot of things are process and numbers driven and it results in beaureacracy which can stunt creativity and energy. Many of us are in the middle of raising families and that may work out better for those that have outside obligations.

Mozilla Builds

I've said that I'd put out a Firefox pre 3.0 for quite some time and I decided to actually build it today. I think that I'm going to go with 3.0 pre as the default build on my MacBook Pro. It's up under Elliott's Mac OSX page.

Getting PGO on the Windows x64 build is another story though. Very time-consuming trying to find the modules that cause problems.
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May 2, 2008

A decent night sleep can be rare in life but last night I think I found it. This afternoon I was again sleepy. I wonder if I came down with something.

I think that I will focus on PGO for x64 for now. I was disappointed in the VS2005 bug. I've seen similar things in VS2005 in the past. I'm all set to go with trying to get PGO to work. And most of the JPEG optimizations are in the next set of builds too. So it should make for a nice build if I can get it to work.

I may play around with that Mac OSX 3.0 Trunk build that I've been meaning to get out for near forever.

Update: the GL and NOGL builds finished and I'm trying my old PGO_30 instrumentation script. If it doesn't work, I'll just grab the build logs to fix it. My general approach is to find the images and then the modules which croak the PGO optimization build. I then replace those modules in the GL build with NOGL modules. It is a time-consuming and painstaking process and sometimes I'll only go down to the library level. At any rate, I find that this approach provides the best performance.
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May 1, 2008

I was up all night working on stuff including the Windows x64 builds so I'm going to be zonked today. I'll have to steal a little sleep somewhere. Lots of work and I need to get started. I need lots of free coffee too.

Mozilla Builds

Success on the JPEG stuff. About a 34% performance improvement. I don't have time to upload it this morning but may update it later tonight. I want to get the rounding code working too.

Update: and so I've been playing around with the rounding code and everything so far results in the compiler bug error. Unfortunately it takes about 30 minutes to turnaround a test. I will spend a few more hours diddling around and looking for a solution. In the meantime, I can try to port the jdsample code to SSE2 on Mac OSX.

Update: this compiler bug is turning into a real pain. My current approach is to keep the old rounding routine under another name and call that in modules with problems. We'll see if this works with the broken module. If there are a bunch of other broken modules, then this approach will be to costly (in terms of my time).
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April 2008

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Updated May 1, 2008. For comments and questions, send email to Vector.x64@gmail.com. Contents of this blog are Copyright 2007. Fair use portions may be copied with a link back to this vector64.com.