New blog

I finally got sick of blogspot's inability to handle basic editing tasks, and moved to a new blog on wordpress.

Talk: Using the Fedora Windows cross-compiler

Date:	Sunday, 8th March 2009
Time:	18:15 UTC
Location:	Virtual -- #fedora-classroom on irc.freenode.net
Details:	https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom#The_Current_Timeline
Background:	https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Windows_cross_compiler

A talk and interactive session, "Using the Windows cross-compiler":

• API basics: POSIX, libc, Win32, gtk, Qt, etc.


• Cross-compiler basics


• Practical demonstration:
  setting up the cross-compiler in Fedora
  compiling a small Gtk program
  testing it in Wine
  building a Windows installer


• Future directions (Win64, Mac OS X ?)


• How to get involved

If you have root access to a Fedora 10 or rawhide install (i386 or x86-64 only) you can follow along with the practical part.

Photos from OCaml Users Meeting, Grenoble, 2009

We had a very successful OCaml User Meeting this week, with 45 people coming from around Europe to Grenoble.



Xavier Leroy on progress made over 2008

Sylvain Le Gall OCamlCore.org and OCaml as fast as C

Maxence Guesdon Chamo and Cameleon

Florent Ouchet VHDL symbolic simulation

David Teller Batteries Included

Christophe Troestler pa_do (delimited overloading) syntax

Richard Jones (me) OCaml Windows cross-compiler

Christophe Raffalli Parsing with dypgen

Xavier Leroy on the right:



Dinner the evening before:

Talk in London on Fedora & Windows cross-compilation

I am giving a talk and demonstration in London (UK) this Saturday afternoon, 31st January on the subject of the Fedora MinGW (Windows cross-compiler) project. Free entry, everyone is invited!

Previous MinGW postings on this blog ...

ocsigen (OCaml web framework) benchmarked

This benchmark compares the OCaml web framework ocsigen against Ruby on Rails and lighttpd+C with some excellent results for the OCaml framework:

	Reqs/sec	Mem usage
Rails with mongrel, 1 process	260	49MB
Rails with mongrel via nginx (rev proxy), 1 proc	220	~51MB
Rails with mongrel, 4 processes via nginx	430	~200MB
OCaml ocsigen (1 process)	5800	4.5MB
lighttpd with FastCGI app in C, 20 procs	9300	4.5MB

OCaml is not just an order of magnitude faster and an order of magnitude more memory efficient, but it also provides complete compile-time safety, catching multiple errors at compile time which would otherwise only show up after extensive testing.

More discussion on this reddit thread.

There's a Fedora ocsigen package waiting for review here.

Home server, part 4, installing the OS

For want of a cable, my home file server wasn't coming along very well, but today I hooked up the 2.5" IDE to PATA converter cable from Maplin with the hard drive from the disassembled Viglen MPC-L:


The Viglen was really easy to disassemble by the way. Two screws on the back hold on the backplate, and then the entire motherboard/hard disk assembly slides straight out. Another three screws let you remove the hard drive.

I settled on relatively simple route to install CentOS. I used Red Hat's KVM virtualization to run a VM, attaching the physical hard drive and the (virtual) CentOS DVD ISO. It sounds complicated, but all you need is this virt-install command line to do it (the host is Fedora 10):

virt-install --connect=qemu:///system \
  -n centos5 -r 512 \
  -v --accelerate \
  -c /root/CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-DVD.iso \
  -f /dev/sde \
  --vnc --vncport=5900

(Adjust the path to the CentOS DVD ISO, and the physical hard drive device as appropriate).

CentOS 5.2 installed in about 15 minutes: