It's Thursday afternoon and in about 24 hours from now, I'll enter the Massachussets Turnpike and start driving south towards Florida ....
The last three days, I've done a lot of bug fixing in MCS and significantly cut down the number of open bugs. There's also a new debugger release, but it'll require latest Mono CVS, so it'll be available next week together with Beta 1.
After almost two months, it's finally getting time for me to say goodbye to Boston.
I'm leaving to Florida on Friday and finally fly back to Germany on the 16th. Unfortunately, there isn't much time to do sightseeing before I leave and I also can't go out drinking on Friday. I'm coming to the office that day, but I'll leave shortly after lunch ....
Today and tomorrow, I'll try to fix as many MCS bugs as possible and if I still have time on thursday, I'll also make a debugger release.
Took a day off to watch the Boston Marathon - and it looks like I found the perfect spot to watch it :-)
I went to Wellesley College and was watching it in the middle of a crowd of screaming college girls. That's about half the distance of the race, between milestones 12 and 13 and you could already hear the noise at the Wellesley Square commuter rail station, about half a mile away from the college.
It was really amzaing to stand in the middle of all these excited people and watch the marathon. After about two hours or so, most of the field passed and the runners were more scattered, but the Wellsley girls were still cheering and applauding at the same noise. Must have been an amazing feeling for the running ...
Tomorrow, I'll upload a few picutues, I'm just too lazy to go the the office right now ....
Update: The pictures are now here.
I'm also starting to face my very own marathon very soon: I'm driving all the way from Boston to Florida and back in about two weeks. My original plan was to rent a car in Boston, drive down to Key West and fly back from Tampa Bay, but it looks like all car rental companies are charging and incredibly high one-way rent for this - about $400-$500 or so. So I changed my plan and drive down and back again.
Before anybody calls me crazy, I have a map and I know how far it is. I know that it's 1800 miles one-way, I know that 1800 miles are about 2950 kilometers and I also know that there's a speed limit in this country ...
Some people also told me that New Jersey sucks, that there's nothing to see in North Carolina, that Florida is a really a _very_ long state and that I'll see nothing but highways ....
However, I really want to see South Carolina, I really want to see Georgia and I really want to make this trip.
Originally, I just wanted to port the Debugger to the PPC this week, but now I'm breaking everything and doing large changes in the command line interface.
We're getting a really kick-ass command line interface for the debugger until the end of this week, but for the moment, don't use the debugger from CVS (if it isn't obvious) - it won't build and if it builds, well, it may kill your children, blow up your house or just drink all your beer ....
The new command line interface will be a lot more user oriented than the current one and it'll also contain a nice scripting language which'll be reusable in other projects.
Tonight, I'm finally going ot the movies to see Walking Tall - it's playing at 11:10 pm. I planned to see this movie for more than a week - it's the latest one they're showing on weekdays - but each day, I was too busy with hacking to make it in time.
I relaxed a bit this weekend, had a nice easter dinner with friends, did some sightseeing and went to the movies. Yesterday, I took the blue line to Wonderland and walked around at the beach a little bit. The weather wasn't that perfect it, but it was still great.
In the evenings, when it was already dark outside, I also hacked a little bit on my cool new toy: PowerPC support for the Debugger.
Before I started to actually port the debugger to that new architecture, I realized that it may be a problem that the JIT isn't fully ported to this architecture yet. So it may be difficult to run a huge and complex Mono application like the debugger on it.
However, very quickly, I found a solution for this problem: remote debugging ! It wasn't that complicated since the debugger was already using a small unmanaged helper application to do all the low-level stuff. So I just provided a small CORBA wrapper for it and everything was fine. I'm now running the debugger on my laptop (Red Hat 9) and it talks to a remote debugger process on the PowerPC. This stuff isn't perfect yet and it has some limitations (for instance, it isn't translating path names, so you need to have your target application on both machines and in the same path name), but it should be fine for the moment.
The next step was actually porting the debugger. It turned out that it wasn't that difficult than I originally expected and debugging support on the MacOS is also really good. So at the moment, we can single step, read/write the target's memory, read/write registers and insert/remove/enable/disable breakpoints. And, of course, it's showing you source code while single-stepping :-)
I think this MaxOS port will not only help people on the mac, put it'll also benefit the debugger on Linux. For instance, I already found and fixed a few bugs in the platform independent code while doing it.
Next week, when I'm doing some more bug fixing in MCS, I'll also start using the debugger to debug MCS ....
After about seven months of hacking, I'm finally done with C# generics :-)
This means, we've finally reached the point where people can start actually using generis in their code. The new compiler may not be perfect yet, but the more people are trying it, the faster it can sort out the remaining bugs. At this point, the most important thing left to do is having people use and test it and file bug reports.
However, I'm currently really happy with it. It took at lot longer than I originally expected, but I tried to follow the spec really closely and also reporting all the required errors, so that's one of the reasons why it took so long.
It's now the last day of the month and it looks like I haven't blogged until I left germany in February. I'm still in Boston and I start to really love the city :-) So now I'm staying here from another month and then I'll do some vacation - which'll involve driving all the way down to Florida ...
In the meantime, I've made really big progress with generics and will probably finish them within the next couple of days.