Automatic commit of irc logs

When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know who have gone
to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.
		-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

diff --git a/irc/#ipdf.log b/irc/#ipdf.log
index 91c4f45..258dd65 100644 (file)
--- a/irc/#ipdf.log
+++ b/irc/#ipdf.log
@@ -112,3 +112,81 @@
 11:31 <@matches> The "Experiment Running" sign seems to have worked
 11:31 <@matches> Also open source VHDL stuff is less "actually compiles" than I had hoped
 11:32 <@matches> The two I've tried so far seem to generate absolute monstrosities of C or C++ files and then fail to compile and/or link
+--- Day changed Wed Apr 09 2014
+15:27 <@sulix> So I've been hitting my head against my desk for about half an hour trying to work out where some bugs were in some ipdf code I'm writing.
+15:27 <@sulix> Turns out to have mostly been precision issues due to the lack of precision in your Real data type.
+15:28 <@sulix> Switching it to double fixes them all.
+15:32 <@matches> Oh
+15:32 <@matches> Sorry
+15:37 <@sulix> Nah: it's good. It means that precision actually is important!
+15:37 <@sulix> (I was getting a little bit concerned for a while :P)
+15:40 <@matches> Well
+15:40 <@matches> I have rediscovered just how awful VHDL is
+15:41 <@matches> It seems like you can't define anything without typing it three times
+15:42 <@matches> You define an entity
+15:42 <@matches> Then you define a component with identical ports
+15:42 <@matches> Then you tell it to use the entity for that component
+15:42 <@matches> Then you tell it to map the identical ports to the entity ports
+15:42 <@matches> adder_0 : adder port map (a=>a, b=>b, cin=>cin, s=>s, cout=>cout);
+15:44 <@matches> Pretty much all the hardware papers I found talk about using VHDL for things
+15:46 <@matches> Let's see if I can make any sense of this jop-devel thing that appears to be a JVM implemented in VHDL
+15:47 <@matches> Uh oh, .bat files
+15:48 <@matches> This looks ominous
+15:51 <@sulix> The whole swapping out main thing breaks the makefile in a few ways btw.
+15:51 <@sulix> Because none of main.cpp's dependencies are listed.
+15:51 <@matches> Ah
+15:51 <@sulix> So if you change main.h, nothing gets recompiled.
+16:02 <@sulix> Okay, just pushed support for click+drag and zoom in and out in the viewer.
+16:03 <@sulix> (I did change the default precision to single, rather than half, as zoom out was totally broken with half-precision)
+16:05 <@matches> The half precision implementation is broken itself anyway
+16:07 <@matches> Hmm
+16:07 <@matches> I can't seem to compile anymore
+16:07 <@matches> Hang on
+16:07 <@matches> That would be because `uname -i` reports "unknown"
+16:12 <@matches> I have made unknown default to x86_64 :S
+16:13 <@matches> I can see the precision issues! Good work
+16:14 <@matches> These lecture notes seem useful: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~demmel/cs267/lecture21/lecture21.html
+16:14 <@matches> Lecture notes > Blog post in terms of suitable reference?
+16:16 <@sulix> It's got fortran in it, it must be suitably acedemic.
+16:18 <@matches> Haha
+16:18 <@matches> The VHDL compiler I am experimenting with uses Ada
+16:18 <@sulix> I'm getting my fill of new languages by trying out some c++11 features.
+16:20 <@sulix> I think I broak realtofloat by changing things to be single precision by default.
+16:22 <@sulix> (Hopefully fixed)
+16:49 -!- Netsplit mantis.ucc.au.uniirc.com <-> arctic.uniirc.com quits: @sulix
+16:49 -!- Netsplit over, joins: @sulix
+16:54 <@matches> What's with the netsplits
+16:55 <@matches> You're on mussel? I'm on mantis? They are VMs on the same host?
+16:55 <@matches> I don't know what this uniirc nonsense is
+16:56 <@matches> What is "arctic"
+16:56 -!- matches changed the topic of #ipdf to: Happy Bannana Netsplit
+17:33 <@matches> Well I compiled the VHDL FPU
+17:33 <@matches> It seems to work quite well
+17:33 <@matches> Except for the part where it never actually finishes an operation
+17:34 <@matches> One of the virtual transistors must have overheated
+17:43 <@matches> Oops it might help to actually give it a valid operation
+18:27 <@matches> Alright, so I'm going to experiment with getting our Real operations to run on the virtual FPU
+18:28 <@matches> Then I can look into both hardware and software ways of getting arbitrary precision.
+18:30 <@matches> VHDL appears to have text I/O so I could make everything read and write from pipes, but this seems like a terrible idea
+18:30 <@matches> On the other hand the compiler is using Ada
+19:21 <@matches> Oh wow
+19:21 <@matches> To open stdout
+19:22 <@matches> You pass it a string "STD_OUTPUT" for the filename
+21:40 <@matches> Ok, I give up trying to link this thing
+21:40 <@matches> fork() and exec() is seeming more and more elegant
+22:11 <@matches> Nooo, buffering
+22:11 <@matches> Ok, screw this
+--- Day changed Thu Apr 10 2014
+00:00 <@matches> Note: Actually exec'ing the program instead of just going straight to "exit(EXIT_FAILURE)" is generally important
+00:00 <@matches> Wall of text commit message incoming
+00:01 <@matches> Horribly inefficient interface to virtual FPU sort of implemented
+00:02 <@matches> I would have made it based on binary read/write rather than hex strings but I could not work out how to do that in VHDL
+00:08 <@matches> I still can't believe what I have just done, it seems ludicrous
+00:08 <@matches> Using an entire executable and stdio operations
+00:08 <@matches> To do a floating point addition
+00:10 <@matches> You should see how much is involved in compiling the VHDL FPU...
+00:11 <@matches> I'm very pleased that it actually compiled from the version in jop's github without much effort, but still
+00:11 <@matches> It's like 30 object files
+00:11 <@matches> This is why it isn't in the code repo
+00:19 <@matches> Whoops, there are some blatantly wrong comments in vfpu.cpp
+00:19 <@matches> Oh well