Omlette

Spent all afternoon in the garden, mowing the lawn and nature strip, sweeping up leaves, weeding, fertilising and watering all the pots, spraying some oil on the citrus. To finish the day off I made a nice variation of a Spanish Omelette for dinner, and it turned out ok even though I forgot a few ingredients.

Bacon, eggs, capsicum, a bunch of greenery from the garden (stinging nettles and sweet potato leaves), chillies, chives, pepper, fish sauce. Fried in a hot pan and then finished under the grill topped with cheese and spices. For something different I also put in a some limequat juice and chopped up rind (kumquat hybrid) which added a nice tang and some bitterness.

Ate the whole lot in one sitting! Well it was the only meal I had today.

Beanz Meanz ...

I was going to make some refried beans. So I soaked some red beans overnight, and then put them in a pot to simmer. And simmer ... and simmer.

After about 8 hours I ended up with this brown stuff. I found out later that I should've also added some salt and onions and garlic to add some more flavour, but I missed out this time.

I realised I didn't have enough onions to do the refried beans, so instead I made a variation on a Mexican breakfast dish "huevos tirados" as suggested by an old Mexican workmate Frederico.

Onion, bacon, eggs, chillies of course, together with the cooked beans, salt and pepper, all fried up with some oil. Topped with some fresh mint and basil collected from the garden. Even with the relatively bland unadulterated beans as a base it turned out quite tasty.

Frederico also suggested a pressure cooker and I might try that next time if I get hold of one. They're not terribly common here so tend to be a bit expensive, but mum said she might have an unused one in the shed.

I ended up cooking way too much of the beans and subsequently had beans for a few meals in a row, which was probably a bit of a mistake in hindsight. Emphasis on the hind bit.

Sourdough 0.2

I have this never-ending battle to try to bake decent bread. Results are very inconsistent and mostly quite poor, but one persists. The latest chapter has been sourdough, using naturally grown yeast.

I think my first attempt was a bit premature as the starter hadn't settled down properly yet and I only used plain wholemeal baking flour. For this second attempt I had a much more active starter, but hit some cold weather which adversely affected the final rising. I got quite an active proofing although it took all night to run, and after making the dough it rose fairly well although it took all day as well. But I think I made a mistake in punching down the dough and expecting it to rise again - after a very long time it barely went anywhere and I was starting to worry the whole lot would go off so I just baked it.

It might look the part, but it's about 1/2 of the size it should be. You could build roads with this.

I had trouble getting the right moisture level using the wholegrain flour too which seems a perennial problem when I can't remember how it was last time I did it.

Cheese & Rosemary Biscuits

I did some midnight baking a couple of days ago, and tried making cheese and rosemary biscuits this time.

It's mostly butter and cheese. It was very greasy. I added more flour than the recipe called for too, although since I used cheddar rather than parmesan it probably had a lot more grease to absorb. It's not that I didn't have parmesan handy, but it was easier grating the cheddar.

I don't think my oven is the correct temperature. The recipe called for 6-8 minutes but after 10 they were still quite not yet done. I cooked them a bit more to brown them up.

Once they cooled down they were quite tasty, the rosemary sharpens the cheese taste quite well. I added some chillies too for a little bite in the after-taste.

They were a little crumbly and fragile so not really a great biscuit, although they do 'melt in your mouth'.

Cheese & Chive Biscuits

I tried making some cheese and chive biscuits.

It looks like I added a bit too much garlic chives. And the food processor over-processed them.

And the garlic was a bit overpowering. The recipe called for oil and not butter, which seems wrong.

They look a lot better than they tasted. Very tough and too heavy, with a strange flavour. It was almost like a thick tough party-pie base. Not cheesy enough either, despite using plenty of parmesan.

CLGLTexture2d

Hmm, bit of a slow and frustrating today although it felt like I did something by the end of it. I was up till nearly 4 but couldn't last it out to watch the Australian soccer game - pity, it sounds like it was a decent match. Just as well as some tree loppers came cutting trees around 10am and woke me up with the chainsaw and mulching machine. The fence and wall where my bedroom is seems to act like a wave guide for audible sound waves, so anything on the street immediately in front of the house is loud and clear through the closed window.

I was trying to play with using image2d_t objects in the OpenCL code to see how they work. I didn't get very far - not a lot of documentation and the whole api is still a little too new. I eventually found one simple but show stopper bug, but there was also other puzzling behaviour such as not being able to use mono-channel textures. I think I filed the first bug for JOCL on the jogamp bugzilla with that patch which either implies it's quite stable, or nobody else is using it. I haven't had much luck building JOCL so I might have to wait for a new build to include the patch I sent before progressing along that track.

I guess i'll leave that stuff for now and just try to get the basic algorithm working. I'll be happier once I can remember the bits of API i need without having to lookup every single change so I don't have to spend so much time mucking about with the setup.

This call may be monitored ...

For once I asked that the unsolicited call I got from someone trying to sell me something that I didn't want the call monitored.

And they said well we can't continue as it has to be monitored ...

Well fuck 'em then, not like I was going to change my phone account anyway as I know i'm on the cheapest one and I never make calls. Pity everyone didn't do it, hardly a way to sell something if they can't talk to you, they'd quickly change their tune.

Telstra btw ... actually they shouldn't even be calling me, last time they asked me (a very long time ago) I said I didn't want to know about 'special offers' anymore - probably just trying to drum up more business with the NBN deal.

Update: I'm not entirely sure of this, but it seems from some whirlpool discussions that any call involving a potential financial transaction must be recorded for legislative requirements. Still, they should not have been calling me anyway, and as soon as Internode offer a way to switch from ADSL2+ to Naked ADSL2+ in a way which I wont potentially lose an ADSL capable phone line (crowded copper issues), then the big T can get the big F..

convert_uint4

Got the main algorithm i'm working on converted to run on the GPU today - it doesn't seem to be producing the correct results yet, but it should be doing the right steps. Speed is a bit disappointing so far too. But on linux you're flying pretty blind as to what is going on on the card so I don't know if it's merely an uncoalesced memory access problem, not mapping well to the multiprocessors, or something else. I guess I should work out the FLOPS and see if i'm just pushing any limits.

Because local memory is so limited i'm storing data packed in bytes (I need to re-read the same section of data many multiple times), but the unpacking into vectors is pretty inefficient. Even the built-in functions provided aren't as efficient as they could be:

  uchar4 *src;
  uint4 work = convert_uint4(src[0]);

Compiles into more code than:

  uchar4 *src;
  uchar4 v = src[0];
  uint4 work = ((uint4) { v.x, v.y, v.z, v.t }) & ((uint4)0xff);

Which surprisingly compiles into more code than:

  uint *src;
  uint v = src[0];
  uint4 work = (uint4) { v.x>>24, (v.y<<8)>>24, (v.z<<16)>>24, (v.t<<24)>24 };

The latter would be pretty nasty with SIMD (without an unpack or shuffle at least), but with at least the AMD GPU it is only a half dozen shifts and and's.

Changing a single convert_float4 to a variation of the last one above gave me a 20% speedup ... which probably means i'm just doing it the wrong way to start with ... If I had more local memory I'd convert to a more convenient working size as I loaded it, but alas I don't have enough for this algorithm.

Next i'm going to look at using image objects to access the memory instead. This gives automatic format conversion and caching, and removing the need to manually cache stuff in local memory allows for more flexibility in parallelisation. Unfortunately JOGL doesn't seem to expose the basic image routines from OpenCL without using OpenGL as well which I was hoping to put off for a bit.

I guess I should really try and get a version that at least gives correct results too.