List of English words I can't pronounce...

Partly because I've learned English by reading and partly because of my French native tongue, I have enormous problems correctly pronouncing some words - especially those with a th sound

I'll update as I'm reminded of those I can't say correctly:

• threaten
• three/tree
• earth
• analytics

O Canada!

This is Canada. This is Canadian culture. Rick Mercer is Canada. Or at least Anglo-Canada, as I bet very few French-Canadians would know about Rick Mercer.

But they should, as all should you: funny but also deeply opiniated, Rick Mercer is at ease interviewing anyone. Manitoba trappers, roller derby players in Montreal, the prime minister and the fantastically interesting mayor of Mississauga - everyone gets the treatment but usually comes out more human, more Canadian.

A must-see, must-subscribe and must-follow kind of show for the Canadian expats and those who want a funny but informative outlook on Canada. Based on the very low view count, this is an unrecognized show...

in reference to: http://www.youtube.com/user/MercerReport (view on Google Sidewiki)

Intel VTune tools are broken on Windows 7 64-bit

If you want to profile C++ executables on Windows 7 64-bit with an Intel CPU, don't bother downloading Intel VTune or Intel Thread Checker or Intel Profiler (AFAIK, all the same thing) - they all crash as of these versions:

"Intel(R) VTune(TM) Performance Analyzer 9.1 Build:385" and

"Intel® Thread Profiler 3.1 Build:0.27583"

...with this uninformative error message:

SERA_Set_Platform_environment() Failed

For those like me having the same problems who are still looking for a free profiler that works and can't wait for Intel to fix VTune, check out AMD's CodeAnalyst.

And yes, the time-based profiling for this AMD product works for an Intel CPU (i5 in my case) on Windows 7 64-bit as I've just confirmed... and the download size is a fraction of VTune. You can also see this blog post if you don't believe me!

In CodeAnalyst, you can get functions level percentage by clicking your application process cpu usage bar in the system graph - it will then open a separate tab with function level samples.

Interesting that the trial software from a big company like Intel doesn't work as well as a free (as in beer) software from a company one tenth the size. The fact that Microsoft can't be bothered to provide such a basic development functionality except in their very costly Visual C++ premium edition is unforgivable... Doesn't Microsoft want to show off the fastest apps on their platform?

Note also how much of a pain and expenses are involved in profiling on win32 compared to apt-get'ing gprof and running that on any Linux box!

It's frustrating to have to go through registration screens, Internet Explorer specific sites and a few hundreds megabytes download to discover these facts...