phik

Even after a week, I’m still of the opinion that the new They Might Be Giants album is approximately 30% good new content, 30% butchered old content, 30% unimpressive new content, and 10% average.

Most disappointing: Tie between “Another First Kiss” and “Finished With Lies,” one of my favourite Dial-a-Songs that bombed in the studio
Most underappreciated: “Man, It’s So Loud In Here,” which has authentic “phat 80s beatz”
Most disastrous: “Mr. Xcitement”

Ben Folds also released an album recently, and it’s pure quality. I grabbed a Blackmore’s Night album while I was there, but the jury is still out, which is to say I haven’t listened to it yet.

KML truncation steams ahead; hopefully I’ll be finished and ready to hammer it with tests before the weekend, since I think Peter and I will work on other things while he’s here.

Spent almost the entire afternoon on it, but managed to finally get the paperwork all sorted out and pick up my car. It is very pretty. I still have a generally loathing for cars, or at least a lifestyle which requires me to drive them to get anywhere, but I hate this car less than most.

Wow, Salon’s really tightening the belt, it seems, and most of its new content is Premium. I hope they make it, though I haven’t yet decided if I read them often enough to subscribe. I’d rather get the Globe and Mail, but that’s really expensive. Yeah. 13 weeks of just Saturday papers, delivered a week late, is over $9 per newspaper.

The old owners move out of my new place on Friday; in theory it’ll take a couple of days for some painting and drywall repair and so on, and then I can move in early next week. I am very eager to get settled, and that’s the last major hurdle.

One of the unexpected perks of this job is being able to force my views about code style and design on the less experienced, more impressionable developers. I like to think that I’m making the world a nicer place to debug.

I spent a lot of time tonight hacking on someone else’s project with them, since I had some pretty strong opinions about how it should be designed. I guess I don’t really care about it, since I’ll probably never write more than an evening’s worth of code for that project, but I couldn’t resist, and I think those design changes will help them a lot.

I have to admit that I’m pretty happy to see Freedom die, or at least that implementation of Freedom. Don’t get me wrong–I think that the world needs such a service, and I was happy to have Zero-Knowledge provide it–but the Freedom code is total, total shit, and should have been replaced years ago, if not sooner. Lots of people came up with lots of clever solutions to hard problems, but the implementation of those solutions was a disaster. I hope Zero-Knowledge can convert on its other plans more successfully.

I need to finalize my Ottawa plans soon, if I’m going to get tickets during the current Air Canada seat sale. I should figure out what my US Thanksgiving plans are, too, but those are less urgent, since I’m going to drive. There’re still a bunch of boxes of things in my parents’ attics that I want to get, and shipping them all is pretty impractical.

I’m nearing the end of the KML truncation work, but I’ll probably put it on the back burner while Peter’s in town this weekend. Once KML truncation and cache purging are finished, InterMezzo is almost totally usable as a laptop’s main storage, assuming that you usually have a fast uplink with your fileset server. We need to make conflict detection more robust or it’ll get really annoying, but that’s minor in the big scheme of things.

I finally bought “Happiness Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch”, after I realized that I’d just been listening to Deb’s MP3s for the last two years. I’m generally unimpressed with “Spiritual Machines”, but I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve listened to it a few more times. I bought it a few weeks ago, but it sat largely ignored in my CD case until today.

I just spent the better part of an hour reading the Preface to the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, along with other interesting bits of the “About the OED” section. Sometimes I wish I’d focused a little more on linguistics while I was at university.

Which reminds me, shaver still has my copy of The Language Instinct. I want that back some day.

Not enough sleep. Ugh. We met at the office early, since Peter’s flight leaves at 15h00. We talked about Lustre for a while, Subversion, InnoDB, and some other stuff. I took him to the airport, went to the grocery, and went home. One yummy pasta creation later, I crashed early.

Happy Canucksgiving! Also, happy European Rape and Enslavement Day, formally known as Columbus Day.

Bought two used Rheostatics albums on a whim, since I like their name so much. They toured with the Hip, after all, so how bad can they be?

“Warning: unauthorized reproduction of this recording is prohibited bt [sic] Federal law.” Come on. I know Time Warner could afford someone to proofread the text that they print on the back of the CD packaging. This is even worse than the its/it’s error that was on the front of the box for the cdrom that Peter bought, because a machine could have caught it.

I heard on the radio this weekend that Rush are recording a new studio album, and that it’s going well.

Sigh. Some tiny patches that should be almost obviously correct are causing trouble, so they’re back in my to-do list. I spent a couple of hours chasing the bug, thinking it was in my KML truncation code, until I backed out the other patches and it went away. Very strange behaviour.

Have I mentioned how much I love Mozilla bookmark keywords? Are you using them?

How about those Cleveland Indians? They’re built for the playoffs, or so my father claims. I’ll have to go back home for a game if they make it into the World Series…

This needs no explanation. He is my idol, second only to the guy who created Rabbit With Bread Hat.

I need to work in the same office as Mike again–he understands sugar consumption. I feel like I’ve fallen off of the diabetes monorail.

Someone sent me an xferstats patch today. Isn’t that just the cutest thing?

Slowly making progress with KML truncation. I’m really ready to move on, but there’s so many changes to make, and it touches a ton of subsystems. By the end of the weekend it should be done and ready to stress-test, I hope.

I give up on trying to make signals work in Perl, by the way. Fuck it.

After more than a year of on-and-off hunting, I’ve finally found someplace that will replace the crazy watchband that rotted through. They’re in Peoria, IL, so I’ll probably have a fixed watch by the end of the month. Hurray!

We keep tripping the circuit that my computer is on at the office, so they gave me a UPS until the electrician gets here to sort things out. I wasn’t losing that much work, but it was getting pretty annoying.

Still haven’t moved in yet. A symphony of unexplained delays. Hopefully soon, but I don’t know when. Oh well. If I’m not moving this weekend, I can probably get some serious cebolla hacking in.

Blizzard and I were talking about the complete insanity that has gripped our fucked up country:

“Earlier this evening I was flipping channels and I happened upon a really bad movie on TNT. You have to understand, I was trying to fall asleep. Near the end of the movie there’s a scene where one of the main characters is led to believe that her family has been killed in a plane crash. Not only is the scene completely omitted from the movie but the simple words ‘plane crash’ were bleeped out of another scene as if they were one of the seven dirty words.”

Normally I would say something like “I hate this country,” since I often do, but I’m not in the mood for black helicopters following me around today. Everyone keep quiet and don’t rock the boat; our “leaders” need us to stick together as they bomb some peasants into the late prehistoric while confiscating what was left of our civil liberties.

Spent the first part of the day at work, then went to Ric’s for his new son’s one-month-old gathering. I’d considered coming back to work afterwards, but one thing led to another and we got home at 05h15. Drink lots of water, kids.

Come to daddy.

I’ve decided that the reintegration code needs a stern talking to, and then a total rewrite. For every 15 minutes that I spend thinking about how to solve a bug, I have to spend 30 minutes tracing code paths to decipher where values came from and how they’re used later in a manner totally inconsistent with the variable name.

Matthew Good Band is apparently doing a MuchMusic show next month, and are planning their Audio of Being tour, predicted to run from December through February or thereabouts. Mmmmmm.

The lineup at the post office was out the door, but it did not diminish my love for the USPS. We have it good.

Also, I would like to be crystal clear about one thing: the new crunchy M&Ms really suck. I need to order a big box of Smarties. No, not those Smarties, these Smarties.

Dearest Nathaniel, and esteemed residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,

It is with a heavy heart that I write to you today, having recently received your correspondence of the fifteenth of October, in the year of our Lord two-thousand one. Although I am elated to read your accounts of that recent joyous occasion, I am also deeply saddened by the manner in which you accuse me of such wanton disregard for the well-being of my cater-cousins.

For countless hours we have conspired on the details of my forthcoming journey to the City of Cambridge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and it is well understood why my travels must not commence immediately. Futhermore, despite the reality that many hundreds of days have passed since your most recent visit to my residence, we harbour no ill will for you or your brethren. The difference in travel time is quite negligible, so let us dispense with the arguments of excessive distance–all manner of motorcar and steam engine exist to make your travels both comfortable and expeditious.

In the spirit of the lighthearted birthday tidings which were delivered to our noble friend Jacob, I am willing to overlook these similar transgressions, and wish to extend the olive branch of peace, enclose a dove of friendship, and send a wreath of good tidings. For while you may believe me capable of all manner of hostility and slight, it was most certainly never my intent to disappoint my Puritan acquaintences of whom I am so fond.

As we have discussed on countless occasions, I eagerly await the passing of the days which remain until my next planned peregrination to your fine municipality. If you have further queries regarding this expedition, I implore you to dispatch word with all speed, for said event draws near.

Best wishes to you and yours,

Phil Schwan

I miss those guys so much. Also, one of my co-workers (who shall go unnamed) needs to learn to read for content before trying to come make jokes about my activity log.

People have been asking me what I want for my birthday. Please don’t buy me anything; instead, consider making a donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

BioWare’s telephone hold music is from Baldur’s Gate. How cool is that?

This article is one of the most sane things I’ve read in a long time. Nobody seems to talk about the dangers of widespread antibiotic overprescription. Why not? Especially now.

I hate this country.

Did some brainstorming with Peter about a new mini-InterMezzo type of thing that will use much looser semantics to really simplify things for users who don’t need instant and exactly up-to-date files all the time. We think it will even be suitable for really lightweight applications, like synchronizing files on an ipaq.

I needed to get some data off of a hard drive that was in storage, so I brought my computer home, set it up, plugged it in, and flipped the switch on the power bar. Sparks shot out the back. sigh.

Went over to Ric’s for breakfast, then we went to see my new apartment and figure out what repairs need to happen before I move in. People are going to come fix and repaint the walls and ceiling Monday through Thursday, and then the carpet gets replaced on Friday. By the time I get back from Calgary and Boston on the 1st it should be long finished.

Bought a new power supply; let’s hope that’s all that blew up.

Did a tonne of laundry at my new apartment, since I’ve been too lazy to go to a laundromat lately, and the place I’m staying doesn’t have laundry facilities. I also took my first real shower in three weeks, since my current abode also lacks shower curtain rods. Normally that wouldn’t be enough to stop people from showering, but the water delivery is also pretty fucked. Every few seconds it goes from the temperature you desire to as cold as possible and back again. Great.

At any rate, I am pleased to report that both the shower and the laundry facilities in my new place are in perfect working order. Also, the new power supply did the trick, amazingly enough. I had feared the worst.

On the way to lunch we saw a little computer store with shrinkwrapped copies of Red Hat Linux 5.2 [sic] proudly displayed in its front window. A-maz-ing.

Folks at the office bought a cake for my birthday; they’re such nice people. I think my mom tipped them off when she tried to call this morning and I was gone.

Fixed a stupid InterMezzo HEAD bug, did some more KML truncation debugging. My kernel gets very unhappy when I try to reserve 249 blocks of journal space; I don’t think the ext3 “reserving more space than the total size of the journal” failure mode was tested too heavily, given that it results eventually in the death of the interrupt handler. Can you blame him?

My friend Deb got some very good news recently, but I will let her tell you about that.

Saw 6 or 7 deer in the back yard after I got home last night; little toddler deer and big grownup deer. So cute.

I think I see the light at the end of the KML truncation tunnel. I’m getting the occasional corrupt KML record, but I haven’t crashed my machine in a full day, and I can copy large directory trees across truncation boundaries.

Of course, three minutes into the next test my interrupt handler is killed. Oh well.

There’s a guy who keeps sending mail as alex@off.net, when he means something like alex@offl.net (given that most of the people responding are @offl.net). I’ve given up on trying to clue him into his mistake. I bet he wonders why he never hears back from anyone he sends email to.

Ric and I went to visit a friend in the hospital who has been having some emergency foot surgeries; an infection set in after some prior surgery, and he apparently is pretty lucky that he went into the hospital when he did. He has an IV that goes into his arm just below the elbow, travels up a vein to his neck, and then back down into his heart, through which they administer the antibiotics. He will be on a round-the-clock antibiotic drip into his heartfor the next 6 weeks. Poor guy.

Spent the majority of my day traveling to Canmore, AB. Got some cebolla hacking done on the plane, but mostly I slept.

Zach and I met up in the Calgary airport then took an airport taxi to Canmore to Peter’s house. After some good sushi we sat down to squint at the Portals API and code, and try to build a small pinger with it. Portals is a fairly sophisticated message passing interface designed and implemented by some people at the Sandia national laboratory. Coupled with the right network device drivers, an application could use this interface to do extremely high-throughput, low-latency zero-copy RPC and bulk data transfer. After a couple of hours of writing code, I’ve actually grown to like the API quite a lot.

Much Portals hacking. I woke up first, and had the pinger going in userspace by the time that Zach and Peter woke up. We started on the kernel Portals infrastructure and worked on a few pieces in parallel; by the end of the night we had something that could initiate kernel pinger/responder services and send and receive data with Portals over a socket backend. Absolutely incredible progress for 12 hours, I think. Much more productive than I’d anticipated.

Zach, Peter, and I had some quick breakfast and then took a drive through the breathtaking scenery that begins right in Peter’s backyard. I’m sure that Zach will post one of the 50 or 60 photographs that he took.

We did some more Portals hacking, and I refactored our test server to try to use the event callback mechanism that we added; so far it only does a very good job of destroying the interrupt handler, but we think it’s quite close. At any rate, we ran out of time, went to have lunch, and took Zach to the place where the airport shuttle picked him up.

Peter and I came back to the house and, in the span of 6 or 7 hours, really tremendously refined the new intersync model. We had planned to hack all day, and maybe even get the first cut done, but by spending the time talking and designing I think we saved many thousands of lines of code and have now a much, much better system. It will be very interesting to implement over the coming weeks.

Spent most of the day flying back to Philadelphia, where I paid $64 to park for 3 days at the airport. I’m never parking there again.

<math> phil, we love you and your fetish for confectionary-headfashions applied to pet rabbits

Got Simon from the kennel. Wow, kennels are expensive. Wow.

Took him to my recently-renovated condo. Well, mostly renovated. The painters and carpet guys left the place a mess, including some oddities in the kitchen. The fridge was in the middle of the room, for no apparent reason, and there was a huge pile of trash where the fridge was supposed to be. “Damn, I have a bunch of trash, what should I do with it?” “I know! I’ll move the fridge and put it there!” Morons.

Drove to Boston; largely uneventful, made it in about 5.5 hours. Chatted in the Ximian offices with Nat and Joe for a while, then ate dinner and saw They Might Be Giants at Avalon. They were in fine form, and the opening band didn’t suck too badly. They were no Cub, but also, thankfully, no Lincoln.

Finally started to catch up on my sleep, despite being in Boston. Taylor was up early, but Nat and I didn’t wake up until noonish. Ate lunch with Joe, walked around Boston, played some NHL 2002. Went with Ryan and Joe back to the cave and watched But I’m A Cheerleader. Strange.

Ate dinner with Ryan, Joe, Nat, Taylor, Chris, and Shona, then crashed relatively early. The keys that Nat gave me didn’t work. Sigh.