phik

I had to leave Boston before Nat or Taylor were awake, and I had to abandon my shampoo and soap in Nat’s locked bathroom. Oh well.

Drove back to Philadelphia in very nice weather. Got some stuff out of storage, bought a vacuum, and started cleaning up my apartment. My cat seems to have developed a head cold while I’m gone, because he sneezes like crazy and sometimes blows little snot bubbles with his nose. It might just be related to all of the dust and carpet fibres in the air, so hopefully my cleaning will do him some good.

Went into the office for a couple of hours around 21h00. My Matthew Good Band CD still hasn’t arrived; did they send it via bicycle messenger, or what?

More trips to storage, more unpacking. I must replace the bookshelves that I left in Montreal before the pile of books crushes me when I least expect it. Hopefully tomorrow or Sunday I can visit one of the few furniture stores that appear to be having bankruptcy sales.

Had a pretty mellow dinner at Ric’s; Vickie cooked enough food for twice as many people, of course, but it was all delicious.

More unpacking, more cleaning, blah blah blah.

Deb seems pretty down on Montreal, so I want to balance it a bit. Although the French can be a drag and it’s the only city in which I’ve been beaten senseless, I still really enjoyed living there. Excellent food, good public transportation, a clean city centre; largely safe, with mostly friendly people, a nice snowy winter, and good parks to ski or play frisbee. If it were Montreal, Ontario or Montreal, Alberta I would move back in an instant. It’s mostly the Quebec part that’s a drag. I love Montreal.

Also, I think that Mike and I need to teach Deb how to appreciate being unemployed. I have a difficult time even imagining what it’s like to be bored. I’ll consider myself blessed if I can get my to-do list down to a few dozen items before I die.

I restocked my kitchen (it’s expensive, that first trip to the grocery) and cooked at home for the first time in two months last night. I really miss cooking with Mike and George.

My red wine glasses are an inch too tall for all of my shelves, so they’re sitting on my counter. God damn it.

The telephone jack in my bedroom is connected to someone else’s house. I have yet to (and probably won’t) sign up for telephone service, but I tried the phone anyways and it works. Sometimes when I pick it up, I can hear a woman with a north Jersey accent talking; every once in a while it rings. If I were less scrupulous I’d never pay for long distance again, but I guess I’ll call the phone company this week and sort it out.

Found two very bad bugs in Lento’s permit upcall handling, which were causing some stress. That code path could never possibly have been tested, as it silently failed 100% of the time.

An emergency shipment of Matthew Good Band has arrived; notable quotes from reviewers of his book of manifestos At Last There Is Nothing Left to Say:

“Complete crap from beginning to end.” — National Book Review Weekly

“…thoroughly boring and extremely hard to follow at the best of times.” — Literary Journal

“…extremely redundant and wandering. The kind of book that makes you feel like you’ve wasted precious hours of your life for nothing.” — The Lakeside Independent

“…disjointed, schizophrenic, and down right absurd. A damn fine example of why freedom of speech can be as harmful as it is empowering.” — The Book Monitors

I can’t wait.

Went to Atlantic City to hang around at Ric’s limo trade show and the associated parties. Did some stuff, cut a very small rug, stayed the night.

Took the train back from Atlantic City, which was remarkably convenient. Getting a taxi once I arrived, though, took almost as long as the ride from AC.

Spent the afternoon mulling over the new intermezzo design and merging the KML truncation branch with the trunk. Not a moment too soon; I can’t wait to be finished with this annoying chunk of code.

I realized after I ate dinner last night that I was totally wiped out and just went to bed. Almost all of my belongings (except for some large stuff, like my bed, dresser, futon mattress, dining room table, filing cabinet, and bicycle) have been transferred to my apartment. I left my bookshelves in Montreal, so books are piled against the walls all over the place. The only place that is totally unpacked and clean is the kitchen, because I have my priorities straight.

I like when people misspell “professional”.

I did 45 minutes or so of cebolla hacking, decided that I wanted to rename the new file, closed my emacs buffer, renamed the file, and then copied over it by accident. sigh. The dangers of hacking right before bed.

Finished up some data-on-demand changes, reviewed a big patch, blah blah blah.

Started a batch of pickles at lunchtime. I think they might be a little garlic-heavy, in retrospect, but I’ll give them a couple days and find out. I’m still a little wary of a pickle recipe that contains no vinegar (I really like vinegar), so this may not be the recipe that I stick with.

More unpacking; the apartment is still a disaster, and I still haven’t replaced the shelving that I left behind.

Most of the day was spent laying around, reading bits of At Last There Is Nothing Left To Say and The Return of the King. Went into the office for a bit, refreshed the source trees on my laptop, caught up on email.

Made beef stew, and outrageously delicious scallion pancakes to go with it. I wish I’d discovered those years ago.

Made pancakes for breakfast. Mmm, pancakes. Luckily, I had a little bottle of syrup that Zach and Alice gave to me before he left Montreal. I would have been very cross to discover that I was entirely out of syrup.

Did a lot of cebolla hacking, although I might have broken something. Since I don’t have internet access at home yet, and I didn’t think to make a backup of the pristine source tree, I won’t know until tomorrow.

I’ve decided that either Mark Bittman likes garlic way more than I do (which is a feat in itself), or my garlic is much stronger than his. If I use his pickle recipe in the future, I will use about half as much garlic.

Today did not happen.

Observations:

• I hate RPM even more than before; many of you did not believe that that was possible. Many of you probably also did not know that it has to call home for Erik Troan’s personal approval during some operations; at least I don’t know what else could take it so long.
• The motherfucking openssh-server RPM uninstall scripts kill the server. Whatever mouth-breathing bag of rancid boogers thought that that was a good idea should be fired immediately. I almost bought a gun yesterday.
• Rackspace technical support, while giving the impression of clued helpfulness, is no longer impressing me. I have absolutely no idea what the “managed” in “managed hosting” represents.
• There were zero initial public offerings in September. Zero.
• The DSL provider for our connection at the office has a transparent http proxy. They are pig fuckers.

I restored my early-1998 backups for the Nth time, and I’m determined to sift through it and write the bits that I care about to CD. Restoring 12 gigs from tape every year or so is just silly, especially since much of that is system files and data that’s no longer interesting.

While that was running I finished The Return of the King, which ended much more favourably than I expected. Many of the books that I’ve read recently end immediately after the climax, which is usually disappointing. More often than not I’d like to read about how the characters get on with their lives.

George is coming to visit on Saturday. I miss that crazy Montreal bunch. Deb moved to Ottawa today, too, which gives me an excellent excuse to go visit that wonderful city.

More upcall-packing hackery, which threatens to simplify this code immensely. I am all about simplification these days.

It’s been 20°C outside for the last two days. That’s insane. It’s the middle of November, I demand to be waist-deep in snow. I knew it wasn’t going to be truly wintry in southern New Jersey, but still, what a let down. On the other hand, I’d much rather have this than awful 0° freezing rain. My rules for a happy climate are very simple: warm (17°+) or very cold (-15°-).

Food shopping and then home to clean up the house a bit before I pick George up tomorrow. Laundry too, sweet god. It’s overflowing the hamper.

In case I didn’t mention it before: The Audio of Being is highly recommended. Run, do not walk.

Got up early to look at the meteor shower with some friends; George, alas, decided to sleep in. Very impressive indeed, and then I slept until 10h.

Made some pancakes. Played some frisbee. Bought some shelving, at George’s insistence.

Took George back to Princeton to meet with a professor and fly home. I miss that crazy guy already.

Landed Vinodh’s d_data patches which, somewhat predictably, broke the tree. sigh. Landed my upcall format changes anyways, while Shirish tries to figure out what broke.

Went home, started Xenocide. I might as well just finish the series now.

It rained last night, and traffic on the turnpike will probably be sucky, so I might depart for Ohio sooner than anticipated. I need to figure out how to make my car payment first, so that they don’t send troops after me. You’d think that they’d be very interested in having me know where to send money.

Nothing exciting has happened to me recently, and don’t expect any wild adventures while I’m in the heart of Amish Country.

Had dinner with Joe at our now-traditional El Campesino (authentic Mexican food prepared by authentic Mexicans; child menu now available for seniors 63 and over). Afterwards we digested at his house and watched television with his parents. I miss those guys.

blah blah Thanksgiving.

Helped my dad choose some components for a new machine. Dug all of the books and old hardware out of the attic that I wanted to bring with me. Had dinner at my mom’s house with my extended family, including my increasingly-senile but still fun grandparents.

My Blackberry ran out of battery overnight, but I miraculously woke up in time to make it to breakfast with my aunt, uncle, grandparents, and father. I didn’t really get enough sleep, but I remained remarkably alert.

Went to my dad’s house and installed Linux on his new machine. He’s computer savvy enough to handle things pretty much on his own, but he’s new to Linux. The driver for the onboard SiS900 failed spectactularly, of course, so he put his old network card back in.

I drove back to New Jersey, and somehow did it in 30 minutes less than my trip out, despite being waylaid by incredibly bad rain and fog in the mountains. I have no idea. Maybe it really took 6 hours to get to Ohio, not 7.

Caught up on a week of InterMezzo news with Peter, hashed through some recent cebolla issues with Zach.

It’s almost certainly going to be a largely lazy Sunday; maybe I’ll get motivated to move the mountain of cardboard from my living room to the recycling receptacle, if I can locate it.

I’ve been on hold with the Internal Revenue Service for the last 15 minutes. I consider it a small victory that I’m even in the call queue, since when I tried this morning it forced me into the automated system because of the high call volume.

I started on a CVS client in MOO this evening; I’ve wanted to have version control on moo code for a long time, but my interest was sparked when I found twenty lines of 8-month-old vapourware code in a sourceforge project.

> cvs -d :pserver:phil@off.net:/home/cvs/off.net login
[Type your CVS password or `@abort' to abort the command.]
password
cvs login: success

> ;me.cvspass
=> {{”:pserver:phil@off.net:/home/cvs/off.net”, “A:yZZ30 e”}}
[used 1 tick, 0 seconds.]

> ;me.cvsroot = “:pserver:phil@off.net:/home/cvs/off.net”
=> “:pserver:phil@off.net:/home/cvs/off.net”
[used 1 tick, 0 seconds.]

> cvs co -c
all          -a test

> cvs add -d moo $cvs
Directory /home/cvs/off.net/moo/CVS Client Object added to the repository
Directory /home/cvs/off.net/moo/CVS Client Object/verbs added to the repository
Directory /home/cvs/off.net/moo/CVS Client Object/props added to the repository

> ;$cvs.cvs_data
=> {{”Root”, “:pserver:phil@off.net:/home/cvs/off.net”}, {”Repository”,
“/moo/CVS Client Object”}, {”Entries”, {}}}
[used 2 ticks, 0 seconds.]

That’s enough for one night.

The last week of intermezzo kernel instability seems to be behind us. Shirish found and fixed some nasty d_fsdata bugs. Meanwhile I should probably spend some time getting 1.0.6 ready, since it’s largely escaped my attention recently.

More progress:

> cvs commit -m blah $cvs
cvs commit: Examining CVS Client Object (#157)
cvs commit: Examining: #157:_ci
Checking in _ci;
/home/cvs/off.net/moo/CVS Client Object/verbs/_ci,v  <--  _ci
new revision: 1.5; previous revision: 1.4
done

I’m probably going to rewrite some bits, now that I have a better idea of how things need to work, and what abstractions make sense. I would like to take this opportunity to also point out that the CVS protocol was designed (if you’ll permit the exaggeration) by what I can only assume were kindergarteners during recess. It doesn’t make any sense at all. And this is the only document I have to work with.

Fifteen years ago I found myself suddenly in the hospital instead of playing in a baseball playoff game; we won that game and the team had the game ball brought to me while I recovered. I found it last night, unpacking stuff that I’d been keeping in my dad’s attic for the last few years. I found a lot of cool stuff like that.

It’s hard to be melodramatic about byte order.

Got status, diff, and update working well. Spent the rest of the evening abstracting most of those functions away. They weren’t quite working again when I went home.

I thought of a much better abstraction in the shower. It is all totally clear to me now how to write this, as long as I can remember it long enough to commit it to code. I still hate the CVS protocol, even more than before, only now I understand it.

“You should not notice this change at all, except that you will loose all your bookmarks the next time you start galeon after recompiling/reinstalling.” — Ricardo Fernández Pascual