phik

Happy Deb day!

Chris pointed out that Netflix is having a promotion, which was enough to remind me that I’d meant to subscribe. Sweet, beautiful Netflix.

I haven’t been climbing in over a week, and my body is letting me know that it’s ready for action again. Tomorrow, for sure.

Spent an unreasonably large chunk of the day merging a large Portals patch that we got from someone at LLNL. Unfortunately it probably took me longer to merge the patch, which was made against a totally out-of-date tree, than it would have taken me to just reimplement the functionality. I was pretty grumpy afterwards.

I watched the first two episodes of From the Earth to the Moon. It’s really good so far.

I spent most of the day working on Lustre’s distributed lock manager. All of the local plain and extent lock tests pass now, and it’s time to hook it up to the network.

Instead of writing yet another doomed set of pack and unpack functions, now is a good time to convert the entire Lustre RPC infrastructure to use one simple, elegant set of buffer-mangling functions. Unfortunately, this will probably take a couple of days to retrofit and debug.

Peter’s wife is in town for a conference, so we had dinner with Ric, Eric, and Vickie at Cafe Spice. Mmmm, best Indian food ever.

The whole day went towards new RPC buffer management. By dinnertime, though, I had about 75% of the operations working again.

I watched Enemy at the Gates. It was ok. I really like Ed Harris.

The RPC buffer handling rewrite patch is good enough to pass all of the basic operations tests, so I landed it.

 31 files changed, 1316 insertions(+), 1997 deletions(-)

<blizzard> phil_: I can almost _hear_ the code leaving out the back door.  

I went climbing in a new gym today–much nicer than the usual house of crap that I usually climb at, and with much higher walls. I didn’t have a particularly good climb, though, just one of those days I guess.

I can’t believe it’s the 9th of April already.

I did a bunch of work on the lock manager today, then wrote the two sections of our Cluster 2002 paper that I’m responsible for. I’m a little surprised that he didn’t ask me to write more of the paper, but Peter’s a bit of a glutton for punishment, I guess.

I sent blizzard a photo of the pickle jar that got me so riled up a few weeks ago. I found my camera’s battery charger.

Ran a bunch of errands and then somehow made it to 30th Street, found a parking spot, and made it to the platform in time to catch the train to Boston.

Joe and Jacob met me at the station. We ate Thai food. It was good.

Now I know where to get yummy crepes in Harvard Square.

None of the 6 rental agents called me back. Do they not work on Saturdays, one of the only two days of the week that the common man can look at properties? What the hell?

Joe, Chris, Shona, and I went to Blue Ribbon for some (truly excellent) pulled pork. When we got back to the house we discovered Jacob and Peach outside enjoying the excellent porch weather. We sat on the steps until it was time for Charlie’s. I need a porch.

It’s Patriots Day in Massachusetts, which basically guarantees that I won’t hear from any of the dozen agents that I’ve left phone messages or email for. The holiday seems mostly to be a convenient excuse for people to watch the Boston Marathon. We watched it for about an hour, mostly from Nat’s sidewalk and balcony, which put us about 20 feet from, and 10 feet above, the 24.5 mile area. I have no idea how people can stand outside for 5 or 6 hours watching people run.

I did some work for a while, watched some TiVo at Nat’s, and went to Charlie’s. Buck Dewey’s Big Band were playing. They were pretty good.

I woke up and packed, then had lunch with Nat, Joe, Jacob, and Chris before I went to the train station. Sweet, sweet Acela Express. Of course, it was late because of signal trouble, thus nullifying almost all of the benefit of the express train for which I paid. Sigh.

Still no listings from agents. 1 reply.

Day 6 without cable modem service begins! If you are reading this and happen to be a Comcast executive, you need to fire your IT department immediately. Three days to upgrade their support ticket system, during which time they can neither read old tickets nor assign new ones? Six days (and counting!) to upgrade a little tiny fucking field in a stupid fucking database? Ignore, for the moment, that this is the fourth time they’ve “fixed” the entry in their database…

Day 7 without cable modem service has come and gone. During one of my two daily telephone calls to technical “support”, I asked the woman whether six weeks is a normal and acceptable time for provisioning to take. She actually said–I am not making this up–“I don’t know, I’ve never worked in that department.” As if it is possible that yes, six weeks is a perfectly normal and acceptable amount of time.

To make myself as clear as possible, the Comcast IS department seems to be even more incompetent than the Zero-Knowledge IS department, and that takes serious, concerted effort. (Except for Shane, of course, who is one of the most competent people I’ve ever worked with. We miss you, Shane!)

At long last, my cable modem has been fixed. Billing and I are going to have an intense heart-to-heart next week.

We fixed the (really stupid) bug that was blocking progress on IA64 and sparc64, and I made more progress with the DLM.

This new flat rate local and long distance phone service is pretty interesting. It’d save me around $150/month. I wonder if it’ll crap all over any attempts to get DSL.

The documentation for my printer reads “up to 8 ppm black” which, aside from being a meaningless statement, is as misleading as a meaningless statement can possibly be. I think that if it didn’t have to put any ink on the paper, the paper-feeding mechanism could move 8 pages per minute. Slowest. Printer. Ever.

I got some serious DLM work done today, and a lot of the pieces came together all at once towards the end of the day. I talked to a couple of apartment agents, and they’re off gathering up properties that meet our criteria. I also made a tremendous amount of progress with some contract negotiations, which means that today belongs firmly in the Win column.

I wish I could say the same about the Leafs. It was so hard to watch that game, so hard to watch the total failure of the powerplay unit to get the job done, especially when compared to the unstoppable Islanders unit. I hope it was a sobering loss for the Leafs, since it’s now a 3-game series. sigh.

erasmus gets about 30,000 web hits per day, which is nearly triple the count for early last year. I guess that surprises me a bit.

I really hate the tax systems of both the US and Canada; arcane and complicated beyond belief, they rely entirely on knowing about thousands of special cases, and thus being able to assert that your crazy deductions and wild loopholes are correct. If you have a lot of money, you can pay an expert whose entire career is devoted to knowing ways to avoid paying tax. If you don’t have a lot of money, you go to an incompetent clearinghouse like H&R Block, or you do it yourself, and either way you lose. How many billions of man-hours have been eaten by the simple inefficiencies of the tax system? How much of our GNP evaporates into useless paperwork? Isn’t the likely growth in national productivity reason enough to switch to a flat tax?

That being said, right at this moment my favourite person is my accountant, who just saved me 10 or 15 times the cost of her services by substantially reducing my tax burden (even before taking into account the value of the time that I’m not spending on my taxes). She is my new best friend.

I mustn’t forget to congratulate Alice for being the newest member of the “friends with more degrees than I” club, and Tyla for extending her lead. When we bring the party north next weekend, we will properly make up for the months of hard work and good judgement devoted to lofty academic pursuits. Also we will eat a lot of unhealthy food and see unhealthy amounts of my good friend George.

I spent most of the day cleaning and filing, so hundreds or thousands of pages of near-meaningless paperwork are safely ordered in the entropy reduction unit.

I picked Peter up at the airport and we went straight to the climbing gym, which was a really good idea. I’m nice and tired.

I got the DLM to really work for the first time this morning, and watched a lock ping-pong between two mountpoints overwriting the same piece of file data. Very exciting, if your brain is wired like mine.

Peter and I did a fair amount of work on the metadata server recovery too, and the first big chunk of that code appears to work well. It’s ridiculously little code, but so powerful, which is precisely how it should be.

There’s a small but growing stack of Economist and Guardian Weekly periodicals by my bed. Given the amount of content in a single Economist or Guardian Weekly, I should resign myself to never finishing those and skipping back to the present. Sigh.