Last night, my laptop got sick. It was causing all sorts of odd filesystem errors, and e2fsck didn't like what it found, so I left it running more intensive disk checks overnight. When I came in this morning, I was in agreement with e2fsck: I didn't like what it had found, either. Definitely time for a reinstall.

First, I ended up getting Chris-at-Velocet to burn somehow-corrupt images of the second and third Red Hat 7.3 discs, though it took far too long to find that out. Then, as I started to slip gently towards success, I found that the 7.3 install really doesn't like the video card in my laptop. Believe it or not, this paragraph's fumblings and frustration took almost the entire day.

I finally gave up around 5:30pm and went to meet Hilary for Ultimate. The game was quite fun, the team is quite nice, and even though we lost by a pretty large margin, I played decently; all rather pleasant. Hilary and I then headed to find Tyla at home, showered, and went wandering on Bloor in search of food. (Rob joined us just before we left the house.) We found OK food, and discovered that they're filming a movie on Bloor. I wonder what it is...

Tomorrow is our anniversary, and I didn't get out to buy Tyla's gift today. I think I'm OK, though, because Tyla, at last check, still hadn't even picked a gift for me. I don't have to outrun the bear, and all that.

(Reconstructed from notes on the morning of 1 Aug. I didn't have a working computer at work, etc. Sosumi.)

Alasdair and I were having a perfectly nice late-night meal at Mel's, when we saw a mouse scurry across the floor. I'm sure they manage to keep things sanitary, and I'm sure most restaurants have the occasional rodent interloper, but I think I'll have to spend a little time away. It's just so hard to get "disease carrying vermin" out of your head while you're reading the menu!

This morning I got tinderbox reporting limping along for Lustre, and then attended a teleconference with all the other people working on getting MCR up and running, so that we can get on to helping people make better bombs.

Then Tyla and I raced to the office to meet with Graydon and Frances for lunch, after which Tyla wandered off to shop for groceries and furniture, and I spent longer than was really necessary wrestling with my new desk with Ken and other officemates. Lisa doesn't really like the part of my old, breakfast-nook desk that overhangs the edge of hers, but I'm sure she'll get used to it. Or she'll club me silly when I'm not paying attention.

I forgot my cell phone charger in Boston, I think. I hate being dumb.

Now, back to the export-munging stuff, on Peter's fast-moving branch. I want to get a lot done tonight and tomorrow, because I'm playing Ultimate with Hilary's team tomorrow night, and then Thursday is our anniversary, which will involve at the least a long lunch at the ROM or AGO, and probably a leisurely dinner. And then we're off to Blue Skies for the long weekend. Great fun, but not conducive to keeping up with Peter's breakneck pace.

Tyla's off seeing more Bostonian wonders, and I'm hacking on tinderbox stuff, which makes for a fine Monday morning, all in all.

Phil — who looked quite sharp in his tux, natch — is off to Denver for some meetings. His car — buy his car, Jacob! — had a flat tire, so we had to put the spare on it before the Blizzards could drive us to a nice Indian dinner. (Phil and I really need to get our own "Where To Eat In <City>" pages up and running, I think.)

I find that I have trouble, on re-reading my diary, figuring out when I'm describing the listed date's events, and when I'm recalling the previous day's events on the listed date. Given that a major motivation for this whole thing — other than the discipline training that results from writing (just about) every day — is to aid in my personal recollection of my life, this may be a sign that I need a new system.

Chris is going to drive us to Providence this afternoon for our return flight, and then we'll probably collapse at home. Travel is fun, but it's always nice to be back home, where I have clothes and stuff.

Later: Chris is such a great friend. He endured literally two hours of sucky traffic to get us to the Providence airport just barely in time. If the flight hadn't been delayed, we'd never have made it. It was a great weekend, and part of me wished it wouldn't end, but it's also great to be back home. Even if we did have to wait for 45 minutes for our luggage to appear on the carousel.

I'm glad to see that the Penny Arcade guys are enjoying the MP3s I sent them (the Neuromancer ones). I think they're even legal to distribute, or that's my dim recollection from when I grabbed them off a web site a few years back.

The black-tie affair was an absolute blast, though finishing the night at Charlie's meant that my tux smells like a thousand-dollar ash tray. Pictures were taken, and I'm sure they'll show up shortly.

Phil and I hacked our own separate hacking yesterday, and I was only mildly confounded by Peter's continuing breakneck pace — much of the code I was working with still operates in materially the same fashion.

Tyla did more Boston-touristing, so at least one of us is getting out to enjoy the city. I had hoped to cheat a little and see some sights with her on Monday, but it looks like I'll be on the phone and IRC getting tinderbox working. That's OK, because we really do need something like this in place, and it is, like, my job, but I think Tyla's a little disappointed that I don't get to wander around with her. At least she seems to be liking Boston.

We had a nice breakfast this morning, after a restful sleep last night, and then Tyla took off to see various pretty parts of Boston. I opted to see some decidedly less pretty parts of the Lustre code, and continue on our quest to rationalize export data management. ("Export" is our term for all the state a server component — storage, metadata and lock management — keeps for each client. Right now, each server piece keeps its own list or lists of this data, and we want to put it all into one place.) Every time I touch something to fix it, I have a combinatorial architectural explosion and have to mutate a bunch of other things. Tortoises, all the way down.

Soon, though, I get to dress up all pretty and party with some friends here in Boston (which is, really, quite lovely this time of year). That will be more fun, and less confusing.

Never travel with me. It'll just end in disaster.

• Moved Tyla's wallet on her, causing her to leave it behind in Toronto — totally my fault;
• Contributed materially to our missing the flight to Providence — got on a flight an hour later to Boston instead, which was basically the best possible outcome;
• Almost missed the flight to Boston because Tyla and I didn't interpret "meet at the gate" in exactly the same way — and we'd exchanged passports inadvertently at the Customs pre-clearance, so Tyla had no ID and no purchasing power for a while, with our flight leaving any minute now.

Once we got to Boston, though, fun was had. Chris picked us up in Phil's car, and then we met up with Jacob and Joe and Nat at Phil's place. I hacked a little bit, got a ride around the neighbourhood in the Fiat, and munched on some Indian food. We didn't make it to Harvard Square in time to eat with Chris and Shona at Mr. Bartley's, but since Tyla and I managed to score some excess concert tickets at cost within 60 seconds of arrival at the Somerville, even the outrageously slow and mediocre food at the joint across the street made for a cheery meal. (This place can't seem to master a Greek salad, but they advertised homemade — as though that were some sort of endorsement here — crab and lobster tortellini. Uh, pass.)

The concert was great, predictably. Even the opening act was decent, and the Hip didn't miss the proverbial beat when all the stage lighting died halfway through the show. Lots of Canadians present, of course.

Blizzard fixed an off-by-one bug today, which is really cool, but then he made an off-by-65 error with bus advice that had Phil, Tyla and I going to Dudley Square instead of the nice ice cream shop. Not much of a tourist destination; I think it's what you'd get if you took our Montreal neighbourhood shopping at the NRA Superstore.

Sleep now, so that I can work a bit tomorrow and then get my black tie on with many cool Boston people.

I have the internet at home again. I bought an SMC Barricade to replace the aged and crusty FreeBSD box I'd been using as a router for years, but I think I'm going to take it back and get something else. There are a handful of problems with it:

• I can't find a way to turn off the address translation stuff, though it may be possible if I turn off all the firewalling.
• It doesn't have built-in wireless support, so I need to blow a port on connecting my existing wireless access point, and power the WAP, and...
• I can't tell it about a network segment that's smaller than /24, which is a problem because I have a /29 routed to me by my ISP. (Which is why I want the NAT turned off, etc.)
• The printer port, which I am quite interested in using, now that I've seen that they're available, is parallel and not USB.
• It makes a buzzing noise. This should be a completely solid-state device, with minimal power requirements. Not acceptable.

I have to go drop my tux off for cleaning now, and then finish setting up the computer for Tyla's use. I was thinking about working from home, because the desktop box is a lot beefier than the laptop, and user-mode Linux is quite the workout, but I have some errands I want to run downtown, and I left my cell phone (well, the loaner from Rogers) at the office last night.

Fixed another portion of our interrupt and timeout code today, and tomorrow I start on shuffling our export and connection code around in preparation for some real recovery work. Tyla's coming to Boston with me this weekend, so I'll probably get a fair bit less work done, but we might get to see one of our favourite bands in concert, so I'm not too heart-broken about it.

What a paperwork day this was. In addition to getting my learner's permit (!), I also filled out about a billion forms so that I could get access to the test cluster for MCR. This is my third learner's permit — old-style Ontario "365", one from California, and now this G1 — but the first time I've ever applied for access to a sensitive computing resource as a foreign national!

A good friend of mine — a good friend of yours too, even if you haven't met her, as long as you're not really creepy or anything — is in the process of quitting smoking, so my thoughts and pride are of course with her. ("Quitting smoking" is an awkward-sounding phrase, but I'm sure that awkwardness can't compare to the feeling of having your brain reconfigured chemically over a few weeks. Go Deb!)

Mildly productive day at work, but I have still not achieved total domination over our interrupt and timeout situations. Tomorrow, I will play dirtier, and borrow some of Peter's brain.

I dropped off my phone and Blackberry for service today. I hope I get them back soonish, because I'm going to Boston this weekend. I should get my tux cleaned, too.

Helped Fixy and Chris make PHP and Squid play happy caching games, to obtain some significant speedups for the World Youth Day web site, or something. Two orders of magnitude isn't bad for half an hour's work.

I have some entries for previous days floating around on the computer at home, but I don't think I'm going to bother digging them out and putting them up. We were very busy, and I didn't have internet access, and it's OK for me to break my months-long streak. Really it is.

The unpacking is going very well, and while Tyla was off visiting her relatives — I was not visiting my mom, though that had been my plan; perhaps next weekend — I was a moving-in machine. Office, bedroom, dining room; none could withstand my deboxing wrath. With Alasdair's and Madhava's help, I also got a pile of stuff over to storage and the air conditioner set up and — possibly the most important achievement — the grill fueled and (thoroughly) tested.

If you are planning to become a professional packer for a moving company, I have a little test to prepare you:

• You are packing an office full of manuals and documents and books and other paper products. At the end of one of the boxes, you find that you have a longish, narrow rectangular space left. Do you:

  1. Fill that space with packing paper, given that you have many cubic metres of the stuff lying around anyway?
  2. Grab a book from one of the other nearby shelves to finish the box?
  3. Stick a bottle of Fantastic in the perfectly-sized space, such that it can damage photographs and manuals when it is inevitably jostled during the move?

• You are packing that same office, and come across a large envelope that is clearly marked "Do Not Bend". It is about an inch too long to fit properly in the bottom of the box size you're using for this room. Do you:

  1. Put it aside for packing with art or other outsized things?
  2. Ask one of the residents, who are sitting around doing basically nothing while they wait, if they would like to take it with them?
  3. Stick it at the bottom of a box anyway, so that Tyla's nice diploma has a crease in it?

If you answered "C" to any of those questions, please come to my house so that I can stomp on your head.

Some people have been putting up posters in the neighbourhood about the idea of making the TTC free during smog days. This isn't a horrible idea at all, but, as Alasdair pointed out, who's going to pay for it? The TTC apparently gets something crazy like 80% of its operating budget from fares, so there's going to be some serious shortfall action if they toss open the doors a few dozen times each summer. Still, interesting idea.

I'm still happy about the phone-plan switch from the other day, but I seem to have busted the phone in the process. I think it was the part where I got them to replace the cracked case, because I was able to make a call right before that, and ever since I've had No Service. Alas.

Anyone want to buy a television?

We had believed that the kitchen would pose no storage problems for us, because it's replete with cabinets and drawers and whatnot, but it turned out to be a near thing. The office is probably going to be easier, and likely the next task, but I'm a lot more cautious with my optimism now.

Chester is settling in nicely, but we're a little worried about his habit of jumping up onto the (smooth-top) range. I'd really like him to learn that it's not a good idea, but I fear that it'll take a painful injury for the lesson to take.

My prescription needs renewing, but my Québec prescription isn't portable to Ontario pharmacies, so I'm going to have to find some walk-in that will just cough up the Celexa scrip without actually forcing me to endure rediagnosis, etc. Maybe I should take a quick trip to Montréal and get a year's worth of pills.

Tyla's dad was also critical to the success of our relocation, and I was remiss in not calling attention to that fact in yesterday's entry. Today he's taking our chest freezer, spare desk and miscellaneous books and magazines to Kia, back in Ottawa, because he's a glutton for punishment.

I have to get a new cell phone today, and I'm thinking that I'd like the new Blackberry. I just bet that I'm going to have to break someone's brain over at Rogers in order to get it set up, though.

If you're using the Ximian gnome2 snapshots for your desktop, do not update. It's a total disaster right now, if you want to use the panel or gnome-terminal or stuff like that.

My cell-phone adventure was somewhat successful. After trying futilely — at two large stores — to arrange something that would let me use the new Blackberry when it is made available for non-corporate use in November, without requiring me to buy a completely new unit at non-subsidized retail, I had a brainstorm. Instead, I just switched my current phone over to a Toronto number, while keeping my Montreal one active (it now has a voice mail message telling people where to go, as it were). I also switched to a flat-rate plan for long distance and roaming in Canada and the US, so as to avoid any more $700 surprises after extended trips south. (There are about two dozen cities where I will get hit with $4/min charge if I pick up my phone, but I hope to never need to spend time in any of them.)

Eight thousand four hundred pounds of our belongings arrived this morning, and our house is a little crowded. Chester, who had been hard-pressed for appropriate hiding places in the barren hardwood wasteland, hasn't been seen in hours.

Alasdair came by to help us out. He has a car, lives a scant two minutes away, and is free during the day. In short, the perfect friend. Most of his work involved the drive to and from storage, to help the movers dispose of some excess goods, and the collection of groceries on the way. It was all pretty smooth, though the mouse that one of the movers pivoted on was likely not as impressed. The mouse was pre-dead, just to clarify, and I think he might have had other unfortunate kin in the building: there was a slightly off smell to the place today.

I hoped to get some work done today, but with my laptop at Madhava's, the phone service still not working, and my power cables at the office, it turned into a totally unproductive day. (And I managed to burn some of phil's time on the phone.)

Time for some unpacking, I suppose.

I slept like a thing that sleeps really soundly. Madhava's couch is quite comfy, though as long as it was roughly horizontal and not on fire, I was going to get some quality sleep.

It seems that some people are upset about the townhouse/condo infill proposed by our landlords for the space behind our new apartment. Aven, Mark, Madhava, and I had a pretty good conversation about the issue while we wandered over to the new place, full of the sort of balanced and reasonable discussion that I fear we'll never see in the press or activisty web sites and pamphlets. (The other infill development in the area, in which my landlord actually lives, looks to be quite nicely done, and completely in character for the area. Dunno what that means, exactly, but it's an interesting datapoint.)

Madhava has a really interesting idea for a company, and I think when I'm done with this Lustre thing in 2005 I might well see if he still wants to pursue it. (It's not my place to divulge the details here, of course.)

For a big chunk of today, the Lustre tree was broken like a drunken promise, so I tried to get some voice-over-IP stuff working. (My office phone might end up being such a system, once the Pope coughs up a spare line.) What a mess. I can't use the provided binaries, because they want a version of libstdc++ that you can't get for Red Hat, trying to build the binaries against the packaged versions of the libraries — which I rebuilt, sooooo sloooooowly — pukes all over itself, so I'm now rebuilding the whole mess again. If this isn't smoother than buttered silk when I get it all built, I think I'm going to stick to good old POTS for a while. (Not that I'm totally unexcited by some of the stuff that a good VoIP setup would let me do, such as answer my office phone from home or the road, and poke at my voice mail over the web, and so forth. But really, there's only so much guinea pigging I'm willing to do with my office phone.)

Andreas has fixed the Lustre tree, so I'm going to run some tests before I take off to µPowered for some drinks with the rest of the geeks in this office. I'll probably head home a little early to see my wife, father-in-law, and cat, but it'll be fun to see everyone. As long as Justin and I don't start yelling at each other about software licenses again, that is. I just know that these people are going to ask hard questions about Lustre, so I'll have to get used to referring them to the documentation. Some day, I hope soon, I'll understand this beast better.

Madhava and I talked a fair bit about government funding of various projects and whatnot, and today I ran into an interesting take on student loans. I'll try to remember to write more tomorrow about the funding stuff, because I think we came up with some interesting ideas, but for now I must test and hack and then drink.

OK, now we're really moving. People are putting many (82, if I recall Colin's count correctly) boxes of our things into a nice big truck. Soon, that truck will arrive in Toronto. Yay.

Our last meal in Montreal — well, mine; Tyla might have had lunch today after I left — was at Lezvos, and I'm going to miss that place something fierce.

Turns out that you stop being eligible for the Air Canada "youth standby" fare when you turn 25, which was especially surprising to me as I bought and used such a ticket on Father's Day this year. That mildly screwed my "getting to Toronto" plans, but there was a Tango flight later in the afternoon, so I grabbed a ticket on that and hunkered down in the departure area for a long conversation with Phil about locking and interruptions. Pretty productive, considering that I was still totally exhausted, and working in an airport. (For me, anyway: I suspect it wasn't as great a use of Phil's time, but he's never going to learn to stop saying "call me if you have any questions" unless I show him the error of that way.)

I got to the new office mid-afternoon, and after a quick tour I actually managed to get a touch of work done. It's kinda weird having people around, but I'll get used to it, I'm sure.) The subway is very convenient on this end, and a nice 10 minute walk from the house on my end, so the daily commute looks pretty sweet. (During Pope-a-palooza things will get a bit hairy, but it's certainly a walkable distance if the TTC gets out of hand.)

Speaking of Popefest, followers of my Bell sufferings will likely find this tremendously amusing: because Bell can't get phone lines installed at Union Station in time for the WYD registration, Velocet (my ISP and office-host) is redirecting four of their voice lines via voice-over-IP down to the internet infrastructure they're providing at the other end. If the Pope can't get Bell to rush an order — why not just disable a payphone or two, I wonder? — I don't really feel like I ever have a chance.

Madhava and I got dinner at the Indian Rice Factory (those reviews, at least in aggregate, are spot-on: the food is great, but the portions are pretty small for what you pay), and then wandered by Loblaws for banana bread supplies and replacement toiletries. So tired.

After my erstwhile teammates played their last 3 games of the tournament — doing much better without me than with me, though they politely denied any belief in a correlation — I wandered to Mondo Frites to overeat with the best of them. After that, Geoff and Mehmet and Hoye and I failed our willpower rolls (Tyla wasn't too happy with me, it seems, but I think we're all OK now) and ended up playing another game of Titan until about 1:30am. With the Indy jammed into the back seat of Geoff's car, alongside its new caretaker (Hoye), they took off back to Ottawa.

And so departed our last Montréal guests. I'm really looking forward to being in Toronto, but I think we're really going to miss this house. It has served us tremendously well in our frequent and ambitious hosting, and I like to think that others will miss it as well. We'll certainly be entertaining in our new house — as though that needed saying — but it won't be in such a palatial fashion. People had better get used to more crowded floor-sleeping. (I think our new kitchen will allow us to continue in our culinary ways, happily.) Thanks to everyone who came and visited us over the last two years — even those who showed up on minimal notice with their entire Ultimate team. We really enjoyed having you around, and your periodic presence brightened our already-pretty-sunny home. Blah, blah, maudlin, blah.

I stayed up pretty much all night pruning the office and bookshelves pretty viciously, and it now feels like we own nothing. Our packer, Colin — ask for him by name; he is professional in ways previous packers are not even able to pronounce — has been putting our remaining trinkets into boxes at a somewhat frightening pace. I'm starting to think I should hire someone to do this every year or so, just for the tidying angle.

Pretty much everything that's not required for me to type this entry is in a box now, and I think we're going to get lunch soon. I might head to Toronto tonight as the advance team, but we're supposed to go to Lezvos tonight, and I really don't want to miss that. Maybe I'll just get an early flight/train tomorrow.

There is apparently a heat wave starting up in Toronto, which will make our planned acquisition of a pair of window AC units that much more difficult. Maybe we should get them in Montreal, where there is no such heat wave? Running out of time for that sort of cleverness.

I am still sore from Ultimate, but it's a good sort of sore. What are the muscles (?) over the bottom half of the ribs called? Mine are quite tender at the moment, and I don't even know their name.

Madhava says our keys work, which is great. Also, he took some very nice pictures of our new place. I can't wait to make a huge mess of it!

It seems the US gov't has an ingenious plan for dealing with unemployment, or something. Feeling glad I didn't move to the states again.

Before people arrived for the shower parade and far too much discussion of food plans — some of which started after Chris and I had already made burger patties and prepared veggies for grilling — I took a peek at what's involved in the timeout stuff. Going to require some infrastructure, but it's infrastructure that we are going to want eventually, so I think it'll all work out. I wonder why there's no wait_event_timeout even in 2.5. I sort of wish there were, because it would make this sort of complexity someone else's problem.

At around 12:30am, Mehmet had the brilliant idea that we start a game of Titan; Hoye and Geoff and I happily obliged. Great fun, though we ended up having to call the game (in Mehmet's favour) around 3:30, due to fatigue and the looming spectre of a 10am field call for the second day of the tournament.

I feel great this morning, if a tiny bit stiff, but I'm skipping the remaining games. Breaks my heart, but if we don't have this place ready for the packers tomorrow at 10am, Tyla's going to break more than that.

If you ever need a whole pile of booze and food consumed, drop me a line: I know a crack team. We ate and drank a truly move-helpful amount last night, though I have slight concerns about my teammates' ability to play hung over. I guess I'm about to find out. Wish me luck! (And then stop what you're doing, concentrate on this very important task, and wish my knee strength and joy. Thanks, that means a lot.)

We lost our first three games, and I skipped the fourth because my knee was getting a bit tired, but I had a great time. It's amazing how quickly it all comes back: I hadn't played Ultimate more than five or six times since this tournament last year, and I got back into the swing of things pretty easily. Thanks to all those who prayed for my knee. Seems to have worked well.

When I got back home — many thanks to Geofford for the ride back — I spent a little time tracking down the last major problem preventing me from committing my block read/write stuff and getting on with my life. Turns out that these two lines are different in a very important way:

nioptr = lustre_msg_buf(request->rq_reqmsg, 1);
nioptr = lustre_msg_buf(request->rq_repmsg, 1);

Can you spot it? Yes, of course you can. Took me a while, though. (Phil and I are seriously discussing renaming those fields, to prevent further episodes of this sort of silliness.) Seems to work great now, so I've committed and am doing some office cleaning and whatnot before I eat and start on the timeout stuff.

This filesystem stuff is hard. Every time I think I'm getting close to making this block read/write stuff work, I stumble into some other hard case. At the end of the day, things will be a lot better because of this work, but right now I occasionally get the feeling that I'm going backwards. (If anyone knows why the XID is always zero on the client in my new code, please share.)

I had a great chat with Peter today about what the next pieces are in my gradual work towards the actual failure-recovery support, and I'm deeply psyched. Of course, I'm going to get very little done next week, because of the move, but at least I should (must!) get this brw stuff working before I drop off the net. Once I hit Toronto, I'm going to be working in the lovely offices of dsl/velocet.ca, the finest ISP in the land. I bet I'll even start to eat lunch regularly!

People are starting to arrive for the tournament, so I should go start cooking. This is going to be fun, though I think I'm only going to be able to play a few games today. I have to do a lot of cleaning, and some of the aforementioned Lustre work, and I really don't want to screw my knee up again.

(Failure. Again! Sigh.)

Today I put my credit card to the best use it's ever seen: a private MRI. Purchased over the phone, no less. (Much ink has been spilled over whether private MRI clinics are a valuable outlet for demand that onstrips supply, or the subversion of our health care system. Today, I really didn't care: a friend is going to get a diagnosis she needs, and timeliness is key for her.)

In other money news, one of the people coming to play Ultimate this weekend sent this neat little note to the team:

I have just been reminded by my sister: the armoured vans are on strike in Montreal. Apparently bank tellers are carrying cash around in cars with gunmen as protection but they can't keep up with the demand. Bottom line: Montreal ABMs are likely empty so fill your wallets in Ottawa.

Huh. I bet that sort of thing wouldn't happen if we voted for The Money Party.

Two interesting bits of reading about online games came across my inbox this morning: a Salon piece about upcoming online games, and a really good forum thread about gratification-based play and other playstyles. They're pretty good, even if you're really not much of a game weenie. We all know it's the sociological stuff that's really cool anyway.

Work-wise, phil pointed out that while the solution I'd come up with was cute and all, it didn't really represent progress towards overcoming some of the flaws in the code I was touching — primarily race conditions. So today I rewrote a large part of the block read/write code in the client, and tomorrow I will teach the server about the changes I made. My stuff compiled on the first try, with only a single warning (which pointed out genuine badness, but still). I think that means I'm really lucky.

Even after ten years (!), the Singles soundtrack is really quite good. Even the Paul Westerberg stuff, I guess. If I'm not listening too closely. And I listen for the voice inside my head...nothin'. I'll do this one myself.

(Yesterday's entry didn't validate, and nobody even noticed. Web standards are a joke.)

Back when I was at Zero-Knowledge, we used to spend a lot of time talking about reputation, and the ability to develop machine-readable credentials on the basis of that reputation. We used to use eBay reputation as an example of such a credential, but what happens when people start to sell reputation outright? Interesting times.

The house is starting to look a little emptier, which is a sign of progress. Hoye has offered to take the Indy off my hands, and while I'll miss it a fair bit — we had some fun times, that Indy and I — I'll miss the space more, once we move. I'm sure he'll give it a good home.

Speaking of moving and good homes, Madhava picked up our keys today. Yay!

I found the bug that was keeping me from mounting Lustre, and of course it was mine. Alas. Fixed now, though, so I can start hacking out my interrupt coping strategy.

0 (@0 osc_request.c:osc_brw_write,l. 661 545): interrupted, orphaning desc a1a36634

0 (@0 osc_request.c:osc_brw_cleanup_orphaned_bulk,l. 408 2): Cleaning up orphaned desc a1a36634

Whee! The read case isn't quite working yet, but I'm sure I'll sort that out. For now, progress. (Rough translation: we got interrupted by the user while we were writing to the Lustre storage server, so we let the process return early, and cleaned up the buffers in the background when everything was done. The server never suspected a thing.)

We all know that loose lips sink ships, but did you know that jokes can crash planes? This lady wasn't joking about hijacking the plane, and even if her question had been completely serious, I don't understand the "security risk" posed. Make sure you don't ask any other safety questions, lest you get kicked off your flight. Losers.

(Geoff is also interested in the Indy, it turns out. Maybe we can get them to duel!)

We're not really packing — it's actually cheaper if the movers do that, and then our belongings are also insured — but we're doing our damnedest to help out. Today we recycled about a dozen paper shopping bags' worth of magazines and jewel cases (will they actually take them?) and old computer-game boxes and whatnot. Oh, and some bottles. Tyla went shopping today partially because we were a little short on food, but mainly so we'd have more handy recyclable receptacles. (Our blue bin went missing some time ago, and I haven't the heart to "pass it on" and nick one from a neighbour.)

I cooked dinner for what felt like the first time in a decade (probably more like two weeks, what with the travel and whatnot), and it was pretty nummy. Bittman rarely steers me wrong.

Work-wise, so-so day. I had to rebuild my Lustre tree because — well, it's not that interesting a story, but it was related to my recent reinstall, of course. After that, I was mysteriously unable to run our basic mount-and-ls test, but I decided not to spend too much time trying to figure it out. Instead, I realized why my original plan for handling user interrupts was going to fail miserably, and started scheming about a better model. I'm too tired now to actually remember why it was going to fail — not that I'd bore you with the details anyway — but I'm quite sure it would. New plan looks good, at least so far. We'll see what phil and peter think when they get back.

Want a chest freezer? Yours for the taking, just show up.

I think the Dad-family are off at a cottage now, which will make the timing of the TV transaction — should it actually occur — a mite tricky.

My CDs are so well-organized now. Phil would be very proud. He'd laugh at the duplicates, because he's a meanie, but I think there would still be some pride involved. After we get to Toronto, and I have positive confirmation of my CD inventory, I can go about replacing all the ones for which I only have empty husks. Sad, silent husks.

Anatole is off to a conference in Switzerland today, which sounds really cool. He offered to stow me away in his luggage, and I got all excited, but it turned out he was only teasing. I hope he has a happy birthday anyway, and don't wish him the slightest bit of embarrassment or discomfort on his trip. If he were to fumble his French and accidentally ask the flight attendant if she would like to sample his fragrant blossoms, or some such, I would not find the slightest joy in his predicament. Because I'm his friend, and it's his birthday.

(OK, maybe the very slightest joy.)

My hands were still sore this morning from fighting with the innards of my desktop machine last night. Whoever designed the power-cable connectors for hard drives needs to report to NASA for immediate assignment to Pegasus, because there is no way that those things could ever fall off accidentally. Unless it's the kind of accident that turns the entire American southwest into a smoking crater, I suppose. And did I have Lou Ferrigno put the screws in the drive enclosures? Crikey.

You may have noticed the part in yesterday's entry where I said I could build Lustre. This was a useful milestone, because I get paid to build Lustre, break it, ask Phil and Peter questions, and type in their answers. It seems that my celebration was a mite premature, because today's first full rebuild took an hour or so of puttering. Now, though, it's really all on track.

Once I got all that settled, I read through a lot of the portals documentation, and I think I've got a handle on how we want to handle client cancellation of requests without either deferring the cancellation (bad for the user or program that wants to interrupt the read or write) or causing the server to begin recovery. (Recovery is a pretty disruptive process, since it's designed to recover from things like a machine slipping into an alternate reality, or the network igniting, so we want to avoid it wherever feasible.) It feels like another layer of the Lustre onion has been peeled away; that ding! sensation really never gets old.

I tried to get Source Navigator working, in hopes that it would do a better job than etags when it came to schooling me about my source tree ("who calls osc_brw_finish? where does rq_level get set?"). I let it chew on the Lustre, Portals and Linux kernel source directories for well over an hour, and when it was done I couldn't get it to do anything useful. The documentation was pretty crappy too, so I'm back to etags. I should set up lxr, perhaps, and integrate it with the main Linux one. Not tomorrow, though.

(I am reminded at how awful most introductory technical documentation is, as I try to find expository links for the various tools I mention above. Not everyone reading this diary knows what the heck they all are, likely because they do something with their lives other than type and click, but it shouldn't be hard to explain these concepts. I expect I could do it in a 2 minute conversation, but finding a page on the web that summarizes the issues clearly and concisely is harder than finding my keys when I'm already late for my flight. Where are all the technical writers when you need them?)

Packing, or rather pruning, continues apace. While I was scratching my head about Lustre, Tyla did all the warranty stuff for the sale of our kitchen appliances and sentenced a large number of magazines to death, and Steph sorted through pretty much all the music CDs in the house, so that we can put them in big CD wallets and get rid of the bulky jewel cases. (We're taking this live-in-a-smaller-place thing pretty seriously.) My contribution was letting Tyla throw out the vast majority of my magazines, without getting too snarky.

Steph also rolled our change, which turned out to be a bit of a big job. $196 worth of job, in fact. That seemed like a lot until I did some math and realized that it's only slightly more than a quarter a day, for each day we've lived in this house (with no breaks for travel). And that's not even counting the loonies and toonies that are floating around, likely. Somewhere in there, waist-deep in the writhing snakes of my laziness and screaming for mercy, is a savings strategy.

Jacob fixed a pair of GNOME2 bugs for me today, so I'm even happier with my Linux setups now. I need to upgrade the laptop as well, but I probably won't do that until we've moved.

I haven't been phoning into the Mozilla meetings for quite a while — I really hate conference calls involving speakerphones, perhaps because I need a decent headset like phil's, and I'm also kinda forgetful — but I'm going to make a special effort this week. If I can remember when it's scheduled for. *sigh*.

My diary's been pretty boring, of late. I'm always so tired by the time I get around to writing about my day to get into the interesting stuff. Which is quite a shame, really, because just about every day I have a conversation or five that are genuinely thought-provoking — for me, at least — and it would be great to share those with the silly people who come and read this thing every once in a while. Maybe I need to start writing entries over lunch, when I have more energy. Or set aside time on the weekends?

Failure: I forgot to publish before I slept again. Why is this so hard?

I spent pretty much all of today fighting with various operating systems, in order to get XP and Red Hat 7.3 on the same machine and happy. I could fill countless paragraphs with heated invective on the topic, but I'm really way too tired. Sorry. It looks like I can build Lustre again, which means that I can be productive tomorrow. Phil and Peter are in Santa Fe for a design review or something, so I'll have to lean on my other coworkers for clues in their absence.

(I also got Shadowbane and Neverwinter Nights reinstalled, in case the productivity thing just doesn't work out for me.)

I did register for electrical service at the new house over the web, which was nice. We couldn't figure out how to do that for cable, though.

I really do need to start packing and whatnot, as well. And where the heck did I leave my book?

Damn, I'm tired.

Last night's dinner was, of course, a blast: good food, good company and rather good wine. If anyone ever offers, as Adam so kindly did, to bring a bottle of Joseph Phelps Insignia (we had the 1998) to an apportez-votre-vin restaurant, it is imperative that you not refuse the offer. You don't drink wine, you say? Bring a container that seals tightly, and FedEx me your portion.

In other booze news: tempting, tempting. Adam is, it goes largely without saying, a member, and my limited sampling of their wares has left me with rather positive feelings towards the organization. I wonder if Peter and Phil would be interested in a Corporate Membership....

I got mail from Bell this morning, telling me that my service would be connected on the day I requested, and here's my new number, and thanks for using Bell's web site. No, Bell, thank you for taking that key first step towards repairing our relationship. (Some day, I shall recount my various Bell Canada misadventures, I think.)

Today, I'm embarking on a massive reinstallation of various operating systems and such, as we prepare to reduce our domestic computing capabilities dramatically. This is me, looking very much forward to having an office that isn't at my home, in which the noisy and hot beasts can live.

I fixed my first Lustre bug today, with lots of help from Peter and Phil. I'm finally starting to see the pieces of the puzzle come together, though I'm still asking a lot of dumb-in-hindsight questions on IRC. I really enjoy being the dumbest person in the room, I think, which must be why I miss all my high school and Ottawa/Montreal/ZKS/etc. friends so much.

<shaver> honey, I fixed my bug!
<tyla> if you're so smart, why haven't you packed anything yet?

Indeed. So I also signed up for phone service at the new house over the web, mailed my Dad about buying our TV, and talked to Ken about office space. Progress, of a sort.

Update to yesterday's entry:

• Tyla's exceptional pictures, or at least the role of cosmetics in their unprecedented exceptionalness, is to be credited in no small part to Steph, whose stuff-you-put-on-your-face savvy — and, to be sure, MAC discount card — were critical to the success of the operation.
• The pottery shards are being soaked clean so that they can be used to assist in the drainage of future pots. That will involve covering them in soil again, but Tyla claims that this water — "and soap!" — treatment will help keep fungus at bay. After Graydon's explanation at OLS of the powers of fungus, including its ability to push through steel doors, I must confess to some skepticism. But there you have it.

Adam has proposed dinner at La Coulombe, and found his proposal readily accepted, so we'll be off shortly for what will be, I'm sure, a lovely evening.

Failure: I forgot to publish this entry after writing it, until the next morning. I lose.

I hope all you patriotic Americans out there are enjoying your Independence Day celebrations, safely and happily. I saw a segment on CNN a few days ago entitled "Fear of the Fourth", and it took me a good five minutes before I realized that they meant "of July" and not "Amendment". I'm not sure if that says more about me or CNN, or perhaps about the kind of people who make this sort of "very vague" alert. (Question that remains unanswered: how are these people with ties to terrorist groups kept under such close internet-activity monitoring, without being immediately incarcerated by the Homeland Security folks? Maybe I don't want to know.)

Tyla got her grad photos yesterday, and they are flat-out amazing. Her beauty has never been credibly challenged, but the abilities of the professional photography industry to effectively capture that beauty have been sorely lacking. Tyla credits her black eyeliner, and I have no significant opinion on that matter.

There is currently a small pile of soil-covered pottery shards soaking in one of the kitchen sinks. This provides a purely circumstantial, but rather compelling, evidentiary chain linking the cat to the loud noise we heard this morning, but questions remain. Here's one: what possible future use for those shards will require them to be soaked?

I've spent the whole day working on signal-handling issues in Lustre. Peter thought that this would be a good, quick bug to get started with, which means that either he thinks I'm five times smarter than I really am, or I'm uncovering some other badness as I go. We'll see if I can make any real progress tonight. The heat wave appears to have broken a little bit, which will help.

OK, this brain-melting heat is getting a little old. I didn't really get anything that could be considered sleep last night, so I passed out in the afternoon for a few hours, woke to a stellar movie plan from Adam, and then fell asleep promptly upon returning. At least I missed the worst of the heat. Or something.

Desperate to get something productive done today, I started testing some of the error-handling paths in Lustre, only to end up locking my laptop up, and corrupting a partition. That's not supposed to happen with ext3, but there we were, with the happening and the corrupting and the teeth-gnashing. After e2fsck was done with my partition, things were mostly OK, except that my Lustre user-mode Linux disk image wasn't mountable. I think I'm going to print a chunk of the huge master.pdf document and sit in a cool bath, or something. Grr. Argh.

In brighter computing news, GNOME 2 is, so far, a dream. I'm using the Ximian snapshots, so some things are a little bit rough, but for me there's no going back. gnome-terminal redraws correctly! Metacity is pretty and clean and pleasant! I can log in in finite time! Huzzah!

MIB 2 was watchable, and that's really all I was after. (The first screening for which we purchased tickets was to be presented in a room with no air conditioning, which would have defeated at least half the point of the exercise.)

We're selling our stove and fridge and dishwasher to the landlords, in exchange for our last month's rent. I had hoped that the lovely, lovely stove would find a new home at Aven and Mark's, but they were quite rightly put off by the cost of getting gas installed in a house that they don't own. At least we don't have to move that stuff now.

Man, I am going to be so productive tomorrow, after I get my UML environment set up again. I can just feel it.

Holy crap it's hot. Right now it's 33C/91F in Montreal, 47C/116F with Humidex thrown in — and given that I am dripping sweat as I type this, I'm all in favour of throwing Humidex in. Tyla and I have deployed box fans upstairs, but we're still living la vida convection for the time being. I think a movie is in order tonight. Maybe two.

Last night's Canada Day festivities were lovely, though I do get a little tired of the obsessive need to alternate between anglophone and francophone acts. To me, they should be featuring Canadian artists that have a national following, not one that's limited to a single province. That doesn't mean that we won't see anything from Quebec — Mitsou and Celine would be "fine", for example — but I don't think that we'd see half of them from Quebec. Ah, well. If anyone has a good MP3 of the David Usher "Crazy Train"/"Get The Party Started" cover, which is apparently a staple of his live performances, I would love to stumble across a copy.

I'm going to wait for Peter's impending phone call, and then I'm going to run to somewhere cold, before the heat gets to my brain, and I'm tempted to go spear fishing.

Happy Canada Day, to all my fellow Canadians and Canadians-in-spirit! Today's also the first real day of my new job, but I fear that I'm not going to get off to an especially productive start, what with all the patriotic partying to be done. I'm sure Peter will understand.

(If you're interested in the Chris & Kris wedding, or Ottawa restaurant information, make sure you see June's last entry. My batch-uploads of these entries makes it likely that you'll have missed it, poor things!)

I actually did a little bit of hacking/debugging with Phil, trying to track down some locking infelicities. My brain is completely full, to the point that the ll_intent_release call paths have displaced important information like my address and the name of my cat. I'm going to run off and see some Canada Day stuff with Tyla and company, and see if I can't recover some of my personal information. (This Lustre stuff is going to be so much fun.)