In the course of a mildly unpleasant, but ultimately quite satisfying, Ultimate victory last night, I managed to torque my back a bit.

Therefore, today’s predicted complement of blog-post editing, document authoring, and general PowerBook jockeying will be pre-empted. Instead, we will be offering a delicious selection of lying on the floor, hot water bottles, and an ibuprofen buffet. Moaning and cursing are available at a small additional premium.

(I can be reached through the traditional channels of cellular technology and Blackberry-borne email, though my response time may be even worse than usual.)

I was supposed to fly to SFO today, to spend the weekend at Foo Camp. In fact, I guess I still am supposed to fly to SFO, since the last flight isn’t scheduled to leave for 4 hours. But between a stomach bug that had me up all night and is still plaguing me — I’ll spare you the details — and the recently-declared tornado warning for Toronto, I’m thinking that I’m not going anywhere.

If both the external and internal weather clear up in time, I suppose I’d crash with Vlad and drive up in the morning, but I’m not feeling very optimistic. (Ignoring the fact that I haven’t actually asked Vlad yet.)

Update: Madhava has a candid of the weather where he works, at the north end of the city. Good times!

Saturday and Sunday were spent driving to Ottawa, getting our mad visitation on in Ottawa, and then driving back. Sunday evening found us at Dad’s in Markham, enjoying the pool, shade, and BBQ to the limit imposed by local authorities.

After the driving and swimming, I was a little stiff when I woke up yesterday morning. It was nothing serious, though, so I had to make sure it became serious by playing the first Ultimate game of the season last night with but a single sub.

We had a great time, and also won, but this morning found me more than a little stiff. Quite a bit more than a little stiff. “When did my desk get to be so far away from my bed?” stiff.

The stretching and Vitamin I have returned me to service, though, so I’m off to get lunch, and then, well, then I help Madhava and Kate move into their nifty new apartment, or something.

Michael Jackson’s in court, and I really don’t want to talk about the details of that case any more than I just did.

I have a long backlog of posts (lightning plans, a response to Frank Hecker’s excellent disruptive-innovation Firefox analysis, travelogue, congratulations to friends of all sizes) that I have been putting off finishing because I really, honestly, am too damned busy.

But!

I cannot let this pass: CNN has an honest-to-god scorecard for the various charges and counts at play here. I…but….

Stunning.

We had a power glitch at the hosting facility for my machine the other day, and after that we had reports of single-bit errors coming from one drive in the RAID-1 pair during read. (Tip ‘o the hat to Nathaniel Smith for being brave enough to call me at 06:15 with the news.)

Yesterday, I bought a new drive to replace the erroring one — which was, itself, not all that old — and things seemed to be OK. Today, though, we’re seeing the same result, with the new drive, so I’m going to have to go back in and move it to the known-good IDE channel or something.

I hope it takes, because I’m leaving in less than 36 hours for Europe, and it’ll be really hard to do work on the box from there.

My Lightning interview was published today, by the ever-patient Simon Paquet. I think it turned out pretty well, though perhaps not seven-weeks-of-waiting well. Ah well, such is life.

I’m pretty busy right now preparing for my security talk at the Zurich Information Security Center, and then for my XTech keynote — which follows a whopping 15 hours later in Amsterdam. I’m glad Europe is so small!

I’m pretty excited about both presentations, and I think they should be a fair bit of fun. Fortune has favoured me with lots to talk about in both areas, and they’re both great opportunities to get smart people thinking about problems and opportunities that matter quite a bit to me. Not a bad deal, and to sweeten it further I get to hang out with my long-but-not-lost friend Paul, who I haven’t seen in far, far too long.

A charmed life, truly.

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Reports of my incredible slack on posting here, as well as finishing with the questions from my Lightning interview, however, are pretty much right on the mark. Sorry.

I’m headed to Ottawa in a few hours to assist in a very indirect and hovering-nearby way with Mom’s neck surgery. I will probably be online from there in bursts and spurts until my return Friday.

I suspect that I’ll be looking for food and company on Thursday evening, once all the dust has settled, so Ottawans should feel free to call me (647.296.1922) and, uh, have me likely not answer because I’ll be in the hospital. Ah well. I’m sure we can sort something out.

Updates:

• Thursday, as Geoff points out, is Chu Shing night. I think I’m likely to be there.
• I may be very receptive to offers of lodging for Wednesday night, as mom’s new apartment is Very Wee. Worst case, I have fond memories of Arc.
• I am sorry that I hurt Planet when I forced an RDF rebuild.

Apparently, I have recently been informed, a fair bit of mail that I’ve sent since last Friday as not been reaching its intended recipients. Not all of it, though! Baffling, and at first I thought I’d screwed up the mail system when I was resuscitating the machine on which it is hosted. Nobody else has seen this problem, though, and the logs pretty clearly indicate that my outbound mail wasn’t being seen by that mail server in the first place, so it didn’t really even have a chance to screw me up.

Turns out that I managed to mangle my Thunderbird, in the course of wild and reckless hacking on it for my own purposes, to set it into “offline-send” mode while retaining the ability to pull in new mail. So there were quite a few choice morsels of communication sitting in my Unsent Messages folder, wounding my very soul in their now-untimeliness.

(I say “were”, because that folder is now largely empty because of a follow-on screwup involving the order of the arguments to the “cp” command. At least I have the indecipherable summary database left to help me track it down!)

Some of them in there made it through, probably according to whatever hacking I was doing on my tbird build at the time, so I’ll be poring over log files to figure out which ones are missing later today. If you haven’t heard from me about something you were expecting to, well, you’re probably used to that now, but resending your request might not be a horrible plan.

(I know I’m way behind on the things I wanted to post about before, too. I don’t want to hear about it right now.)

So, yeah, 28 today. Perfect number!

Beltzner and Madhava have arranged for a location of celebration. (See extended entry.)

If you think you’d like to be there, you should feel welcome to show up. If you bring a gift, you risk having me berate you.

Want to celebrate my birthday in another way? Perhaps you have some sort of neurological damage which makes you want to give incredibly fortunate people like me gifts, just for playing the safe life expectancy odds?

Do something nice today for someone. Go a little out of your way. If it’s someone you don’t usually like that much, all the better. Or maybe a total stranger. Feel free to comment below with stories of such things, but also feel free to just quietly make the world a little nicer today.

If you feel utterly compelled to spend money, Covenant House would love to hear from you.

Party details:

Announcing SHAVERFEST 2005!

We’re happy to announce that the 28th annual festival of all things Mike Shaver, will be taking place starting 6:00pm this Thursday at the Pour House at Dupont and Spadina. Planned activities for this year’s event are:

• Drinking
• Multimedia slideshow: The 28th Year of Shaver
• Eating
• A plenary on the habits of the Cotton Boll Weevil
• “To Be A Shaver”, interpretive dance by PartisanMotion
• More drinking
• Maybe … desert?

The “Party Room” (visible when you first enter) has been reserved under the name “Mike Shaver” (cunning!) for the evening, and we’re happy to announce that the establishment is pulling out all the stops and has said that they’ll have decorated with balloons. Streamers, if we’re very lucky.

COST:

• Free to members of this mailing list!
• Well, you’ll likely shell out for some beer and food

HOW TO GET THERE:

• TTC to Spadina (then walk north) or Dupont (then walk east)
• Park on the street or in the LCBO parking lot … at your peril!

Map lovingly provided by Google.

Yeah, I’ve been slacking pretty hard on this web-log front. Lots of reasons, none of them very good. I’m hoping to get back on the horse a little bit now — I had, in fact, hoped to do so yesterday — so we’ll see if I have any readers left!

Some stuff I’d like to write about over the next week or so:

• Lightning, a project I’m leading to stick Sunbird and Thunderbird in some sort of rigorously engineered software blender.
• My work to make Mono talk to XPCOM, recently landed in the Mozilla tree in hopes of tricking roc into largely taking it over.
• Some upcoming speaking engagements, confirmed and tentative, so that you can figure out where to catch a nap at various exciting conferences.
• Some thoughts on software security, user protection, code auditing and “blame management” which will likely reveal how naive I continue to be about these things.
• How you should properly observe my upcoming birthday, regardless of geography or relationship.
• My most excellent Christmas vacation.
• Why I’m going to the Game Developers Conference again this year, even though nobody has ever paid me a dime to work on a game, and won’t in the foreseeable future. (It’s probably not what you think.)

Or, you know, I could just disappear again, under the weight of my own mounting ambition and inability to manage my time. Were I you, I’d place bets very carefully, if at all.

(Yes, I live.)

It’s not often that I support creationists over the ACLU, but here we are!

The stickers read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

(Personally, I’d like to see that sort of sticker, especially the last sentence, plastered all over most textbooks.)

I don’t see how that sticker is offensive, or incorrect, or says anything that shouldn’t, in fact, be said in all respectable descriptions of evolution. (That it’s still news when new results to support the theory of macroevolution are found supports its status as theory, IMO. But then, I don’t think there’s anything foolish in making decisions on the basis of a “likely theory”, since I make very few decisions in my life on the basis of anything stronger.)

I don’t think that Creationism (or other alternative theories; I hear that Native Americans have some interesting ones) necessarily deserves “equal treatment”, but I would not object to some time spent discussing how other theories interpret the same evidence. If evolution is (as I certainly believe) the most likely of the theories to be correct, then such a presentation is to “evolution’s benefit”, no? There are certainly a lot of people in the scientific community making careers out of thinking critically about macroevolution, given the still-raging debate about how new structures and species can be “created” by evolutionary processes.

If the presenter has a bias against evolution, no curricular edict will prevent that scorn from colouring the students’ lessons. No point trying to solve that by outlawing stickers.

Today some things happened involving a person I semi-routinely (but always quite politely, IMO) disagree with, and I said something kinda rude in what I believed to be a private discussion with some others, and, of course, out-of-context word got back, so I generally made a mess of things for a bunch of people, and it kinda sucked quite a bit. I apologized for the rudeness, but really, that sort of thing is hard to undo completely, especially when there are other such fires raging nearby.

And all that because I was compelled to be more “clever” than to just say “X likes Y quite a bit”.

Ladies and gentlemen, your star attraction!

In not-completely-unrelated news, my WebDAV work is coming along pretty well, and I’m pretty psyched to see Dan start to do CalDAV on top of it.

I’m still alive, though a little sore after Zodiac. Been a little bit busy, though.

I think I’ll fold some shirts tonight.

Edd was right to call us, by which I mean me, on being a little too ranty during our talk on Tuesday. I got a little carried away, though I think it was important for us to dispel some of the halo surrounding the W3C as the only way to “morally” put forward new standards. The days of the divine rights of standards kings are behind us, for better or for worse, and Edd has already covered (quite well) some of the reasons why. I want “more tech and less rant” as well, and I hope to put some tech-money where our rant-mouth is in the very near future.

I’ll put our slides up somewhere later this week, though I don’t generally write slides to stand on their own, mainly because I can’t stand people reading exposition off of the screen, and don’t want to become the thing I hate.

Best. Federal Election. Ever.

(I am eligible as a write-in candidate in your riding, remember.)

Hoye got some good mileage the other day out ofthe relative inferiority of the vehicle-based Voltron series, and I was tempted to embellish upon his reflections with my own wandering thoughts — please find attached, elsewhere, sometime, perhaps, the virtues and pains of flatter organizational charts, and the productivity gains associated with allowing bright people to despecialize from time to time.

Instead, though, there is something more pressing. Somebody out there just might have M.A.S.K. episodes in some format that I could fetch with terrifying alacricity. These 30kbps RealVideo things are not exactly stuffing my MASK-hole, if you will. Little help? I am overwhelmed with nostalgia here.

Hrm. I’m very tempted to go to Ottawa this weekend for Lisgar’s 160th. I wasn’t expecting this.

(I’m even tempted to contribute to the auditorium renovations, which also baffles me. I guess I did have some good times there.)

After a successful inaugural meeting of the Mozilla Technical Advisory Group, Nat and I decided to hit the city, and ended up, of course, at DNA Lounge with Jamie and Angela and Toshok and others. Whereupon Jamie tried to kill me through my liver, and appears to have only barely failed. Getting to my 1PM flight was quite the adventure.

I did have a pretty good time, but I feel I should apologize to the cab driver who took us back to Jamie’s at — I dunno, 6? I hope we tipped you well.

V. busy these days, getting all set up with the new job, but I couldn’t resist.

This one’s for my Mom.

There are a number of companies who have purchased Google AdWords associated with Sasser, the latest phage to visit my favourite software monoculture. You can see their ads with an appropriate Google search, over there on the right, products of a market’s quick reaction to breaking news.

None of them are Microsoft, who do have a pretty good starter page on the topic, eminently suited to life as an AdWord link-target.

Ah well, maybe the next time.

My Bell woes are well-documented. It’s never fun dealing with them, but there are few other choices for some of the services I want, like DSL.

Recently, they were upgrading DSL services, moving their 1.5 megabit customers up to 3 megabit for no charge, and we 3-meg customers up to a nice 4.5 megabits. I was quite looking forward to it.

First, they did the 1.5→3.0 upgrade, and apparently that didn’t work exceptionally well, so they reverted those customers to 1.5. Except, whoops, they took all the existing, premium-paying customers with them. What a crock.

After last night’s hockey-watching extravaganza, I had to get to bed pretty quickly, because this morning was my first trip rock climbing in well over a year. It went pretty well, and the previous irrational fear issue seems to be largely resolved. Lots of fun.

A mostly-lazy afternoon followed, in which I played video games, watched still-more hockey, made a nice dinner of grilled-beef-and-veggie sandwiches, and then made a fair bit of progress on monoconnect:

: old; mono --debug ../xpcom-dotnet.exe say this-is-sorta-cool

testimpl says: this-is-sorta-cool!

: old; mono --debug ../xpcom-dotnet.exe shout this-is-sorta-cool

testimpl shouts: this-is-sorta-cool!

(Meaning, roughly, that I can now invoke methods on XPCOM objects from C#, as long as they only take string parameters, and as long as I don’t need to do anything especially tricky to get my hands on those objects in the first place. Baby steps, baby steps.)

I hear tell that Nat and Erik of XImian fame are descending on my fair city tomorrow, so I should do some liver stretches before going to sleep, I suppose.

Today was my last day of work for CFS, and I spent most of last night up finishing off the last features I really wanted to see in this first cut of the web management tool, so I had a bit of a slack day. Turned off the bugzilla notifications, deleted my ssh keys from the company server, removed some autoconnect entries from my IRC config, sent the requisite “thanks+bye” mail, all the usual stuff.

I am in a ridiculously good mood.

At some point, Coop will really have a great manager, and this will clear up some of his misconceptions. I had a great time working with him, as I always do, and always knew I would. I hope, too, that he can continue to enjoy his time with CFS, and that they’ll take good care of him.

To celebrate, I suppose, my new unemployment, I sat on the couch reading fiction (link has spoilers), of all things, and drinking girl drinks — the kind with real vodka and sugar, though; you can keep your corn-syrup-malt-beverage nonsense down south, thanks. That led, of course, to a nap, and upon waking I watched some quality playoff hockey. If you were at the Calgary/Vancouver game, I will confess mortal, all-consuming jealousy. It was one of the finest hockey games I have seen in years, non-call on the Vancouver shove-and-shoot goal and everything.

And because I’m a geek, I did a little bit of hacking on a Mono/XPCOM bridge, which I’ve been meaning to do for some time:

: xpcom.net; mono --debug typeinfo.exe nsIComponentManager 4

nsIComponentManager#4: [0] UInt32 getClassObjectByContractID([In] [Pointer]String, [In] [Reference, Pointer]NSIdPtr, [RetVal, Out] [Pointer]InterfaceIs)

Relaxing is my business, and business is good.

There are no subscriptions. We don’t lack money, and we may attack you in the next issue. No one is safe.

We will print no letters to the editor. We will give no space to opposing points of view. They are wrong. The Underground Grammarian is at war and will give the enemy nothing but battle.

A friend of mine says that my writing reminds him of Mr Mitchell’s, which I find quite flattering, though I remain skeptical.

"We've got to put it behind us," Senators defenseman Wade Redden said. "We obviously don't feel good about it, but it's not like they really dominated us."

On that note, bring on the playoffs!

First off, I don't know anything about art. I consider myself to be having a very cultured day if I can distinguish opera from bluegrass; if someone were to hold a gun to my head demanding the names of 3 famous pointillists or dancers, I would be praying for a jam. Tyla knows me for the savage that I am, and drags me through museums occasionally just hoping that something will stick to me.

With that out of the way, I think that it's quite possible for games to be art, in as much as art seems to be routinely defined as "appealing to aesthetic sensibilities without pandering to the empty-experiential-calorie crowd".

The whole concept of interactive entertainment reminds me of all the times I've read an interview with a live performer (musician, actor, dancer, stand-up comedian, conference speaker) describing how important it is to react to the audience's moods and so forth.

One problem with this is obviously that the "artist" is usually greatly removed in time and space from the audience/player. This requires that all the (often subconscious, I believe) human facilities for "reading a crowd" be distilled into something that a computer can perform, and this is a pretty underdeveloped field of research. Some AI weenies have made attempts at it, but putting research-grade AI into a modern game system is often like trying to make an ancient water-clock into a pocketwatch. We'll get there, though, and people like [Peter Molyneux][] are making great strides.

Another, related, problem is that the means of expression for the player, in terms of inputs perceptible by the game, are quite coarse and crude. We can do better than is generally done now simply by trying (see Scott Miller on adaptive difficulty), but there's still a long way to go before a game can get enough data to react to a player's apprehension, boredom, or excitement. I think we'll see a lot of clever heuristics going into games in the next few years to pick up the low-hanging fruit here, but then there will likely be a plateau while more research goes on in the background. Feel free to start a pool.

Additionally, we have the fact -- and I use the term "fact" here in its web-page meaning; read: assertion convenient for my argument -- that people are generally more patient and open to "artistic" experiences in other forms, which is why nobody complains that Rigoletto doesn't let you save anywhere or skip the long cut scenes.

Even with those problems I think some games do a good job of being "experiential art", in that they perform admirably at the task of pulling the player -- and often viewers as well -- into a constructed experience, albeit one that may not have the same narrative or sensory focus as music, dance, sculpture, etc. Prince of Persia, Rez, Chu Chu Rocket, you get the idea.

Sturgeon's law defends games admirably here, and I don't think it applies any more forcefully to them than to other art forms. Various issues with upwards pressure on production values, budget, and team size affect games just as they affect film. We still get Baraka and Lost in Translation along with our Scooby Doo 2, so there's reason to be hopeful.

(These issues apply equally to "game design" as to assets like art, music, modelling and level/world design, I think, but I think the influence there is more a function of the estimation of the value of "casual user" focus for many game types. That, in turn, flows from the same tainted spring as the "Hollywood envy".)

Personally, I'm more disappointed that I don't see more game in most art.

I'm at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose this week, and it's been very enjoyable so far.

I've been interested in game development for a very long time, perhaps as long as I've been interested in video games at all; Mom will no doubt relate some story about me typing machine language into my C-64 from the back of Compute's Gazette. There are a lot of things about the field that interest me quite a bit, but the main thing is, well, that there are a lot of things about the field that interest me. The inter-disciplinary nature -- marketing, psychology, visualization/graphics, artificial intelligence, all manner of art issues, networking, simulation/physics, interactive information presentation and user experience, etc. -- really turns my crank, you might say.

So I've been trying to hit a number of differently-targetted sessions here at the conference, while keeping my growing network of game-industry contacts fed and watered. I'll try to write about some of the more interesting stuff over the next few days, starting, well, now.

The first session I took in, on Wednesday morning, was about behavioural psychology as a system for discussion, investigation, and planning of gameplay systems. It focused almost exclusively on reward mechanics, which I suppose makes sense given the field from which the material is drawn, and while it wasn't the best presentation I've ever seen -- the speaker likely just needs a little more practice, and maybe some work on pacing -- it was pretty informative, and had just the right number of examples of counter-intuitive behaviour to keep people listening closely. If nothing else, I have a whole new set of terms to feed into Google. (As if I couldn't just have asked Madhava or Beltzner whenever I wanted.) It's nice to see more of these "Something 101 for Game People" talks at GDC, because there is a lot of rich material out there in the more academic spaces just waiting to be applied to the task of improving game characteristics. Wheel reinvention seems to be slowly going out of style.

I'd intended, after lunch, to see any number of interesting sessions about AI or game design, but instead Vlad lured me into one of the many NVIDIA sessions showcasing the goodies documented in their new GPU Gems book, with special attention paid to the effects made newly possible by their upcoming NV40 chipset. The demos weren't all that spectacular in and of themselves, but the technology elements that were underlying the presentations -- especially the vertex texture fetch and full FP rendering -- are very promising. I think I might have to buy a new computer this summer after all.

(I spent some time running around and chatting with various gaming types that I only "see" via email during the rest of the year, including some pleasant surprises from other parts of my career, like Netscape and Zero-Knowledge. It is indeed a small world, after all.)

The expo floor was relatively interesting, and much busier than it was in 2002. Lots of companies are hiring, often for multiple titles, and the combined onslaught of AMD64/NV40/R420/PSP/etc. made for a lot of relatively sexy demos. One game that really caught our eye is Saga of Ryzom, which looks like 4 MMO games jammed into one slick package. If I hadn't watched the demo right there, I'd have dismissed it as impossible vapourware, but it does looking like most of the goodies will be there for the summer release. Definitely one to watch, if you're at all interested in that game style. (World of Warcraft will be getting all the magazine covers, and perhaps not without reason, but Ryzom is nonetheless worthy of your attention.)

Next up was Brian Reynolds' AI-and-design talk, which was a mixed bag. For one thing, it was more evidence to support my proposed inverse relation between the size of the audience and the speed of the presentation. As a semi-frequent speaker myself, I understand some of the factors that might cause this to happen, but it's still annoying to see content drag out like that, especially when there's only an hour for what could be a very rich presentation. I know that I would want to make better use of an hour of Brian Reynolds' time, given my druthers. His suggestions for how to evolve AI and design in parallel and -- more importantly -- in harmony were good, though not earth-shattering. Given the generally-abysmal state of the art in game software engineering, though, the recommendation to "start small, refine to solve the most pressing constrain, and repeat until you run out of time" was likely a meaningful contribution to the industry.

Last session of the day was Peter Molyneux's take on AI-and-design (read: showcase of Bullfrog/Lionhead games, past, present and future). Nothing really earth-shattering, but by that point in the day I was quite exhausted, so I wasn't really complaining. Fable looks interesting enough that I'll probably pick it up, and his presentation style was quite engaging.

I'm flat-out exhausted now, so I'll leave today's blurbs for, well, tomorrow. I left lots of stuff out, I'm sure, but I'll try to answer questions if people care enough to leave them.

A lesson I've taken away from this week's travels to the Bay Area:

If your cell phone display says "Cingular", you've already lost.

Totally unacceptable.

Alasdair and I (mostly Alasdair, honestly) weathered some unpleasant weather and drivers of questionable talent to return to Toronto in time for both of our commitments: he had to work at 3, and I had a flight at 19:30 to San Francisco, where I am spending 2 days working on Lustrey bits from the comforts of the Mozilla Foundation offices, and then 3 days attending the Game Developers Conference for my own amusement and edification.

The flight was uneventful, as they should all be, and Eleanor and Brendan arrived promptly to pick me up at the airport, Natalie Anne in tow. I was whisked off to their lovely home, where I am a lucky guest for the next few days. Should be a lot of fun.

This past Sunday we celebrated my grandfather’s 81st birthday, with a nice family get-together at the (lovely) home of my Uncle Steve and Aunt Marg. It’s always wonderful to see everyone¹ together, I have to say. It was quite a festive affair, especially because Chad and Jen shared their double-barreled news with us all: not only have they bought a lovely home in Oakville, but they’ve got a baby on the way to help fill it. Amazing stuff, and boy, did it ever not help my baby-craving to be talking about it all afternoon. Hoo boy.

¹ Actually, Steph couldn’t make it, but we talked about her quite a bit anyway. In other Steph news, she’s on the cover of Salon Magazine. Nice picture, I have to say.

Thank god.

‘Tis the season, I suppose. Matej is starting to get back into driving again, and I passed my first-ever in-car driving test on Friday. It wasn’t a Ministry test, so I’m still not really a very well-licensed driver, but the combination of the YD collision-avoidance skills test and the “simulated Ministry test” left me feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Time to schedule my road test, if you can believe that.

(I haven’t mentioned, I suppose, that we have a car now. Mike and Kristen very, very generously donated their pasture-bound Escort — affectionately known as “Kermit” in spite of a slight colour mismatch — for my practice and errand-running pleasure, when they bought their spiffy new Kia. It’s been outrageously helpful to actually have a car around in which I can shuttle Tyla about the city like the princess she is, and also, coincidentally, get in lots of wheel time. Thanks, guys!)

We’re going to drive up to Markham tomorrow to visit the family for Dad’s birthday celebration, and from his enthusiasm on the phone it sounded like he’s at least as excited about the prospect of having me driving as about the actual visit. I’m sure that was just some reception problem with the cordless, though.

Ten days can really fly by, if you’re not careful about it. Let’s recap!

For the first time in what is really an irresponsibly long while, I’m off to the dentist to be chided for oral neglect — settle down, Beltzner — and prodded with sharp things. As much as is reasonably possible under the circumstances, I’m actually quite excited about the prospect. I think it’s a tremendous sign of maturity that I did not have a breakfast of Hot Tamales today.

So, yeah, birthday.

Got off to an auspicious start, when my driving instructor called to say that he had an excess nail in his sidewall, and would I mind rescheduling. Combined with the phone message from my trainer asking where the hell I was yesterday — did anyone else realize that it was Monday? — my hopes were not high.

I did get some nice well-wishing phone calls from my mother and father, and Madhava. Emily called, not to wish me a happy birthday — though I know she wishes me that, deep down — but to inform me of tickets to tonight’s Boston-at-Toronto game that were dangerously close to affordable. By the time I found someone else to go with, it was too late, which made me feel sort of dumb. I’ve since convinced myself that they were probably spoken for, at their half-off price, long before Em even finished dialing, and I’ll thank you to keep your rebuttals to yourself.

I got slightly more accomplished at work today than I thought I would, which is a very nice change from the usual. Especially, I should add, because I did it by finding a better variant of the problem to solve, rather than just churning through my solution faster.

Tyla’s home soon, I hope. I should tidy a bit before she arrives, because I’m sort of digging this being-married thing. I did do some laundry, at least.

Thanks to everyone who managed to find someone to be nice to today! There was a time when my new year’s resolution every year was to go out of my way at least once a day to help someone, and in 1998 I actually made it until something like June before breaking my streak. It turns out to be relatively easy once you get the hang of it, finding someone with a question on a web forum that you can answer, or walking to the corner with someone seeking directions, to point them to the next landmark.

Hmmm. I wonder if Al and I can find some reasonable scalped tickets…

Sorry for the longish outage; I was on the road — more accurately, I suppose, the hotel, highway, airport, and beach — and before that I was preparing to be on the road. Today I’ll be recovering from being on the road, but I will write about my adventures a little later. I’ll probably even twiddle with the posting dates to correspond to the chronology, if I remember.

Happy Year of the Monkey!

Coop has been exhorting me to marinate with miso, and recommended, especially, this recipe. That does look good, indeed, but I’ve had very little sake luck of late (both LCBOs that I went to were out of it, against all expectations). So I figured, sure, that recipe was finely honed by Wolfgang Puck and Nobu Matsuhisa, but how hard could it be to make miso and booze tasty? I decided to throw caution to the wind and marry my nice red-brown miso with a bottle of Dragon Stout that I just happened to have lying around. We’ll see how it is when I pull the flounder out on Friday (that is not a euphemism for anything, beltzner) but it sure smelled like a winner.

That didn’t resolve tonight’s dinner issues, though, so I brined some chicken breasts with lemon zest and pepper, and then pan-fried them to what I consider to be within the bounds of perfection. Since I’d had such fantastic luck with the technique during Sunday’s impromptu “steak au poivre pour quatre”, I figured I’d try my hand at a reduction sauce to finish up, and it turned out pretty darned well itself. A little heavy on the lemon — the sauce was “bright” in that “do not look into laser with remaining eye” sense — but otherwise a fine piece of work. As a bonus, deglazing is a great way to make the cleanup a lot easier.

Tyla made a very nice salad.

We finally got around to spending some quality time with the eyetoy that Jacob gave us for Christmas. A little TV-watching, a small group of friends, some booze: a perfect setup.

I think our favourite games so far are the rocket rumble and kung foo. Emily’s been on her “last game before she goes home” for about ten games now, and counting.

If you own a PS2, I highly recommend it as a party game. I’m not sure if it’d be as much fun solo, but with three or more, it’s an utter riot.

(If there’s anything cuter than Tyla playing the boxing game, I don’t know what it is.)

Jacob’s been in town for a few days, so we’ve been enjoying the simple pleasures of hockey and pork. I’m not sure exactly what’s on the menu for tonight’s New Year’s drop-in, but I figure Shona and I can keep people from starving. We sure do have a lot of chicken!

We’re moving a machine from one ISP to another today, starting in about 90 minutes. There are any number of things, technical, social, or even astrological that could go horribly wrong with this procedure, but I’ve got my faith on.

If you’re in the Toronto area, and aren’t a complete jerk, feel free to drop by our place after 8 and watch us fumble around with Jacob’s gift.

Update: the server move was more successful than I could have even hoped for. Total downtime from “halt” at the original location to “move complete, enjoy your NYE” at the new location: ~25 minutes. Get there.

I refuse to believe that I’m coming down with the flu, so I’m going to tell you that I have some sort of whole-body-ache, nausea-and-chills, congestion-free cold. I appreciate your co-operation in this matter. If I make my Dad-family ill while I’m visiting them in Markham and Kitchener and other far-flung, exotic locales, I think there will be repercussions that I’m not prepared to handle. (Sparing them the risk by staying home and feeling miserable by myself would have other, more domestic repercussions, for which I am no more prepared by any means.)

I had a plan for at least dealing with the nausea, but that’s now on hold.

I’m pretty tired.

Today I called my wife to see how she was. She had a headache. I told her that I purchased three computers today — which is true. I think she took it pretty well, all things considered.

This past weekend featured the 7th and final Annual 711 Crawford Cocktail Party, of which there is now photographic evidence available from both Anatole and Madhava.

Some things just don’t go together, but I think it’s clear that Tyla and I do.

Copious and insufficient thanks to our ever-gracious hosts, for their tireless and classy efforts.

I can’t find my Windows XP CD, which is really too bad, because our Windows installation is pretty busted right now. Neither it nor my 98SE CD are in their usual homes (the operating-systems section of my massive software CD wallet), which is consistent with them being used for some sort of installation, perhaps on my computer. But then, I find myself asking, why would they be outside arm-and-chair-rolling reach of the computer? Perhaps Tyla hid them, that I might be further motivated to clean the office.

In what I hope is not some sort of freakish alchemical transformation, there are also two gold earrings in the office (small ribbon-hoops, about the size of a nickel, width of about 1cm) to which neither Tyla nor I have any rightful claim. I don’t think they’re Mehmet’s.

Day 4 of my new wonder drug, and the nausea hasn’t made its previously-daily appearance. I still can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, so I can count the number of useful work-things I’ve accomplished this week on my antennae, but that’s up from the heartbeat-span I was working with on Monday and Tuesday.

I have a truly daunting backlog of work, but I’m now back to being enthusiastic about it, instead of feeling like I’ll never get through it, or that I’m going to be fired at any minute. Speaking only for myself, I greatly prefer the current situation. All sorts of exciting things are going on around me at work, which helps buoy my spirits, and later this month I’ll be able to talk about them in more detail.

Not a lot of traffic, hereabouts, in the last week or so. I was down fully or partially for 4 days with a cold, but with modern instruments we can now distinguish a reason from an excuse.

The reason is that I’ve been gently, seductively sliding into a wee little depression, and that sort of thing is specially formulated to interfere with goal-directed behaviour, as it were. There are other, more important goals being impeded than just this screed-sack, of course, but that’s a discussion that I should have with my parole officer.

It’s the winter, so it wasn’t completely unexpected, though it’s worse than my usual downward cycles. You’d think — unless you know me at all — that I’d be better predicting my mental weather, so that I could tell a summer shower from Hurricane Andrew (an overstatement, really; I’ve never had severe depression, as professionals use the term), but I really never seem to know until it’s been too long and too dark for me to pretend that it’s just a little blip.

The recent addition of a gym membership to my monthly expenditures was intended to help with this little issue, and while I do feel great when I leave the gym, the endorphins apparently aren’t enough. Or they’re not sticking around long enough. Or something; it’s just not pulling the nose up sufficiently.

In what I hope is a sign of things to come, I actually managed to get to a doctor today to get some new medication, and I have high hopes. Celexa worked OK, I guess, in that it was vastly superior to being miserably depressed, but I didn’t like how I felt when I would not otherwise be depressed. Disconnected, a little out of step, I don’t really know how to describe it. And, honestly, being on drugs for the rest of my frickin’ life isn’t as appealing as it once seemed.

So the new plan is a new drug, which only takes (we hope) a large handful of days to take effect, and which I can go on and off as my adorable little mental illness requires. I’ve read some mildly terrifying things about the withdrawal process, but reading about medication on the internet is generally an excellent way to find the ends of the spectrum. People who are taking more than 4 grams of brain candy are a little out of my league, thank heavens. We’ll see how it goes in ~5 weeks, when I expect I’ll want to start tapering off. Hmm, maybe just before Christmas isn’t the best time for that sort of thing.

Also, I think I will now be starting on a strict bacon and sour cream diet, which should help my mood immensely.

The other day, I broke down — by which I mean actually remembered from one day to the next that I wanted to do this — and signed up for NHL Centre Ice. I’d not had a lot of time for Leafs-watching since that happened, and Alasdair’s silly job kept him from coming over to “force me” to watch the Sens, so it wasn’t until last night that I really appreciated the fully power of what I’d wrought.

Matej and Mike arrived with an outrageous selection of beer, and then the man himself showed up around seven, at which point we did truly, and with great gusto, get our hockey on.

It’s all a bit of a blur, truth be told, because there was a lot of beer involved — even my carpet was tipsy! — but we ended up watching, in whole or in part, victories by Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton (over COL no less!), and Boston. There were easily another half-dozen games to choose from, in case we suffered a collective head injury and were suddenly interested in the fates of the Blue Jackets or Flyers, for example. As Jacob rightly put it, it’s like the first round of the playoffs every night, and it will be that way for some 6 months. If I had a Tivo, I might actually hurt myself.

If this doesn’t get Phil to visit me, I will know that we have truly fallen out of love.

21:39 < neil> i was thinking of shaver when i typed “evil”

I think that’s the nicest thing that anyone’s said to me all day.

I have a lot to be thankful for, which is probably why I took both turkey-barrels right in the stomach this past weekend. Totally irresponsible levels of poultry consumption are a hallmark of my harvest-celebration history, though, so it’s not like I couldn’t have seen it coming.

When Tyla and I arrived in Ottawa on Saturday, we discovered that Martha was, along with three classmates, preparing a Thanksgiving meal for that evening. Reckless, perhaps, given that we three could see the Holmes/Schueneman Family Feast on the horizon, but I was in no position to object. Tyla’s Sangria stylings were a hit, and the meal — well, let me just say that the mashed-and-baked potatoes included both sour cream and cream cheese in the ingredient list, and leave the rest to your imaginations.

Once we could barely stand, Tyla and I zipped off to Anatole and Miriam’s housewarming. I cannot but offer the most hearty endorsement of their lovely apartment, and their hospitality is, of course, top-notch. We had a better data point than usual with respect to their kindness and hosting prowess, for Hilary’s amazing wine-throwing powers resulted in quite a few people needing to borrow pants and the like from Anatole’s closet. Happily, I just had to wash my shirt; nobody really wants to see me in Anatole-sized jeans. Amos has a cute Mac laptop, and I’m entering that fiscally-dangerous portion of my depression cycle, but I think I can hold my ground. Think. Madhava’s birthday gift was chipped, so we had to return it the next morning and then hustle it to his parents’ place before we took off to Eric’s farm.

Eric’s friend Lorri’s mother and daughter were involved in a car accident on the way to Eric’s (from Kingston), but neither of them were seriously hurt. (Given that it was a 3-car head-on-head-on-head accident with most cars at 90kph or so, it’s barely short of miraculous that none of the participants were injured in a major way.) We had a bit of a scare when Lisa (Lorri’s mother) had a fainting spell after dinner, but it proved to be nothing more than the triple threat of stress, codeine, and low blood sugar.

Also in attendance were my mother and two of her friends, Larissa and Chris. Larissa was once an exchange-guest in the home of Michael Johnson, with whom I have had no small number of fascinatingly geeky conversations over the past decade. The world felt as small as my belt, I tell you.

Back late Monday night, after a relaxing celebration of Tyla’s birthday in the morning, a nice dinner with Mom at the Grizzly Grill in the evening, and then early to bed; Tyla had a big day ahead of her today, what with the librarianing and suchlike.

This entry is just here to quell the shame of a totally blank diary page. If my laptop were capable of charging its battery, I’d maybe burn some juice on the plane — DEAR TSA OFFICIALS: I AM SPEAKING METAPHORICALLY; THANK YOU — and write some ridiculously entertaining updates.

But, you know, that’s not how this hand was dealt.

One of my co-workers is about to become a father (they're inducing tomorrow, a little earlier than they had planned for), and we're, of course, all terribly happy for him and his wife. For the child too, I suppose, though I never really think of it that way.

 <robert> i've wondered for a long time what this moment would 
          feel like, and it's nothing at all like i expected

A fair number of friends are expecting kids in the next few seasons, which is affecting my biological clock exactly as you might have predicted, if you've been near me and a small child for even scant moments at some point in the past.

Today’s work was good. I managed to remove a long-standing architectural limitation in our system, which let me make a lot of special cases and sharp configuration edges go away. It took a little longer than I thought it would, but still no longer than I had estimated to my esteemed employer. There were some bumps in the road — bits of code that were a little more global than they should have been, and one bit of code which was utterly craptacular in its absence — but I think that made the experience all the more satisfying in the end.

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to go on the canoe trip that I had been planning to attend next week. When I originally agreed to it and arranged the time off work, I’d thought I’d be missing Thursday and Friday. Turns out that I’d also be missing much of the preceding Wednesday and all of the following Monday, which moves it from “I can work around that” to “boy, that’s going to have an impact on our release schedule”.

I’m actually pretty sure I’m not going to be able to go, in fact, but I’m trying to think positive. Or is that denial?

Hey, honey, beltzner says I have to buy a sword.

Eep, I’m late — almost an hour! — for my appointment to resuscitate Aven and Mark’s computer, and I still haven’t had lunch. If I hustle, I can probably avoid starving, and get done in time to take care of Em’s machine today as well.

Why can’t I tell time?

(This entry was, perhaps obviously, written retroactively.)

We flitted off to Las Vegas today, after the whole Chester Incident got mostly sorted out. Alasdair had arrived at my house — and I hope he doesn’t take offense at my sharing this — hung right the heck over. Apparently a wild night of fondue and drinking was necessary before he could face the prospect of four whole days away with me. Tyla’s been known to brace herself that way as well, which might mean that there’s a hint in here for me.

The flight itself was pretty much uneventful, though we still don’t quite understand why there’s so much Japanese-language signage at MSP. By the time we got to our hotel, it was nearly 9PM, which meant that we didn’t have a whole lot of time to arrange our plans for the evening — at least, as long as the plans were to involve the 10PM Penn & Teller show. The show itself was pretty excellent, but I was left wondering who, exactly, thinks it’s a good idea to bring an eight-year-old child to that sort of show. I mean, I will, but I’m clearly different.

(Assuming, of course, that Tyla ever lets me bring our children anywhere near Las Vegas, but I’m sure she’ll come around.)

The hotel is OK (“Holiday Inn OK”, if you will), and it’s on the strip, so in theory we can walk to pretty much anything. I have forgotten my cell charger, because that’s the sort of modern-day superhero that I am.

Fiore micro-review: decent steaks, somewhat over-seasoned sides, least elegant up-sell patter I’ve been subjected to in a restaurant of that general quality-range. I’m sure you can do better in Vegas for the same price, but we were at the Rio already, and time was running out.

Man, I am getting to be so bad at this. When I do update, I end up spending 30 mins editing and linking and such, so I can't really stop and do it in the middle of some work task as a diary-prone thought springs to mind. But then by the time I have time, the moment has really passed. I'm going to try solving this personal problem with software, so the next time I post here will probably be with that.

Some things of recentness:

• It was dark here for a while.
• The Blizzards came and visited, which was nice. They enjoyed the darkness somewhat, I think. It was certainly novel!
• Alasdair and I are not going to Copenhagen, and we're not going to Zurich -- at least, not now. We're going to VEGAS, BABY instead, and in fact we're leaving for the airport in two hours. I should pack. I'm actually quite looking forward to it, especially since there are some things that even Tyla would approve of.
• Novell is paying for my trip, or most of it. Thanks, Novell!

I was going to pack this morning, but then at around six AM Chester decided to get on the roof, and he ended up on the slate side of the roof, and then after several minutes of wailing and scrabbling he ended up on the ground. Because cats are designed to make humans' lives difficult, he had hidden himself in some undergrowth by the time I got downstairs. Black cars may look better in the shade, but grey cats don't look like anything at dawn in the neighbour's garden.

We took him to the emergency clinic, where the nice vet man told us that he'd broken off half a tooth, and split his palate slightly, but was otherwise fine. And no, not to worry, he would not learn one damned thing from the episode. Sigh. Tyla's going to pick him up this afternoon, and then I guess we'll figure out what to do with his tooth at that point.

Some of you may recall that at the end of the trip to PNNL there remained one performance improvement on the list. Last week was spent constructing said improvement, and this one was devoted largely to wrangling for cluster time to test it. We delivered that drop to the customer today, after Matt was unable to break it overnight, and things seem to be going pretty smoothly. Not bad for, well, me.

My grand plans for our anniversary were to rent a steam cleaner, clean all the upholstery, and generally improve the living room to a state of excellent repair. Alasdair helped me truck the cleaner around, but various errors and defects and frustrations involving an upholstery wand and a grocery store kept me from getting a huge amount done on Friday. Also, I was suffering through the tail end of a nasty cold, so I had a lot of napping to do.

We finally managed to get the wand replaced, and Tyla and I cleaned the loveseats and armchair and ottoman and futon mattress — especially the futon mattress — into whatever sort of oblivion is reserved for things that are inexcusably clean.

Yes, Jacob, I'll be there for your birthday.

I've started to jones for hockey again already, for which I cannot offer a compelling excuse, and it made me think covetous thoughts about the NHL Centre Ice package. It's not a horrible deal — cheaper than season tickets, honey! — but the pricing baffles me. $24.95/mo if you take two other channels of bletcherous baseball and football, or $199.99 for 7 months of just the hockey. I can save how much by adding channels I won't watch? (I bet I can get more Coop-visits with the football feature, though.)

I need a beer.

My intention, you see, had been to not write this entry until I had delivered unto my lovely wife — whose vague terror of my anniversary plans grows with the passing of every minute — the gift with which I plan to commemorate the fourth anniversary of our marriage. But my plans are being laid to waste by the swift and sure hand of Cruel Fate, so I thought I'd vent a little bit. More detail later, but I wanted to get that off my chest.

I didn't get great sleep last night, what with the starting at 5 and the waking up at 9 to get a computer plugged back in, and the cell-phone wrong number, and the housekeepers banging on my door to see if I was checking out. (I wasn't, yet; they wanted Coop's room next door.) But when I got to the lab around 2:30, I had a wonderful meeting with the project director here, and he agreed that Lustre was now in production-ready state for his cluster. There's one performance improvement that is scheduled for a drop in the near future, and on which I will be working over the next little while, and everything else is ready to go.

Hot dripping goddamn, that felt good. Now I get to go back and figure out my hours for the last two weeks, which will give a nice sense of closure.

Honey, I'm a-comin' home! (You know, for a few days, and then I go to Ottawa for a week.)

We're in the end-game of this customer visit now, and the best available data indicates that we're going to leave here in pretty good shape. Coop is getting on the 5:18AM flight out of here tomorrow, which is in about 3 hours, and I'm following him precisely 24 hours later. We'll reconvene in Ottawa next week, so absence will not have too much of a chance to make the heart grow fonder, or something.

On the topic of which, I am so ready to be back home with my wife and cat and house and clothes and time zone and computer and bed. So Tom Sawyer ready, as the kids are saying.

The other day I merged some fixes from the branch on which Peter and Phil had been performance filesystem-miracle dances. CVS makes the process not entirely unlike something that sucks completely, so we have a process that makes the steps very clear. Perhaps idiot-proof. For no good reason at all — certainly, I assure you, not because I thought I didn't need that process; I know better than most how quickly and deeply CVS branches can bite you if you don't keep them under tight control — I didn't follow that process, and today I reaped the bitter, cackling fruit of my error. I had missed some key elements that put at risk no small amount of Peter's valuable time. I managed to wield cvsps to regain control, and Peter and Zach are now back at full throttle on that branch, but I learned a valuable lesson. Unfortunately, I already knew that lesson, so I don't know if I'm really better off.

I'm pretty loopy right now. I'm very tired. Sleep has become something that I do to kill time between tests, or to burn a couple of hours on to make the jitters stop, and I'm running out of fuel pretty quickly. The only possible way I will make my I-sure-didn't-pick-that flight time on Saturday is if I stay up the whole night before, I think, and that's going to really hurt. It might leave a mark. Maybe I'll go to bed at 9 on Friday and see what I can do, but I suspect that I'll either be too worried about some test failure or too excited about our eventual success to really pull that off.

Some day, I'm sure, I'll miss this place, what with its lovely weather and fast computers and, well, lovely weather. That day won't be Sunday, let me assure you.

Today was Saturday, so Chris and Mathew and I headed into the lab around noon, lest we miss any precious banging-head-against-machine time. We have a decently-sized node reservation for this weekend, which means that some 160 high-powered computers are set aside for the express purpose of making me weep hot tears. Actually, it's not all that bad, but it feels like it from time to time. I've been helping out as best I can with other Lustre tasks, in addition to trying to organize this test-and-fix marathon and missing my wife terribly, so I have a reasonable sensation of accomplishment to fall back on.

If you're not a regular reader of Mike Hoye's Blarg, you should take some time to catch up, because he writes very well, and much more reliably than myself. In one of his recent installments he discovered that "Red Hat Package Manager" is etymologically related to "Fool's Gold" and "Near Beer", for which I must offer my deepest sympathies. I have friends who have built excellent software houses atop RPM's shifting and sucking sands, and they have many grisly tales to share. I would recount some of them now, but I think I'm going to need to conserve my hot-tear supply for the rest of the week.

I cannot recommend The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen to you. Not at all. I was probably only marginally more bored during the proceedings than the cast, but I was not being paid nearly as handsomely for my time. "Avoid."

Coop and I dined at what has been described to us as the best restaurant in the Tri-Cities area, and while the food was good, and while our other culinary experiences here make it difficult to name another strong contender for best, it was not an entirely satisfying experience. For the same price, in virtually any other city to which I would travel even semi-voluntarily, we could have had a much better meal.

I'm currently in Richland, WA, at the Pacific Northwest National Lab, helping these lovely people get their massive supercomputer all Lustre-ized. Having a pretty good time, even if I am missing a neat-o LAN party back home, and even if I am thousands of miles from my wife for two weeks.

The weather here is amazing, probably because we're in a desert. Lushest damn desert I've ever been to, though, what with the massive irrigation thing they've got going. And yet, with this oasis of 500 square miles of perfect lawns and trees in the middle of a desert, I have yet to see any wildlife but insects. Kinda creepy.

They do all sorts of crazy science here, from using high-energy light to pick up individual molecules to ripping apart proteins with enormous magnets, and I don't understand a shred of it. But the people are very friendly — the badge-making woman told me that the only important thing I needed to know from the brochure on site safety was that if I saw other people running I should probably chase them — and the accomodations are surprisingly excellent.

More later, but for now I must return to making our filesystem rock even harder.

We're moving, which is the sort of special joy that some people probably don't experience every calendar year. I pity those people so much that I'm willing to go into the community to show the sheltered sedentary how to freebase packing tape, how to grotesquely underestimate box requirements, and how to develop karmic debt to transport-friends so deep that even Argentina's finance minister doesn't want to be seen with us.

Now, we're not moving very far, and our landlord's compassion has combined with his inability to rent or sell the unit on time to give us a week, give or take, with access to both locations, so it could be a lot worse. It has been a lot worse, pretty much every time, to be precise. And yet, still, it's a move.

I was very keen about the short-distance-osity of this particular adventure in nomadism, and my head was filled with visions of a dozen trusty friends shlepping loveseats and shelving units from hither to yon — no, just a little more yon — that's perfect, thanks. It didn't quite work that way, mainly because our friends are smarter than hats, and saw that once we had movers involved for the relocation of the television and bed we could get them to move a lot of other stuff as well. Madhava was especially cute about this, until I beat him with a curtain rod and made him carry my weights to the back of Alasdair's car. He's now experienced the Platonic ideal of moving, and some day he'll grow up and thank me for that.

This is not to say our friends have not been the souls of helpfulness. They've all — Alasdair, Emily, Mike, Kristen, Madhava — all been so helpful that Madhava had to flee to Austin this weekend to avoid actually rupturing his help-spleen. I daren't enumerate their feats of derring-do, for fear of critical, offensive omission before the moving is technically over, but I will say that I will think of Emily every time I walk into our new bathroom for some time to come. And that's just not normal.

Yesterday, the aforementioned movers — an Ozzy Osbourne look-alike that didn't make the stunt-double cut and his two acompetent assistants — showed up to move the things that we really didn't want to move ourselves. Considering that I jogged between the apartments tonight with a pair of half-height Billy bookcases, this was not really geared towards the easy stuff. OK, fair enough, it was geared towards whatever stuff was packed or cleared well enough to be transported at the time, but we had taken Special Measures to ensure that the really awkward stuff was ready for the professionals. I know they were professionals, because I paid them, but without that commercial certainty it would have at times been a tough call. At one point, I was mentally spending the TV-replacement money, after Tyla called to warn me that they'd dropped it "a little" when moving it from the stand to the dolly. It turned out OK in the end, I'm happy to report, but there were some tense moments while I sat at the desk trying to work, but mentally preparing my submission to the New England Journal of What The Hell as various confidence-destroying interjections floated in from the staircase.

I was going to have a bath today, but I couldn't figure out the stopper. It's metal, and looks for all the world like it should move into a water-draining position when a correspondingly-metal knob is turned, but that knob came off in my hand without so much as a twitch from the stopper. Tyla said that she knew how to get it to open, after which information I inquired quite enthusiastically. She used the bottle opener to pry it up, she said. I don't think she understood the face I made when she told me that.

Given that I am stumped by our bathtub, you can imagine that my intellectually-demanding work has not been just zipping by, though I've been generally enjoying it. Lately, I've been trying to impersonate Zach so that the page cache will just get over itself and make these two sets of numbers match, there's a dear. I do not really resemble Zach in any way that's meaningful to this piece of code, so it's been sort of frustrating, in that "some day I will know what all these words mean" way. Zach will be back from Hawai'i soon — a place I am led to believe is materially more relaxing than vmscan.c — and then we can sit on the telephone for 15 minutes and forget that I ever wasted hours of precious bug-time not knowing these things. Still, I think I could some day mature into a solid backup hitter in our VM area, and on that day I will look back on the email and bug comments from this period and try to figure out how to have them deleted from all recorded history.

I think that was a little more than I was ready for, all at once like that. It's been two weeks since my last update, and it felt alternately like an eternity and a moment.

My Nana passed away on the 9th, and it hit me like a brick. I was really not prepared for it, and I can't imagine how her children felt. (They were there by her side from Friday, when her condition degraded severely and they thought that she was in her last hours. In fact, she held on for 3 more days; not the first time her strength and courage were underestimated, I'm sure.)

The visitation and funeral were, as much as such things can be, wonderful. An incredible number of people came to comfort the family and celebrate Jean's life, and succeeded completely in both regards. I think Nana would have approved of the affair, especially with the grandchildren playing and drawing pictures on the couches while Papa energetically — it was amazing; the man does not know how to quit — met with every single visitor.

I don't think I'll be writing much more about Nana here, at least not for a little while. Which is not to say that I'm not thinking about her every day — a practice that I'm ashamed to admit I did not observe during her lifetime, generally — but the things I have left to say are difficult to articulate, and some of them are just between me and Nana anyway. (And she'd tell me to stop crying and get back to taking care of my lovely wife.)

We're moving now, because we hadn't done that in a few months, and so far it's going....OK. More about that later, I assure you.

I'm still not a huge fan of his post-Bill-and-Ted's acting, but it's hard to hate Keanu the person. Who have guessed?

...

Steph headed back to Milan today. I've been trying and failing to get my work groove on, so I've been a little grumpy, and didn't spend as much time with her as I'd have liked. She'll be back soonish, though, and I can be a better big brother then.

I had a bath today to try and clear my head, which turned into the other kind of waterworks. A good cry left me pretty exhausted, so I took a nap, and am now feeling much better. Phil helped me realize that I've really not been at my best for a couple of weeks now, probably because I've been in a total exercise drought, and the news about Nana was icing on the despair cake. I was able to actually finish tuning a patch that I started on yesterday, and I'm now going to try to fix some recovery glitches that we've somehow regressed on over the last little while. Being productive is so good for the soul.

...

More Keanu: his philosophical preparations for the Matrix movies, about which I have no further coherent comment. I might have to get my film-stud wife to walk me through a deconstruction of Speed later, though.

My grandmother is dying.

I had all manner of things on my mind, and plans to update this diary with some backlogged stuff, but last week I found out that Nana's cancer was beyond treatment, and I've been off-balance ever since. Organizing things like Steph's next-day trip back from Milan and our visit to Kitchener helped focus me a bit, but my head hasn't really been in the game at work.

Visiting Nana helped, and I'm glad we made the trip. She's very sick, and very tired, and very weak, but she also seems to be at peace with the fact that she's dying — to the point that she was making jokes about great-grandchildren; I had no idea what to say to that, at the time.

I wish I were more at peace about it. Nana and I were never extremely close, in no small part because I was a pretty mixed-up kid for much of my youth and that complicated my relationship with my family. I wish I'd been able to get to know her better — that's a copout; I was able, and I wish I'd done it.

When Steph and I headed up to Kitchener on Friday — Steph fresh from a 9-hour flight back home — we got to see quite a few of our relatives, and it was nice to be around them. Weird not having Nana there, though, and very hard to see my Papa with a broken heart.

I never know what to say.

I wish Nana were going to be able to hold her great-grandchildren. I guess all I can do now is make sure that they know about her, even if she'll never know them.

...

Tyla and Steph and I drove up to Markham on Sunday to visit with Dad and Lisa and the girls. Yes, drove. Hilary is travelling this week, and she left her car with us for parking and our use. Quite nice of her, and we've been taking advantage of it to return beer bottles and visit family, mostly because it's an opportunity for me to get some more road time. Driving automatics is weird.

Visiting with the Markhamites was nice, as it always is, and it made me wish I got up there more often, as it always does. We invited them down for a Father's Day dinner, which would happen to fall on the last day of our move-window. Tyla thinks that might be a problem, but I'm very much looking forward to having my sisters around for some of the unpacking chores.

...

This fantastic news brightened my day, and it was really in need of brightening.

Of course, it is not the May Two Four Weekend, but we did our best to overcome that slight Gregorian obstacle. Video games were played in the morning, and then Madhava met up with George and me during our sushi lunch — n.b. that he did not get the message we left on his cell-phone, which would have been a flat-out miracle, but instead saw us walking by his restaurant on our way to Japan Sushi. Sushi was good, but what came afterwards was even better.

First, we stopped at a local deli to purchase reckless quantities of sausage and sauerkraut, which we then deposited back at the house. We sometimes have trouble getting friends to join us for dinner, but with George as bait it was simply effortless.

And then we three did trek to the Distillery Historic District, for much touring of the new gallery spaces, brewery and shops. It was quite fantastic, and I hope to get back there at some point when it's less crowded. The brewery actually already has its wares available at the LCBO — there was some tension with Brewers' Retail that I don't fully understand — in the form of half-sized bottles of Original Organic; perfect for breakfast.

I only burned the sausages a little — it is well past time that I retire the ceramic blocks, and perhaps the whole grill, because the uneven heat and the flare-ups are really getting out of hand — and they tasted just fine. The $10 worth of gourmet mustard that I couldn't resist buying at St. Lawrence Market didn't hurt either, I have to say.

George and some other people who I thought were my friends have planned a hiking trip in the Pyrenees for the end of June, and I managed to strong-guilt-arm-trip George into a half-hearted invitation. Tyla thinks that my knees aren't up to it, but that has historically not been a major factor in my decision-making.

Many thanks to Beltzner and Asa and Deanna and others who sent their support and helpful scar-prevention suggestions. I'm bewildered, pleasantly, by the number of people who care, even without having to wake up next to my scabby mess every morning. On their collective advice, and based on clear recollections of what I did as a child every time I had inside parts that tried to get outside, I'd been keeping out of the sun and slathering on the Polysporin. (Some of this advice comes from painful experience: massive surgery incisions and the like. I'm touched, and feel perhaps a little bit wasteful, as though I were having Richard Holbrooke explain the I-cut-you-choose rule to me.) This afternoon, though, there was a wee little problem with one of the servers we host at Velocet — to be specific, rsync developed an utterly insatiable appetite for memory, and munched its way through everything else on our poor little box — so I headed in to supervise a reboot. All went well, and Emily — a frequent and always-welcome visitor who was up to her usual dropping-by tricks — had fetched a fresh George Showman from the nearby bus terminal, so I threw caution to the wind and we walked back to the house.

I had thought about doing some grocery shopping and cooking dinner, because we were expecting a fair number of guests for Game 7, but instead I wimped out and we ordered merely-OK Indian from Restaurants on the Go. And then we watched Ottawa lose a heartbreaker of a game, alas. I think it was worse than if they'd lost in overtime; I could barely stand to watch them play out the last 3 minutes of the game, knowing that they really weren't going to make it — when New Jersey feels it's time to field 5 defensemen, there isn't a whole lot that could be done. I think they performed admirably through the playoffs, and that they came back from a 3-1 series deficit shows that they are really not the choke-prone team of olde.

Yesterday, I jogged into a tree and scraped the crap out of my face. That's the short of it, and nothing I tell you about sidestepping a teetering toddler and what not will take away from the essential tree-walking nature. There are not pictures, but I look pretty beat-up. Tyla gets this sad look on her face whenever she looks at me, and I hardly got any sleep last night because I woke up in a start every time the left side of my face touched the pillow.

I also broke my glasses a little bit, but Lenscrafters fixed me right up. I think they were especially helpful because there was still blood trickling out of my cheek. I don't know if they have a policy about that or anything, but I'm left with a strong sense that my jump-the-line, just-need-a-new-screw, thanks-a-ton cause was helped by my very visible injury.

I've been avoiding going outside, because I'm a little bit self-conscious about the whole face thing. If you've seen the clothes I wear, or the way my hair often gets, you'll realize that I'm not an especially vain person. Or, at least, not an especially successfully vain person. This feels different though, and I'm really hoping that it doesn't scar up too badly. In pursuit of that hope, I've rendered myself approximately 30% Polysporin by volume.

George — friend, not landlord — arrives tomorrow, and I expect a weekend of merriment and waste. I hope he's up for some hockey watching, because Ottawa surprised me by winning in New Jersey, so I think I owe them my viewership for game seven — sorry: Game Seven — tomorrow night.

Oh, and I'm just going to give up on the old entries, because they're all stale and uninteresting. Onwards!

Yeah, this is way overdue. I've been keeping jot notes as I go through the day, even if I don't have time to write full entries, and the idea was that I could then easily go and fill them out when I had more time. The good is the enemy of the perfect, or something, because when I finally take the time to flesh them out — and really, a week is way too long — I can't decipher all of my notes. I'm the king of the world.

I do remember some things, though, so I'll do my best.

Today (yes, today) was Matrix night, as well as Mark's birthday. We dined at Tiger Lily, and then took advantage of one of the Paramount's early showings. I thought it was a pretty good movie, really, and I think it'll generally be well-received. I'll probably see it again in the theatre, and I'm quite looking forward to the 3rd in the series. Hard to ask more of a middle movie, really.

Kev asked why our apartment listing indicated condo fees, and I have a good answer: it's a condo. We're just renting it because the landlord got tired of trying to sell it, around this time last year. Mom asked an even better question: where the hell is the "den" they talk about? It's sure not in this unit; maybe they have it mixed up with the unit upstairs, which is somewhat roomier?

I'm really starting to get into this whole "fire-fighting" thing. Robert is all over the recovery stuff now, and I'm sure he'll do a much better job with it than I did. My energies are now focused on Total Customer Satisfaction: helping our clients put Lustre through all sorts of sick, physicist-and-biologist-derived paces, and then helping wipe up when Lustre just can't quite contain its excitement. Things are going pretty well, but there's the occasional, well, occasion in which things don't go according to anyone's plan. Even the sort of plan one might plausibly construct retroactively in order to rationalize the results one found lodged in the side of one's head after a particularily energetic software explosion.

Those occasions are sort of fun, though, because I get to get on the phone with Phil and Zach and read through megs and megs of lock-manager skid marks, until they figure out what the problem is and I run off to do my part: add bug graffiti. I feel like one of the nameless coroner's-office folk on CSI, just taking the bodies away when I'm told it's over. Fun stuff.

Season finale of Angel tonight, and game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals, and the all-over-but-the-forum-screaming penultimate episode of Buffy. And the new Matrix movie opens this week, and I'm actually interested in the West Wing again, and Tyla's enjoying her job, and the cat is being all friendly. And I got my hair cut, and George is coming to visit, and I've been cooking up a storm.

I guess it has to all come tumbling down now.

The Titan game was over pretty early last night, all things considered, but I still slept in a little bit. After I got up, I poked a little at some bugs at work, and read a fair bit of code, but nothing really special.

I spent no small part of the evening preparing dinner for Tyla — tequila-lime-jalapeño salmon, steamed artichokes, walnut-rice pilaf — who was mildly exhausted when she returned home, but appropriately appreciative. I also managed to get some Planetside in, and watch a spot of CSI. Not bad, for a Monday.

Not very exciting, but I'm perfectly OK with that.

Hey, look, Mother's Day. I called and chatted with Mom this morning, which was nice — it always is, which makes me wonder why I don't do it more often. I bet she wonders, too. =(

There comes a time in every man's life when he must make a stand, when he must do what is right instead of what is convenient, when commitment and maturity must trump the shallow temptations of youth. Tonight is not that time: a simple call from The Hoye — whose blarg? is really very entertaining; you should make a point of reading through it from time to time, such that my own meagre writings may improve in your eye through simple association — led to some late-night Titan with Geoff and Mehmet. I lost, but it was fun to get the old box out again and breed some puges. When George is here the weekend after next, I think we may have to revisit our glory days.

I bet Mom thought she raised me better than that. (By which I mean "raised to win Titan", not "raised to go to bed a respectable hour", obviously.)

Tyla's working again today — what sort of barbarian goes to a library on a Saturday? — so I'm rushing around fetching food-components and tidying for tomorrow's open house — don't look into that URL string with your good eye, pal — and fending off the depredations of the New Conglomerate dogs.

I am fully prepared to grill and drink and watch hockey until I can no longer stand, so you've all been warned.

Tyla's doing her very best Sheena Easton impression today, so I made it into work at quite a respectable hour. We were running a large test shot on my new cluster-of-record, so Phil and I were going to supervise a little and make sure that any Lustre problems were filed in the correct bin and tagged appropriately. I was working solo for a bit, because our newest contractor decided to take our CEO out and get him drunk. And keep him drunk for quite a few hours. Everything went pretty much fine, in that we largely hit problems about which we were already quite aware, and for which we are hard at work on solutions.

Because I got to work early, I felt it quite reasonable to head home around seven, and Tyla returned shortly afterwards — it's all about timing, this DINK lifestyle. She was in a pretty good mood, until she discovered that Chester had left us a Special Digestive Present on our bed. Some people came by to see the place today in our absence, but the promised four hour notice turned into, on the average, a mere ninety minutes of forewarning, so I figure they rolled those dice themselves. It's quite possible that Chester had his little accident after they'd come and gone, but I'm pretending not, because it amuses me in a childish way.

Emily nearly revealed our secret tryst to my wife, by showing up to ask me on a date around 8pm, and then compounding her error by announcing that she was doing so. I think Tyla was still off in cranky-land, though, as she didn't seem to notice. Em wanted to see X2, and I'd had so much fun the first time that I agreed without hestitation — well, without any more hestitation than was required to wolf down the pizza that we'd ordered for dinner. It was fun again, for the record.

I made a little bit of progress today on my top-priority bug, and a larger bit of progress on the debuggability of the test cluster in question; the latter is much more interesting to me, I must admit. Phil doesn't think I should really be trying to become an IA64 assembly expert, and I'm sure he's right, but it still feels a bit frustrating to not be able to analyze these problems to the depth I enjoy on IA32. Maybe I'll read the IA64 kernel book that Chris Beard gave me years ago, and see if I can become a little less helpless.

While I was on the way back to the office after my haircut, I got Tyla a book to commemorate the start of her new career. She seems pretty pleased with it, though she was too tired by the time I got home to do much more than read the back. It's got a fair amount of programmer-oriented content, but Tyla should be able to hold her own there; back in the mists of high-school, she wrote one of the best few-page overviews of OO Programming I've yet encountered. She's also really digging various Gibson books, which I also find sort of cool. She wasn't a huge fan of Sawyer, but Gibson is, IMO, a better author by a fair margin.

...

Huh. How about those wacky Wild, eh? I suspect that viewership of the western conference finals will be down, because neither Anaheim nor Minnesota are big hockey names, which is sort of a shame: I think both teams are going to play great hockey, and I'm quite looking forward to it. I think an OTT/MIN final would be pretty exciting, given the speed of both teams, but OTT/ANA wouldn't bother me too much either. Just as long as New Jersey doesn't do anything silly like with their conference final.

Buffy last night was pretty good. I find myself again interested in the remaining (two!) episodes, and not just for compleatist or historical reasons — they might well be interesting to watch. Who knew!

I think Matthew is missing the point that I was trying to make the other day. There is nothing materially "plain" about structured XML, for example, except that it can be usefully viewed and manipulated with simple, widely-available tools, such as the human eye. I never suggested plain text, precisely because there are important structural and semantic characteristics that we want to preserve during however many conversions from presentation-format-du-jour to primary-source-storage and back. (We can still convert from EBCDIC to ASCII today, and there's no good reason that you wouldn't be able to convert your XML-in-ASCII storage to XML-in-XASCII2 at any point. I submit that this is a much less invasive change than from mySQL to Postgres or OpenOracle, and will break fewer tools that operate upon the content. But to equate modern-day ASCII — even modern-day XML — to EBCDIC, when the latter was never designed for any sort of interoperation and was supported only out of direst necessity by anyone outside of IBM, is to be either deeply misguided or rather disingenous.)

And why is it easier to do all those maintenance tasks with an opaque storage format and its one set of manipulation tools than with a format like XML? It seems to me that whatever approach you use with a SQL-guarded backing store will work pretty isomorphically with another storage format, with the possible exception of searching. But then I think that to rely on the full-text search capabilities of a database is to abandon much of the structure-value that people so painstakingly add to their entries. How would you search for all the times that you cited Mark Pilgrim, with a database that sees your every entry as just a sequence of bytes? How would you extract an index of such things? Maybe that's not a case you care about, but I can imagine many such indices and reports that would be of value or interest, and having to regex my way through byte-blobs seems like a sign that my storage and generation system has failed me. (And would you want someone searching your web log for "archives" to pick up all the times you linked into an URL with that string in it?)

(I don't really care about trackbacks or pingbacks or comments, though I'm interested to see why Matthew thinks — as his final comment implies to me — that they are an evil to be actively avoided.)

...

And just now I got back from a relatively awful driving lesson. I was doing pretty well at the start, and through the various emergency maneuvers, and even during the highway driving, but then a pressure-change headache started to set in, and then it all went to hell. Clumsy clutchwork, some oversteer, a few "slightly hot" corners. Bah. I want a mulligan. Ever since the instructor switch, I really haven't been very much on my game. Not sure what it is, really; could be the car, which is — and I'd not thought this possible at the time — even less suited to my size than was the Mustang; could be the instructor, with whom I don't really get along very well, and who seems to have only two pedagogical modes: Lecturing In His Outside Voice, and Silent — unless something unpleasant happens, at which point he will say something typically unhelpful, like "careful". Could be that I've just seriously regressed as a human, though I was doing fine on Martha's car the other weekend. Bah. I guess I should trick Alasdair — I can't drug him, because then he wouldn't be a legal passenger-seat driver-type, note — and get some more practice in.

The headache isn't improving my mood any, at all.

Made it to the office today, after signing the lease on the new place. I need to get George-the-friend in touch with George-the-architect-landlord for some internship idea exchange; I'll try to remember to get that rolling tonight at some point.

I used to bitch a lot about how hard it was to test recovery, but I was wrong. Testing recovery is a walk in the park with a martini and a fine cigar compared to testing anything under IA-64. I would kill for a sharp stick and a good, strong piece of twine. If this is payback for complaining about recovery testing, I can't wait to see which dripping maw of hell I will end up in next. (Actually, it's not all that bad. It's just that I also ran afoul of productivity killing bugs in gnome-terminal, had to wait out a cluster upgrade, got torqued in a proctological manner by sourceforge — save us, Jacob-wan! — and have a headache. Tomorrow has to be better, right? Right.)

I think I've been having blackouts lately, during which I run marathons, or climb mountains, or maybe just move large stones from one pile to another. I'm having trouble coming up with any other satisfying explanation for the fact that I slept thirteen hours last night, and was still tired when I woke up this morning. Perhaps it's just the crushing burden of keeping Tyla's computer hardware habit sated, though.

mpt writes about data preservation in his ultimate weblogging system, but I think he's wrong. On the off chance that such a bald assertion is not sufficently compelling, prima facie, I shall elaborate.

Using a database system like MySQL simply to get "presentation-independent storage" is sort of like swatting a fly with a Buick, only without the satisfaction that comes from actually killing the fly. If you want some future-proof structured form for storing metadata-heavy but interrelation-light content, I think you're probably going to end up using some XML Schema and then converting to display-format-of-your-choice. He rails against "static files" as a form of latter-day 8-track, but MySQL's data storage is just a bunch of static files on a disk somewhere. And it's in a format which is not designed for interoperability — or even simple backup — and which has as baggage many storage design decisions that are very useful for the General Purpose Database Problem — flexible and ad-hoc query support; fine-grained authentication and authorization; high-performance parallel query capabilities, with indices and stored procedures and whatnot; sophisticated locking for parallel update/update and update/query operations — but not necessary for the Stable Web Log Content Storage Problem. And when your format has the vast majority of its design effort focused on problems that aren't problems for you, I think you've chosen the wrong storage format. (Additionally, very few browsers can usefully display MySQL database files as of this writing.) A future proof format is one which places the fewest burdens — think not only of the "obvious" software and hardware burdens here: what if the MySQL format is found to violate an Oracle patent, heaven forfend? — on future readers, which is one reason that archivists will only humour you for so long when you talk about "long-term digital storage" before they clap you upside the head and tell you to print the content on acid-free paper and move on.

Any second-year computer science student can write something that will produce Format Of Choice from valid XML, and a good 20% of them could probably do it without weeping hot tears if you told them they couldn't use the language of their choice with its built-in XML parser goodies. Could they do that with the MySQL data format? Maybe if they had some good documentation on the format. So now you might want to ask yourself: "what format would I use to store the documentation?"

I tried to find some web-people who'd run into the same problem that my motherboard-and-such switch had caused me, but no dice. I found some that were close, but their descriptions of solutions made it clear that they were still able to boot into Safe Mode, and I was patently not. A fresh install of Windows XP didn't have this problem; I tested on a spare partition that, apparently, I was keeping around for just this occasion, and then starting backing up all of Tyla's RIAA/MPAA-bait.

In the midst of this, Tyla and Madhava and Hilary went climbing — my back is still a little sore; no, really — and by the time I met them for yet more sushi, I'd mostly got everything working again.

It's pretty sweet. Now I'm thinking about that LCD we saw, or maybe a liquid cooling kit. Not thinking too hard, though. Don't worry, honey.

The landlord was showing the place this afternoon, so Tyla and I went out for a nice brunch. We were sitting on the patio — where it was a tiny bit chilly, I now admit — when Tyla informed me that computer was being a little slow when she was making movies. I swallowed my disgust at the very prospect and let her drag me bodily down to College, where I was forced at gunpoint to purchase, oh, a new motherboard, CPU, and video card. Oh, and some new memory, just for completeness' sake. It was like chewing my own eyes out, but I managed, for Tyla's sake.

Now, while the filthy hordes gather in the living room for 8 hours of Buffy and Angel — some people were in Amsterdam for 4 months, and now have some catching up to do — I'm going to perform the requisite hardware transplants and then scoot over to Alasdair's for a spot of hockey-watching.

...

That didn't go as well as it could have. Going to need some software surgery tomorrow, I think. And another beer.

I took a nap yesterday, after ingesting some Vitamin I, and when I woke up, my headache was gone. Gone with it was the entire day, though. Ah well. It's not like I was going to be productive with that throbbing cranial thing going on anyway.

Today, I walked to work and was doing pretty well — ignore, for the moment, the brief network outage caused by a fat-foot error in the server room — until I developed a serious back-pain issue. Neither horrific music nor obese, megalomaniacal rodents could cure me, so I stole some Advil from Fixy and lay down on the floor. Doing much better now.

I did finally get Movable Type installed, and it wasn't that hard. I guess I should set up web logs for various kin and folk soon. I'll wait until they ask again, I think.

Tonight: X2 and a tour of Tyla's library. Alasdair's in a cranky mood — he says it's not my fault, but really, who else can make someone that cranky? — and doesn't want to take the back roads up to the East Nowhere branch of the Toronto Public Library. In spite of that, I think we're going to have a good time, even if we keep our pants on.

Jacob, my dearest love, I didn't mean to abandon you. Just had some laptop issues, got a little behind the curve; you know how it is.

About once a year, I'm treated to a great conversation with Miriam (and other people who happen to be standing nearby) about the Nature Of Science. I think she'd probably enjoy this discussion, but to be honest I never remember very much of the conclusions Miriam causes to lodge in my midbrain each time. That's part of what makes it fun, I guess.

It was inevitable, I suppose. After a few days of fantastically-beautiful weather, we got a low-pressure invasion that has left my head feeling like a Bunol tomato. The agony.

I wasn't in the mood to advance my life in any way today, so I missed Dad at the office again, walked to work again, made dinner for Tyla again, and got to see Emily again. Actually, I hadn't seen Emily since she left on her latest travel adventure, but I thought I'd slip that in there and see if I could fool you. And then I went and gave it away, proving that I'm really not cut out for this whole "sneaky" thing.

I did manage to make some cunning plans with respect to a friend's upcoming birthday, but I am not at liberty to divulge additional information at this time. Thank you for your co-operation.

Oh yeah, I also didn't get Movable Type installed again. Suck, thy name is Mike.

I did a bunch of things today, but the one that turned out the best was walking to and from the office. What a gorgeous day! I hope the weather holds up, so that I can continue to get the nice exercise and whatnot.

Today is my middle-youngest-sister's birthday, and so I went to Dad's office to drop off her card, such that it would arrive in her hands today. My incredible planning prowess came again to the fore, and I discovered only minutes ago that my father isn't at the office today. Sorry, Marla. I suck. (Marla is turning 14 today, just like Sara.)

Tyla's first day at work was yesterday, and yet she hasn't written about it yet. I guess she was too tired, or something.

...

Tonight's Buffy episode, capsule review: "Huh. I see."

I managed to get my laptop revived, using what I now recall is the same trick as was required the last time: unplug the (oh my god that's tiny, how can all my data fit in there?) hard drive from the controlled, wait 15 minutes, boot with it missing to cause the laptop gremlins to bang their heads together in appropriate ways, reinsert drive, write the laptop's service number on the LCD with chicken blood, boot again, sigh contentedly.

And then I spent the rest of the day trying to fix problems with my patch that didn't really exist. Sometimes, just sometimes, I need to realize that it might not be my fault, that our build system might be a little wonky, and that I should start from a newly-clean build. It's OK, though, I wasn't using that day anyway.

...

Played some Planetside with Fixy and Chris and their krew tonight, and it was lots of fun. I should have been finishing up the Movable Type installation for Andrei and J and Madhava and others, but I was really in no mood to wrestle with software. Besides, I have to let this slide for weeks and weeks, lest the users of my system develop unreasonable expectations of promptness.

I have a few days of entries — Coop'n'Kris visiting; in-laws: shopping and dining and birthday celebration; clothing, in which our hero discovers white T-shirts; train travel; small worlds, and the cities thereof; a year of ~shaver/diary — that are sitting on my laptop now. My laptop is not booting, because it can't — or, as I suspect, just won't — see its hard drive. Sort of annoying, because there's some work on there I'd also like to give to Phil and our partners. The work is small, though, so I can redo it tomorrow if I can't bring the laptop back from the dead.

So, yeah, one year. More later, sigh.

As a visitor from Toronto, I feel that I have some responsibility to spread the plague within my host city. (Don't be fooled by the fact that active cases are constant-or-dropping, and that there hasn't been a new case of SARS outside the known-to-be-vulnerable healthcare community in a dog's age; Toronto is still seething mass of danger and viral terror. You should probably visit someplace tropical instead, where you don't get those nasty WHO travel advisories).

In service of that goal, I've been talking with a sputter and forcing myself to cough whenever I'm in public. So far, I seem to not have caused Ottawa to fall under the umbrella of our plague, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. I'll almost feel bad about it when it happens, because my hosts have been very kind to me, what with their provision of futon and Pho and Mexican goodness, but this us-vs.-them thing has to stop. And if people are already terrified to go to hospitals in Ottawa, where they haven't had suspected case number one, I feel they should have their fears justified. I'm just doing my bit, as I see it.

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of this little diary endeavour, and I have nothing especially special to present in observance thereof.

We went shopping today, Sara and Tyla and I did, and I purchased some clothing. I now own a mildly-fitted white T-shirt, and I don't know why I never did before. Vastly more comfortable to wear under things than the non-fitted variety I already had, as I'm sure you all knew. Sara says that I need to work out more before I can wear just the T-shirt — she and Tyla tried to back pedal in a variety of ways, but I know what I heard! — but I'm sure she meant it in the nicest, kindest, boy-my-brother-in-law-is-a-slob way possible. Tyla also made me buy a bunch of socks that are identical, because she finds the close-but-no-cigar nature of my present dress sock collection to be frustrating. Also: why was I not informed about this "machine-washable silk" innovation? Reasonably-priced machine-washable silk at that.

At Marroush, home of shawarma that is very much worth almost missing your train for, I ran into Pete Matthews. This was inevitable, because there are only 300 people in Ottawa, and I know half of them. The extras employed by the city to keep the place all bustle-y do a great job, don't get me wrong, but you'd do well to not be fooled by them.

A variety of people attempted to convince me that we were celebrating Sara's 21st birthday yesterday, but I know that to be false: Sara is fourteen years old, and always will be. I have neither the time nor the patience to continue debate on this topic, so I will thank you to keep your "corrections" to yourselves.

I always forget about this fact, but my family (families, I suppose) and Tyla's family are very different. I'm not having a lot of luck articulating, even to myself, the specific differences, but they always strike me within about 20 minutes of arriving at a family gathering. It used to be that I would only notice this difference when visiting Tyla's family, but now I get that same "huh" feeling when I visit with my own kin. (Exception: other than some trivial clothing-choice differences, and the fact that I can be marginally meaner to Steph in pursuit of my own entertainment, the Three Sisters are pretty much mix-and-match.) I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but it was a little weird when it happened the first time.

Martha let me drive her car around yesterday, while we were in search of desserts for Sara's birthday, and I'm now a little worried that it was illegal. See, I forgot my license — and debit card, and credit card — back home in Toronto, and I'm not sure if there's any present-it-at-a-police-station leeway for we G1-holders caught without our credentials. I guess it's for the best that I didn't do anything worthy of a traffic stop. (OK, other than that one little I'm-turning-no-I'm-not-tee-hee swerve on Bank Street. But really, if they pulled people over for that, the world would be a very different place.)

I headed over to Chris' and Kristina's to crash last night, because it was a little bit crowded at the Primary Holmes Residence — to whom it may concern: I do not sleep on a "twin" anything — and because I wanted to get an early start on work with Coop in the morning. Worked, for the most part. Also, I feel this moral imperative to impose on these lovely people whenever I'm in town.

Coop and I were going to have a little chat about recovery testing today, hopefully so that Robert doesn't get another mess of surprises like the one I stumbled into on the most recent test-binge. Of course, Robert wanted to be involved in that call, and then Peter felt he should join in — sure, now everyone wants to help with this sort of testing. In other news, I have a fence that needs painting, and nobody is getting any of my bread. (It occurs to me, only now, that we never did discuss in detail the two issues that spurred Coop to ask for my input. I'm such a loser.)

It's a gorgeous day today, and I'm going to get to see most of it. Tyla is travelling to Ottawa on the 9:30am train, and I got up about when she did this morning. Since then, I've tested a patch, tidied up a bit, assisted the landlord in the installation of a security camera, worked on fixes for a few other bugs, packed my luggage, and played with the cat. Not bad for it still being before 11.

Somewhat apropos the yes-yes-I-know-it's-flawed-you-can-all-stop-mailing-me test from yesterday, a mathematical model for marriage. Is that systematising or empathic? (Apropos very little: the author of the E/S test is possibly related to the British comedic persona Ali G, whose HBO show is surprisingly entertaining.)

There's been a lot of talk lately about Rick Santorum's remarks regarding rights to sexual privacy — an amusing interview in places: "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about man on dog with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out." — but the best analysis I've seen so far is on the Volokh Conspiracy, where there are about a dozen well-written posts on the topic.

Time to shower and hit the, er, rails.

The Leafs really did run out of steam last night, but I'm not all that sad about it. A healthy Leafs team would have done better, I think, and I have to say that some of the best Leafs hockey I've ever seen took place in this series. And, really, the Flyers were much more "together" during most of the affair. Hopefully, Pat'll keep this excellent roster together next year, so they can finish gelling (like a felon) and return to the playoffs with a little less falling-apart in their D, and a little less of the two-line passing and offside parade that so amused Jacob this year. I still believe.

Kudos to Minnesota for just plain old wanting it more. The West is so freaky this year. I love it. (I am sort of sorry that Alasdair's hockey pool entry is basically worthless now, but I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.)

I'm 43 points worth of empathic and 55 points worth of systemising, for a nice balanced brain. I haven't tested, but personally believe that I'm also very little country, and somewhat more rock and roll. (Links to non-Flash tests and more background available on the main "Essential Difference" page.)

Madhava should watch out, because there's a new disease running rampant in the pirate community: SARRRRRRRRRRS!

...

I just paid my taxes for 2002 — I don't have to file until June 15th, because I'm all self-employed and such — and apparently it never becomes less than terrifying to sling that amount of money around with my web browser. Not that anyone shouldn't trust Mozilla, because I mean, really, it's all good, but that's a major financial shift hinging on the press of one little grey rectangle.

...

Driving lesson today was OK, but brief. I really don't like this Honda as much as the Mustang — not that I'm really a muscle car sort of guy, but the dead-zone in the accelerator is no fun at all. I'll practice more on Martha's car this week, when I travel to Ottawa for Sara's birthday, and then maybe trick Alasdair into letting me wheel about a bit in his car next week.

Good day for online findings:

Appearing on national television Wednesday, Dosha seemed in fine spirits apart from a gunshot wound to her head and other injuries sustained from being hit by the car.

and

The vaguely quantitative words "significant" and "significantly" are used 5 times on this slide, with de facto meanings ranging from detectable in largely irrelevant calibration case study to an amount of damage so that everyone dies to a difference of 640-fold. None of these 5 usages appears to refer to the technical meaning of statistical significance.

Jacob had better start training. He only has 360-odd days to brush up on his public urination, indecent exposure and general lack of hygiene before next year's Boston Marathon.

I'm not really panicked about SARS, since the fatalities so far have all tended to be the aged. Unless this little crisis drags on for another decade or two, I think I'm out of the danger zone. Some people have suggested that it might be a good idea — I think one of them actually used that term — to intentionally contract SARS while there are still unoccupied respirators in the Toronto area. I'm not sure that's a great plan, but I am sure that this assclown has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad plan. I mean, really. There are better ways to demonstrate that you're not under the thumb of The Man than by endangering your fellow Torontonians.

Some of you might have seen the comic before it was removed, in which case you will likely appreciate, as George did, that they missed a golden opportunity to use "Cherry Tart" in their parody. Now, though, they've been "asked" to take it down, in what seems like a case of lawyer-letter attempting to trump parody and fair use. I guess it's possible that the parody angle doesn't cover their use, since they were intending to parody American McGee's mauling of classic stories and not the Shortcake franchise itself, but I have hope.

I don't have a lot of hope left for the Leafs at this point, what with them being down 5-1 with the third period about to begin. Not that the score reflects the play in this game inaccurately. Bah. At least Beltzner will be able to sleep tonight.

Some years ago, Chris bought a car from this lunatic. I wonder if that's like buying drugs and supporting terrorists, or driving an SUV, or something. I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the kidnapping, dog-biting Syracuse tree:

	<blizzard>	I'm never too jaded to loot and burn
	<blizzard>	I'm just waiting for my chance

I'm still a little giddy about the passage of The Test, and that glow carried me through a handful of nice little fixes today. One of my patches totally breaks things, but that doesn't bother me too much. I'll get to fix it tomorrow.

Phil's been a sweetheart of late, and has been helping me with the little bits of tidy-up bugs left in the rest of the suite. I really do so enjoy working with him, and I'm thrilled that the answer to what next, when recovery is "done"? involves toiling even more closely by his side. Huzzah.

In my continuing efforts to push more and more of my work onto my unsuspecting Coopbot, I drafted a quick note about the first steps in analysis of a Lustre crash captured under UML. Hope it makes some sense. I'm sure he'll tell me if it doesn't.

A few modest suggestions on how to improve the sport of hockey:

• When the goaltender is out of the crease — or, for purposes of this rule, an enlarged crease-like area — he should not be immune to bodychecks. Many goaltenders act as "third defensemen" to play the puck under forechecking pressure, and that's fine, but they need to be subject to the same rules as the other two defensemen. Within the crease area, the goalie should remain a god among men.
• A penalty shot should be awarded in addition to, not in place of a two-minute minor. While exciting, a penalty shot isn't really much of a penalty in many cases, and if a goal on the penalty shot invalidated the penalty — as a goal on a delayed penalty call does, for example — there would not be a risk of a "double" penalty.
• Even if the ice surface "can't" be widened, opening up the game a little bit more through removal of the center line, at least with respect to two-line passes, would be welcome. There's a reason there aren't many highlight reels devoted to the neutral zone trap.
• I should be awarded Leafs season tickets, including any and all playoff rounds, to encourage my further development of these and other game-saving suggestions.

Go Leafs, and I leave you with some words of sport-relativism wisdom:

<odorizzi>	even if the avs lose, remember...there's always basketball!!!
<shaver>	basketball is a sad substitute for playoff hockey, Jason
<shaver>	for shame!
<phik>	basketball is a poor substitute for a razor blade sandwich
<phik>	If you worked in my office, I'd cut you

I had a nice anniversary post composed, about what motivates me to write, and how it's somewhat similar to what motivates me to program, and what sort of things I wanted to do over the next year. I say "had" because it appears to not be here anymore. It's not like the last time, at least according to my command logs. Huh.

Also, the anniversary is next week. Who sucks? I suck.

I woke up today to two fantastic discoveries. First, last night's run of The Test I Hate With All My Spleen blew the requirements out of the water, running longer and failing over more frequently than the acceptance criteria require. What a huge weight off my shoulders. We're so close to passing the last test — and then, of course, re-running everything "for the record" — that I can taste it. And like tonight's dinner, about which more below, it tastes great.

The second discovery was that it is definitely spring in Toronto. Perfectly timed, too, because Tyla and I needed to disappear during the landlord's open house. We started by wandering down to Bloor for brunch, including some tasty huevos rancheros: a dish that Chris Blizzard will never eat, I predict. Tyla and I looked around briefly for a new joystick, because the one I've got right now generates random noise for the "stick rotation" output, which makes piloting virtual aircraft more challenging than it really needs to be. We came up empty-handed, but our failings on the computer-peripheral front were more than compensated for by our grocery triumph. I picked up some rib steaks and a pile of pork chops from a little butcher shop in Kensington Market, and then topped up with a bag of veggies from some random market stall. When we got back home, the open house was still on, so we put our groceries away and retreated to the park to enjoy the sunshine — and play with random friendly dogs, as it turned out — until the hockey game.

Alasdair couldn't stay for dinner, which I think actually worked out for the best. If he'd been here, I'd have cooked two of the steaks, which would, I now realize, have been far, far too much food for three people. So Tyla and I split a only-slightly-overcooked steak — I'm still getting my grill-groove back — and some grilled baby bok choy, scallions, and tomato. The improvised garlic-jalapeño-lime sauce for the veggies was, oh, a seven out of ten. I'll do better next time.

There's a pretty good screaming match going on upstairs. Maybe one of my neighbours is an Edmonton fan who's watching the replay of Turco's heinous diving. I hope they fine the crap out of him, even if no EDM penalties were called as a result of his performances.

Apropos yesterday's mention of wasted time and energy: a slashdot comment I didn't have time to write. I never thought I'd be giving lessons in diplomacy, but here we are.

The Firebird fracas continues to consume time and energy that should be spent elsewhere. I love people.

Coop passed two additional tests today, which made me very happy. Just 2 left now, including the one that I've been working on since the Carter administration. Some day I'll be through this. Some day.

I torqued the setup of one of those tests, but I'm too weary to go back to it, now that hockey is over — along with the Islanders' and Bruins' seasons — so I'll go play Battlefield 1942 with Phil and Jacob. I should dig out my joystick.

Phil headed back to Boston today, ostensibly to play some street hockey and get work done, but really because he couldn't bear to watch the Leafs lose a heartbreaker in triple-OT. (Boston television was not showing the PHI @ TOR game.) I'm tired just from watching that much end-to-end-to-end-to-end hockey. What a fantastic series.

Actually, I'm also tired from grinding through logs all day, in search of little edge-case bugs that bite our recovery tests. Yes, I'm still trying to pass that test. Made a fair bit of progress today, including fixing an error case that has been plaguing us — or, at least, me — for literally months. Finally got a client to stop in a state that preserved the failure condition, and then it was just a simple matter of staring at code and logs for two hours. I wish they were all that easy, or something.

Mozilla is going through a name change for one of its projects right now, and it's the usual hell that results when you do anything involving more than five people. I've done a little bit to try and calm things down, because I hate to see people waste energy like that, but there's not much I can really affect. More later, when the dust has settled a bit.

The handymen came by today to start the repairs on the house, in preparation for the showing this Saturday. We really, really need to clean this place up, too, though the kitchen and living room are in not-terrible shape already. If I can figure out the current problem with The Test in the morning, I'll be able to spend the afternoon cleaning in inter-test bursts and then watching hockey with Alasdair in the evening.

Scarcely more than a week ago, it was snowing and hailing here, but today we had weather that I consider to be just about perfect: low 20s, mild humidity, sunny, nice breeze. I could handle another 6 months of this, but we're apparently getting some more freezing rain later this week.

I got some good work done today, with a handful of test fixes and some good design discussion with Robert, but Phil's bitter that we interrupted his work for a walk to lunch and a handful of errands. Actually, I don't think he's all that bitter.

The hockey orgy continued today, with a mediocre-Buffy-episode intermission. Phil was very tolerant of our fannishness, especially Tyla and Beltzner's. A fine dinner of pasta and sangria and pie kept us moving, and Phil and I continued with some hacking after all the hockey dust had settled.

Earlier in the day, the landlord was outside trying to clean the spray paint off his signs, and some random guy was standing in the street yelling and swearing at him. I guess we'll be on the lookout for further vandalism. I have to say that I'm glad we won't be here when they start sabotaging the construction site.

Apropos of which, we accepted the new apartment today. The lease numerology works out quite nicely, since we have a five day window in which to move our stuff a block. What could go wrong?

I hadn't realized that Beltzner was at the Matthew Good concert along with us. I wonder if he was as entertained as we were by the guy running around with white LEDs all over his jacket, dancing like a fool. I also wonder which hypocrisy he thinks Matt was pointing out. I recall him talking about Operation Playmate deciding to continue with non-nude photos to avoid offending various Islamic nations — as a rather contrived segue into a description of US troops kicking back with a Bud to relax after a hard day of slaughtering women and children — and his mention of Ernie Eves' claim of wide-spread Ontarian support for the US military action. (I keep hearing that Canada-wide support is in the mid-70s, which makes the Ontario-vs-Canada dichotomy even odder, but maybe he's not had time to keep up with polling data while on tour.) Neither of those seem like pointing out hypocrisy — an activity for which I offer nothing but unbridled support — but there might be something else I'm forgetting. I don't agree with all of Matt's politics, but he's at least well-spoken, even if I think the random anti-American cheap shots are beneath him. I don't know why that previous sentence is there, since it really doesn't flow from the thought before it, does it?

Mom visited yesterday, and we all had a good time. She was even nice enough to not object to Phil and I taking brief naps. Sounds like she might come back next weekend to coordinate a visit with my cousin, which will be a nice break.

Disabling the page cache yesterday helped, but then I had to fix a few other gotchas in our debugging infrastructure — it's like a fireman arson party, the way these tools keep getting in my way. Some semi-routine maintenance on the large test cluster apparently didn't go so well, so instead of being ready for dataset creation on Friday night, we're now thinking tonight will be the night. Or tomorrow, maybe. I fixed some bugs today by inspection, since running tests was foiled in various uninteresting ways.

And now, hockey.

...

Oh, the hockey. If the hockey were any more exciting, I would need to wear a diaper.

The landlord came by today to ask about the signs he'd put on our front yard advertising the newly-approved townhouse development, and which had been vandalized some time last night. We hadn't seen anything, or we'd have called the police, but it was sort of surprising. I don't usually imagine a large overlap between the neighbourhood reactionaries and the spray-paint crowd.

Those wacky guys from IBM UCD are at it again:

IBM tells us that the absence of Windows key is a result of internal ergonomic and usability studies which determined that putting a Windows key on a keyboard alters the normal typing pattern and makes the unit less ambidextrous.

Not that I'd really ever buy a Thinkpad, but it's nice to know that they're still innovating in the space. And so is Shuttle, who I may reward with a purchase the next time I need a computer. (Even I'm not fooled by that use of "need".)

Tyla and I are moving again. The place we're in now is being sold as part of a condo/townhouse development, and we're not really looking to buy it. So we get to embark on a grand moving adventure again, which I approach with the sense of childlike glee usually reserved for cleaning suck-starting septic equipment. At least we're living in the "target" city this time — HELLO MISTER RCMP, NOTHING TO SEE HERE — which can only make it easier.

As luck would have it — or perhaps luck would not have it this way, but was beaten in a Spanish Train-esque bet by some more helpful force — our landlord has an apartment on the top floor of the (enormous, beautiful) house he lives in, a mere block south of us on Brunswick. Further endangering my karmic balance, this apartment recently became future-vacant, as the current tenants gave notice of their intent to flee the jurisdiction, as of June 10th or thereabouts. So we wandered over this morning to check the place out, and were pretty pleased with the prospect. The apartment layout is fairly different, with a combined living-dining-cooking area and a very large master bedroom standing out as the dominant differences. The total living space is comparable, the rent is the same, the hunt would end early, the neighbourhood is perfect. I'm pretty sold, but I'm sure Tyla will have some good questions to ask.

Mom's coming into town today, at some point, so I guess I should get some work done first. I'd really rather be playing BF1942, though.

We had planned to get to dim sum for breakfast this morning, but Phil and I got up too late for that to really work out. The Blizzards had to return to Boston early-ish today — with their camera, though there were some tense moments! — so an early start on siu mai events was requisite. I think I had some chocolates instead.

Phil and I worked during the afternoon, as we are oft wont to do. Phil is working on the parallel-RPC code that we started together in Boston, and I'm fighting tooth and nail to just get one bloody set of proper logs out of this test, please please please, is that so much to ask, I'm not too proud to beg. Current thinking: disable the Lustre page cache, which we don't need for these tests, and which Zach will absolutely not want to repair on this rapidly-aging branch, when it's already largely repaired on the main development tree. Such drastic measures are even being considered only because the current state involves a massive, system-wide lockup right after the arrival of the bug I'm trying to get logs for, which means that I can't get the logs. And the crash-dump tools in use on this cluster don't provide a means for forcing a crash, and getting a dump to analyze. (Not that it would tell us much, because I already have a pretty good handle on the lockup, but it would at least be something.) Bah.

Alasdair joined us just before the second hockey-viewing of the evening, wherein the Senators tied up their series, but really didn't put a lot of hustle in their bustle for much of the game. I guess they can get away with that against the Islanders, but if they don't smarten up in a hurry, it's not going to be a long post-season. The last game (STL at VAN) was fantastic hockey; archetypal playoff stuff. It was sort of sad to see Cloutier's shutout broken so late in the game, but it doesn't really diminish his excellent performance.

I didn't think we'd get a chance to play Battlefield 1942, but it turned out that Phil and I didn't have concrete plans for the four-hour period beginning at 2am. That's a pretty fun game, right there, though a training mode wherein one could learn to effectively pilot various vehicles would be a welcome addition. It took us about half an hour to figure out how to open the gate on the landing craft, which was not the most exhilarating part of our gaming experience.

The test cluster was down for much of today getting some extra disks welded on, so Phil and I ran some quick errands in the afternoon: lunch, pickup of concert tickets, and acquisition of video games that we will likely never have time to play.

When the cluster was returned to service, I got another afternoon's worth of frustration chasing logs and "good" test runs — by which I mean "representative and well-instrumented", not "passing"; I am ambitious, but not insane. Coop did some good work on my behalf chasing people and running tests, for which I rewarded him with some fixes to test bits and actual bugs. I hope he's happy with the trade, because we're going to be making it over and over again until we pass these tests.

The Matthew Good concert was pretty excellent. The first opening act ("Pilate") was pretty good; I might search out more of their music on my own. The second group, "The Dears", is part of the whole Matthew Good tour, and they sucked so hard my ears popped. The keyboardists were pretty hot, though. And speaking of hot, I should clearly have been spending more time at Matthew Good concerts when I was younger and singler. Aye carumba. I don't know how Phil left that place without at least two wives.

Matt also replaced the "super-size" rant from the album version of "21st Century Living" with the inevitable war commentary. Not really my political take, but I can generally handle opposing viewpoints pretty gracefully; that's the flavour of "liberalism" to which I subscribe. I did think that his description of US troops kicking back with a Budweiser to relax after "taking pot-shots at women and children" was out of line, though. Someone appears to have spilled some Michael Moore in my rock star.

Phil and I had planned to watch the Leafs game on tape after we got back from the conference, but some dork-head announcer at the concert told us that they'd lost 4-1. Kinda took the wind out of our sails. We'll save up our hockey time for tomorrow, when Alasdair comes over to watch the Sens try to regenerate some dignity.

Phil decided that I wasn't a liar. We added some more instrumentation — that's right, our 25 gigs of log data didn't tell us everything we needed to know — and I waited my turn for a re-run on the highly-sought-after test cluster.

While I was waiting, Chris and Shona showed up back at the house, so I headed home to kick off the test from there. It went pretty well. Too well, even: it hadn't triggered the failure condition I care about before we had to leave for dinner, so I left it running. Tragically, the test doesn't stop correctly in some failure cases, and so it over-wrote its log data when it looped around, and all was for naught. Over-writing the logs sure seemed smart when keeping everything around was causing the disks to fill up, but it didn't seem so smart when I got back from the evening outing to see what I had wrought. I'm going to get Coop to re-run in the morning, while I analyze an entirely different failure from an entirely different test.

Basic was OK. Connie Nielsen didn't really do much of note, but the rest of the film at least kept my interest. Maybe we should have seen Chicago, with Tyla and Shona, but I really wasn't up for watching Richard Gere sing and dance. At least there was no awful rap act being filmed in the theatre before the movie, as there was the other night when Alasdair and I saw Phone Booth. "YYZ", indeed.

Phil arrives tomorrow, and I have to pick up the concert tickets and do an incredible amount of testing. Could happen, could happen.

I remembered on the way home last night that I hadn't published yesterday's entry, but when I got home Tyla was on the computer, and I was fricking exhausted, so I just went to sleep. Sorry.

Almost time to head into the office and see if I can fix the clock on the cluster, so that things don't "happen" 100+ seconds apart on different nodes. Whee.

...

Playoffs started today, so far so good. Toronto won their first game, though they didn't look all that strong for some of it. Going to be a great series, if this game was any indication.

Phil and the Blizzards arrive tomorrow (I think) for the Matthew Good concert, which means that I should probably go down to the Skydome and pick up the tickets.

I finally got good logs of the bug that's killing me on the current test, and it's a doozie. I told Phil about it, and he thinks I'm a liar. We'll see who's the liar tomorrow, mister! (I sort of hope it's me: this bug will be no fun at all.)

I forgot my power adapter at the office, so this is all I write. 'night.

My driving instructor quit today. His back problems weren't getting better, and I guess it occurred to him that teaching people to drive standard wasn't a great occupation for someone with chiropractic issues. I liked him, even though we occasionally seemed to be working from different calendars and clocks, so I'm a little disappointed. I'll find out in a week or so what my new instructor is like.

My laptop has been resuscitated, and I'm now quite loving Red Hat 9. For those who might be following in my path, here are the things that I needed to fix in order to make my Inspiron 8100 work the way I wanted:

• add support for using the left-hand Windows key as Compose, because my laptop doesn't have one on the right;
• install apmdfix so that I could use the built-in Ethernet after a suspend;
• add Option "IgnoreEDID" "true" to my XF86Config, so that I could use resolutions bigger than 800x600;
• install xmms-mpg123-1.2.7-21.i386.rpm so that I could play MP3s;
• install the kbd package — which, I'm assured, should not have been deselectable during the install — to quell the unicode_start errors I would get with every shell.

I never did get suspend-to-disk working properly. The laptop complains that the partition isn't big enough, even though I used Dell's utility to create it. I probably have to do something icky and manual, with which I shall likely never bother.

Alasdair and I are going to go see Phone Booth tonight, in spite of rumours of savagely-bad reviews. They didn't show up on Rotten Tomatoes in any significant number, so I'm going to pretend they don't exist. Hmm, I need some food, too.

...

Phone Booth wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. The little pieces were fine, excepting for the moment some small continuity issues that Alasdair rightly points out, but the big picture wasn't really all that compelling. As redemption plays go, it could have been a lot worse.

I just spent hours and hours looking at logs, correlating network activity across 28 computers in order to find a bug. The logs show "impossible" behaviour, which I may detail later, but will describe now only as a "system configuration problem". Which rhymes with "colossal waste of Mike's time", alas. I guess 3am is time to go home, anyway.

Basically since I got it, I've lived with my laptop not doing all the things that I think a laptop should. Like use DMA to make the disk go at a decent speed, or suspend so that I don't have to shutdown and reboot all the time. The recent release of Red Hat 9, in addition to getting Matt Wilson some much-deserved press time, promised to provide solutions to both those problems. So I spent a bit of time today installing that operating system. It went quite well, though the network install took about three times longer than it predicted: over the course of nearly three hours, the "time remaining" lieindicator never claimed anything north of 53 minutes.

It still didn't suspend, though, so I thought I'd try updating the BIOS and fixing up the suspend-to-disk partition. I don't have my floppy drive at home, but I was able to work around that during the installation process — short version: use the pxeboot kernel and initrd, and point grub at them as an alternate boot choice — so I was pretty confident that I could pull similar magic again. The BIOS upgrade was no problem at all: Dell provides a "floppy-less" version, and it worked like a charm. So quickly, in fact, that I thought something had gone horribly wrong, but everything came up roses afterwards.

Then I got clever. I figured I'd try the grub-alternate-boot trick with the floppy image for the suspend-to-disk partition. Slammed the floppy image onto an otherwise-unused partition, hacked up my boot configuration so that it wouldn't try to boot off the partition that was about to get spanked by the suspend-to-disk code — see? so clever! — and rebooted.

GRUB _

That's all it said when it booted up. That's all it says now. It beeps if I press any keys. Smug little thing. I think I'm going to be heading into the office tomorrow, where I can wield the floppy drive in an attempt to undo my cleverness. The lesson here, of course, is that I'm really not as clever as I'd like to be.

My test is going well, though: 27 failovers in a row before something as-yet-undiagnosed goes wrong. More fun with logs tomorrow.

Turns out that I was inspired to hack a little bit on Mozilla, thanks to Seth's excellent guidance through the mail/news code and Justin's complaints about account management. I think my fix is good, and I hope to see it in 1.4b. It had been a while since I was last in that source tree, and I'd lost a lot of fluency. Took me forever to figure out which parts of the mail/news code talked to which other parts. I really appreciate Lustre's (relatively) small size, now.

I had another driving lesson today, and my instructor thinks that I'm just about ready to pass my road test. I guess that means the remaining 12 lessons will go pretty quickly. Still need more stall-parking and some parallel-parking practice, but I'm quite comfortable and smooth with the whole "control of the car" thing. Even the Gardiner with waves of spray pounding at the windscreen didn't faze me. Go me. If I take my test in Peterborough, I could have my license by the end of May, it seems. That's a bit of a hike, but it might be worth it.

The only real problem with making more progress on my test is that we now run longer, which means that we generate more log data. Faced with some 13 gigabytes of log data, I took the appropriate and responsible course of action: I closed my laptop, played some Shadowbane and watched hockey with Alasdair.

In addition to my work on availability and failure recovery in Lustre, I'm now doing some business development work as well. I'm quite enjoying it, since I get to use the other half of my communication skills, and spend my time telling people all the wonderful things our software can do. Or will be able to do soon, in some cases, in exchange for eminently reasonable sums of money.

Brendan and Hyatt wrote a new Mozilla development roadmap, and I think it's pretty darned good. Some people are nervous about the move away from a monolithic application suite — even the ones that aren't under the mistaken impression that we're dropping XUL — but I think it's the only way for Mozilla to move forward. I think the new plan is good, since it emphasizes motion towards the practices that have already produced the most promising work in recent months — to wit: stronger, tighter module ownership; small application teams building a small app core with robust extension mechanisms; and a more natural relationship between the "embedding core" and the "application layer". It might even inspire me to do some hacking.

There was something else that I was going to write about here, but it eludes me at the moment. I have a driving lesson in 9 hours, so I should really get to bed and sleep. The "Indian winter" snow and freezing rain of the last few days — hello, it is April, is it not? — should make that especially interesting.

(Make that 8 hours; silly daylight savings!)

This is the return-to-diarying that you've been dreading. I guess it was only a a smidgen more than a week, but it really did feel like a long time to me. I hadn't realized how much a part of my life writing this thing was, I think, until I stopped doing it for a while. Glad to be back.

I'll probably start writing about various war-things soon enough, since it's basically impossible for me to avoid reading about it, and therefore developing strong and provably correct opinions. I hope that doesn't bother too many of you; I know there's already tons of war-noise (actually, that's a really good site for aggregated stories) out there on the interweb, so I'll try to leave things that are reported elsewhere, well, elsewhere.

I'm still trying to pass my damned test, and yesterday I analyzed about 7 gigabytes of log data — this is the equivalent of 15 Libraries of Congress run through a mulcher and then forced down one's throat with a hydraulic hammer, in case you're not familiar with the scale of data I'm talking about. I discovered the same important fact twice: neither set of logs contains the right information for me to learn anything helpful. And that's all I'm going to say about that, because if I'm sick of this test, nobody else needs to hear about it either. Until I pass it, of course.

The rest of the code I'm working on is working out quite well, though. I'm quite pleased with how the massive recovery reworking — yeah, I keep doing that — went, all things considered.

...

I didn't pass it yet, partly because as we get farther along it becomes clearer that we don't have an especially crisp definition of "pass", but we were able to fail over 4 times just now, and then we hit a failure that may not be related to recovery at all. 6 consecutive failovers would be enough for me to claim we were able to meet this initial, explicitly-not-bullet-proof threshold of capability, so things are, for the first time in a long time, looking pretty good.

Furthermore: woo.

This is not the return-to-diarying that you might have been waiting for. Well, maybe it is. It's not the return-to-diarying that I'm waiting for, though. That'll come later this week, I think.

This is just a quick note to wish my good friend Deb a happy, drunken, ignore-that-silly-bug-list birthday. Happy Deb-day!

I discovered that I am really quite serious about my displeasure with the current state of my writing. When Saturday started to near an end I just couldn't bring myself to write another lame paragraph about how I spent the whole day typing in my pajamas, then ate food and went to bed.

The daily update schedule is its own reward, generally, but after 11 months of forcing myself to spit out some nonsense just to have some text on the page, I think it's past time that I figured out a way to have something more interesting to say. So there'll be a brief hiatus while I get that sorted out. I hope some of you are here when I return, but really, this is all about me.

(Anatole points out that blogger is a lying sack, or was at least mildly untruthful, and that the link below was broken. The right one is apparently this, but that doesn't render because of a MIME-type problem. Top Men are working on it. I'll update the original link when that gets resolved.)

Orin Kerr thinks that people are making too big a deal of the fact that this war is being watched in what's basically real-time. I agree that it's a little unsettling, but I think that's good: just as with capital punishment, I think that the public's visibility into a war conducted on their behalf is very important. I'm sure there are a lot of people 8 time zones from me that would love to be bored of the war, too. (Yeah, I know Canada's not in the war right now.)

I moved the two new links into the traffic analysis section, because that's where they properly belong. I'm not really thrilled with most of this new Clayton guy's posts on the Conspiracy, but Eugene continues to deliver.

Anatole has justified my blogroll faith with some new updates, including a choice bit of Fleischer deconstruction.

The lady at Air Canada tried to convince me that their war-in-Iraq rebooking policy only applied if I was changing my ticket "because of the war", but she relented pretty quickly when I asked what that would mean, exactly. So I'm off to Boston a little early.

I'm looking for a new doctor, if anyone has Toronto-area recommendations to share. I'm leaving my current one partly because there is no schedule management at all, partly because there is minimal "patient management" — if you know the doctor is 3 hours behind, say so when I arrive 5 minutes before my appointment — and, well, it was the record management that really broke the deal for me. In spite of telling both her and her assistant twice during the visit, they didn't seem to believe that I'd been a patient before. And they didn't have any records from my last visit, so I guess they might as well have been right. I got to go back over my whole history again, spar a little about whether or not I should be on Celexa "that long", blah. I could go to a walk-in for that, and probably wait less.

And then it rained on me on the way back to the office.

...

Got to have a nice dinner with Tyla and Kev at Tiger Lily, and then come back to work and actually get some good results out of llite/11.

I bought the Get Your War On book at Indigo today, along with some other stuff. It was right next to the books of anti-war poetry, so I didn't linger long. (I'm not really pro-war, and I think that the US has screwed the process fifty ways to Sunday, but I do think that use of military force to remove Hussein is likely required, and very likely appropriate. Maybe I'll say more tomorrow, but I spend all day talking about it, and, well, others — see below — say most of the things I'm thinking in much more interesting ways.)

Two new additions to the links section today, and they're the first two people linked up there that I haven't met and wouldn't consider to be friends. But they write very well, and while I don't agree with all of their politics, I very much enjoy the way they present their positions, and enjoy even more the way their writings sometimes make me poke around a bit at the reasoning behind my own positions. (Strictly speaking, the Volokh Conspiracy link points to the writings of more than one person, but we'll just let that slide. Won't we?)

I haven't been very happy with my writing here lately: a lot of things are being left unmentioned because I'm too tired when I get around to updating, and, to add insult to what cannot really be described as injury, the quality of the text I do produce isn't that great. I think I need to devote a bit more time to it.

Phil is back from Edinburgh, which meant that I didn't have to put on a Phil mask and trick the DLM into telling me secrets about the causes of a bug I encountered. Also, I got to talk with him for a while on the telephone, which is always fun. It's good to have him back.

I'm not going to write about the upcoming war today, if that's OK with everyone. I would like to say, however, that it's harder than I expected to find a list of signatories — or, if you prefer, High Contracting Parties — to the Fourth Geneva Convention.

...

Went out for µPowered this evening, and had some fine conversation with other local geeks. I was up $60 in the darts gambling before my sense of fair play started to erode my winnings. (Gavin and I had, strangely, bet on each other in a game that we played, and I was too much the gentleman to blow it at the end. Ah well.) I think I ended up $20 down, but I'll get him back next time, for sure.

I don't recall which of Gavin or Kris won the bet on the start-date of the war, but it was a near thing.

I had intended to hold off until about 3 or 4 o'clock before I started drinking today, but then I ran into some more nonsense on another test cluster just after noon, and James was here waiting for Chris and me, and then the next thing I knew I was at James' place playing videogames and wondering where my first 3 beers had wandered off to. Mom assures me that I'm plenty Irish for this sort of thing, so don't be giving me no guff.

I didn't see Deb on this trip, but I don't think it's because I'm a loser. Which is to say that even if I weren't a loser, I might not have seen her.

Tomorrow, back to Toronto. I miss my little woman, I must say.

I had intended to hold off until about 3 or 4 o'clock before I started drinking today, but then I ran into some more nonsense on another test cluster just after noon, and James was here waiting for Chris and me, and then the next thing I knew I was at James' place playing videogames and wondering where my first 3 beers had wandered off to. Mom assures me that I'm plenty Irish for this sort of thing, so don't be giving me no guff.

I didn't see Deb on this trip, but I don't think it's because I'm a loser. Which is to say that even if I weren't a loser, I might not have seen her.

Tomorrow, back to Toronto. I miss my little woman, I must say.

I had only one concrete plan for today, so small that it was really just a planette, and that was to see The Hunted with Coop. Don't believe the anti-hype, it's really not all that bad. It felt like it was edited with a heavy and perhaps somewhat overmedicated hand, but what was left was not unpleasant. Unless you have a problem with blood, in which case maybe you should just stick to Carrie.

The bug I was pretty sure I fixed on Friday may or may not be fixed. I'll find out tomorrow, before I start drinking to forget in honour of St. Patrick's Day. I must be part Irish somewhere, given that my mother's name is Halligan, so I figure I'm entitled. Also, it will keep me from, you know, going insane.

It took some doing, because a lot of places close at five o'clock in this fair city, but Chris and I returned to the house with some nice thick pork chops, assorted vegetable matter and some fatty cow juice. Over the following few hours, we turned them into some a-little-too-spicy, but still oh-damn-that's-juicy pork chops, not-as-overdone-as-I-feared broccoli, a very nice pilaf — note to self: Korean pear; who knew? — and a crème brulée that, on its very own, justifies the continued existence of dairy products. I only spilled a little wine, and in my defense I think there are quite a few human endeavours where an error margin of a mere few inches would be considered a virtual bullseye. It's not like I bombed a Chinese embassy or something.

Kittens: still damned cute.

I woke up a little later for this morning's train than I'd have liked — Tyla's lightning reflexes slayed the alarm clock after but a single bleat, it seems, so I never really noticed — but because it's a Via train it turned out to not matter very much. By the time we arrived in Ottawa, we were running 45 minutes late, which apparently entitles me to a 50% refund-credit thing. It's annoying to be late, as anyone who has ever done a time-sensitive thing with me can attest, but I wasn't in an enormous rush, so I think I'm happy with the trade.

Chris graciously met me at the new Fallowfield train station, and after some en-route beer and wine purchases, we arrived at Chris and Kristina's lovely house, where I got to meet their new kittens for the first time. Adorable as all get out, which I think is why they call them "kittens". I apparently made quite an impression on Saba, because he sat on my lap for an extended period of time. Chris says that this is pretty much unheard-of, and I think that if he were going to lie to me he'd do it about something more important. Regardless, I squandered that goodwill later by hissing to get him (Saba, silly) and Miso off the table later in the evening, so it's of little historical interest.

Between the waxing and waning of my friendship with Saba, there was a lot of snow-oriented fun. About a dozen of us trekked out to Bruce Pit, a short walk from — but, as you will hear, a longer walk to — the house in question, where we proceeded to fling ourselves down washboard-like hills until the combination of fatigue, deep-muscle bruising and dangerously low blood-beer levels drove us back to shelter. Well, some people drove back to shelter. I wanted to walk back and take the "shortcut" through the snowy park, because it was a nice night, and because I thought it would be fun, but mainly because I have the sort of foresight that may well someday lead me to attempt a mid-December infantry invasion of Russia. The trip back, distance-wise, was quite bearable; definitely under a kilometer. As the crow flies, it represented a significant savings over our previous route. Given that we were unable to find anyone in the "shortcut gang" with the gift of flight, however, we ended up trudging in thigh-deep snow for about, oh, a decade. These are my thighs I'm talking about here, so probably a good 80cm of snow. If you ever find yourself in desperate need of lower-body fatigue, drop me a line; I have a great source.

The rest of the evening was food and chatter and beer, all the ingredients of a wonderful party. Chris-and-Kristina's house is truly lovely: wonderfully decorated and furnished, immaculately maintained and, of course, nicely catered. Some day I'll grow up and be able to have nice things like this.

I wrote some code on the train, just a few hundred lines, because I finally had a few hours with a computer and without the seemingly-everpresent distraction provided by truly world-class test flailing. It's good to be back, or something.

I slept late today, but not too late. I'm going to try to get llite/11 at least reporting useful results, but not too hard. I'll put some work together to do on the train tomorrow and on the weekend, but not too much work. I'm going to get on an early train tomorrow, but not too early. I figure I'll give this balance thing a decent shot, see what it can do for me.

Intelligence analysts once assumed that terrorists organize in isolated cells. But [...] the active structure resembled that of an IBM project team.

I thought the ads linking drug use and terrorism were a little far-fetched, especially coming from a government that poured money and training into their designated terror bad guys (Taliban, and to some degree Iraq) for decades. But the idea that file-trading funds terrorism is mind-boggling. They can't even show that the commercial piracy operations are funneling money to Evil Men, and it's a little amusing to watch them flounder around suggesting "public service commercials" — well, I guess the RIAA is a part of the public too, in a way — to "highlight that alleged connection between piracy and organized crime". It's mainly sad, though. "If more American parents understood the connection between the pirating of intellectual property and organized crime", Mr Wexler, they'd realize that the biggest societal risk present when their kids pass around the digital equivalent of a mix tape is that Kazaa or some other piece of loser software will send piles of personal information floating around the net, helping the growth of identity theft. Hey, this tenuous-link thing is kinda fun. Maybe I should run for office.

I think they do themselves and the public a disservice by distracting effort from the genuine intellectual property violations present in commercial piracy operations, but I'm not really sure that I mind anymore. Someone has to be their worst enemy, and I guess it might as well be themselves. I mean, I have always made my living off of the strength of intellectual property rights, and they're totally failing to generate sympathy in me. Can they imagine how ineffective they must be with people who only see IP rights as the reason they have to pay $20 for a new CD, hundreds of dollars for prescription medication, or $30/month for cable or satellite signals that are "out there already"?

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Hahahaha. Ha. ... *sob*

Jamie, dude, I feel for you:

: ptlrpc; history | grep -c "killall.*gdb"
27

...

I cannot believe how badly the last 6 hours of my life have been wasted. Even my Halo break didn't go well, but that is nothing compared to the utter squandering that was my evening. I can't even write about it. Augh.

Let's just not talk about work today, OK? I got to do some fun stuff, sure, and I managed to beat the recovery test back into submission, but the rest of it was just purest pain. Frosted with agony and served with a frustration coulis.

Instead, I'll have one of these weird blog-conversations with Hoye. (This will make no sense in a few months, because I have no idea how to link to a Hoye-blurb in a future-proof way, but don't worry about that. Live in the moment.)

You don't make a method or a field private because you don't trust the person using your classes. It doesn't matter if they have the source or not, it doesn't work. "#define private public" and "#define class struct" before your library's headers and all of the sudden the parents are out and the liquor cabinet was mysteriously left unlocked. It's like const: a way of setting policy for the use of your objects, in such a way that the compiler can provide strong hints. You make something private because it's not suitable for general use; people who want to use the class safely — which you could usefully define as "in a manner which permits the class to perform its functions as documented"; the kooky design-by-contract Eiffel folks might like that — will play by those rules, and the compiler will help them. (In some runtime environments, such as Java's, data hiding is used as a security mechanism as well, but that's largely an extension of the same concept: it's very hard to write security-safe code without controls on the way your classes can be poked and prodded, and for many classes, the Java system is relying on it keeping its contract to avoid a breach of the whole system. I don't care if that didn't make sense, because it's not central to my point.)

Good code ownership isn't just about setting up fences around the squishy parts of your data structures, though. It's about making sure that the code is properly factored, and designed, and tested, and documented, and that it interacts in a polite and friendly way with the other parts of the system. Collective code ownership disperses that responsibility throughout the development team, meaning that you can and should fix all those little things in all the other people's code that just aren't right. It also means, along with pair programming, that you develop experience with and exposure to lots of parts of the software. This means that it's easier for you to work in "other" parts of the code, but it also means that it's easier for you to design "your" bits so that they fit well with "other" bits.

(I say "other" and "your" with the quotation marks, but I only half mean them: while everyone owns the code, people will often work mainly on one part of it. That's not a failure of collective code ownership, though; everyone on an Ultimate team is responsible for the team playing well and having fun, but some people will handle more, and others will usually show up in the cup.)

Pair programming is a fantastic thing. It's one of the things I miss most when I'm telecommuting, and even then I try to find excuses to talk to people on the phone while I'm coding and debugging. When I'm on the ground with someone else — even when I'm actually in the air, actually — I'm a lot more productive, and I think it's the case for my coworkers, too. Talking to someone about what you're doing, having them that you really typed "foo++" when you meant "bar++", the presence of an extra brain and pair of eyes that can stay a level or two above the syntax details looking for things like repetition and opportunities to refactor — priceless. Just being able to toss the keyboard to someone else when you find yourself rewriting the same loop condition over and over is enough to make you a believer, I think. This is an OK article about pair programming. You may not find the "interpersonal interaction" bits interesting, but the benefits are very real. I've found that students and new grads are often reluctant to get into it because they have bad memories of group assignments. It's not like that. I promise.

I think the real money is in DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork and YouArentGonnaNeedIt. For me, I think that's because I sort of "grew up" as a software person with this awed reverence for The Right Design, and didn't realize until much later that you can't design a system really well until you've built it. So the trick, I think, is to move the code towards the design, and then move the design towards both the code and the (constantly refining) goal, in lots of little steps. But you've all heard this before. I really want to believe that a lot of these things apply outside of software, but I may never find out because I'm sure I'm driving away all my non-geek readers.

I remembered what I had to do today: get tickets to Ottawa. I did most of that, but now I'm not sure that I actually purchased them. I guess I'll find out when I go to pick them up tomorrow.

...

It's a little after midnight — OK, it's about four hours after midnight, fine — and I'm still chasing my tail. It's not as easy as it could be, because my tail is caught in the jaws of "llite/test/11", and test/11 itself is being yanked all over the map by hardware and software failures of all kinds. Maybe I'll take an early train on Saturday, so that I'm not filled with blinding fury when I reach Ottawa. I'm not invited to the ballet, anyway.

The first part of my plan worked very well: I was perky and productive and fixing bugs all over the place until about 9AM. At that point, I realized that I was going to have to take a nap if I was going to be both effective and polite during the day, so I went home and slept for two hours. Which is 90 minutes more than I had planned for, truth be told, but for some reason the single polite chirp of my cell phone wasn't enough to wake me up.

After I woke up, my day degraded into chaos. I spent about 10 hours involved in setup for a test that should have been set up and running days, if not months ago, during which I actually performed useful work for 10 (fixing some configuration scripts) plus 5 (fixing an honest-to-goodness bug in recovery) minutes. By the end of the day, I was clinging to the last shards of my veneer of implacable professionalism. The kid gloves are coming off tomorrow, because my time is worth more than my reputation for pleasantness with these particular people.

My driving instructor just sort of showed up today, apparently expecting me to have been ready to go out with him, even though we had had no communication in a week. Specifically, we had had no communication since I responded to his message about rescheduling my last session, and his suggested time slot for that — which I had indicated in my message was just fine — had just slipped on by. I was pretty frazzled by that point, so we just booked a session for next week and I sent him away. Nobody wanted me behind the wheel of a car anyway.

...

More time has passed, and has mainly been wasted. I'm supposed to be writing some license text for a contract we're otherwise ready to sign, but I think I'm going to do that tomorrow, because right now the combined effects of fury and fatigue have caused a state of intellectual near-paralysis. Oh yeah: we released our beta today. The release notes are full of scary warnings about recovery, because most of my choicest fixes missed the train, but all in all I think it's a pretty good beta. The next one will be unbreakable, let me tell you.

Tomorrow, really need to [ed: I fell asleep at this point, last night. I don't know exactly what I need to do today, but I'm sure it'll come to me.]

I need to kiss and make up with my sleep cycle, so I'm going to bed after I finish with this. And then tomorrow, I'll get up and walk to work, and fix all my bugs. And then I'll wake up for real and see that I've slept through my meeting. You read it here first.

I thought I was supposed to have an in-car lesson today to make up for the one that got snowed out last week, but I never heard back. Even checked the messages. Ah well, I guess I'll see him Wednesday, though we didn't set a time for that.

I fixed some stuff today, and tried my first real failover with the new recovery code. Was looking pretty good, until I got spanked like a red-headed rented mule by some infelicity in the loop driver. Or ext3's data journalling. Or something. I don't really know, but it sucked. I'll use a different storage system tomorrow, and it should go much better. I really should have done that after the first hour spent debugging it, but I spent a while fearing that it was a subtle bug in my code — heaven forfend! — and then after that thinking that I could, you know, fix it with some configuration changes. Error.

Tyla made a great dinner tonight, but my appetite sort of disappeared. Sucks. City is showing Gunmen, and it's not any better than it was last time.

I didn't get an angry call from Phil, but the patch did have some problems. All better now, and yay for me. I think I had extra hacking luck because I didn't get out of my PJs today.

Brined some chicken breasts overnight last night, in a rare burst of forethought, so I made some seared-chicken sandwiches for myself and Tyla for dinner. Mmm, much yum. The boyz also had a good brined-food experience, just to keep us in sync. (For posterity, the rub in question was: 1 tbsp each of cumin, chili powder and curry powder; 1 tsp ground black pepper; 2 tsp brown sugar. I think we're going to try it on tuna tomorrow.)

Madhava came over and the three of us watched Le pacte des loups. I drifted in and out a bit, but it was pretty good. Felt a little long, at 2:32 — this time, I might be interested in seeing the someone-other-than-the-director's cut — but it was pretty fun, and the visuals were great. Madhava said that some review described it as the product of an explosion in a genre factory, and the facts would certainly bear that interpretation.

I chatted with Andrei and Vlad about game design some more, railed against the NIH syndrome that plagues game-development companies, and registered for an online course in terrain rendering. I almost signed up for a cocktail-party cooking class as well, but then I remembered that I'm going to be at Coop's toboggan party on the weekend. Maybe the knife skills course, instead.

Hoye is quite right to view OO as a technique, and not a feature, and it's a position I've had to argue more than once in my days as JavaScript evangelist. I'm not sure that being able to #ifdef logging is the best argument I've heard for use of accessors, but I've always been a bigger fan of the whole meta-object protocol game than most other people. Especially if you restrict that set of "other people" to those that program, but have never programmed anything significant in a Lispy language. AspectJ™ and other bits of Aspect-Oriented Programming might interest like-minded individuals; logging is one of the "cross-cutting" pieces of software development that's often used as an example of a good A-O candidate.

We ran a little late, as we always do when I'm involved, but we still arrived early enough that our Mission of Cheese was successful. It was wonderful to see the family again, of course, but I really need to practice my drinking if I'm going to keep up in the future. Crikey.

Then we got a drive home with Chad and Jen, including a wonderful demonstration of cool-headed collision avoidance provided by Chad, and I did a little work on a bug that Phil reported to me this morning. It fixed another longstanding bug as well, so I'm generally happy.

I'm trying to decide if I should test that patch, sleep, or watch the overdue copy of Brotherhood of the Wolf that's been sitting on the coffee table for 9 days now, mocking me with its monkey pants. I suspect that I'll end up falling asleep while watching the movie, and wake up tomorrow to an angry phone call from Phil about the patch. Who says you can't have it all?

Speaking of movies, I was thinking that I'd try to find time to see The Life of David Gale, but now, well, maybe not. Zero. Huh.

I went into the office today, for the first time since Coop came to visit, and it's a much calmer place now. The renovations are complete, and the new lighting is nice. My desk and chair combination still suck, but I think I'll be able to fix that next week. Neither Chris nor Fixy were there, because of a late-night maintenance operation last night, so I'll have to wait until Monday to make sure that they haven't grown extra noses or anything.

I walked to and from the office — about 35 minutes each way, not counting the stop for dinner on the way home at 23h30 — and it was tremendously pleasant. I need to try to make a habit of that. If it were fattening or bad for my sleep cycle, I'm sure I'd have no trouble.

Today's diff was only about 300 lines net, but I did manage to remove more than I added yet again, keeping the streak alive. It can't last, but it's fun so far. Phil helped me sort out the last remaining problem in his refcounting work, so we're in a pretty good position now with respect to the architecture we need to have in order to deliver 1.0-grade recovery while that release-train is still accepting passengers.

Tomorrow is Papa Ross' 80th birthday party, so I need to do some compensating for last night's 4-hour sleep accomplishment if I'm going to be able to keep up with my family. 'night.

I wrote the other day about the various changes I was juggling, and how they were all proceeding in lockstep towards an as-yet-invisible point of completion. I'm not done yet, quite, but I'm about to fire one hell of a warning shot across the bow of our software:

21 files changed, 312 insertions(+), 1106 deletions(-)

Even if you're one of the folks whose eyes glaze over every time you see something here in a monospace font, I want to draw your attention to the fact that I'm fixing bugs while removing hundreds of lines of source code. I don't get to do that very often, but when I do, man, it's a great feeling.

What the hell, I'm going to geek right out — normal people can skip ahead to the ellipsis, and I won't be hurt at all.

Some great discussion about iterative development over in Hoyeland. Alex and the other other Mike have said most of the things that I wanted to say, but a few things remain to tempt me.

Most importantly, for all the times that I've been involved in projects that tried to do non-iterative development, I've never seen any that did. You always end up needing to make changes, unless you're building software faster than any outside factor (competitive landscape, customer needs, marketing whim) can change. I've never seen interesting software completed that quickly, and I've worked with some pretty sweet teams. So now you have two choices: "fall back" to iterative development, or start a new waterfall attempt. (Alex and Mike and Mike and I are going to chuckle about that link for a fair while, I think.) At Zero-Knowledge, I used to tell people to treat software change like rain. You can either spend your days doing rain dances to keep it at bay — design once, then never look back — or you can buy some bloody umbrellas and learn to live with it. Maybe plant some flowers.

The other problem with doing waterfall is that you're fighting a losing battle against time. You do a pile of design up front, it takes a month or two, you write code for 6 months of a 4-month schedule, polish and document and box and ship, and now, hey, look at that: you have software that's targetted at a 10-month-old market. Of course, if your market isn't totally moribund, it's moved a little bit in that time. Your customers need to integrate with new things, your competition has released some things with shiny new features that your sales guys have to answer awkward questions about, and, huh, who knew that you'd need a client for OS X? Oh, and of course, you were late. So now you really need to nail the next iteration, so you end up with a more ambitous — pronounce that "long and fragile" — design cycle, a development phase that's even more overblown, and you end up losing ground on the market by even bigger chunks.

I'm not sure if I believe in all of the things that XP would have us do, but I can buy all the way into short, sharp iterations with frequent review of what would be the best use of development effort now. (If Phik wants to send me to Italy to find out more, I can probably find the time to pack.)

SCO suing IBM about Linux is just pure comedy gold. Even ignoring the fact that SCO bought Caldera — yes, they named their company "smoking crater" — and is now suing IBM over putting things in Linux, the basic situation is that SCO is bringing a knife to an intellectual property gun battle. My current theory is that SCO's outside counsel pushed them into this, in order to get more money out of SCO than the bankruptcy proceedings would provide.

I'm not the CEO of Red Hat or anything, so maybe I'm just missing something, but I really don't see how Sun could produce a non-GPL'd version of Linux.

...

OK, I'm done now. I also went driving today with Alasdair, who was a very patient passenger, a source of calm wisdom about his car — did you know that the Mustang I'm taking lessons in can actually creep forward just on idle revs, without stalling? did you know that Alasdair's Honda can't? — and a pleasant dinner companion. He even tried valiantly to remain non-smug about the play of the Leafs the other day. We both miss Alyn. I don't think I hurt his car too badly.

(This is getting long now, no? Stay with me: this next one is really important.)

I should have written about this long ago, but I'll try to make up for lost time now. Back when I told people that I'd like people to give to charity in lieu of giving me birthday presents — and this was, I swear, intended not to solicit such things as much as to deflect people who were already intending birthday-gift silliness towards more reasonable practices — um...that sentence just totally got away from me. Anyway, Mehmet, about whom this paragraph is ostensibly written, combined big-heartedness and athleticism in his usual way, and risked his very life and limb at the Matterhorn Matt All-Night Charity Ultimate Tournament. By all accounts, a great time was had, and I'm touched that Met chose to participate "in my name" — I was, in fact, touched some time ago when Mehmet first told me about this. I don't know what I did to deserve this sort of thing, but it must have been in a previous life. All I did in this one is drag him out to arcades at very academically-questionable times and forget his birthday with a regularity that would make the USNO blush.

My driving lesson was cancelled today. Ah well. It's not like I don't have things to fill the time. And while I'm sure that I will, someday, be perfectly capable of handling a rear-wheel-drive vehicle on streets with 15cm of fresh snow, I guess it's reasonable for that to not be on the second day of in-car instruction.

Phil and I like to work together, because we have a psychic mind link which allows us to coordinate our efforts with the precision of an atomic clock.

cvs server: [10:40:40] waiting for pschwan's lock in
      /cvsroot/lustre/lustre/include/linux
cvs server: [10:41:10] obtained lock in /cvsroot/lustre/lustre/include/linux
cvs server: Up-to-date check failed for `include/linux/lustre_net.h'
cvs server: Up-to-date check failed for `include/linux/obd_class.h'
[15 more]

S'ok, pal. I didn't have 400 lines of changes in my tree, or anything.

...

My last in-class session was today, and it was...well, it was. Wasn't bad, wasn't great, you know, the way most things in life are. They ran a video of "National Driver Test" that CTV and YD did a decade ago, and of course we all knew the right answers. So now everyone leaves that room thinking that they're near-perfect drivers, which is just what we need. I didn't bother to ask about the fact that the video was asking us to describe how we do drive, rather than how we're supposed to drive, and that it was possible that, you know, we didn't likely have an established driving style, since only three of us had more than one in-car lesson. Then they showed us another "drunk driving is bad" video, and asked us to fill out a feedback form. What? They were asking for it.

For the record, you know, I offered to do this job for them back in January of last year. I'm not really bitter, but it would make reading threads like this even more entertaining. The Wolfpack guys (and gals, I presume, though I never met any of their female employees) are pretty smart, and they really did a much better job designing their server software than I have been led to believe is common in that industry but I have this niggling suspicion that they might have won a little bit more if they'd had a little more in the way of state machines and a little less in the way of inter-thread communication. I mean, I'm working with a very limited set of data here, and I'm not one of the "state machines are what smart people use instead of threads" crowd, but still: that's what my gut says. Maybe I'll have to hit Austin and visit a pub with them again and see how very, very wrong I must be. (I understand that AC1 did a good job with their server architecture, though they ended up not using most of the fancier clustering and balancing features, and ran roughly over the shoals of not having enough flexibility in other parts of their engine. Not the first time that song's been sung in the software space either, of course.)

(No, I had no idea how I was going to get Tyla to move to Austin.)

I still don't understand airline pricing, but I did have a good time reading about it.

For dinner, I made some pork chops and pasta. Tyla asks that we never ever prepare pork again without brining it, and I think that's all I need to say about that meal.

I didn't get to sleep until, uh, nevermind last night, and then I started today with a mildly irritating conference call, so this was looking like a Tuesday of unusually sucky proportions.

Right after that meeting, I got on a much better meeting where we figured out the rest of my work for LL 1.0. Well, the rest of the recovery work. You can see that I'm not doing all the work, but you know. I'll feel most nervous about it until it's done.

I like game design. It's fun. Even if I never actually get to work on a game — and these days it feels like I might never play a game again — it's a wonderful intellectual exercise, and it stretches my brain in different ways than the other stuff I do. In a parallel universe, where time has no meaning and I can plan my way out of a wet paper xylophone, I'd be off to the GDC again this year, to pay special attention to the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and everything that Doug Church comes anywhere near. Ah well, maybe next year.

More in-car driving lesson stuff tomorrow. There's a lot of snow on the ground, so it'll be pretty exciting. By which I mean, of course, that it will be a fantastic opportunity to improve my defensive driving skills, and that there will precisely zero skidding about and giggling. Alasdair, maybe it's best if you go back and unread this paragraph.

New MGB album out today. Consume, my friends; consume with all your consumptive might. I'm sure the rest of his old band did a wonderful job, and I quite enjoyed their performances, but this solo effort makes it pretty clear who put the "Matthew Good" in "Matthew Good Band".

I'm about to start reading the first book in the Wheel of Time series, which I have been led to believe will cause me to hate Robert Jordan — specifically, his publishing non-schedule — with great fury and passion. I'm already a patient fantasy fan, so I think I'll be OK.

I've actually read a few good books in the last few weeks (Pattern Recognition, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Humans), and I should write more about my thoughts on them. Or, you know, keep meaning to for a month or two and then just forget about it once the moment has passed. I can play it either way; crazy like a fox.

I've been sort of schizophrenic at work for the past mumble days, popping back and forth between different parts of the stuff I'm working on, as work on one change points out a need to get a little farther with another piece. Now I'm about 80% done with five nice changes, and I have nothing checkin-able to show for it. Frustrating, and it doesn't make dealing with my current up-and-down focus-swings any easier. But soon I'll be able to land a nice set of changes, and feel all good about myself.

Working on recovery stuff is weird. My job is really to make sure that relatively infrequent occurances don't make things hurt too badly. It's hard to measure incremental success — I don't get to make things a bit faster or bigger or more efficient: either we survive a failure or we don't. Also, as our software gets more stable, it turns out that it gets harder to validate my changes. I hadn't expected that.

Hoye raises a good point about useful diagnostics and error messages. One of the interesting parts of the work I've been doing over the last week is cleaning up our recovery-related error-reporting story. The core issue is balancing two things:

• When a machine enters recovery — and, hopefully, exits unscathed out the other side — we want to tell the administrator a fair bit about the failure that occurred, what we're doing to fix it up, and how that process is proceeding. In many cases, these diagnostic messages may be the only forensic evidence available after the fact to help figure out what went wrong, so the compleatist in me needs to be indulged. But:
• When you have a thousand nodes cough and sputter due to a single event, such as a critical server taking its ball and going home, what was once considered "helpfully thorough" quickly becomes "an unbearable onslaught of logging data".

I'm erring on the side of verbosity right now — I know, that must be very difficult to believe — but I have this feeling that I need to swing back the other way a fair bit. Is it OK to log a string of extremely concise description and just expect the administrators to learn to decode it, or hand it up the chain to their support contact? Should I be providing tools to aid in the interpretation? Is there any way I can make this a configuration problem, and thereby stick it on Robert's plate?

Whatever the answer is, I bet it's not this:

<Isidien>

msvcprtd.lib(MSVCP70D.dll) : error LNK2005: "public: __thiscall std::basic_string<char,struct std::char_traits<char>,class std::allocator<char> >::~basic_string<char,struct std::char_traits<char>,class std::allocator<char> >(void)" (??1?$basic_string@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@V?$allocator@D@2@@std@@QAE@XZ) already defined in GameObjects.lib(Player.obj)

...

As if that weren't geeky enough, I just have to say something about Judy. Zach pointed me towards it the other day, and the "shop manual" is a great example of technical documentation. I'm sure none of you like data structure stuff as much as I do, but this is my diary, so nyaaaah.

(Confidential to Kev: I still love you! I haven't even thought clearly about Halo in what feels like an eternity. Soon, though. So soon.)

We pushed out a new interim release of Lustre yesterday, only hours before Phil discovered an embarrassing bug in the recovery code. I'm not 100% sure I caused it, but it did reveal a significant gap in the test set I'd been running. Fixed, but still shame-inducing. I think I'll pause my part of the rearchitecture work — letting Phil continue to kick ass, of course — and just bang on recovery with a test-mallet for the rest of the evening.

After we go watch Madhava's concert. I'm sure it'll be wonderful, even if it is in a church.

...

The concert was quite nice, though we showed up ten minutes late. See, I was showering, and we ran out of hot water, and...never mind. We were almost on time. While we were there, it got cold out, and in one heck of a hurry. Otherwise-pristine pools of water and slush became mirror-like patches of purest glazed treachery. And I forgot my hat.

I get to eat the pie soon, though I'll have to brave Hilary's company. Normally, that's not a big problem, but right now she has some lung thing that may turn out to be whooping cough. Mom sent me my vaccination info a few weeks ago, so I guess I should dig that up and find out if I'm going to die for the taste of lovely pie.

I mentioned brining in the past, and Phil is a fan, but I really want to drive this home. Even if you're not a fantastic cook, it is nothing short of imperative that you bring this technique deep into your heart. Cherish it, like a fond memory or a childhood toy.

To start with, it makes stuff taste better. I mean, you get to put salt and sugar and seasonings right inside the food, where they can mingle productively with the flavourosomes and other important parts of the chowganism. This is really reason enough to play the brining game, though it is possible to misapply brine in such a way as to turn tender, lovely, defenseless shrimp into Dark Warriors of Sodium. You won't do that, though, because you're smarter than I am, and therefore won't brine a handful of shrimp for 24 hours. (Well, you sure won't do it now.)

More important, though, is that brining puts water deep into enemy territory. Moisture mismanagement is the easiest way to screw up a dish, in my dish-screwing-up experience, and brining is like having a second chance in this regard. Like having a scratch monkey perhaps, only not quite as morbid. You can do things like cook your turkey to an internal temperature of two-hundred-and-stupid degrees, or develop a very crisp outside on pieces of chicken, without having to call for pizza. Plan ahead by a few hours, water+salt+sugar, bingo. You'll thank me later.

I burned my fingers cooking today, mainly because I really need to concentrate pretty hard to remember that the lid from an otherwise innocuous saucepan may be some 375 Farenheit degrees if it came out of an appropriately-hot oven recently. I was not concentrating hard enough, it seems. Ow.

Tyla made a pie today. It looks like it teleported in straight from the Elemental Plane of Yummy. I can't eat it, because it's for sharing with friends tomorrow. Friends and sharing both suck, I just decided.

I think it's safe to say that Tyla and I both think we should cook more often, and perhaps more ambitiously, but I don't think either of us are this crazy. And that's a damned shame.

I thought my changes were going to be a little invasive, but then Phil got into the game. Man. I hope nobody was emotionally attached to the old networking code. It's going to be wonderfully better when we're done, though.

I'm not going to Ottawa this weekend. You all knew that all along.

I finally read my birthday card from Mom last night, and listened to some of the songs on the CD that came along with it. *sniff*.

Tyla and Madhava and I went out for dinner, then brought back Army of Darkness. Neither of them had seen it, and I could not permit that to stand.

Where did February go? I mean, I know it's a short month, but this was just silly.

Today was my father's birthday, so I took him out for lunch. We don't get together for lunch as often as we should, partly because I haven't been at the downtown office for a while, but mainly because we never seem to remember to call each other about it. A good time was had, though, and not just the usual two-beer-lunch kind.

I lost virtually none of my time today to IRC and email, instead piling it all into hacking like a machine. I cannot wait to land this branch, because it will make a lot of things work better, and it'll make some things work at all. The best part, really, is that every time I go to make a change it turns out to be less invasive than I expected, which is exactly the sort of treasure I want to be stumbling across at this stage of development.

Alasdair invited me out to a showing of Baraka at the Bloor, and I was gentleman enough to accept. Good flick. I might come with him to Ottawa this weekend, but I think I'll probably end up staying here, hacking my brains out — figuratively, Mom, don't worry — and watching Madhava sing.

Someone, you'll never guess who, scooped the photo out of the Globe's photo system for me. This one is even in colour! I think I was looking sceptical at Chester, who chose that point to climb onto the TV. He knows things, that beast.

Much of today was spent learning how to drive. In addition to the usual Wednesday evening in-class lesson — complete with another practice test full of frustratingly ambiguous questions and incoherent explainification — I got behind the wheel of an actual automobile. Went pretty well, I seem to be a bit of a natural with the whole standard transmission thing. A pleasant surprise, that, since I was very much not a natural when I last tried, which was on Mom's Cherokee 8 or 9 years ago. Can one become a natural over time? Hmm.

The Globe & Mail article turned out pretty well. The quotes are accurate, and while he inferred a few things that I don't quite believe, I'm quite happy with it on the whole. The picture in the print version is nothing special, and certainly not as good as the last time they ran a photo of me. Ah, the glory days.

Too tired to remember much else.

...

Late-breaking flashes of recollection:

• This is spooky.
• This is the best description of Libertarianism I could find in a brief search today. Chief among its virtues is that it represents Libertarianism as neither the saviour of all human endeavour nor the source of all modern evil.
• This is such a huge frittering-away of goodwill that I can scarcely comprehend it.

Also, I found my keys. Goodnight.

As I type this, and I mean that quite literally, there is a nice photographer from the Globe & Mail here taking pictures of Chester. Apparently they're doing a story on some study released today about mental health and "the tech workplace", which clearly includes my living room. Some people's cats are actually quite work-helpful, but ours is really just a pretty face.

I hadn't heard from David Akin since he was at the Post and I was at Zero, but we caught up quickly on the phone this afternoon and then exchanged thoughts about depression, emotional investment, work-life balance, the dot-com boom and bust, foosball tables, the usual stuff. I'll link to the article when it goes up on their site, I guess. Let me know if you see it first.

I actually had a very good experience — relatively speaking, of course — with the people at Zero-Knowledge when I had my last major depressive episode, but I'm sure not everyone is as lucky. The study in question was produced by Warren Shepell, which was — and may still be — the EAP adminstrator for ZKS. I didn't interact with them myself, but some co-workers reported, uh, mixed results. Your mileage will vary, I'm sure, but I did make the point that an EAP is really not a complete solution, and that you still need in-house people who understand some of these issues. Especially because computer people are all a bunch of big babies.

Zach and Alice sent me a birthday gift, because they're insane. I now have my very own princess hat. I don't have a digital camera at home — thank god that the G&M photog left before the the package arrived — so you'll all just have to imagine it.

Tyla was apparently offended by my proportionate response entry below, for which I am therefore compelled to apologize. I certainly didn't intend to insinuate that you were not replete with the very essence of hospitality, merely that you got a little more freaked out by the idea of people coming by in the afternoon without explicit warning than I think was warranted. That was a crappy sentence, but I am so not spending any more time on this issue, and that includes editing.

I made more pieces of recovery work today, and wrote tests for them. I got a little excited about the whole test thing, and dumped some bugs on our intrepid QA lead about getting even more tests working.

Another in-class driving lesson today, and it was everything I had feared. The topic of this lesson was dealing with adverse conditions, including driver impairment, which of course requires amateurish video telling us all about how wonderful some random victim of drunk driving was. One of the videos was about — though we didn't learn this until after the segment ended and the instructor told us — someone who was hit by a car while playing chicken. I'm not sure what the lesson for us is there, unless the lessons are supposed to cover a much broader range of common sense than I had previously suspected. Maybe we're supposed to take away the fact that people can do crazy things on highways, but in that case it might have been good to a) hear from the driver, and not just the girl's classmates, and b) tell us that in the video. Lunacy. I think the whole notion that anyone paying a thousand dollars to learn to drive, in the year 2003, needs to be told that drinking and driving can kill people belies a fundamental lack of respect for the customer's time. I'm sure there's some provincial requirement that we be shown a certain number of tragic yearbook photos, though, so it's probably not all YD's fault.

We did spend some time on the notion of personal responsibility, though, which was unexpected and rather refreshing. Weather doesn't make cars go out of control, and cars don't cause cars to go out of control: inappropriate driving causes cars to go out of control. It is very difficult to end up killing yourself or someone else in a parked car, so make sure you know what you're doing, and be very conservative about your choices, if you decide to take a large, heavy, dangerous vehicle out of that quiescent state. (If I ever end up in an accident and blame the weather or the car — even tire blowouts — please come to my house and read me this entry until I regain my senses. Thank you.)

At least all the silly "hey kids, don't drink and drive" video time gave me a chance to design some solutions to the recovery problems that I came across today. Of course, I could have done that at home, without paying someone for the pleasure, but I'm not bitter or anything.

My sleep cycle is broken like a drunken promise right now, and I don't really expect it to get better in the next few days. Ah well. It was a Sunday.

Last night's Honest Ed's Movie Night was a rousing success, featuring such cinematic abominations as "Gunmen" and Jackie Chan's break-out hit "Fabulous Bodyguards", along with a wide variety of junk food. We'll have to do that again, I think.

For my birthday, Tyla got me a wonderful cookbook, and while I haven't cooked anything out of it yet, she's been cooking up a storm. Yesterday, she made cheese. Unreal.

Most of today was spent in my bathrobe, playing A Tale in the Desert, which is really a fantastically novel game. The game world is a bit sparse, in that it's the size of Egypt and has but a few thousand people scattered throughout it, and you do end up doing a lot of running, but when you throw in the co-operative research paths and rich resource/production system, it all adds up nicely to a game in which there is a real sense of regional community. I guess it's sort of like Pharoah meets The Sims Online, but I say that more because it's easy than because it's true. There's a free 30 day/24-hour trial, a very active community, and you can download the client to get started. There's no combat at all other than some battles of wits and economic competition in the form of some opposed "tests", if that affects your decision at all.

I didn't do any work today. Not a sausage. Tomorrow, I'm going to finish testing the hot, dripping hell out of my latest batch of changes, and then check them in. You're welcome to do the same, but be advised that not just anyone can bring that move. It's a judgement call.

I got up late today, so I haven't hit Honest Ed's yet. And it's now after two o'clock. Apparently, this can cause the destruction of the very universe, especially when combined with having invited people over for the afternoon without informing Tyla of the exact time. I know, I was just as aghast as you that I'd invited people into my home without filling out my TPS forms.

Seriously, though. Untwist thy knickers, wench. People are always welcome in our house in the afternoon, and you know it.

If any of my guests actually show up before I get back from Honest Ed's — in the rain, I add for no particular reason — they are free to bitch at me for misrepresentation of my readiness. Please direct your comments to Chester, our customer relations specialist.

OK, Hixie, I took out the one fixed-point font thing. I hope you're happy. (But I don't think your complaint is at all related to "going on about standards", just for the record.)

...

I spent most of today on one problem with my new patch, which Phil found after approximately 90 seconds of review. I need to go to the Phil-well much more often, and sooner.

Mom's not visiting today, and neither is Phil. Such neglect.

This is a crappy entry, but the next part is important, so look alive out there: Honest Ed's Movie Night is a go. I'm going to go buy movies tomorrow at lunch, and people should feel free to call and/or arrive any time after around 2pm. There are some snacks in the house, but purists will agree that I need to get the bulk of our nourishment from Honest Ed's itself.

There may be a break in the movie-ing to watch the Leafs tear a strip off of Montreal, but it's subject to debate and bribery.

My lovely sister-in-law Sara and her lovely — though I mean it in a very masculine way here, of course — boyfriend Alan arrived this evening for a weekend visit, which should be lots of fun. All the more reason for locals to come for HEMN!

...

No, Jamie, let me assure you that he is not joking at all. Blizzard had some encounters with him in the past, and I probably have old email on the topic that I can post without feeling the slightest bit guilty.

I woke up this morning to a call from Phil, after what must have been almost five hours of sleep. Seems that I'd rendered Lustre inoperative with a checkin yesterday — not the really cool one I wrote at 2am, but a little tiny change I made about twelve hours before — and he was quite reasonably demanding that I fix it. A little embarrassing, but Phil made me feel much better a little while later.

And now I've discovered that the working code I wrote yesterday is really only the tip of the iceberg for support of that scenario, so I've been talking to Phil a lot about the intricacies of the rest of those cases. Fun stuff. He's not coming to Toronto this weekend, in all likelihood, but that's mainly because he wants to avoid seeing my Mom, and not because he's too busy or anything.

...

I took a bath, which turned into a nap, and then I finished the nap in bed. So this means that I had a four-hour sleep starting at 20h00, and that in turn means that my sleep cycle has taken it in the teeth again. Ah well, I guess I can work for a few hours.

I only got a few hours of sleep last night, but then I woke up with a complete and perfect understanding of my bug. Whammo. I don't remember my dreams, but it's not like dreaming about computers has killed anyone recently.

I was pretty tired in my driving class today, and only the combination of emergency-manoeuvre videos and a biggish latte kept me awake. When I got home, though, boy. Oh boy. Wired like a wiry thing.

I put that to good use, by writing some very sweet code, finding some bugs in other people's code, and passing my new test on the first try. Booyah, as the kids are saying. Makes me think that maybe mixing scotch and NNSA-controlled computers isn't the horrible plan that those policemen make it out to be.

Coop, my good man, you don't have to apologize for asking questions. I don't care how dumb they may seem, given a few months' or hours' or moments' hindsight, because when I answer a question for you, it stays answered. A little booyah for you, too.

Tyla's going to Europe to visit Emily, and — not to discourage her or anything — Jacob is talking about coming to visit then. I hope he brings Phil, and maybe even Joe or Chris. We would party very hard. I'm not sure we're actually zoned for that amount of party, but I can probably get a temporary permit.

...

And as if that weren't excitement enough, Phil might come into town this weekend, before jetting off to Calgary or something. I'm not sure where I'd bed him, so to speak, but I'm sure something can be arranged. I'd bat my eyelashes at Madhava now, but it really wouldn't help.

I have totally failed to organize this weekend's Honest Ed's Movie Night. Maybe I can blame it on Alasdair's guest-person, and bail for now. Bah.

...

And seriously: let's lay off the French. It's not like they're Quebecois or anything.

Slow, but steady, progress. That's how recovery is going to get finished. Both yesterday and today were spent doing a lot more thinking and reading than actual testing, but once I found the day-eating bugs they were both relatively straightforward to solve. Almost "duh" grade, except that the interactions are becoming so complex that I am very wary of initial "duh" reactions.

In order to track down today's bug — related to a scenario that will not often happen in real deployments, but which our test suite turns up with tenacious regularity — I pretty much cut myself off from email and other communication stuff. Other than calling Phil all the time, of course. So if you've sent me mail in the last two days — who am I kidding? Nobody still expects 2-day turnaround from me.

It was a good gaming-news day for me. I signed up for, and played a little bit of, A Tale In The Desert, which is quite a refreshing way to wait out the occasional cluster reboot. And later this evening, the NDA was lifted on Shadowbane, which means that I will be free to talk in detail about the state of the game. Except that, you know, I have no time.

Laugh or cry: you decide.

It's my birthday, so I'm going to take a "diary day" off. I can do that, because in this one important way I'm my own boss.

A quick and inadequate thankyou to Mom and Kev, who took my charity request to their big hearts. It really does mean a lot to me.

(Oh, and to Alasdair, who finally got me the picture I'd been meaning to take for years. And everyone who came out to my little pub trip this evening.)

Tyla and Madhava went to Climbing this morning, but I stayed home and puttered with both Lustre and Shadowbane. Both putterings were equally fun, I think. I was really intending to go climbing with them, but I didn't really need to deal with a panic attack or some other overwrought reaction once I got to the top of a wall. I'll have to figure something out, but that figuring wasn't being done this morning.

I did manage to join Tyla and Madhava for post-climbing dim sum, though. Yummy, filling, social: a perfect meal. We considered going to see a matinee of Daredevil, but decided instead that we'd save that as a reward for Madhava finishing an onerous piece of schoolwork.

When we returned home, Tyla was very cold. To warm up, she got in the bath, and I played more Shadowbane. I tried to play this game of computerized Risk with Phil and Joe and Jacob, but I kept clicking in the wrong place and killing the game. (For the record, I think I was performing a perfectly reasonable interface operation, and the software is just stupid and fragile. So there.) We instead tried a few rounds of a new and very difficult type of multiplayer Halo, where the minute xboxgw-induced lag combined with my already-questionable aim to keep me firmly in the cellar.

I had salad for dinner, and sour cola-bottle candy for dessert. It's good to be an adult.

After dinner, I played more Shadowbane. Tried to sleep a little, failed, and played more Shadowbane. I'm really setting myself up for a doozy of a birthday tomorrow, what with the work and driving lessons and perhaps after-lesson drinks with some friends. And now the lack of sleep. It's good to be an adult.

If you're one of those crazy people who's been asking about birthday present ideas (or one of the even-crazier ones who would just go out and pick something), permit me to now exhort you in another direction. Pick a children's charity or food bank, and make a small donation. It'd mean a lot to me.

It was Hockey Day In Canada today, which meant three all-Canadian games, varying filler from tiny towns across Canada (Iqaluit, Medicine Hat, Ottawa), and shameless automotive advantage-taking (of Alasdair).

After we finished our errands, which was in turn after I finished playing a decent pile of Shadowbane, Madhava arrived and we settled in for some Ottawa-vs-Toronto/vodka-vs-us showdown action. I'm not sure how much we drank, but these rules will let you calculate it from the box score:

• ½ ounce for a minor (2- or 4-minute) penalty your team takes.
• 1 ounce for a goal by the opposing team.
• 1 ounce for a major penalty taken by your team.
• 1 additional ounce (total: two ounces) for a shorthanded goal scored by the opposing team.

Madhava and I were on the Toronto side. Alasdair was on the Ottawa side. Alasdair didn't drive home.

I need to figure out why I'm dreading climbing. It's a weird sensation; the prospect makes me quite uncomfortable. Last I climbed, I had some serious fear issues with the descent, which issues I'm pretty sure are the result of my little free-fall episode months and months ago. I don't know why it gets worse with every passing excursion, but that's seems to be the pattern. And if it doesn't get better with practice, or with time elapsed from the incident, I wonder how I'm supposed to get that confidence back.

It's interesting, at least to me, to note that I'm really only bothered by the descent, after the climb has been completed — or, you know, aborted due to fatigue or incompetence — and that I don't really have any problem at all with fear when I'm actually climbing, or even when I fall off the wall onto the rope. Probably related to over-thinking, or maybe a trust issue. Or too much thinking about trust issues?

Sucks. I really enjoy climbing, but now.... Bah.

Today is Valentine's Day, which means that I'm going to watch a movie with Alasdair and my wife. A sort of PG-rated cinematic threesome, if you will.

I don't know about you, mpt, but it sounds from over here like Mr. Raskin has reinvented both sam's UI and emacs isearch. I don't have a Mac, so I can't really check out THE on my own.

I really do love you, Jacob, and not just because of the stylesheet cunning. Smooch.

I need to stop sending email when I'm tired, or something. A huge amount of energy is being wasted on misunderstandings that are likely my fault, and it's a crying shame because we have very important uses for that energy.

...

That actually got mostly resolved today, because we're all grownups. I'm glad.

In case you were wondering, Version 7 Unix did have memory protection:

The system data is not addressable from the user process and is therefore protected.

(From UNIX Implementation, by K. Thompson.)

...

Also, I thought I would share this little tale of craziness:

<eeb>	anyone want a laugh?
<eeb>	the Vendor Widget driver is binary compatible with a bunch of linuxen because........
<eeb>	It has some tables of assembler to try to match against likely places in the kernel
<eeb>	which it then uses to get hold of unEXPORTed entrypoints
<eeb>	and noodle with the protocol tables!
<coop>	that's not funny 'ha-ha', is it?
<shaver>	sounds like the old RIMOS message-API symbol-finding hack
<phil>	yeah

It's OK if you don't understand that, but it's better if you laugh along.

I didn't get as much code written today as I'd hoped I would, but I did manage to design away two nasty problems with what I was about to implement. That's the right thing, I think.

Booked my first in-car lesson for the 26th. Heard back from Air Canada, who are quite reasonably letting me purchase the tiny number of status miles I need for Elite in 2003. Got my hair cut; looks good now.

Phil might come to Toronto this weekend, for our hockey and related gluttonies. That would be neat.

Some minor release fumbles caused a bit of a fire-drill this morning, which was a nice team-building experience if nothing else. Phil barks orders in a really friendly and classy way, in case you were wondering. (I don't think the problems were my fault, because I haven't really been productive enough to get anything into the release in question, but, you know, historically...)

Once that was all settled, I tucked into a second course of the recovery-surgery feast — I like my metaphors shaken, not stirred — and made pretty good progress. I think the best part is that I was again passing basic filesystem tests before it was time to stop for the night, which means I didn't lose critical debugging state during that loserly sleep process.

Robert is starting to really know his way around my recovery code, which means that Phil and Peter will be free to fire me soon. He ran into a few snags, and we discovered that he had, in fact, already tried the things that I was going to suggest. Nice to know that we're on the same page, but it meant I wasn't as helpful as I'd hoped to be. Tomorrow, I'll try to do better.

Second in-class driving lesson today, and now that it's behind me I can book in-car sessions. Might be a good week to stick to public transit, if you're in the Toronto area, and keep an extra eye or three out if you're on the sidewalk. I'm a little bothered by what seems a reasonably important inconsistency between two of the "CollisionFree™ sub-habits", but attempts to get some coherent explanation from the instructor were fruitless, so maybe I'll just sleep on it instead. And ask my in-car instructor, I suppose. On the whole, the lessons have been pretty good so far. I know a fair bit about the rules of the road, and the way traffic works — I did drive legally and otherwise for about 18 months on my various learner's permits, after all — but it's already been pretty educational.

Now, I could live without the constant use of items from Jay Leno's Tragic Accident Clippings, Volume 5 to illustrate the importance of, you know, doing the things they're telling us. I don't really see the point of that: does anyone in the room not know that people die in car accidents? The instructor also has an easy laugh that's part of his "filler" when speaking, and that makes for some morbid moments. Good thing none of the family of Ahmed, the 8-year-old that "wasn't smart enough to stay away from parked cars", were in the class tonight, I guess.

My friend Gavin had a poker night tonight, and they ordered pizza from 2-4-1 (no link, they don't get my help). Didn't go so well:

<Gavin> Man. I'm still mad about the pizza thing tonight.
<Gavin> A 2-4-1 pizza arrived a few minutes late, they wouldn't give it to me free.
<Gavin> I phoned the headquarters to talk about it while the delivery guy was there. He kept getting upset that I was talking about a few minutes.
<Gavin> (they say: "40 minutes or free", he hears: "43 minutes or free!")
<Gavin> then he ran into my apartment, picked up the pizza from my kitchen, and ran away with it.
...
<Gavin> Anyway, so when the alarm was over when he came, I knew it was late. The guy on the phone said something like "I guess we didn't anticipate people who didn't have something better to do with their time than set a timer"

I think that kinda speaks for itself.

All that talking and thinking and muttering really started to pay off today. Phil and I tore through the implementation of our latest design like ravenous code-wolves after a season's fast, and everything worked on the first try. That's what I'm talking about.

Alasdair's birthday today, so I took him out to Young Thailand for some yummy Thai food and quite a nice conversation. I know Jacob would approve, at least of the Thai food part. Among other things, we started to plan this weekend's hockey gluttony, and next weekend's Mike and Alasdair's First Invitational Honest Ed's Movie Night. More about that later, but Toronto-area hockey fans should feel free to drop by on Saturday any time after noon.

Jane Jacobs really likes Toronto, and so do I. Right now I can hear the gentle scrapes and slaps of shinny being played across the street, so I'm going to go lie down in my bed with my shiny new copy of Pattern Recognition and catch up on the sleep I didn't get last night. (Madhava would never tell you this, unless you paused for breath or something, but Jane Jacobs lives on his street, a mere two blocks from us.)

(Yes, Andrei, I'll send you those links tomorrow, when I find them again.)

Phil's and Peter's messages arrived, just as I expected they would. Instead of continuing to read diffs of raw T_EX source, I'm going to generate a new PDF and print that at Kinko's today. I already said things about Phil's mail, but they weren't all that smart.

Grown-ups did that. Never forget that.

...

Went downtown to drop off a book at the office, and forgot to take the book (sorry, Leandro!). Had a nice sushi lunch with Ken, then came back and wrote kinda-smart things in response to Peter's email.

Took a driving lesson today (classroom), while Tyla was off swimming. Was pretty decent, for a first-lesson-in-a-classroom. Might miss next Monday's lesson, because I arranged tickets for a test screening of Crime Spree in observance of my birthday, but I could probably find someone else to take them off my hands. Otherwise I have to wait until March to take that lesson over — including a test! ooh! — and that seems like not a lot of fun.

In that I've started thinking about my birthday, I have yet again come to the annual realization that I totally forgot my good friend Mehmet's. I wonder how many times I can do that before I stop being allowed to use the phrase "good friend". At least he didn't have to remind me this year! The guilt is all mine!

Oh, and I think it's Alasdair's birthday today, but I'm not completely certain. I'm such a loser.

...

Now I'm completely certain: I'm a loser.

Boy oh boy. All it takes is a little article about Digipen, a few hours talking about really cool game design stuff with Andrei, and catching up on my mud-dev mail, and now I'm all interested in working on games again. I guess I sort of had my chance before, but after I become an expert on recovery, I'm sure I'll be that much better suited for it.

Alton Brown will tell you to brine things, and Phil will tell you to brine everything, but today I learned an important lesson: if your brine is a standard salt-and-water brine, and you are brining shrimp, 18 hours is too long. I ruined a perfectly nice dinner by not knowing this before, and trying to feed my lovely wife food that only Zach "Kidney Failure" Brown could bear. She wisely declined, ate the salad, and made herself a fried egg on toast. Oh, the shame.

After that, Jacob and I held our own against Phil and Joe in a few spirited games of Halo. Joe and Phil have some small cause for complaint, in that telephony provided semi-private conversation for Jacob and me, and I did have a whole TV to myself, but I think at the end of the day we all know that Jacob rocked, and I struggled to not hold him back. Our victory was your victory, Jacob, and I'm honoured to have been by your side. Sniff.

Any moment now, email is going to land on my inbox from Peter, detailing the upcoming week of insane recovery rearchitecture, and from Phil, about our branching and release-management strategy. I will be expected to say smart things about both of those topics by pretty early tomorrow morning. So I sleep now, after reading the very last pages of my book about the gadget.

I stayed up far, far too late last night talking game design with my good buddy Andrei, so I didn't get out of bed until late o'clock today. Happily, it's a weekend, and there isn't too much that I really need to do.

One nice surprise was the discovery that Phil has published his January entries. He's getting dangerously close to caught up, and then the very universe will tremble before his punctuality. It largely stands without comment, but I hasten to point out that I don't really blame him for the mild disaster that work made of our Edinburgh vacation. I mean, the code that was sucking too much was my code, after all.

Revisiting that period does, though, make me feel all guilty and sad inside, for subjecting Chris to our loserly ways in such disappointing fashion. I understand that Phil will be involved in a return engagement in the next little while, which should make up for it. Especially because I'm going to steal his secure-ID dongle so that he can't work. (Attention Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Security Personnel, Yes You With The Machine Gun: this is a joke.)

My next nice surprise was the outstandingly pleasant conversations I had with customer service representatives from both destina.ca and Aeroplan, which now leave me quite confident that I will be granted Elite status for 2003, even though I technically don't qualify. (I am a whopping 600 miles — of 35,000 required — short, and everyone involved seems to think, as I very much do, that I should get a break here. Did I mention that I already have nearly ten thousand miles this year? Yes, I did, in my formal request for status review, sent by email Just Now.)

As a wise man once said: "From elementary group theory we see that computing conjugates of the transformations is the relevant operation to perform." Yeah, it was that sort of day. Peter and Phil and I have been redesigning recovery, which involves a lot of detailed discussions with ever-increasing senses of confidence and accomplishment, followed by a body-blow of "hmm, crap, what if this happens?" This is the good stuff, though: pushing the technological limits of my field to produce maximally reliable systems, while working with people who are terrifyingly smart. This is why I'm in the game.

I was tired, but in a good mood, so I decided to take my wife on a date. Dinner, movie of her choosing, public displays of affection, holding of doors, the whole deal. We dined at Tiger Lily's Noodle House, which was very good — exceptionally good for the price. One especially nice find was Nigori sake, which was one of the finest I've ever had. Recommended, highly.

Tyla's movie of choice was Shanghai Knights, in no small part because she has a thing for Owen Wilson that's sort of like my thing for Emily Proctor, only with less squirming in the chair. The movie itself was quite a bit cleverer than I'd expected, and I rather enjoyed it. I'm glad they retained the sense of fun that made the first one so much, well, fun. Jackie Chan is a great dancer, and I totally forgive him for the painfully faked house explosion at the end of Mr. Nice Guy.

At the end of the movie, after the credits had finished rolling and the house lights had come up, things got a little weird. The guys in front of us stood up and one of them asked, loudly, "has anyone ever punched you in a theatre?" At first I thought he was talking to his buddy, but then it became apparent that he was talking to us. Before that shock had fully subsided, it became clear that he was talking to Tyla. Apparently, he'd asked her three times to stop kicking the back of his chair, none of which times were actually heard by us (and I only saw him turn around once, not that facts were really of interest to anyone at this point). I'm not sure Tyla could have been kicking his chair, given that my legs were crossed over hers for the majority of the movie, but before I could actually figure out what I wanted to say to this guy Tyla had pretty much defused things. I even resisted the bait of his "I didn't threaten you, I just asked...", though part of me wishes that I'd just hopped a seat and smacked him. I mean, what the hell? (I haven't been in a fight worth the name since grade eight, but I had about a foot and fifty pounds (thirty or so non-fat, ahem) on him, and if you can't throw down when someone threatens your wife — sorry: asks a threatening question of her — then why bother learning to form fists in the first place?)

I was still pissed off — mainly at the loser, but also at myself for not even saying anything helpful, let alone defending Tyla's honour in a more traditional fashion — by the time we got to the office to pick up my laptop, but I'm feeling better now. More brain-bending with Phil and Peter helped settle me.

Tomorrow, I'm going to explain to Air Canada how their inability to properly credit my flights shouldn't affect my status with them in 2003. And if I fail to do that, I think I will become a devoted United customer on the spot. I don't think it's an unreasonable request I'm preparing to make, given my track record with Air Canada — including nearly ten thousand miles flown with them in January of this year alone — but we'll see if they see it my way.

I woke up this morning to find Coop gone, but at least he left a note. His help with yesterday's dining extravaganza — roast lemon chicken, scallion-horseradish mashed potatoes, mildly-overcooked broccoli, strawberries and just a teensy bit of wine — was much appreciated. I'll have to drag Tyla to Ottawa in the near future for a rematch.

After I dragged myself out of bed, I spent a little while looking at a bug that turned out to be a false alarm — note to would-be bug reporters: if you say you're using the "latest" tree, and you are in fact using a tree that is 3 days and ~70 checkins out of date, you may find me at your door with instruments of torture. I compensated for that by talking briefly to Peter about the next stages of recovery support, and then followed up with a highly productive conversation with Phil. The latter conversation was so informative, and I am so forgetful and easily confused, that I immediately transcribed our findings. I invite you all to digest that information, so that you can explain it to me when my brain melts over the weekend.

Madhava has shared with us news of an event that is right up my alley, and I mean that in the least proctological manner possible. Also, he reminded me that I wanted to say that Clone High is really quite a funny show. Especially if, like one of our Buffy Night guests, you appreciate Ghandi with a C cup.

I was sure that Anatole would have something poignant and compelling to say about the Columbia explosion, or perhaps about space elevators. Heck, I'd settle for a good story about goats or rabbits with bread on their heads.

Lest there be further unwarranted worrying, I should clarify that my previous mentions of resumé-writing have precisely nothing to do with plans to change jobs, largely because no such plans exist. I won't name names, worrying-person — though I am flattered to count you among my readers! — but I'll give you a hint for future reference: if ever you suspect that I'm intending to leave CFS, you need only look for signs of incredible relief in our CEO.

Coop and I shopped and Alasdair came over and Coop and I cooked and we all drank quite a bit and the food was good so you should always brine your chickens and I think that it's best for all concerned if I just give up and go to sleep now because actually touching the code that I work on for a living would result in some dramatic failures down the line and so I bid you good night.

Coop and I worked from home today, because we had a conference call to deal with and the office at work, well, it's a little cozy for that. Went OK, and I got to sleep in a bit, so everyone wins.

The conference call itself was about plans for the next phase of Lustre and, as I expected, my team's job is to just keep stuff working while others make changes underneath us, and keep our recovery requirements out of the hair of people who are working on the actual performance improvements. Given that "my team" is presently "me", that could be a fair bit of excitement.

I fixed a bug today. It was a dumb bug, and I don't know how that code ever, ever worked. And yet, I know that it did work not that long ago. The wondrous mysteries of my life.

Coop participated in his first Annex Buffy Night this evening, and I'd guess he enjoyed it. More than he enjoyed Rollerball last night, I'm sure. Egads.

Time for bed — I have to fix a bug tomorrow morning before a big debug run on our large test cluster, and besides that Tyla wants me off the computer so that she can, you know, save the world.

I sort of suspected it was the case when Japanese schoolgirls started sending pictures across the internet on their cell phones, but now I'm dead certain that we're living in the future. I wonder if that'll take all the fun out of cooking. Probably not.

I had to wrestle for about 45 minutes this morning with the hard drives in my work machine, so that Coop had something to, well, work on. Seems that it needed some screws tightened, a few plugs secured, and a lock — for which I have never seen the key — returned to the "it's OK, you can use your storage devices" setting. All better now, though.

Tonight, Coop and Alasdair and I are going to go watch the movie that dare not speak its name (around Tyla). In fact, we're doing that in just a little while, so I should get ready to travel.

I was going to write something about the post-Columbia-disaster eBay runs, but after thinking about it some more I'm not sure I still hold my original position. Hmm. Such are the rhetorical perils of sober second thought.

On Saturday, I started doing my weight routine again. I'm still sore, but it's a good sore. Tomorrow morning will probably be a great sore, because I'm due to do some weight work tonight. This is the price I pay for being a slackass for two months, and I can already feel it building character.

I don't know if I'd have gone with this naming choice for the upcoming Matthew Good Band tour, given recent events, but that's not going to keep Phil and me away. No siree.

...

We're living in the future, and Phil is no longer living in the past! Huzzah!

Last night Tyla and I went to a birthday dinner for my good buddy Ken, and had a wonderful time. We're trying to eat out less, as a shot-in-the-dark way to manage money a little more like the grownups we're supposed to be, but this sort of occasion is definitely an exception. Citron had yummy food, and very nice service. Recommended.

This afternoon, we went to see Madhava's choir group perform at the ROM. Nice concert, and we should really get to the ROM more often now that we're members and stuff.

Now Coop is here, so of course we had to watch a cinematic masterpiece. Ahem. At least Coop's here!

Phil meant to write in his diary about the fact that the Indian astronaut on Columbia wasn't part of the Indian space programme, and that it wasn't her first flight, but he slipped and sent it in email instead. I'm sure he'll fix that up soon, though.

Everyone is by now aware of the accident that claimed the lives of everyone aboard Columbia this morning. NASA has a good summary of what's known so far, and is minimally sensationalist; I hope they'll keep it up to date. It's quite possible that more people have died driving to work at NASA over the last 17 years than perished in the Columbia and Challenger accidents combined, but there's still something tragic — and perhaps even oddly beautiful, though that sounds more morbid than I want it to — about people losing their lives in pursuit of human knowledge and exploration. The space program, for all its too-human faults, has been of tremendous symbolic and practical value to the cause of scientific discovery for more than fifty years now, and there's still a twinkle of "hero" that I hear everytime I come across the word "astronaut".

My heart also goes out to the supporters of the Israeli and Indian space programs; what a shame that their first in-flight contributions would be such bitter sacrifice. I hope that they don't lose sight of the larger dream, as the US will not (according to comments today from President Bush).

Since the dawn of mankind's quest to "slip the surly bonds of Earth", space travel has been a fragile balance of risk and adventure. Happily, Richard Nixon never had to deliver the speech written for him in the event that Apollo 11's crew were lost, but William Safire's words seem appropriate for today:

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. [...] Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied.

I wrestled with my test suite today, and I think it came out to a draw. Didn't find any new core-recovery bugs, and spent a long time tuning the infrastructure, but I did fix a lot of cleanup bugs that have been bugging people for a while. Not bugging me so much, which is why they didn't get fixed before, but still.

Madhava and Tyla and ALASDAIR and I are going to get some food and then watch a bad movie. The Recruit might do well in that role, if Tyla can be convinced.

I was thinking about Chinese New Year celebrations as an alternative to moviegoing, but now I'm not so sure I'd enjoy that. Snakes are a little iffy for me at the best of times, you see.

January has just about ended, and I'm about to acheive total failure with respect to my New Year's resolutions. Maybe I'll do better next month. (Other than the exercise one, all I really hoped to do in January was sign up. How hard is that? Sigh.)

...

Forgot to publish when we got back from the movies (Catch Me If You Can, because of Tyla's influence and timing) and dinner (Sottovoce, pretty good). There was a time when LiveJournal would sort of screw itself up if I added to a day's entry after it had grabbed one copy, so I would try to just publish once for the day. I missed it when Jacob pointed out that they fixed that bug, but now I don't have to worry. So I'll just publish all the time, and fill the world with timely joy.

This morning, Tyla got up early, showered, answered her email, ate a healthy (if small) breakfast and walked to U of T, where she participated in an Aquafit class. Meanwhile, I sat in my boxers on the couch, typing on my laptop, watching Muchmusic, and eating Fuzzy Peaches. I swear, sometimes it feels like we're the same person. When is she going to start living her own life?

Work went well: my test suite is starting to bear fruit, in the form of bugs that I'm finding and fixing before the customer gets a chance. I fixed about ten bugs today, half of which were problems or omissions in the test infrastructure, and the other half of which were things in the recovery space that Just Weren't Right. And then I got to explain to my good buddy Phil some of the way recovery works — how we deal with replaying opens and closes correctly, to be more specific than any of you really want. Slowly, I'm working off the huge clue-debt I accumulate every time I look into the lock manager and then make Phil's phone ring.

Coop isn't coming to visit on the weekend proper, but it sounds like I'll get to enjoy his company during the week instead. He'll get to join us for Buffy night, and we can even get some work done together. Much fun.

This evening, Madhava invited Tyla and me along to a production of Un ballo in maschera at the Hummingbird Centre. It was a lot of fun, and I'm now three for three when it comes to enjoying opera performances. I should go more often — especially if Madhava can keep scoring these sweet $15 tickets.

Bedtime. Tomorrow I will spout productivity like a geyser and get the recovery test-train rolling at full steam. Also, I guess I should go and buy some more metaphors. Cripes.

I work on recovery. This means that I'm responsible for getting the cluster — or, at least the filesystem parts — back into mostly-serviceable shape automatically, if (OK, when) something goes wrong. Could be a network failure, or one of the server or client computers crashing. Maybe a rack loses power, or we hit a fatal bug in our server software and it autoreboots. The combinatorial explosion of failure modes and their effects is really pretty impressive, and makes for some challenging analysis problems. ("OK, but what if the file was created on the other client, and then we have to replay the open on this client?" "Wait a sec, that transaction could make it to disk before we send the reply to the dead client.")

Today, I embarked in earnest on a test suite to let us test the various combinations of, well, recovery things that we care about. (This is, for the record, the same test suite I told Coop yesterday to not write. After I told him to write it. Tee hee.) I'm very excited, because the quality of tests tends to have a significant correlation with the quality of the code in question, and I think it's pretty important that recovery, our "software safety net" be robust.

And just in time! Phil and Peter have each put both fists — that's four flying fists of hacker fury, in total — through the lock management and metadata parts of Lustre, and it's going to break some parts of recovery like a drunken promise. I don't mind, though, because it's improved our stability so much.

When I wasn't fretting over recovery today — I seem to do that a lot since I started this job, don't I? — I was reading some pretty entertaining stuff on the interweb. Colby Cosh is a funny guy, and this bit from an article about the Davos conference registered as Officially Funny over here in this armchair that I'm calling an office this week:

For some, life begins at conception, for others at birth. "According to Jewish law," deadpanned Yossi Vardi, an Israeli software entrepreneur, "life begins when the fetus becomes a lawyer."

My main man Jacob has acquired hockey tickets for my next trip to Boston. It's all starting to come together.

I was a little bit concerned about getting back into the rhythm of work after four days away — my god, four whole days! — so I decided that I'd make myself feel a little less outclassed by sending Coop off on a wild goose chase for a few hours. Sorry about that, bud. (Also, I can't believe you didn't like Office Linebacker ad. "Hi, Janice!")

I still have a nagging chest cough thing, but it's getting better. It might be my annual bronchitis — no joke, it happens every January — in which case I will end up living la vida penicillin.

I don't have a lot of trouble believing that this site exists, though at one time I would have spent a lot of time fretting over such an obvious sign of the apocalypse, but I do have trouble understanding why Boing Boing linked to it. You feeling OK, Cory? Are there a lot of people who are wardriving or otherwise flitting about from network to network, but don't know how to find out their own IP address? If so, is that a huge victory for wireless network usability, or a savage condemnation of the usability of the rest of the network software floating around? I'm sure mpt can tell me.

Four days left in January, and I have already pretty much blown one resolution — 30 minutes of exercise every day — for no good reason. Still have a chance to get some of the other ones underway before I fly past my self-imposed "during January" window of victory.

I'm tired, and I need to shake this cold, so I'm going to go off to bed and read about the discovery of plutonium. February 1 will usher in a whole new month, I predict. And maybe some exercise!

OK, just to be clear, I have no idea why I haven't been publishing the entries for the past few days. I was reminded on Friday that I hadn't published Thursday's, but it really seemed to not stick. Given that "publishing" involved typing one 20-character command, it's a little disappointing. For me, anyway.

...

"Mystery" solved, as though you care: I was issuing said command in the wrong directory, thereby republishing December's last entry over and over. I'm going to be unstoppable at work tomorrow, I can tell.

Tyla and I went grocery shopping. Then we ate sandwiches. Now we're going to watch some Super Bowl and then probably I'll play more Shadowbane. It's so fun!

Played more Shadowbane this afternoon. There's a big story-arc event going on tonight, with seiging and feature characters and all manner of fun stuff, but I'll have to miss it: Tyla and I are joining Aven, Mark, Madhava, Hilary, and Rob for a spot of celebration in observance of Rabbie Burns Day. Should be good fun, so off we go!

...

That was quite fun, though the conspicuous lack of pipers made it seem — other than the haggis, of course — like it was just another evening at the pub with some friends. Which is a quite wonderful way to spend one's time, but I guess I was hoping for something a little more...experiential.

...

And, because we're both morons, Tyla and I are coddling our sick selves — Tyla has a cold-like thing that I am still not taking responsibilty for — by staying up until 5AM playing on various computers. Alas.

As I had hoped, but didn't dare to predict, I felt a lot better this morning. Probably 80%. There was a time, back in the silly days of my youth, when I would have jumped back into work with both feet, knocking myself out to make up lost time. But I'm older and wiser these days, or at least less hardy, so I decided to take today as a day of rest and additional recuperation. Nobody at work seemed too upset; they're probably just glad that I'm not breaking anything.

I played some Shadowbane — which is shaping up into quite a fun little diversion, I must say — napped and read a lot, didn't go out anywhere, all responsible I'll-get-better-or-die-trying behaviour. Yay for me.

It would have been fun to zip to Ottawa for the weekend and watch the superbowl with Coop and Kev and James, and maybe go to a Sens game with Alasdair, but that would also have been irresponsible.

Time for bed, nice and early. Tomorrow, I get to go out and see people!

I had trouble propping myself up in bed last night, such that my lungs would work as designed, so I ended up retiring to the futon with Chester instead, where I fell asleep sitting up for a fair while. When I awoke, I still felt like I'd been beaten with a Buick, so I fished around for my doctor's phone number and made an appointment for 6pm.

In the interim, I talked to Phil a little bit — he's a wonderful guy, and goes so far out of his way to make me feel good about my mildly-broken work that it's quite unbelievable — and then had a nap. When I woke at 5pm, ready to call a cab to hit the doctor's, I noticed something strange. Something different. What's this? I can breathe. I'm not coughing every ten seconds. Whoa, whoa, whoa, my nostils are useful.

Well, holy crap. I called the doctor back to reschedule my appointment to tomorrow — if I'm feeling even better then, then I don't need to waste her time, though I really should get my prescription refilled soon; hmmm... — and she thanked me for not coming in if I was on the mend. It's the little things, really.

Of course, I'm not yet "hey, anyone want to build a house?" better, or even, as we discovered today, "maybe I should check some code into the source tree right before our next milestone release!" better, but the derivative is positive, and I'm in a much better mood. I can take a bath without the steam sending me into body-wracking fits of coughing!

In fact, I think I'll do that right now.

(Confidential to Asa: it seems I don't have Mitchell's bacterial thing — we compared symptoms on the phone today — but you're a sweetie nonetheless. Thanks a lot.)

We all die a little every day. I know this, and largely accept it. This week, though, I really seem to have made significant progress. No noticeable improvement this morning, and Tyla thinks I sound worse. If she were a doctor, or even really awake, that would probably worry me a little.

...

I wrote the rest of that recovery test plan today, and I got in a lot of the old "praying for the sweet release of death", but that's about it. The temperature swings have calmed down somewhat, but the chest congestion has picked up the slack and the caulking-of-the-sinuses seems to be here to stay. Rumour has it that my good friend Mitchell, with whom I spent far too little time on my Californian trip, has something very similar, and it's a bacterial condition that requires treatment. So, yeah, it's doctor time. (You win, mom.)

I pity the fools that shared AC754 with me.

I've been telling Tyla that I love her a lot today, because I want those to be my dying words.

I had hoped to sleep on the plane back, since it was a red-eye and that's what they're for. Failing that, I was willing to settle for getting some work done, because there's always enough of that lying around to fill a few hours.

Instead, I was too tired to work, or even read, and too cold and uncomfortable to sleep. Non-upgradeable tickets are really starting to seem like false economies, given how much travel I'm doing.

When I got home, I slept for 5 sweet hours, in a perfectly comfortable bed with my perfectly lovely wife. Then I woke up with a sore throat and mild congestion. As of this writing, they have only worsened. There is no Neo Citran in the house, and we're now out of honey.

That didn't keep me from a handful of bugs, though, which is making me believe that my groove might really have returned. Tomorrow, I will write a test plan for Lustre Lite 1.0's recovery support, and then probably spend a fair bit of time talking with our testing stud about how to turn that into reality. I was thinking of having Coop come to Toronto for a few days this week (not Super Sunday, of course, because Kev and James would have my ass in a sling), but the Velocet offices are in the final throes of renovation, and it's really quite a disaster.

I forgot my tux-vest in California. Have to call the hotel tomorrow and have them mail it to me. Or maybe get Pav to pick it up and do the mailing, though that didn't work at all with my Netwinder.

Also, while I was away my desktop machine was moved and during the process the power cable for one of the CPU fans got wedged in the fan itself, rendering the apparatus totally useless for cooling the processor. As a result, the processor pretty much melted, so I have to sort out replacement bits sometime this week.

My loving and wise mother bought me a book of historic speeches for Christmas, and since today was Martin Luther King Day, she lovingly and wisely pointed out that I should cue up the CD to his speech and give it a listen. Great idea, and I know I said I'd do it, but I'm just way too cold-tired to give Mr. King the attention he deserves. Maybe I'll remember to rip the CD before my next trip (this week, to Ottawa, perhaps) and I can absorb wisdom and eloquence while I flit about the globe, or at the very least the province.

Just for the record, I didn't make Joe recant, and I didn't set out to make him look like a fool. I just feared the worst, as I often do with Mozilla.

The wedding last night was pretty great. I'd never been to a nuptial mass before, and the biggest impression I took away was that there was not a lot of room for negotation on some points of Catholicism policy. I can handle that, though, given that I was very much on their turf. (And beautiful turf it was.)

Pavlov finally arrived to come to SF with me — Caltrain doesn't offer weekend service right now, wonderfully — so we're off to see dmose and maybe the Watersons. Then dinner with Jamie and a red-eye back. My jet lag is going to be fierce.

I just got back from Hyatt's, after Brendan and Eleanor's wedding, and I'm really tired. I'm not going to even do a crappy list of things. Good night.

Most of today was occupied by Air Canada flight 757, and transit related thereto. Actually, it was only about 8 hours, of the 22 I've been awake as of this writing, but spiritually it was a clear majority.

I got a lot of work done on the plane, which felt great. I might really be back in the groove this time. A really frightening problem — frightening in that we really had no idea what would cause extN to behave that way, not in that it woke me in the middle of the night with loud noises — turned out to be something else entirely. I've rarely been so happy to find three involved bugs in my code in the span of an hour, but Andreas and I had a good little analysis run.

My tux is being cleaned and pressed overnight. My hotel is literally a five minute walk from both the cleaners and the site of tomorrow's wedding ceremony. The hotel also backs directly onto the Caltrain station, which was very convenient for visiting Mitchell for dinner, and hanging out with Casey and Jarett (did I spell that correctly?) and Dawn and Myk and Judy. So far, this trip is pretty darned sweet.

I'm going to go to bed now. When I wake up tomorrow — I'm guessing around 9am my time — Peter and Phil will have changed everything on me.

This was a pretty geeky entry. Sorry about that, if you're not the pretty-geeky sort; it was a pretty geeky day, too.

I was going to write something interesting here, I swear, but then I checked my itinerary for tomorrow's flight, and discovered that it leaves at nine fifteen in the morning, instead of three something in the afternoon. So instead I'll just tell you what's in my head right now:

Tux (jacket, pants, vest, suspenders, tie, cufflinks, shirt-studs, shoes, socks), underwear, more socks, passport, itinerary, Mitchell's cell number, Robert's cell number, shirts, slacks, belt, Nomad, Nomad cable (left it at work, I lose), sunglasses, reserve a taxi.

I haven't been very productive over the last couple of weeks — basically since I got back from Edinburgh, mildly burned out — but it's starting to slowly pick up again. I might get to spend some time working with Robert at the tail end of this trip, which would be good.

[Ed.: cp draft.html cotnent.html does not quite publish. Close, though!]

I said I'd be back, but I never said I'd be prompt about it. Regular readers, or people who have actually met me, know that promptness is not my strongest suit. Sometimes, in fact, I think I've been dealt a void. But enough about me.

Quite a little surge in hits over the last few days, due to the news.com story; from my usual daily average of ~450 to yesterday's record of nearly 5000. I bet that at least 4500 of those hits resulted in disappointment.

Anyway, I have two major points of clarification with respect to Mr. Festa's article. I don't dispute that I said the things that he quoted, and I won't pretend I don't believe them, but I do think that there was a significantly larger amount of "KHTML beats/helps us in some areas, and we beat/help them in others" when the quotes were taken in context. Even Safari developers will tell you that Gecko's "correctness" is materially better than KHTML's, for standards-compliant and legacy-quirk content alike. Safari also took one of the most complex and effort-intensive parts of Gecko, the view manager, to add to KHTML, because Gecko's worked so well.

This brings us to the next point of concern: I don't believe that my statements, even the very ones he quoted, support his contention that Apple's choice "stings" Mozilla. Certainly, some of the presentation of Apple's numbers (such as comparing KHTML's size to that of the Java-laden Netscape browser suite) were a little troubling, and jwz has never been known to spare the vitriol, but that's not really the same thing. I explicitly said that I wasn't offended or embarrassed by Safari's performance or the fact that they chose KHTML. I've known about Apple's choice for many, many months, and I wasn't even offended then. Apple had some goals for their browser that weren't met by Mozilla, and certainly ease-of-modification is one of them. I think Safari is great news for Mozilla, because it provides another source of effort for another open source browser, from which we can learn things, as they have learned from Mozilla.

(I really wish KHTML had been "All That" when we were starting out on Gecko, because it would have provided a sanity check against some of the problems that dbaron points out. Their appearance on the scene heralds, IMO, only good things for Mozilla as a project and a technology, other than the inevitable distraction of people trying to spin it into a new browser war.)

That's probably all I'm going to say about this little episode, because I have a lot of other stuff to think about and work on, and I'm already pretty cranky. Festa has robbed me of more hours of my life, and I keep swearing that it won't happen again.

In other crappy media news, the public lost an important Supreme Court case today, opening the door for what could well be an indefinite copyright protection period in the United States. I'm interested in seeing whether or not Canada "harmonizes" its copyright duration laws (read: "kowtows to the US") in time to keep "Steamboat Willie" from entering the public domain up here.

Coop is almost done with a most righteous test suite. I'm quite impressed, especially since I provided basically none of the help I promised. Yay coop, boo me.

Dinner last night with Kev was a wonderful feast of seafood and beer and great conversation. It was great to see him again, especially because he hadn't seen Madhava since The Days Of The Moustache (Moustake?). If you're ever looking for a fun dinner companion, I recommend Kev highly, and if you're looking for oysters and seafood, I can now recommend Rodney's Oyster House as well. (One reviewer didn't like the coconut curry shrimp, but Tyla and Kev sure did.)

I'm working from home today, and there's a cat outside that seems to want attention. I'm not sure where it is, exactly, but Chester seems very interested.

Welcome, news.com readers! I have to get on a plane now, so I can't write all the things I want to write, but you should probably start over here with what Blizzard wrote. It's a lot like what I would have told Mr. Festa if he'd bothered to contact me at all for commentary or confirmation, rather than just tearing portions of my statements out to suit his angle. I'd like to say that I expect better from him, but I don't think that I do.

Back later, with more. (I'm sure you can't wait.)

Phil has been reading this great book about, well, the making of the atomic bomb. I started to flip through last night, before I passed out, and I'm kinda hooked. I've just hit a bit of a lull in the other book I've been reading, so I might see if I can find a copy of the bomb book. What better reading to take through airport security? (Phil, a contractor for the United States National Nuclear Security Administration, also had a book about India's nuclear program with him for a while. I'm not that brave.)

I wrote some docs today, and had a fair bit of fun. Organizing my recovery knowledge into some semi-coherent documentation actually helped me think concretely about some annoying problems in new ways. So, yay for writing.

I am so close to done with the thing I'm writing for the friend I'm not supposed to talk about. He left a really cute voice mail on my cell phone while Joe and Jacob and Chris and I were at a movie and Phil was at home working so hard it made me feel a little guilty. Just a little, though. I'm going to finish this writing thing first thing in the morning thing, so that the friend thing can have it before I get on the flying thing and return to the wife thing. Or something. (Confidential to said friend: I did spend almost an hour on it today. Did I mention that I hate writing this stuff?)

The movie was a lot of fun. Recommended. Great date movie, I think, though I might be biased because Jacob kept putting his hand in on my thigh.

I slept quite well last night, and didn't roll out of bed until about 2:30pm, at which point Phil and I fairly scrambled to the grocery store to fetch vegetables. We are going to have a nice meal — I just know it — at Chris' and Shona's tonight, and our contribution is supposed to be roasted root veggies. Except that we have a lot of veggies, and not a lot of cookie-sheet space, so it's turning out more like roasted sweet potatoes and potatoes, baked onions, and carrots with butter and cinnamon and orange juice and stuff. I think it'll turn out OK.

It seems that Chris was afraid that Phil and I would work all weekend. Ha ha ha. Well, Phil has spent a fair bit of time on the phone and sending email, but I've been the slackest ass in all of slackassdom. That's just going to make things that much more brutal next week, but for now I'm having a blast. This weekend thing rules.

I think our food is ready now, so we have to grab the zipcar and then grab the boyz and get ourselves Blizzard-ward.

We slept in late, because we can do that when Tyla's not around, and then started the day with the watching of some football. I think Tennessee won, and I think that's who we were cheering for — because they weren't, and still aren't, Pittsburgh — but I know so little about football that I was really just along for the ride.

Every time I come to Boston, we don't get barbecue, and since the Boston crowd basically cannot stop talking about it when I'm in Toronto, I put my foot down and demanded that we rectify the situation. Damn, that was some good barbecue. Just what we needed to fortify ourselves for hockey.

Maybe the Leafs should have had some barbecue. Sundin was back in the lineup, and I thought that would help a fair bit — and given that the Leafs had been playing quite well, and that Boston had just lost to Buffalo, that fair bit would be gravy, right? — but he wasn't really a factor. Part of the problem there is likely that he's a bit of a playmaker, and the Leafs couldn't string together three passes to save their miserable little lives. I don't think the Bruins played excellent hockey either, but they sure played better. Ah well; there two more Leafs games in Boston this year, and I might come back to cheer them on.

We're going to play some Halo now, just because we can, and then I'll probably write some more about my travel experiences the other day.

[Ed.: Or maybe I'll just fall asleep watching Sports Night DVDs instead.]

A day in the life, as described by a very very sleepy shaver who is nonetheless quite happy to be in Boston with his friends and the Toronto Maple Leafs:

Work work work.

Pack.

Traffic traffic traffic traffic curse sigh rebook.

Eat eat read relax shoeshine read wait.

Takeoff sleep sleep sleep land.

Chris Shona Phil Joe Jacob Mexicanfood Halo Halo Halo exclamation disperse.

Email diary (soon very soon) sleep.

[Ed. failtopublish sigh lame.]

I stayed home today, which meant that they fixed the noise at the office: Ken had a pretty free hand with the duct tape, so apparently the hissing is no longer a major issue. Of course, the electrician also managed to bust the power to my workstation, so I got to have a little office-related interruption anyway. Made me feel right at home, or something.

We had Aven and Mark and Madhava over for dinner this evening, to thank them for letting us stash relatives at their otherwise-unoccupied houses over the Christmas holiday, and they conspired with Tyla to get me drunk. Scoundrels.

Probably for the best, because Phil thinks that the test I wrote today is totally useless, and now I can forget about that. (He didn't use the phrase "totally useless", but I know that's what he was thinking.)

Tomorrow I get to hit Boston and visit with the boyz (and Shona, who is an honourary member of the boyz), which will be a fine end to a week that saw me mostly recover from a spot of burn-out, and totally recover from a wimpy little throat problem.

I'm such a lucky guy, in so many parts of my life. I wonder what I did to deserve it.

Turns out that I was a little wrong. The Japanese food wasn't waiting for me at all, and it was the Buffy that was mediocre. Or worse. OK, yes, definitely worse. I'm trying to not imagine all those people out there who said "hey, maybe I'll check this Buffy thing out" last night and will now never, ever return. Apparently one of my sisters-in-law has Buffy nightmares at times, and I think I might start as well. "God, will the Slayerettes speak again? Please, no, not more clunky exposition!"

I went into the office today, because the office is where I work. Ha ha ha. After most of a day spent unsuccessfully trying to concentrate enough to rewrite our connection-negotiation code, I finally gave in to the HISSING and the GROANING from the ventilation system, and the SHOUTING that said HISSING and GROANING requires of my office mates, and went home to nurse my headache. I'm working from home tomorrow, because home is where I can get some work done.

This whole Safari thing is a source of deep entertainment to me. I guess I'm supposed to be mortally offended — or at least embarrassed — that they went with KHTML instead of our Gecko engine, but I'm having trouble working up the indignation. We've all known forever that Gecko missed its "small and lean" target by an area code, and we've been slogging back towards the goal, dragging our profilers and benchmarks behind us, for years. If I had to write a new browser, and I was going to have to touch the layout code in a serious way, I would think about Mozilla alternatives. I think it's awesome that they pretty much have to compare Safari to Chimera and Netscape/Mozilla, because it shows how far we've come from the universal acceptance of IE's hegemony. I think it's fantastic that they chose to include "Gecko" in their user-agent, so that they could get standards-compliant content, because it means that our evangelism efforts in support of such content have been working. I'm thrilled that they're going to be another IE-alternative browser, which will try some techniques Mozilla decided against, because we can see if it really works or not. And I really really hope that Mozilla will learn from Safari/KHTML, because they've done a lot of great work in about a tenth of the code. Kudos, guys, and welcome to the web.

(I still think our JavaScript engine is better, though.)

I had to look at his in-development site to find Ian's email address, because it doesn't seem to be anywhere on his current site. Dork.

Today is Jon Johansen Day, all over the internet:

The court determined that it is not illegal to use the DeCSS code to watch DVD films obtained by legal means.

Not a lot of hacking today, but I helped Coop a little with the new test suite — he seems to be kicking ass with both feet now, not that the metaphor really lends itself to such extension. I got a new bugzilla installation spun up for some project tracking work, filed some bugs on myself, sent a vanishingly-small fraction of the email I mentioned yesterday.

My productivity was impaired today by the lack of a ceiling in the office. Whereas before it used to just be annoyingly loud when 5 people had a "conversation" near my desk, it now gets to be infuriatingly, blinding-with-rage-ingly loud. I practically ran to the Eaton Centre in search of magic headphones, which I did not find. I did find Phil's gift, though.

More later, I'm sure, but for now there's a new episode of Buffy and some mediocre Japanese food waiting for me.

First day back at work, today was. So full of promise. I was going to start on three days of solid, heads-down fixing of bugs we found during the course of our New Year's testing. Protocol ugliness would fall like wheat before the scythe of my hacking prowess. Entire industries would spring up around the innovations I would produce in storage technology. Children would break into song spontaneously, honouring and remembering my heroic efforts.

Or, alternatively, I'd start to feel the same symptoms as Phil, spend too many hours sleeping accidentally, and spend the rest of my day ruling out three possible fixes for an ugly bug, because the fixes would have been even uglier.

At least I helped Coop get started on the next test suite.

I owe mail to my mother, George Favvas, Tim Keanini, Phil Schwan, A Friend I Shouldn't Name Or He'll Hurt Me, Dawn Endico, Brendan Eich (postal mail, no less), Jamie Zawinski, Stephen Tweedie, and the status-updates list at work. Most of those messages are composed in my head, or regard work that is more than 80% complete, but I'm too tired to finish the job tonight. Not that staying up any later would be a good idea if I were able, so I guess that might be for the best.

I'm too tired to play Halo with the unemployed, even though I caused him to disturb Phil's rest and he managed to get tickets for this weekend's hockey game.

Welcome back, me!

I'm positively adamant that I'm not going to do any real work today, but there is quite a lot of other stuff that needs to be tidied up today, before I binge on Age of Mythology or something just as pleasantly fruitless.

First on my list is writing a personal description for a person who I cannot identify, relating to an event that dare not speak its name. The payoff could be quite impressive, so I'm trying to do a good job. The problem is that I'm really not very good at writing about myself, because I fundamentally don't consider myself all that interesting; writing resumes is purest, driven torture, a pitched battle between "I should probably mention Some Project" and "boy, it looks so inane spelled out like that". (No, I don't know why you're reading this either.) It's already 2pm and I haven't made anything resembling solid progress.

I also need to set up a web site for my mother, though she hasn't really settled on what she wants her domain name to be. I guess I'll pick the last one she mentioned in my presence, and she can bother me if it bothers her.

And, of course, I need to protect my wife from the contents of our home:

You know those chocolates I told you to hide? Where are they?

Poor, weak Tyla.

If you don't have a lot of things to do today, I highly recommend spending some time with Boing Boing. Cory Doctorow is nothing short of a genius, as you would already know if you'd read his most excellent short story 0wnz0red. Make haste.

I have still not been able to acquire Phil's Christmas present, but I have a promising lead to follow up on tomorrow. I hope he likes it, or is at least convincing in his fakery.

Woke up early enough that I think I missed jet lag. Shopped a little for Phil's Christmas present, largely unsuccessfully. Was visited by Sancus, who came bearing gifts, and joined me for lunch and a mediocre movie. Then I watched some hockey, made dinner, and thought about going to sleep. Instead, some evil men lured me into a few rounds of "King of the Hill".

Now, though, I'm really going to sleep, in case I change my mind and decide to go climbing tomorrow after all. This entry is really just here to keep my streak alive. It will exhibit the crappy Mozilla bug that pops up here from time to time, because I can't be bothered to edit around it. Maybe I'll just learn to live without the first-line-small-caps.

There are quite a few things in this world I don't fully understand, and today many of them manifested themselves in the form of air travel. I would exposit in no small detail about the insanity regarding electronic itineraries and the security implications of giving me a matching set of boarding passes without a printed email for verification, but that would be giving more of my precious, fleeting life to the evil air travel complex.

We did get home — or at least as far as Toronto in Phil's case — and without too much difficulty in the end. I suspect we could have endured more difficulty, even, what with the mitigating effects of a 10AM scotch tasting at the Heathrow duty free. Phil was cruelly victimized by the weather, so he's spending the night here.

We got back from emergency sushi with Madhava, Tyla and Steph, and stopped to purchase Age of Mythology during our return. It was fun, and now I sleep, mercifully free of jet lag. With some small luck, Phil's flight tomorrow will make it out uneventfully, and we can return to our regularly-scheduled programming. Ahem.

This is day four (maybe five) of "so, this is what it's like to vacation with phil", and we just passed the last of the tests. We're done. We can invoice. More importantly, we can actually vacation our little hearts out for the last 24 hours that we're in Edinburgh.

Also, it seems that we can do 3oz shots of Canadian whisky at eight in the morning. Going to be a great day, I can just tell. Time for breakfast, which may well involve enough fat to turn my heart into confit.

...

We had great intentions, but after an all-nighter, half a bottle of whisky between us — I can't believe it either, but it's true — and a very filling Traditional Scottish Breakfast, none of us could stay awake very long. I fell asleep first and woke up first, so I got to make plans to visit with Stephen.

Near Chris' place there are perhaps too many good Indian places, and we found another with Stephen's assistance. Very yummy, very filling, very Edinburgh. Stephen had the wonderful idea to visit the Scotch Malt Whisky Society's tasting room, but it wasn't open when we got there — the automated phone message indicated that it would be open until 11pm, but 2 January is apparently some inviolate holiday in Scotland, so we were out of that particular brand of luck. Instead, we substituted a vastly superior brand of luck, and were invited back to Stephen's to sample his impressive personal collection, talk about topics ranging from the inner workings of Linux filesystems to the devolution of powers in American states and EU countries, and look at pictures of his adorable daughter Heather. Fiona was busy working on a quilt for a gift, but she offered to drive us back to Chris', so we got to chat a bit then. A fantastic evening; I need more of the Tweedies in my life, clearly.

Over the course of the day, Phil and I had toyed with changing our tickets to stay a few extra days and actually visit with Chris, but our airline friends wanted an outrageous amount of money in change fees. I'm still waiting for a wire to show up, so that wasn't in the cards for me. Chris has been a saint, more patient than we deserved with our working and sleeping, and we'll have to come back in a little bit and show him a good time.

I was thinking about sleeping a little bit before we took off to the airport, but Chris just pointed out that that's in something like an hour. He and Phil were smart and slept. I was not, and didn't. Story of my frigging life.

(Yes, this entry did say "2 January 2002" for most of the day. That's going to happen a lot, I predict.)

We weren't hung over this morning, but we could easily have been, so we slept in just the same. A long search for appropriate dinner — technically a breakfast, but at 7pm that becomes an awkward term — led us to a lovely Arabian/Spanish place. We ordered the "Arabian Feast" for three, and got enough food for five. Mmm. Sweet gluttony.

We just made it to a showing of Die Another Day, which is certainly a fine Bond movie. It didn't feel over-long, even, and I hope we get to see more — cough, cough — of Rosamund Pike in the future.

Phil and I are so close to the fix for our last test that the strong force is involved. Now that we've mostly frittered away our vacation, it's not putting up as much of a fight.

Because this is our "boys' week out", we've managed to run out of food in the house, and outlasted pretty much everywhere in Edinburgh that might provide us with nourishment. It's just like when I was single, except I have better clothes now. Maybe Chris can make some oatmeal.

I was expecting her to be a little off-kilter on New Year's morning, but apparently Tyla started drinking early: there wasn't any Monday, December 31st in 2002, to my knowledge. Everyone point and laugh at Tyla!

No Scottish girls kissed today; this morning might have been an anomaly.

Made some New Year's resolutions today, while pondering in the shower, and I might talk more about them later, unless I flub them really embarrassingly.

There are a great number of strategies for avoiding jet lag. A girl at the bar tonight recommended Melatonin, and my mother-in-law studiously adjusts her sleep cycle by an hour every day leading up to the trip. Phil and I have another system altogether: never leave your native timezone. We're physically in Edinburgh, and having a great time, but we're still sleeping and waking as though we were back on the east coast of North America. As a side effect, we don't see really any of the 7 hours of "daylight" available at this time of year, but I think we can live with that.

The fireworks were, as Eric predicted, "stonkingly amazing". I'm sure my pictures turned out not at all, but I won't be forgetting them any time soon. Especially because we were close enough that we actually got firework debris raining down on us. We overheard some people — no doubt Australians — saying that the only better fireworks are to be found in Sydney, at this very time of year. So now we know where we're going next year.

I have kissed at least five times as many Scottish women in 2003 as I did in 2002, and we're only a few hours in. Bodes well!

It's now well past midnight, and Phil and Chris are going to play a little Age of Empires. I'd play too, but my laptop won't talk to their laptops, and we can't figure out why. Ah well. At least our sleep cycle won't be disturbed.

Happy New Year!

I was right, and I didn't stay awake very long after dinner. Long enough to discover that our plane-patch, while awesome and clever, wasn't enough to get around this bug. So went to sleep, exhausted, hoping I wouldn't dream about it.

I have no idea if that worked or not, because I don't remember my dreams, but I did sleep quite well. Phil and I are still working, and Chris is off at a wedding-related party somewhere. He looks very dapper, and when he gets back and wants to be a slob with his friends, I hope we'll be able to oblige.

I think there was some blue Edinburgh sky today, but before we realized that we were witnessing a weather miracle, we had worked the afternoon away. Ah well. At least we got the primitive version of my Most Hardest Test Ever passing.

I think we're going to see the new Bond movie tonight, with martinis in hand. It's no torchlight procession, but everyone has to celebrate in their own special way. (The post-procession fireworks last night were amazing, though. I've gotta come back for Guy Fawkes Day — Chris says it sounds like the Operation Desert Storm reunion tour.)

...

We didn't make it to the movie, and we didn't eat until like 01:30, but we did pass that Most Hardest Test, and we're now hot, hot, hot on the trail of the remaining recovery tests. Phil is spitting out bug reports at me from the other side of the living room, and I'm giving him a new tree to update a few minutes later. We are in the groove, and the weather here is nice this time of year. Chris is finding us some wacky music, and all of the sudden, holy hell, it's 5 AM. We'll sleep when we've passed these tests!

We're going to sleep late again, but when we wake up we will be able to bask in the sweet glow of every-test-but-14.

The red-eye is a great way to fly east. I get to sleep through the compressed night, which means that the flight seems shorter, and then I'm that much cheerier when I have to deal with airports and customs and immigration and security and taxis. The only way to go, if you're flying east and your schedule at all permits it.

It sort of falls apart, though, when one spends the majority of the flight being a complete hacking machine with one's boss. We made a great patch, and it worked basically the first time — I could tell you all about how this was the first time I'd touched the low-level filesystem, and how Phil and I had to figure out the inode allocation system from first principles, and so forth, but I won't because the punchline is all that matters: we are very smart people, and you should feel lucky to know us.

We are also very tired people, and fighting to stay awake. Phil has promised me twelve whole beers if I pass three tests tomorrow, but I don't think that'll be enough motivation to keep me awake that long after we get back from dinner.

Phil and I had a very productive day. He knocked a pile of tests down in a flurry of performance-testing blows. I fixed up enough of my embarassingly-naive multi-client recovery code — hey, it's tricky stuff! — to do some multi-client recovery testing. Good times, good time.

Then, of course, I ran into a classic case of invariants-that-aren't, and Phil and I went into planning-only mode. We're going to hack like demons on the plane, for which we must leave shortly. This is my first trip off the continent, so I'm quite excited. I'd be more excited if I could find my coupons for lounge access, but this is the terrible life I leave.

My day was spent rebooting computers, fighting with them to make sure that they started up properly, running a quick test (usually less than a minute, once the machines were all up and happy), spending minutes-or-maybe-an-hour scratching my head at logs, typing a little, and then doing it all over again.

It's not a bad way to make a living, but it is a pretty darned bad way to visit with your family. Tyla's contingent trotted back to Ottawa today, and my mother and sister are still around, but there's basically no way I'm going to spend quality time with them tomorrow. Bah.

Phil's here now, and we watched some hockey, and did some of that first-paragraph dance. Making some progress, fixing some hard bugs — it's pretty satisfying, but it would be a lot more pleasant if we had another day or three for it, instead of just tomorrow.

I got up pretty early this morning, because the cold hand of fear was clenching my heart. I have miles of recovery left to go before Lustre Lite can be put to bed, you see, and the debug logs are lovely, dark and deep. Phil was terrified about this stuff as well, as any good manager should be when I'm the long pole on a critical deadline, so I sent him a status report in the morning. It was pretty explicit about all the things that are needed to make Lustre Lite recovery sing and dance.

Happily — nay, joyously — Peter had enlightening news. It turns out that for the Lustre Lite acceptance criteria, recovery just has to hum tunelessly and shuffle its feet. That, my friends, I can do. I might even, if I'm just a little bit clever and a little bit more lucky, manage to get this test limping along by the time Phil gets to my place tomorrow evening. I shouldn't say that sort of thing "aloud", because I really can't cope with any more shame as regards this particular piece of software, but here we are.

I dove into that, while the various women in my life scattered to malls and museums. I found some great bugs, and Phil found some great solutions to them, and we're really trucking now. Coop's Lustre-independence grows by the day, so even if I really screw up this coding thing I might be able to get CFS to keep me on board as a recruiter.

It'd been a few weeks since I last read The Volokh Conspiracy, and I found this gem about infinitives and prepositions. Sweet, sweet internet.

Coop's Buffy CDs are great hacking music, if you're into that sort of thing.

And no, honey, I'm not hiding from your family, even if your mother did almost open up our save-until-2014 port today. It's all Phil's fault, I swear.

(Confidential to Jacob: this is the part where you either tell me you're joking about the ticket pricing, or you at least shut the heck up where my wife can see. Are you new?)

Tyla and I have some weaknesses. We have financial management skills that would make Greenspan weep hot tears. We're not very good at the whole Christmas card thing. On any given day, it is almost certain that one of us will forget a meal.

But never let it be said that we don't throw one mean Mister Falcon of a Christmas dinner. I was most nervous about the orzo casserole, because I'd never cooked it before, but Coop and his lovely wife steered me oh so right. Everything was pretty much perfect, right down to the timing of dish completion, and I'm a little worried that I blew all of next year's kitchen luck in one shot. Maybe I just had some extra saved up over 2002? Heaven knows I didn't cook enough this year.

The rest of Christmas was also pretty great, from the near-infinite gift exchanges and cookie overdose to the Buffy viewings and Chester's fanatical devotion to the destruction of wrapping paper. There are lots of people who don't celebrate Christmas — and they usually have better reasons for abstaining than I have for participating, all told — but I hope everyone gets a chance to have some family-rich day like today. I know that not everybody can, but I still have a lot of hope.

We had Joan grace us with her presence at dinner, which was very nice. She's great company, and I was thrilled that she could join us. I hope she had a good time too; our families can be a little overwhelming.

Tomorrow, the sisters are going to shop until someone loses an eye, and I'm going to work on recovery. That it still doesn't work well enough to pass Lustre Lite grates on my very soul, and when Phil gets here on Friday it may begin to cause more tangible physical distress. (I'm quite serious about the soul-grating thing: I've been having nightmares about it, I think, though the fact that I never remember my dreams clearly makes it hard to pin the blame conclusively on my huge bug list.) I might go into the office and take some of Coop's Buffy CDs for encouragement — if Tyla will let them out of the house. Maybe I should rip them tonight.

Unsurprisingly, the wire I'm waiting for didn't show up today, so Tyla will be able to cause only limited damage to my plans for eventual retirement. Not a bad silver lining, really.

And to all, a good night.

Mom doesn't think that drop cloths would have helped, but she didn't see the knuckle-sized chunks that had already accumulated on the plastic sheeting by the time I left. She can do renovation-shielding her way, and I'll do it mine, OK?

I've been trying, and failing, to find anything to corroborate the story of airport security abuse that I mentioned the other day. It doesn't help, of course, that not a single name is given in the article — not any of the TSA personnel, not the Director of Aviation at PDX, not the representative of the ACLU who turned his case down because he's not a member of a minority. I've seen enough incompetence at security screening stations to believe that there could be a fair amount of malice hidden there as well, but I'm still a little uneasy about taking Mr. Monahan's account at face value. You should probably read the word "allegedly" about fifteen more times in this diary entry.

A loyal reader also sends in this proof that "pregnancy" is not a guarantee of innocence. I am all for searching whoever they need to search, even though it means that I always get searched at least once per flight. If the Monahan article had just been disgust that they would dare to search his pregnant wife, I wouldn't have even finished reading it. The nature of the search bothered me a bit, as described — and it was totally unlike anything I've seen or experienced in my many, many searches; screeners have always been very clear about why ("the metal detector went off") and how ("with the back of my hand") they were going to touch me at any point — but it was the discrepancy between his description of events and the text of the report that really got to me. I really like checks and balances, especially when civil liberties are concerned, and supervision with the opportunity for the review of conduct and events is a big part of that. (And it might all be bullshit anyway, sort-of-sadly.)

I should wrap Tyla's present now, and prepare the stocking-stuffer bits for tomorrow morning. The rest of the family will be arriving at some point today, and then I'll really be into the game. Man, it is so good to be here at home for Christmas.

Coop's test now works, and we pass it, so yay for everything. His Christmas gift to Tyla and me — first he takes over QA so that I can breathe again, and now he sends us goodies; what a sweetie! — arrived today as well, scarcely 24 hours after he dropped it off at the postal outlet. I think he should go sit back and relax now, because we're going to be hustling through the next two or three tests as soon as he gets back from Boxing Day shopping.

I booked travel to Boston and the Bay Area, so I'll be off to a fine travel start next year. I think it's actually cheaper to fly to Boston and watch the Leafs there than to catch a home game. For shame.

I headed into the office at about 11 this morning, better-rested than I probably deserved — I think Tyla and I are both fighting something off, and it's going pretty well so far — and full of Lustre ambition and energy.

When I got to the office, I discovered that someone had secretly poisoned my grand plans and enthusiasm with a huge pile of suck. Coop and I thought that the construction workers had just "accidentally" kicked the power out again — no mean feat, considering that I had to use both hands to get anything out of that extension cord, but these are trained professionals — but instead it turned out that the power supply had blown. I'm no level 3 CSI, but I think the huge pile of drywall dust and pebbles that came out when I applied a quick gust of breath might be involved. Or maybe it's just because when they plugged my computer back in after the last interruption they skipped the UPS thing entirely, and I just took the brunt of a surge? I was not really in for an extended session of "why?", and Fixy got me back on track with a new power supply in no small hurry. He's such a champ.

The drywall dust, of course, was not confined to the interior of my computer's case. My laptop case was covered in dust as well, and my laptop, and my keyboard, and my chair and ... you see where I'm going with this. I know they had drop cloths, because I insisted they dig them out before standing over my desk with a trowel and plaster, so I have no clue what sort of incredible manifestation of incompetence was involved in the previous days' activities. (I also had to make it clear to the intrepid saboteurs that they should make a list of all the people in the world with whom they could have an "it's OK, we'll be careful" conversation, and make sure that my name appeared dead last. If at all.)

I think the compressed air got most of the drywall dust out of the gaping PCMCIA bay in my laptop. I'll find out later, when I'm brave enough to try the wireless card.

When it became painfully obvious that "just a few minutes" of ceiling reconstruction was going to turn into several hundred thousand dollars of opportunity cost, I packed up my laptop and headed home. (This was the part where I discovered that someone had helpfully tried to wipe my laptop case off, thereby scratching the living crap out of the front of it.) Once I got settled back at the house, I realized that my fury had been concealing the fact that my eyes had been sanded and left to bake in the sun. Tyla's eyedrops helped a lot, and then I stopped wanting to call in an air strike on the office. (Seriously, though, guys: drop cloths for invasive drywall work. This is not a lot to ask.)

I'm working from home tomorrow, inlaws or no inlaws.

Tyla was at least as cranky and tired as I was, so I took off to do the remainder of the Christmas grocery shopping by myself. Maybe they have some sort of Stepford Spray at the entrance, but I don't really care; Whole Foods put me in a wonderful mood.

I got precisely nothing done at work today, and no doubt impeded Coop's productivity to no small degree. I don't think he should be worried about his first check-in; I think the test I checked in for mine is still broken. If I don't do some work tonight, Phil and Peter are going to sober up and fire me. So I either have to hack like a demon, or send them some wine.

(I have no evidence other than my own experiences at Peter's that they've been drinking.)

Because Tyla is hoarding our computrons, and because sleep calls gently to me, I must provide only a brief description of the day's events. Happily, a day like today needs little said about it.

We had a perfectly wonderful pre-Christmas with Dad and Lisa and the girls (including Steph). The girls seemed to quite like their new Game Cube, and Dad and Lisa were appropriately enthused about the cookbook. (Giving a cookbook isn't like giving deoderant, we decided. They've been Bittman fans for years, by proxy, and just didn't know it.) Dinner was great, even though Lisa let me make the gravy. "Is it supposed to look like that?" From the mouths of babes....

Now we're home, with our lovely gifts in tow, and I'm going to go to bed. After a nice warm bath, it's the only reasonable choice.

I would like to do a few things today. I would like to play a little bit of Shadowbane. I would like to fix some bugs, maybe. I'd like to finish reading my book, and maybe start on the one Deb got me. I'd like to clean the house a little, in preparation for Christmas. I'd also like to spend a lot of time visiting with Mark and Anna, and perhaps watch tonight's hockey game.

I'd will see Mark and Anna, because lives hang in the balance. The rest, though, are in serious jeopardy of being pushed aside by today's Christmas errands. Ah well. At least we're not travelling this year!

My good buddy Kev — now that I'm replying to his mail more than once a season, I can say that without choking to death on the lies — sent me a very strange picture. That is indeed my handwriting — the Sun Microsystems post-it and the book it was found in date it to about 1996, I expect — but I have no earthly idea why I would have written those words. Not a clue.

I go now to hunt a tree.

...

We haven't found a tree yet. Tyla and I are fighting about the Christmas meal and vegetarianism. My work computer crashed, because:

<BiNT|WoRK>

i think the construction ppl kicked the power out by accident

'Tis the frigging season.

...

We found a tree. We resolved our dinner woes without resorting to Tofurkey — or, as Tyla points out, its duck-based cousin "Tofuck". We bought wine and other booze, and grabbed some yummy roti on the way back, as we passed Hey Good Cooking. Anna called, and she and Mark are on their way.

So I was feeling pretty good, until I read this, and now I just want to curl up into a ball and die. All I want for Christmas is for it to be a work of fiction.

5 days to Christmas, amazingly. I am not yet panicked, but if I don't get the vastest of majorities of my Christmas shopping done today and tomorrow, I will have panic to spare.

In other panic-related news, I still await the wire for my last invoice. I am breathing deeply and practicing patience. Also, I'm digging out the line-of-Christmas-credit, just to Be Safe.

Asked by agents if he had anything else to tell them, Cusack responded: "Yes, I've got monkeys in my pants."

I'm going to go shopping now, because I can have the malls largely to myself while real people do their final pre-Christmas work. So cunning!

After that, I will fix not one, not two, but three bugs. Watch me!

...

We fixed a lot of bugs today. Not just the three I mentioned above, but probably a half-dozen more as well. It was wonderful.

Alasdair and I tried to see a movie, but the web site had lied to me, so the movie wasn't showing when we got there. Sucky. So we had dinner instead, and I came back to do some work. Instead of actually working, I played a little Shadowbane — holy crap, it feels like a real game now — and now I'm going to bed.

Part of the unrelenting joy that is working on Lustre is filling out the maze of forms required to access our development and test clusters. Coop is currently starting the search for cheese, poor thing.

Jamie wants a palindrome debugger. Back in 1999, Michael Elizabeth Chastain created one, and wrote a heartbreaking email about it. It broke my heart in 1999, and it breaks my heart every time I re-read the mail.

George called my attention to the fact that I broke this page lightly for IE6 users, back when I fixed NS 4.x. So I tidied that up today, and also made it look even prettier under 4.x. All that while waiting for some tests to complete.

So much fun today, I can hardly stand it. I got to spend the morning getting Coop up to speed on the basics of building and running the Lustre bits, and he's now off and running on some test-development tasks. He's a pretty quick study, so it went rather smoothly. If my ramp-up experience in July was any indication, he's feeling totally overwhelmed right now. Tee hee!

(Still, though. Best. Hiring. Process. Ever.)

After lunch, I popped over to Paramount to watch a a little indie film with Tyla and Andrei and the folks from the office. It was great fun.

After dinner — meals are not primarily sources of nourishment anymore, but rather critical timekeeping events — I came back to the office and worked on some bugs and tests. The usual.

I'm tired, and I've been enjoying getting up early of late — I kill me! — so I'm going home now.

Against all odds, I slept very well last night. Let's hear it for total intellectual exhaustion! With a little bit of hustle, I can be at work before 9:30, and well on my way to breaking new parts of Lustre by 10.

...

Asa is a sweetheart, encouraging people to vote for me in the mozillaZine "who would you like to have over for Christmas dinner?" poll. He's no conversational slouch himself, I must say. I won't take it personally if I lose, of course. I know I'm better than Pav, deep down inside.

Deb helpfully points out that I give no way to actually vote for me, or anyone else (I voted for Blizzard, because I already get to have me around for Christmas, but also because I miss my Bliz). The main mozillaZine page has the poll on the right side, about halfway down. I don't know how to link to just the poll, but you're all smart folk. (If you followed the link to Asa's page, the button works too. Please vote only once, even if it's for someone silly like Pav.)

...

Gotcha. But really, when did I burn you? Even NGR wasn't that bad. (OK, maybe it was. Sorry. I promise this'll be better.)

I spent most of today in meetings about test status, and only a vanishingly small part of today actually fixing bugs that block tests. Now that just ain't right.

I have four bugs to kill (at least) before we're done with Lustre Lite. I believe that I'm the only one left with any bugs that block this major, major milestone. If you can't be the best, be the last!

It is a daily, pitched struggle to figure out what exactly is wrong with Lustre that will prevent sign-off, because reading some of these bug reports is sort of like trying to pick lottery numbers based on the writings of Nostradamus, but I've narrowed it down to the aforementioned four bugs. I think they probably represent 15 days of work. I wish I had 15 days.

I also wish I could run the tests on my own, in order to get first-hand knowledge of the failures, but now I'm just talking crazy.

Phil and Peter are being very supportive, which is wonderful, but I still feel kinda crappy about being so far from done. Who knew recovery would be this hard? Probably everyone who'd done it before.

I had a nice dim-sum lunch today, and a mediocre-or-so Indian dinner. Both featured good company, though, which brightened my day.

I was going to work through the night, but I'm too tired to do good work right now. After a restless night's sleep, following hours of tossing and turning while my brain churns through recovery minutae, I'm sure I'll be much more productive.

I think Deb would agree that today was fifty kinds of Monday. I did get to help Phil fix a nasty bug, though, just by playing Chewbacca.

Man, it's good to be home. Hilary was a sweetheart — a lead-footed sweetheart, the best kind — and drove me back from Kingston. We arrived in Toronto around 9:30, just in time to fall asleep in the arms of my wife. Bliss.

We chatted a little when we woke up this morning, and I was invormed that Tyla had a "bone to pick" with me. Never a good sign, but I bravely asked for more details. Apparently she'd gone to Video 99 down on Bloor to rent, of all things, The Saint, and discovered that we had nearly thirty dollars in late fees. Apparently we've had these fines sitting on our account since we last lived in Toronto, and have been consequently, and reasonably, considered to be rather delinquent in the interim.

"Wow," I thought. "That does suck. I should apologize to Tyla!" But then the rest of my brain engaged. "Wait, wait, wait. Also, wait." How, I asked, was this necessarily my fault? We both rented movies from there, and it could just as easily — ignoring, perhaps, more than the usual amount of historical analysis — have been Tyla who failed to return the movies on time. Her defense to this line of questioning was ultimately not very compelling, so my nascent guilt evaporated pretty quickly. Close call, though.

Deb got me a cool-looking book for Christmas, and it should receive appropriate attention during the flight to Edinburgh, if not sooner.

I'm not going to Portland this month. I can't believe I even considered it.

In yesterday's necessarily-incomplete list of the bright-yet-unemployed people in my circle of friends, I somehow forgot Ian. Ah well, we all know that I suck.

I have so much work to do today. Sweet god, would I rather be playing Halo.

Today's class was pretty good. I managed to actually consume a three hour lab session with software-related blather, and everyone had the courtesy to stay awake.

The afternoon class — a bunch of hardware folks who were apparently nonplussed-or-worse at the prospect of a software guy's life story — was a complete, zero-for-twenty-odd no-show. At least I got to come back to Mom's place and work. Why is it that only the hard bugs are left?

Also, why is it that so damned many smart people are looking for work? And why can't I hire them all? Oh, for the glory days of the boom, when I could just wave my hands and conjure up a half-dozen reqs.

Coop mailed me today, since he knows full well how long it will take for me to get around to it. Why am I such a dork?

Back to Toronto soon. I hear there's a beautiful woman there who hasn't totally given up on me!

I bored Mom's 3rd-year OS class for an hour today, though some of them asked questions that supported the flimsy pretense that they were listening. Sweet that they even tried, really.

Apparently we're allowed to have babies now. Who knew?

(At long last, I upload the last few days' entries. Huzzah.)

I just finished spending hours talking to people at HP to make sure that crappy bug reports like this didn't happen any more. Pistol, please.

destina.ca called, to tell me that they needed signed authorization from Phil, because I used his credit card to pay for my Denver flight. Given that I've already finished with that itinerary, it seems like they're getting to it a little late, but I passed on the message. I wonder what they'd do if they didn't get authorization from Phil. He's not going to contest it — he'd damned well better not, at least — so I don't know what they could do to me. Probably not worth finding out.

There are no fewer than five distinct ways for me to fly between Denver and Toronto, on the airlines with which I currently hold tickets for that specific purpose. But because Expedia booked my travel as two separate round trips, neither airline will break off the autoproctophrenology long enough to get me home a few hours earlier, by filling seats that would otherwise be empty.

I love air travel.

...

Made it to Toronto uneventfully, but I won't make it to Kingston until something like 1AM.

Tyla has a job interview tomorrow. I'm excited, and she must be beside herself with anxiety and hope. Wish I were there, hon!

My battery is about to die, having valiantly given its life to send the sounds of Dave Matthews to my ears during this almost-over bus trip. Also, my headphones are killing me. G'night.

Let's get a few things straight, right off the bat. Colorado is really, really, really dry. Like nosebleed-for-breakfast, dehydration-headache-for-lunch dry. Someone ship these losers some humidity, already.

My hotel didn't have internet bits, but that's OK. I can feel the email accumulating back in the real world, but since our major development partner's labs don't feature actual internet access, I can't do jack about it. If someone has a problem with my email responsiveness, someone should stop sending me to Denver on 8 hours' notice. I'm just saying.

I assumed complete, cosmic control of the test-plan review meeting. Acceptance Criteria Dictator For Life. Good thing, too — there was crack dust all over the original one, but then I guess we can't really expect everyone involved in developing the system to understand anything about it.

...

After a four-hour clue transfusion, and a nice long phone conversation with Phil, I'm on a bus back to the Denver airport, whence I will then travel to my hotel. If I'd remembered to install an MP3 encoder on my laptop before I left, I could be listening to my new music now. Or, I suppose, if I'd accidentally stumbled onto a network.

5:00. I'm up, and headed to the office for my laptop and whatnot. Of course, the subway isn't running yet, and won't be in time for me to make it to the airport on time, so I'm going to track down a taxi. Please don't get me started.

I just know it's going to be cold in Denver.

My email response over the next week or so is going to be atypically dismal. Sorry.

I got up at 7AM today, and it's a Sunday. I'm sure I'll still manage to be late for climbing — I can waste three hours without even breaking a slacking sweat — but I can feel like a good person until then.

Tyla's still in bed, because she was up late last night trying to give me nightmares and warring against the anti-Spike legions on the Buffy forums.

And I just realized that I didn't publish yesterday's entry. Ah well.

Least anticipated lesson from a reality TV show: Fox vice-president reports that their upcoming "marry-a-fake-millionaire" show will let viewers "find out whether [contestants] are really doing this for love". In unrelated news, "Who Wants To Marry A Really Sweet Guy?" was cancelled before completion of the pilot.

...

Climbing was fun, though I didn't manage to complete any of the 5.8s I tried. Madhava was very impressive, with his 5.10b-ing and whatnot. I went to work afterwards — "afterwards" obviously meaning after lunch, as well — and worked on some tricky locking-replay stuff. Phil helped me, by being smart and making noises into a telephone hundreds of miles away. Yes, he's that good.

Uh, it looks like I'm going to Denver this week. By which I mean, "for an 8:30AM meeting Tuesday morning". By which I mean flying out tomorrow night, flying back late Wednesday, hopping on a bus or something to Kingston, and then presenting to a class on Thursday morning. How does this stuff happen to me?

And, to add injury to insanity, I think I'm going to end up flying on Continental. Whichever airline it ends up being, I expect to be able to hear the last-minute ticket drooling when the booking is made.

...

Minor travel adjustment: Air Canada, flight is at 07:35 tomorrow — I'm going to Denver on 12 hours' notice! — I get back about 20:45 on Wednesday to catch a 22:00 bus to Kingston. I arrive there at 1AM, and speak to Mom's class at some point in the morning. Or, at least, that's the plan. Stay tuned.

And I wanted to see a movie with Alasdair this week!

So after I booked my Edinburgh travel, I found Phil on IRC and discovered that he was, in fact, going to be travelling to Edinburgh via Toronto. In addition, he ended up on a different itinerary, such that we shared precisely zero hours of travel, out of our twenty-odd hours of isomorphic vacationing. That sucked.

What didn't suck is that Travelnow.com — the power behind the meagre throne of cheaptickets.ca — let me void my non-refundable, non-transferable, proctology-grade-change-fee ticket. The nice customer service man sounded apologetic that he would have to charge me the $10 processing fee, but I really, really, really didn't care. Really. I'd never used Travelnow.com before, but I won't hesitate to use them in the future.

Tyla has been playing 80's music all day, while fiddling on the computer, but I've now taken it over for a few hours so that I can play Halo with Phil and Jacob. I'm going to get my ass handed to me, but it'll be a fun ass-handing.

We had our kernel upgrade and reboot this morning, and it went quite well. Even AFS is working, though it had been my intention to disable and uninstall it, since it had gone a little bit awry. But when, after the reboot, it was just there and working, I decided to let it live.

Then I had to set up the magic networking for the Mozilla FTP staging server, which featured me turning off bitchcake's networking, while I was connecting over the network to make the changes. Yes, I'm that smart. A lot of swearing was followed by a rapid shower and then a run to the subway station, with a pause when I got there to talk Fixy through saving my butt. (He'd returned from lunch to my frantic begging for server-room assistance.) When I got to the office and actually engaged my "brain", everything came up pretty cleanly.

Worked on some bugs today, whined about bad bug reports, talked to Phil, the usual. Things are starting to settle down on the storage-system recovery front, so I'm going to be getting back to metadata recovery next week. I'll have to test on real hardware, because we discovered that my "impossible bug" was caused but a quirk in User-Mode Linux's I/O handling, and that will likely mean sharp drop in productivity. I've been doing pretty well at fixing bugs by inspection this week, but that's only because I didn't have to. When the pressure's on, it'll be totally different.

I booked my travel to Edinburgh today, apparently missing a "partial business class" fare — at a slim, slim $30USD premium! — by a matter of minutes. If I hadn't tried, vainly, to figure out what "partial business class" actually meant, I think I could have nailed it. Ah well.

And on Wednesday evening, I head to Kingston to visit my Mom (and maybe Hilary?) and speak to her first- and second-year classes about some of my software experiences. (Phil said I could go!)

There had been talk of a trip to Denver in the near future, as a representative for CFS at the design review for the upcoming performance phase, but since that meeting is only 5 days away, it's looking unlikely. Probably for the best.

Looks like I'm going to just miss Aeroplan Elite status for next year. Maybe they'll be nice and overlook the few thousand miles I'll be short. (Less than 10%!)

The Penny Arcade guys hadn't heard of Equilibrium until it opened, and I only came across it in passing — checking out IMDB's list of Emily Watson oeuvres after watching Punch-Drunk Love, if I recall correctly — but the trailer makes me want to grab Alasdair by the scruff of the neck and march him down to Paramount tomorrow. Not that it appears to have opened in Toronto yet. Bah.

I did manage to pick up the advent calendar last night, so I got up this morning at 6:30 to assemble it. The box said it'd take 25 minutes, and they were only off by 200%. Tyla seems to really like it, though, so it's all worth it.

Now I get to go to the office and see my new desk. Maybe I'll even pick up breakfast on the way, like a grownup. I wonder if Phil has seen my other glove.

...

My desk was there. My mouse and phone weren't, though, and my chair was broken. It's mostly sorted out now.

I installed OpenAFS on bitchcake today, and it didn't go so well:

<shaver> bitchcake is now a mess of lost afs kernel threads
<phik_> AFS THREADS ON BITCHCAKE?
<shaver> but it doesn't seem to be affecting things
<phik_> jesus christ!
<phik_> he's doing this on _bitchcake_?
<shaver> well, I'm doing this on bitchcake
* phik_ swoons
<shaver> zab thought it would be fine!
<phik_> get back to work :)
<shaver> seriously.
...
<zab> fine? I said fun! :)

I say we needed a kernel update anyway.

Joe isn't helping.

<joe> Why is afs running on bitchcake anyhow?
<phik_> joe: EXCELLENT QUESTION
<zab> it'll be fine!
<shaver> hey, look at the time

Tyla had a crappy day today. I don't quite know why, because I had a crappy day too, and I really didn't think I could handle having her vent at me, so I refrained from asking.

It's probably not because our cable is screwed, or because her Christmas lights have blown bulbs in a most analysis-resistant way, or even because she couldn't find the new bulbs. It's probably because her husband is a dork and busted her new email address.

For what it's worth, the wine helped. I've almost totally forgotten that I spent my day waist-deep in mediocre-or-worse bug reports. (I'd link to them, but I don't want to face them again today.) And Tyla's almost totally forgotten how to speak English (she's a bit of a lightweight).

Phil had a crappy day too, I think, but then Jacob brought him cookies, so I can't really imagine that he's suffering too badly any more. Jacob: I like Oreos.

Tyla and I are going to go out for dinner now. When I come back, I expect a new batch of bug reports to have landed in my lap. With any luck, some of them won't suck.

Confidential to Alasdair: let's do something this week, if I stay in town. Also, don't tape over this week's West Wing!

I didn't get the expected call last night, and when I called the Toy Shop to ask, I was told that the calendar in question had been paid for, and that I should call back in a day or so. Very disappointing. I did manage to find another place that claimed to have two of them, but it was just closing when I talked to the nice man there. So I was going to go out this morning and pick them up.

First, though, I had a conference call about Lustre testing. Lots of good discussion about the state of various bugs and tests, and I think I got a bunch of the HP testers straightened out with respect to how recovery works. I also managed to cough up some advice and quick patches in response to follow-up emails, so things are looking nicely productive on that front, once again.

After all that was sorted out, I finally got a call from the original person I spoke to at the Toy Shop who informed me that the other person was lying — her words! — and that, yes, I could have picked it up while I was out freezing my buns off last night. Alas. I'll head over there tomorrow, I suppose, since they were nice enough to hold it for me.

I bought my first Xmas present of the season today, for my friend Deb. She's not much of a Christmas freak, but she just finished the launch of a new site at work, and is a little stressed. Hopefully this will cheer her up.

My desk at the office has disappeared, a side-effect of recent merger-y events. I will get a new one soon, but for now I will stay at home and annoy Tyla.

My good friend Anatole sent me some very odd, but promising, mail today about this year's incarnation of a conference he attended in Switzerland last year. Maybe I'll get to go this year? Only time will tell!

The trick to oracular success, of course, is a combination of studied vagueness and liberal application of the Texas-sharpshooter fallacy. But I can't resist pointing out that, in the frequent words of my wife, "I'm soooooooo smart".

Apparently McDonald's didn't see the full range of possibilities that they were unleashing when they signed up for virtual McDonald's restaurants in The Sims Online. But I knew it all along. Naomi Klein must be loving it.

I wish I were that good at predicting bugs. Would be more useful today.

...

Just as I was about to head out to a toy shop, I thought to call and see that they actually had the calendar I sought. They do have one left. It's on hold for a guy named Alan. If he doesn't claim it by 6pm, it's mine!

Of course, this guy could be my dad — in which case his name would properly be "Allan". I'm not sure if that would change my position on missing the 6pm deadline, but it would sure make for some entertaining conversations at Christmas.

Tyla wants me to find and assemble a second one for her sister, as well, upon which quest I shall embark shortly.

...

It's going to be really damned cold here tonight, for Toronto. Seventeen below zero, in our fancy Celcius degrees. Twenty-seven below, with that nasty wind chill stuff. I'm in my long underwear in preparation for the trek to buy toys — T minus 5 minutes until Alan's right to that calendar expires! — but not everyone in this city is as lucky. So I've got the number for the Street Helpline programmed into my cell phone, in the unfortunately-likely event that I come across someone who needs help finding shelter while I'm out and about this winter. Boy, I'm feeling that middle-class guilt pretty seriously right now.

...

Tyla has a web site of her own, now. I don't know if we're going to get a real Alan/Telsa thing out of this, but I guess time will tell.

The thing about climbing is that you have to keep doing it. My technique and muscular capabilities degraded a fair bit during the month-or-more that I was absent from the gym, so I stuck to some simpler climbs. For the first time, I was able to complete a climb with a significant overhang component, though, so it wasn't a total loss.

I'm starting to think that I need tighter shoes, since my toes are basically straight when I put them on, and I have a fair bit of trouble getting good support on the smaller holds. Ken's new shoes are hella tight, and he's doing quite well for it. I wonder if MEC will do trade-ins.

After climbing, we ate. After eating, I napped. (We stopped on the way home to pick up this year's Playmobil advent calendar, but it hadn't arrived yet. I bet the prices come down pretty quickly after December starts ticking away.)

After my nap, I puttered a little bit with Lustre. Andreas thought he'd found a fix for my impossible bug, but it didn't turn out to help. We're now starting to suspect that it's a problem in how we handle committed-to-disk notifications, which means that I get to spend a big chunk of tomorrow fiddling in the deepest recesses of our filesystem. (I think I can explain the nature of this bug in layman's terms, but I'm too tired right now, even though I napped.)

I didn't write a single line of code today.

I also didn't send email to my good friend Coop, with whom I have not corresponded in a shamefully long time. I'm not coherent enough to do a decent job now, but I might try anyway before I go off to bed.

Tomorrow is going to suck a little bit, because I think I've missed my end-of-November deadline in ways that will be a little tricky to conceal. I don't feel that I was slacking or anything, and there have been a fair number of out-of-my-control issues, but still — I said "the end of November", and here we are in December, and that stuff isn't completely done yet. Not a good scene.

We have Zach on our team now, which sure makes the future look brighter.

I woke up to a phone call from Mom today — we're trying to locate my sister, who has, we believe, returned from Japan — and then chatted with Phil a little bit. We bitched and moaned about some problems in the lock manager, and then I polluted his poor brain with thoughts of Rusty's read-copy-update work. (Actually, I think that stuff came to Linux from DYNIX, via IBM, but Rusty's a cool guy so I'm happy to credit him with it.)

Now, some juice and back into lock replay. It's the end of November today, and even feature-completeness will involve a lot of hard work. Sucky. =/

...

Not that I'm averse to hard work, as it turns out:

18 files changed, 527 insertions(+), 403 deletions(-)

I think I'm actually feature-complete now, and it's "just" down to the debugging. Time to test on the real cluster.

I felt much better when I woke up this morning, which is emphatic testament to the combined curative powers of writing code and drinking grapefruit juice. And then I got a call from Phil, which just made my morning. We chatted a little bit about lock replay, and I dove into it with much geeky gusto.

After about two hours, I had a disheartening realization. See, while I was working on the last chunk of recovery code, I convinced myself to put off a more complete rewriting of our RPC layer. Soon enough, I reasoned, I'd have several more of our acceptance tests working, and that would give me a much more robust system for testing my changes. Also, I'm sort of on a deadline, and need to resist the temptation to turn everything into a shining jewel when there are other large pieces yet to be written at all, let alone polished to a gleaming sparkle.

But now, the scales are fallen from my eyes. Now I see that without this rewrite, I'm going to have to resort to profound ugliness, and I really don't want to go there. Like, really.

So I embark on another great rewrite adventure. But first, I travel to Medieval Times for the Velocet holiday party. Should be good fun.

...

It was good fun, actually. I bought Tyla a princess hat, for obvious reasons, and she made me wear it. Revenge will, again, be mine.

I made good progress on my RPC changes after dinner. Pretty soon, I won't be very ashamed of my code at all. (Explaining the superhack— code that was committed by phil, but ultimately made necessary by my early flailings — to Sancus was a great motivator, in spite of his wise reminder of the worse-is-better principle I mention above.)

It took until three in the morning, but I finally figured out how to run IOR — by which I mean that I figured out how to steal Andreas' scripts and ask him questions until it worked — and I passed on basically the first try. (I had to merge a patch from someone else's branch and add a spin-lock initialization, but that so doesn't count.)

And then I locked up hard on our "simple" primary acceptance test. Some brain-off spin-lock thing, no doubt, but I didn't take the time to sort it out last night, preferring sleep at long last.

My "lovely" wife seems to have given me her cold, though the usual post-travel infirmity is probably to blame as well. She doesn't look like she's suffering very much today, other than the outrageous bed-head, so it appears to have been a give rather than a share. I will have my revenge!

I thought I was caught up on my email yesterday, but I'd neglected two whole mailboxes. I'll take care of those today. If you're waiting for mail from me, though, note that "caught up" indicates that I have read it all, not that I've had time to reply to all of it.

Phil is right that I'm a whiner, but I actually said that I was getting on a plane early Wednesday morning, and that I wanted to be able to work on the plane. He knows damned well what timezone I was in! (And he did send the mail before I got on the plane, though after the last email checking I did in San Diego. We both suck, Phil, and the world of next-generation storage is just going to have to learn to cope with that.)

...

I found my bug(s), and they were indeed brain-off spin-lock nonsense. All better, I'm passing acceptance-small.sh as I type this, and then I can land my huge branch. Fear me, Lustre. Fear me.

31 files changed, 899 insertions(+), 532 deletions(-)

I sort of wish I were done with this recovery stuff, because I'd really like a break to work on something like performance, but there's a ton of recovery work left to do. Miles to go before I sleep, and all that.

"Using its engineering knowledge, the robot tried to repair the switch by toggling it on and off."

Back home now, though my wife isn't here. I guess she's allowed to step out for a few hours, if I'm allowed to pop across the continent for a week, but still. Still. Emily came by to show off her cocktail party pictures, which were pretty good. (The ones of me were less good, especially the one in which I resemble a toothy robot.)

I was a hacking machine on the plane, so I've got fixes for most of the bugs HP reported to me yesterday. Now I just have to figure out how to run IOR so that I'm allowed to land these goodies.

Yay, Tyla's back!

I was all psyched today to start on lock replay, after a morning of recovery-related head scratching — and, I hasten to add, a fantastic lunch courtesy of my lovely hostess — but I'm still unenlightened. When Phil gets back from India, I'm going to staple him to the phone until we've got this sorted out.