Older blog entries for gstein (starting at number 98)

All right. Been four months since my previous diary entry.

I got married in July. Went on the honeymoon. In August, helped Subversion go self-hosting. Usual hang out stuff. In September, travelled to Seattle and NYC. Cancelled a trip to Vegas after the WTC tragedy. And now we're in October.

Details are left as an exercise to the reader :-)

Currently, I've got a number of things on my plate which I'm trying to deal with in the short term:

I think that is about it. Way too much stuff, and way too little time. Sigh...

6 Jun 2001 (updated 6 Jun 2001 at 07:22 UTC) »

Woah. Just read about geocaching. Very cool stuff. Sent off an email to some friends to think about some camping/geocaching. Even without that, there are a number of caches nearby that I can go track down. Of course, there is a small matter of buying a GPS receiver... :-)

Did some SWIG work for SVN over the past couple days. Gotta get the bindings up to snuff to be able to do the cvs2svn tool.

Been integrating some patches from Mo DeJong to fix SVN's vpath builds. Seems like that has been fixed.

Not much else going on right now...

More work on the SVN build. I think that everything is licked except for vpath builds, plus a tiny smidgin of work for building the docs (from texinfo files).

After that, I'll be going back to work on the cvs2svn tool. The precursor for that will be the Python bindings to the FS library. That should be fun, and a learning experience for SWIG.

And yes, more PS2 action. A friend was in town Wednesday. We went and rented Crazy Taxi (CT) and Zone of Enders (ZoE). CT was fun, but only for a short while. There isn't really any advancement, opening of new levels, new cars to open up, etc. It is pretty much "here is the game. keep playing until you're better and can get a higher score." Same thing over and over. Ah well. Good thing that I rented it :-)

ZoE was actually quite cool. On the "easy" setting, I went through the whole thing in seven hours. I actually felt a bit short-changed. I had thought that I'd be going to Mars (the action takes place in an orbital station around Jupiter). But it actually ends before leaving. Too bad. The game was actually quite decent, but some of the fighting is actually a bit too easy. A Burst sword attack takes down the enemy in just a few hits. And being so close, they usually can't use their heavy weapons on you. I think it would have been harder if there was a meter on the use of the Burst. The graphics and the motion and the screens were quite awesome. Some of the gameplay (go here, get that, go there, use it) was a bit slow, but I actually don't mind games where there is a lot of mindless hack and slash (on the way to recovering things).

And in an embarassing moment, I trashed the edna repository at SF by doing a partial change to the CVSROOT to add checkin emails. I forgot to "cvs add" some things first, so the new files didn't go into CVSROOT, but my changes required them to be there. Bam! I couldn't check anything more in, so I couldn't even fix the darned problem. Sigh. Should be cleared up Monday when the SF admins reset the CVSROOT.

Released ViewCVS 0.7 tonite. Lots of little bug fixes (mostly dealing with oddities of CVS branches and other edge cases). Some performance improvements. Some new features, such as persistent URLs to the "head" revision and tarball generation.

Also spent some time cleaning up odds and ends with the new Subversion build system.

Weekend was pretty much a no-op. Spent a lot of time playing Summoner on my PS2. Excellent game. Although, I didn't get my summoning ring until I was level 19. To throw skill points into my Summon skill, I've got to gain levels. Feh... up to 19, it isn't too difficult. But you pretty much have to double your total experience to get to 20, and double again for 21. etc. Given that I've been playing for something like 17 hours of real time, that means that 21 is going to be pretty much impossible to reach in any respectable time. Hopefully, I'll find some badass monsters worth 10k experience or something. At the moment, the monsters that I'm fighting are all less than 1k. I chew threw them like a rabid dog with a sack full of kittens, but it will still take a long time at this rate. Not a big deal at this point, though, as my guy is a tough mo-fo; who needs to summon creatures? :-)

Ah well... it just means that I'm now concentrating more on completing the quests and the game rather than busting heads. Summoner is also kind of neat in that you have multiple party members. Their levels are jumping as we teach those monsters who's their daddy.

It is kind of funny actually... I was zooming through this crypt. "Oh, there are three monsters." I wontonly run my guy into the center of them and call down a Meteor Shower. Anybody that survives takes maybe a hit or two before they're dust. Of course, with two other people and a summoned elemental, we made quick work of the monsters. Then I get to the end of the crypt and meet the "boss", named Carados. I start bitchslapping him, and "oh. somebody is casting spells at me. gee, that tickles. hey! elemental! go smack up that Bone Mage." Carados went down with nary a scratch to the party. Heh.

Me thinks I might be screwed towards the end of the game, though, where I'd truly need that Summon skill way up. Just have to see. For now, I'll just keep crushing things. :-)

Completed and installed the new build system for Subversion. It is quite sweet. Fast, simple, and flexible. Sure beats automake for our particular use-scenario.

I could see that automake is good for FSF/GNU projects where they have a particular set of requirements, but it isn't very flexible when you have different policies. It also creates some performance issues (as I mentioned in my previous diary entry).

Shelved the rcs parser for a while. I cranked out as much performance as it can possibly get (without making the code look *really* horrible). Overall, it is somewhere between 10 and 12 times faster than when I started. For small RCS files, it is comparable for forking off rlog and parsing the result. For large files, though, rlog/parse is faster. I think the next step is to use something like mxTextTools or to use a custom RCS file tokenizer. The internal architecture is set up using a "token stream" plus the parser. That should make it easy to swap in different stream implementations.

I tried using mmap, but it was no faster than just reading the darned thing into memory (in 100k chunks). It is simply that the algorithm is not I/O bound, so using mmap to optimize the I/O doesn't help at all.

Over the weekend, I've been working on revamping Subversion's build system. We currently use automake. It is a total dog and some parts of automake are actually a bit hard to deal with. I've tossed out automake and recursive makes, with just a single top-level makefile. The inputs to the makefile are generated by a Python script. Net result is that ./configure will produce a Makefile from Makefile.in, and then the build-outputs.mk will be included by that. build-outputs.mk is generated by the Python script when we create the distribution tarballs (so end users don't need Python just to build; this is similar to how automake uses Perl, but the outputs are portable).

The resulting build process is much faster. ./configure is also going to be speedy since we only need to process one Makefile.in. In addition, automake creates a billion "sed" replacements within configure, then applies all of those to all the files. We'll be reducing the replacements to just a couple dozen. With the reduced file count, it should scream. We also don't have automake's time consuming process (producing Makefile.in from Makefile.am); my Python script executes in just 2 seconds of wall clock time. That includes examining all the directories to find .c files to include into the build.

I've got make all, install, and clean working. I still need to do distclean, extraclean, debug the "make check" target, and then do dependency generation. On the latter, the Python script will just open the files and look for #includes. This will be much more portable than automake's reliance on gcc-specific features. Oh, and we also get rid of automake's reliance on gmake.

Nice all around...

Been working on optimizing the RCS file parsing module (within the ViewCVS package). Having Python fork/exec with a pipe to "rlog" is still a lot faster than having Python directly parse the file. But it is getting closer. I'm now going to try memory-mapping the file and parse tokens that way. Could be much faster.

I want this to be really fast because it would be nice to use manual parsing rather than rlog output since there is a small amount of data loss. In particular: it is hard to reconstruct the actual RCS revision tree from just the rlog output. (hmm; maybe "hard" rather than "impossible")

The second reason is that this module will be used by Subversion's cvs2svn tool. To convert SourceForge's 49 gigabytes of CVS repository, I want this to be as fast as possible :-)

12 May 2001 (updated 12 May 2001 at 00:40 UTC) »

Hrm. Mid-February since my last diary entry. Zoiks!

Lessee... Subversion is at Milestone 2 now, meaning that I got all the WebDAV/DeltaV stuff in there to do full checkouts, updates, and commits over the network. (and imports of new code) Milestone 3 is defined as "self hosting" -- we'll be switching our own repository over to SVN and "eat our own dogfood", so to speak. My big tasks on that are the cvs2svn converter, and some Python bindings to one of the Subversion libraries.

Elsewhere, my edna and ViewCVS projects have moved to SourceForge. In fact, ViewCVS is now used on SourceForge itself! With SVN M2 in the can, I'm going to try and get a ViewCVS release out, then do some Apache and APR work.

Travel-wise, I've been to Seattle a couple times in the past few months, down to Los Angeles for the Python Conference, to Vegas for "boys weekend", and to NYC for a wedding.

Also, I got engaged back on Valentine's day. Anni and I have been together for nearly 13 years, so this isn't a "huge" step, but big nonetheless :-) We've got most of the stuff planned already and are in the home stretch.

On the PS2 front, I picked up Onimusha: Warlords last week. Way awesome graphics on that game! I've gotten through the whole game, I believe, except for the last boss. If he isn't the last, then I'm not sure what would be next. Quite an excellent game. Others that I would recommend are: Smuggler's Run, DOA2: Hardcore, Timesplitters, SSX, and Midnight Club Street Racing.

I think that will be it for now.

The other day, I implemented activities and working resources (and, therefore, checkout) in mod_dav_svn. As a prereq, I revamped mod_dav's CHECKOUT handling. It was stuck back in the old draft days. A number of mod_dav's method handlers for DeltaV are rather old and need to be updated w.r.t the latest draft.

Main point: we now have some server response for some of the SVN actions. Still no backend repository to test against, which severely limits how far I can go.

Next up, I think that I'm going to work on the auxilliary info bits: OPTIONS responses and some live properties. At various points, the client will be requesting this data, and I'll need to get it generated. Much of it, I should be able to do without the FS. For example: baseline resources, activity collection sets, and the checked-in property.

It might be possible to quick simulate a repository that I can fetch. Not sure on that one. The other guys are working on the repository, so it is possible that it will arrive before I get completely blocked. There is simply a lot of little details that I can occupy myself with meantime. [heck, there is some error handling and reporting within mod_dav that needs some work (to deal with the new 403/409 response bodies)]

In Apache land, we finally reached some semblance of agreement (or apathy?) and got some brigade buffering stuff checked in. There is one bit left where I need to post an alternate patch, but it is pretty much there. Unrelated, I went through and cleaned up some really old crud; I was looking further (specifically, at CORE_PRIVATE) usage. Feh. That stuff is hardly private. I'm tempted to just toss it all, rather than continue to pretend that it is private in any way.

Been doing mostly Apache and APR work lately... not as much SVN as I'd like. Also a bunch of time with the DeltaV group and spec. It is finally getting wrapped up, but as with all things: when you give people a hard deadline, a bunch of suggestions come out of the woodwork.
[ of course, that is also to be expected. people will always want a stable spec before spending time with it. they are discouraged to spend time reviewing if they know their changes won't matter in the end. ]

Anyways... getting back to SVN now. Grabbed all the latest changes and updated mod_dav_svn to my latest changes over in Apache/mod_dav. It builds, so I'm starting to work on activities now. It doesn't seem like it will be difficult since it is essentially just recording a table which maps activity URIs to SVN_FS transaction ids.

Tonite, I also quickly hacked together an svnadmin proggie to create SVN_FS repositories. It spits out files, but there is still a ton missing from the FS. I hope that people can use the cmdline tool to create repositories to experiment with while they finish coding the FS. It seems rather log-jammed right now.

Spent some time up in Seattle last week. Visiting XMLFund, as usual. We covered a bunch of ground on the current technology in one of the portfolio companies, where things are going, what kinds of companies XMLFund will focus on, etc. While in Seattle, I stayed with my good friend Kanchan, and got to visit a number of other friends. It is quite nice to be able to go back periodically to visit.

End of last week, this weekend, I've also been moving the list.org and webdav.org websites to new hardware at John Viega's house. Our friend, Hellmonger, who is hosting the sites right now is leaving his job at the ISP, so we kinda need to move them :-). list.org will stay at John's (it's his site anyways), but webdav.org will move onto some dedicated hardware and then colocated for excellent connectivity and uptime. The hardware and colocation are being donated; I'll post to dav-announce when it happens.

Blah blah blah... I think that is all for now.

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