Older blog entries for lgerbarg (starting at number 48)

I have not posted in forever, I suppose I should. I guess the fact that I have not been releasing much code may have something to do with it. I started working for Apple, which has complicated things, but I enjoy my job a lot. There are all sorts of interesting people around, and I get to work on neat things.

Its kind of wierd, I am still doing a bunch of opensource related things, but in a more in a political / administrative way. Lots of things need timing or decisions. My hand is not as free in the sense that I can't just do something, I need to check into it. Yet I have not actually been restricted from doing anything I want to. I bet a lot of people who work in commerical software development have the same issues, though Apple seems to be more highly scrutinized than most places.

I need to finish my draft abstract thingy for BSDcon. I need to finish lots of things.

Well, it has been a long time since I posted. I just presented a hack at Machack. I wrote a kernel extension that patched the panic handler, attempted to recover from a panic, and thrws the message up to the WindowServer. It only works on some types of panics, so I had an instrumented hardware related crash I used to trigger it. It went okay, but not great. Hopefully I will place somewhere in the hack contest.

I am so close to done. Commencement is on saturday. I am signed up for my final couple independent studies. I am moving out of my apartment this weekend.

My goals for next week are really simple. Eat, sleep, bike (I have not taken my bike out this season yet, which is a shame), and write an immense amount of code for INSC. I am hopeful once there is a certain mass of code there people will get more interested.

I have been working on INSC a bit, getting some (very empty nonfunctional) code out, setting up our CVS structure. The fact that everyone on the list except for myself and rooneg are lurking does not help, but I guess the nature of the beast is that once I get a big mass of code out, more people will become interested. Ah well.

I am pretty psyched. I was asked to be a panelist at one of the opensource sessions at WWDC. This has been a pretty good year in terms of conferences. BSDcon in october, WWDC and MacHack this summer. I would go to Usenix except that I will be driving across the country at the time. Ah well, still a pretty good run.

Well, took a little bit of time and did a clean up of BootX. I committed the patches today. I want to get it working with NetBSD/ppc, but I just don't have time for it right now. In a few weeks hopefully.

INSC is moving along. Not much traffic this weekend, but a bunch of people, a few conversations, and a lot of thought. This is like we had thought it would be from a scheduling standpoint. Oh, I found out sourceforge documentation displays in the browser, so I cleaned up the overview so that it would display nicer.

Well, sourceforge/geocrawler still do not seem to be archiving our lists, so I posted an overview of what we seem to be currently thinking in the list discussions. We decided we are going to go with the SCTP socket style interface, and we will introduce the extended calls sctp_bindx and sctp_peeloff, instead of trying to butcher bind to accept multiple endpoints.

I think I have managed to put together a pretty good team of people for this, and once we are done with finals we should get a chance to work on this seriously. I still would like to get someone who is a bit more familiar with IPsec than I am involved with this, but that can honestly wait until we have something working. I am pretty sure I know where the hooks need to go, I am just worried about the subtleties.

Well, I committed /dev/random into Darwin on a branch. I have also been doing some clean ups to the booter, BootX (not to be confused with LinuxPPC's BootX). If I get some time I may try to get BootX booting NetBSD kernel's it should not be that hard. I would also like to get LinuxPPC kernel's running on it, but LinuxPPC will probably require a new kernel entry point.

Now that I am finally finishing up with /dev/random merge I will probably limit myself to the booter changes for the time being, so that I can put enough time into INSC. I have bunch of other Darwin stuff I want to do, but given that INSC is Darwin related, and I have been hired by Apple, a slight break for a little while may be in order ;-)

The fact that sourceforge uses geocrawler for archiving, and geocrawler does not seem to want to archive our lists is annoying me.

Well, in an effort to finish up my last couple of credits at RPI, I am doing an independent study over the summer, attempting to implement an SCTP (RFC2960) stack for Mac OS X (and the rest of the BSDs). The prof is very cool, when I asked if I could do it as an opensource project he said I definately should. I think he feels that anything I lose in terms of writing code I will gain in project management, which would probably be more valuable for me at this stage. I have started a sourceforge project for it, called INSC for it, and even have started roping in a few people (rooneg and fuzzynerd). bey they don;t know what they are getting themselves into ;-)

The page is pretty barren now, I will probably start putting up some references for it later tonight or tomorrow. Also, the mailing list has only had one message so far ;-) Hopefully will be ready to begin RSN.

I have been quiet on a bunch of things recently. I have been hired by Apple Computer. I sent the following to the Darwin Development list a few minutes ago:

Some of you already know this. For most of you it is the first you have heard of it. Starting in July I will be working for Apple.

I suppose the most important element of this is how alters my relationship with Darwin. While I have been hired to work on OS X, I have not been hired to continue any of my Darwin work specifically. I will continue to work on the projects I have been involved with in my free time. I expect that the reduction in the amount of time I have available will be more than offset by the new resources at my disposal, both in terms of easy access to development hardware and software, and the fact that I will actually ne able go and pester various people in person ;-) In short I do not see it significantly altering things, and expect to maintain a similiar presence on the lists, and in the community.

Now I need to get back to coding...

Louis