Older blog entries for lgerbarg (starting at number 54)

I am finally back on the net, stupid AT&T @home bickering. My wireless router is being really stupid, it appears to be setting its netmask wrong when it gets an address via DHCP, and I can't just set that and pull the rest via DHCP, so I thouight I would need to use a wired connection, which would suck since my cablemodem and router are not conveniently located.

I accidentally plugged my cablemodem into one of the lan ports instead of the wan port on the router, and all of the sudden it worked. Even stranger, my system is pulling an IP directly from AT&T, not through the routers builtin nat. It looks like the lan ports and the wireless are all on oneside of the systems interlink (calling it fabric would imply that the product had some sort of quality). I need to sit down and check the DHCP packets and see if AT&T is giving out malformed DHCP packets, or if linksys's firmware is just entirely broken. At this point, I am going to guess both 8-(

I finished up and submitted my paper for BSDCon. I think it should be fine, which means I will probably be presenting a talk there this year. I always love talking about Mac OS X in those sorts of crowds. Despite the fact that it has some problems, it is a Unix, and it is opensource, and people seem to react well to it ;-)

I bought a new IBook, decked out, 640MB of ram, and a 30Gig drive. It is really nice. I thought about getting a Titanium for a while, but quite frankly the G4 probably would not have done much for me. The highend TiBook has a 48GB 5400 RPM drive, which probably would made a lot of building go faster (I am pretty sure I am currently I/O bound). In the end I like the iBook size better. Being able to burn CDs and watch DVDs while on a plane is also nice ;-)

I did some hacks to the bootloader so that I can keep OS X and OS 9 on the same partition, but still see them both in the OF boot chooser, which is really useful. Maybe I will post some instructions sometime, but since it involves moving aorund partitions and other nasty things it kind of complex. At first I thought you could do it with the normal stuff just very strangely arranged, but in the end I needed to build a custom BootX.

I also ripped my entire CD collection. I ordered an iPod, which should be here soon. I want to be ready when it gets here, I hope it arrives before my trip back to the east coast for thanksgiving.

Unfortunately what I have been working on lately is not opensource, which is annoying, but I should be back to my usual stuff soon. It has been a fun side trip, but I like being out in the open more.

Darwin 1.4.1 is out, just one business day after Mac OS X 10.1 shipped, pretty awesome, IMHO. I didn't have anything to do with the build this time, but I am happy to see it happen in such a timely manner. PPC and x86 binaries are available here. Check it out.

Well, people started getting Mac OS X 10.1 this week, and people seem to like it. We also managed to finally get the first two chapters of the Darwin Q&A out. You would not believe how much effort that took. The sourceforge OS X compile farm machines also came up. I have been helping the guys at sourceforge with them out on and off for a while now, so it was really cool. All in all this was pretty eventful week, a whole bunch of things came together very fulfilling ;-)

Today was just so strange. I should have realized it when my phone woke me at 7:30 at the caller ID said it was my mother. She told me about the World Trade Center. My response was "Your joking, right?" She would never joke about something like that, I just couldn't immediately process that it had happened.

Everyone I was worried might be there turned out to be somewhere else. Apparently one of my cousins was in one of the buildings when it happened. He was on the first floor, and is okay. It is just a little disconcerting. I keep wondering if there are friends who were in there that I am not thinking about, I certainly did not expect my cousin to be there.

My family and I were going to get together with my one of best friend's family in LA. My parents aren't anticipating being able to make it now (their flight was supposed to be on thursday), nor is my best friend, though his mother and sister are already there. I may still go, but if I do anticipate that it will be faster to drive than it will be to go through the heightened security

Someone setup an internal rebroadcast of CNN via quicktime at work. One of my testing machines just played it all day. I felt physically ill watching some of it.

Robert Watson was at Apple this week for a conference. I was asked to have lunch with him yesterday. It was amusing since I have met Rob before, but nobody knew that ;-) We talked for a while about TrustedBSD, FreeBSD, and Darwin. Later people watched AntiTrust in Townhall (one of Apple's auditoriums). It was an... amusing movie.

I have a whole bunch of stuff to do, but unfortunately most of interesting stuff is bottlenecked on one development, which is annoying. Things are fun, but they should be a lot more fun soon.

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.