Ok. It's been a while. I've been: 1. Busy, 2. In Atlanta, 3. In Miami, 4. Busy.

And in an attempt to do something non-work related in my copious spare time I decided to scrounge the Internet for VR backhoe/excavator simulators (partly inspired by my sudden urge to knock dhd's house down).

And you know what? They all suck. We're not only talking minor annoyances here or sporadic design goofs. No, no. These wonderful products are fundamentally flawed. Clearly designed by people who: 1. Have never operated a backhoe, 2. Didn't even bother to go read the specs.

Not only are the controls inherently wrong. Arm, stick and bucket movements are restricted in the weirdest ways. I can't believe it. There are plenty of spec sheets available on www.jcb.co.uk, www.deere.com, www.caseih.com, etc.

Now, go do your homework! (Morons)

I have legs!

...seems like an appropriate statement for today. IKEA gave up finding the legs for my desk that they had (allegedly) shipped. So I got in a cab, drove to IKEA Ottawa, picked up the legs myself, went back home and faxed the bill to IKEA Mail Order for reimbursement. Should have done that 5 weeks ago. Gar!

I spent last night moving the computers scattered around my living room floor to their new home under the desk. Much nicer. Now I can get some serious work done.

Despite the fact that I was totally battered, I went to the Loon to hang out with Skud, dhd, and a few other blokes.

Oh, oh, oh. I almost forgot. We released XFS beta1. Well, uh - sort of. The web page got updated waay too early, and we were featured on Trashpot in no time. Bugger. Formal announcement from SGI forthcoming.

I like grapefruit.

More XFS fixing. We had two problems with buffer_head based I/O. 1. blocksize was left in an indeterminate state, so I had to implement a BLKSETSIZE ioctl. 2. Batching of metadata requests broke with LVM. Fixed. I hereby declare XFS bugfree<tm>. Now let's get back to making the Linux block I/O layer not suck...

I should have known that ordering furniture from IKEA was a bad idea. I suspected problems. I expected problems. But I didn't expect to have a desk without legs for 4 weeks and still counting! Gah!

Still busy unpacking my stuff from .dk, which finally arrived Friday. I brought a lot of shit. Why I shipped my SPARCstation IPC and the Amiga 1.1 Reference Manuals beats me. But they are here.

My organ donor and I came to an agreement. My organ shall arrive shortly. Woohoo! Fun, fun, fun...

...except it looks like I'll be spending most of October in US. IBM LVMS meeting in Austin, Atlanta Linux Showcase, and the 2nd Linux Storage Management Workshop in Miami. *sigh*

Oh, and today is Dennis' last day at Linuxcare. I sense heavy drinking tonight...

MUST GRIND ORGAN

'nuff said...

Friday, I finally found the $%#@ bug that has kept LVM barfing with our new kiobuf-based I/O scheme. Turns out we were submitting previously LVM remapped requests to LVM again instead of the SCSI layer. Boo. One line fix, and it was happy.

Yesterday, Jes, Slick, Ryan and I went to see Godzilla 2000. Muahaha. I almost wet my pants laughing. Awesome! After the movie we went to - surprise - the Royal Oak (I've been there every single night this week - Mission accomplished!)

Today was a most productive day. Met up with Mr. Tilder for lunch at Collonade. Then I spent a couple of hours helping my former employees back at the university creating usernames and homedirs for all the new students. Phew. And finally, I managed to hack a bit on GDM3. Wish I had more time. And legs for my desk...