Older blog entries for rml (starting at number 47)

Moving my log here.

my processor is overeating

Last day in Beantown. Up early and into the office before 9. Whoever was here was probably here through the night. I know poor Luis was here very late. Last night, we went to dinner at El Pelon and then to see LOTR:ROTK: beautiful cinematography but felt very long. Afterward we went back to the office. I left and he stayed.

Short but hopefully informative interview over at OSNews.

Hacked on libgtop to make it capable of correctly parsing the 2.6 kernel's /proc/meminfo. Successfully made a patch, but not long after hadess clued me in to the fact I was working off an old code base. Worse, the problem was already fixed in CVS HEAD. Ugh. So he released 2.0.8. Need to get this into Fedora-devel, since it is now 2.6-based.

Playing with udev and its generation of D-BUS events. Pretty nifty.

More hacking on the kernel events layer. Now we can know when the processor is overeating and starving itself.

Firming up travel arrangements for FOSDEM. I am going to be talking on "The Linux Kernel and the Linux Desktop". Perfect, what with my new job and all. I look forward to good food and great beer in Brussels, too.

Couple nights ago took the T across the river. Saw MIT. It has been a few years since I was last in Cambridge. I missed it. Also saw the new office building. Sweet. Took some pictures, putting my new wide angle to the test. Got some good shots of Boston from across the river, but I was tripod-less and it was dark.

My good friend Chris invented a new character for our ever-evolving movie: A sparrow named Sammy who hates flying. This joins an animal who is unable to digest its own food, so it has to eat halfway digested food from other animals that it hunts. But it is a picky eater, so it has to make sure it is hunting an animal that is eating food it likes. We are totally insane, but that is just how I like it.

Flight in a couple hours back to sunny south Florida. Need to eat lunch, meet with Joe, and get some more hacking done before I summon the taxi. I'm out.

contrary to what campd says, snorp is at least semi-metallic in nature

Mac OS X-style Wireless Applet:

snorp rocks.

udev:

More udev hacking. Sent Greg a patch to automatically setup udev's initscript on RPM installation. So, now RPM-based users can have a nearly-complete /udev directory by just installing the RPM package.

kernel hacking:

Continued work on a usable events system for the kernel. It is going to rock, if everyone can buy in to it. The preferred conduit will be D-BUS, of course. But I suspect it will need to be agnostic to any specific user-space IPC mechanism in order for it to be acceptable.

Boston:

Boston continues to be cold, but today was quite pretty. Had good Indian for dinner with Joe and other monkeys last night. Think I will take the T over to Cambridge and see MIT and a certain office building, tonight.

Speaking of seeing buildings, I bought a new lens last week: EF 16-35mm f/2.8L. Yah, baby.

brrr!

Beantown:

Cooked dinner for my parents last night. Up early. Flight to Boston.

Boston is beautiful as always, albeit a bit cold and very wet. But it is a nice change from the weather of Florida.

Jeff broke the news this weekend, but now it is official: today is my first day at Ximian (now a unit of Novell). I am going to be working as a kernel hacker, dedicated full-time to the advancement of the Linux desktop experience.

We have some very interesting things planned, and I am totally psyched. Desktop integration, better hardware discovery/management/naming/etc, 3D/X improvements, performance tuning, and the total elimination of world hunger, poverty, and bad beer.

Stay tuned.

i really like belgium beer

turn the page:

Today is my last day at MontaVista.

I wish everyone there the best.

Monday, I fly to Boston.

UPS men need to knock loud and long

new laptop:

Caved in and returned to the world of x86 laptops, but boy did I pick a good example of an x86 laptop: I got an IBM ThinkPad T41. 1.7GHz Pentium-M, 1GB RAM, gige, bluetooth, WiFi, and an 80GB hard drive with that rad active drive protection system. So far, everything works in Linux but the built-in WiFi, which is a Cisco Aironet 350 MiniPCI card. I heard it works, but no luck thus far. Battery life seems good, too. Rock.

variable-HZ with 64-bit jiffies:

Updated version of the Variable-HZ-plus-64bit-jiffies patch, courtesy of Tim Schmielau. Fixed a bug and rediffed against 2.4.23.

Fedora-devel now comes standard with a 2.6 kernel:

This is great news and no excuse exists for not running 2.6. Live a little.

It looks like the primary goal of Fedora Core 2 will be to have a 2.6 kernel-based system.

Using udev in Fedora-devel:

So now that Fedora-devel is 2.6-based, it is mighty easy to get udev up and working. Here are a few easy steps I emailed off to linux-hotplug-devel earlier today:

• download and install the udev rpm
• download the udev tarball and untar it
• copy etc/init.d/udev from the udev distribution to /etc/init.d
• type /sbin/chkconfig --add udev
• make sure that your /udev is mounted automatically during early boot, if it is not a directory on your root
• reboot

And voila, it just works. [Except for a few classes of devices that have not yet been ported to the new device model].

The Swamp:

Perfection acheived at The Swamp, last week.

again, the dumbest idea. ever.

pictures:

Some pictures of the rave-slash-christmas-attraction that is my apartment.

Keep in mind that this is my home.

There ya go, alex.

this is the dumbest idea ever

Holiday Joy:

One of my roommates and I had a revelation: what if we bought a crap load of tacky Christmas decorations and covered our apartment in them? Short drive across town and a hundred dollars later, we had some bows, a couple hundred feat of garland, a six foot fake tree, one thousand indoor lights, and a light up Santa Claus of such poor quality, you wonder if the painter was blind and suffering from a motor dysfunction.

We quickly decorated our apartment before our other roommate woke up. We now have what I hope -- for the sake of humanity -- is the most tacky and shoddily done Christmas decorations, ever. It looks like a mix between a rave and a cheap roadside Christmas amusement, implemented by the most tasteless individuals the world knows. But, you know, it is really cool to watch TV now in the dark with all of our slick Christmas decorations, tree, and lights.

Oh. We also got "Air Supply Sings Christmas," an unbeatable CD deal for only $6. Highly recommended.

Happy Holidays!

Holiday:

At my parent's house for the Thanksgiving holiday. Had a good meal. I made some cornbread and andouille sausage stuffing. Yum.

Currently outside, in their backyard, hacking. The weather is nice (at least for Florida).

Kernel:

Getting closer.

experience the love

Falconer:

There was a new The Falconer on SNL last night. The Falcon got coked out. Where do they come up with this stuff?

I wrote Will Forte a fan letter like a year ago telling him how hard The Falconer rocks, but he never wrote back. I guess he does not use Linux. I ought to become a crazed fan and send him another one.

procps:

procps 2.0.18 was released yesterday. Lots of fixes, including improved support for big machines and 64-bit jiffies. A couple new slabtop(1) features, too.

If you use use a pre-3.0 gcc and compile from source, you will want to grab the source from CVS, though. There is a simple silly compile bug in in 2.0.18.

FOSDEM:

Been invited to FOSDEM. Tentatively going to talk about the required kernel and system-level development we need to make Linux on the desktop the single greatest user experience known to man, with the aptly named talk The Linux Kernel and the Desktop. I am really stoked about the oppurtunity to go. At OLS I talked on Kernel Interactive Performance, which went over the performance improvements in 2.6 that benefited the desktop. But this talk will cover the important stuff for mass exceptance: better hardware support, desktop integration, et cetera.

I am also really looking forward to seeing Brussels. Havoc was there last year and he tells me that the food and beer in Belguim is great. Nothing else really matters but good food and good beer.

CFQ I/O scheduler:

Jens' CFQ (complete fair queuing) I/O scheduler is super nice on the desktop. An SFQ-esque algorithm distributing the queues by process is exactly what a desktop system ought to be doing.

OAR and Athens, GA:

So got back from my roadtrip to Athens, GA to see OAR with VACO. The concert rocked.

What shocked me was the unilateral hatred from UGA fans onto UF. It is such a one-way rivalry. I guess that is what happens when you win, what is it, 13 out of the last 14 meetings? Example: we went to a bar entitled Gator Haters. Wow. At least downtown Athens was really quite pretty and fun. Lots of cool places to hang out, including any one of the 11 bars we made our way into the first night there.