A Year of Abuse

Today marks my one year anniversary at Ximian, n'ee Novell. It has been a fun ride thus far and we are just getting started.

On the gritty streets of Gotham this weekend

All of my coworkers have been showering me with treasures and congratulatory words, which are all really appreciated. The Novell gift for one year of service is a large platinum 'N' statue, inscribed with the Latin phrases parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus and ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus. Roughly, in English, thanks!

Pretty sweet, if you ask me. Thanks, guys.

In the City, you meet people

I put up the first iterations of the inotify locking rewrite, introducing saner locking and new ref-counting of the various inotify data structures.

Inotify is shockingly easy to use directly from within your application and trivial to integrate into your mainloop (since it is select()-able). A good example is in the inotify-utils package, which contains a sample test app. You could also check out Gamin, a FAM replacement that has native inotify support, and of course Beagle.

Speaking of the dog that everyone rolls with, the other day Joey and Nat hacked up client-side result filtering:

Best

The screenshot also highlights my in-progress Galago presence integration. I hit a "snag" with Galago (ahem, Chip, help a brother out here) but have been too consumed with inotify to sit down and beat out a solution as of yet.

But Beagle is nicely coming together. We are at the stage where we are tuning for performance and memory consumption and that says a lot. I still have a lot of inotify hacking, Galago integration, and so on to do--and the other hackers have full plates, as well--but the project is really culminating nicely. If you have not played with Beagle yet, what the heck are you waiting for? We would really like people to start using it to conduct real-world searches of their data. The goal is to make a tool that really helps the user take control of their information and, if need be, get their life back on track.

Apparently, I submitted the first GUADEC paper. People, seriously, get on it. For those curious, my paper is entitled Attached at the Hip: A Case Study On a Year of Pair Programming with Joey Shaw.

Next Stop, Penn Station

Had a fun weekend with Joey and Nat this weekend in NYC. We took the train down, which was surprisingly nice: No security mess, you can get to the station ten minutes before the train leaves, business class has nice tables, and you can use a cell phone. Plus, I was able to ride the T to the station, board the train to Penn Station, and then get on the metro in New York. So you can have this door-to-door train thing going on, which is pretty sweet and very urban.

The trip started with Nat dead asleep on the train:

Nat sleeps on the train ride down

We went down to see Life Aquatic, which premiered in NYC this weekend, although we fit in the requisite eating and drinking. The movie was dark and funny and, as with Royal Tenenbaums, made great use of music.

The trip ended with Nat dead asleep on the train:

Nat sleeps on the train ride up

Joey knew the city pretty well, which was nice. I have not been in a few years and I was awe-struck at some points of the weekend by the height of the city and the amount of people. One thing is for certain: Boston cabbies can learn a lot from Manhattan cab drivers. Oh, and Amtrak should privative itself.

Ninjas are Mammals

I recently learned that my book is used in the operating system design course at Columbia (that is the Ivy League, to you). Happy to hear that!

The other day, I was debugging a hard lock in my experimental rewrite of inotify's locking. I finally got some sort of back trace out of the kernel before it choked, so I wrote down the trace, register dump, etc. on my whiteboard. I spent the next day or so studying my whiteboard, tracking down the problem:

This call chain is interesting...
Hm, how odd that both edb and edi have the same value...
I wonder, if...
...and so on.

Turns out I was locking an uninitialized variable, a bunch of garbage on the stack. Sigh.

Going to New York with Joey and Nat this weekend. Psyched, although I do not think that we are going to get to wear ascots.

Nick Piggin recently joined Big N to hack on the kernel. Excited.

Dying Dollars and Cool T-Shirts

The other day, I read the latest figures on the dollar's performance: Over the last three years, it has fallen some 30-odd percent against the euro and 20-something percent against the yen.

While a lot of people are pulling for a weaker dollar, the world needs to get serious about the current global financial system before we all regret it. To be fair, the blame for the dollar's current state is largely--although not entirely--domestic. Our deficit is huge and reckless and expected to get larger. With that, the dollar will only weaken and those willing to finance our debt will only dwindle (or demand higher returns). Our current fiscal policies suck and absolutely harm the dollar's reserve-currency status. We need to stop blaming Europe and Japan's slow growth and starting listening to Greenspan and begin a change in US policy toward a stronger dollar, beginning with a reduction in the deficit.

On a more positive note, Tarnished Goods now carries a Dr. Leclair t-shirt:

Dr. Leclair discovered a superconducting ferromagnet

My friend Patrick often finds it hard, while we are out partying, to convince the people we meet that he is, in fact, a Ph.D. physicist and discoverer of a thing that is both a superconductor and a ferromagnet and not a member of a punk-rock splinter cell of the Hell's Angels. The more people who buy this T-shirt, the better informed everyone shall be. And the less malnurished my children will be.

Been hacking feverishly on inotify. Updated patches and kernels are available. Those kernels work on SUSE 9.1, 9.2, NLD, and SLES 9.

I am having trouble sleeping.

Jury Duty

I really only have one irrational fear in life, which is being sequestered on a jury for a long period of time. I have no idea why I fear this, I am sure the odds are smaller than plenty of other things I should worry about, but the thought pains me nonetheless. I do not like the idea of not having control of what I do, spending months on some media circus of a trial. I mean, I have code to hack and books to write. Deep down, I know that ultimately this fear is retarded, like so much of my life.

Regardless, I paniced when I received a summons for Jury Duty yesterday. I have lived here only six months, and already they seek my unsympathetic judgement of my "peers." Joey, meanwhile has lived here many years and has yet to be summoned. And he wants to serve! Phil's case is not going to be heard by a jury, but I sure wish it was. I could neglect to mention that we are acquainted, subvert the legal process, and delivery a wonderous not guilty verdict. Afterward I would hop out of the jury box, run up to Phil, slap him five, and yell No Double Jeopardy, Bitches! (This last quote provided by Joey).

The real problem is that my duty is not until mid February, so I have over two months of sleepless nights fearing that I may be assigned to a two year OJ-esque mess. Let's just hope that Senator Kennedy does not do anything illegal.

Last night we hit up Wally's for live jazz and then got sushi in Chinatown. Fun.

From my last visit to Gainesville, wherein I posed as a reporter, taking pictures for the, uh, party section of the paper:

The man in the panda mask belongs to my posse

Last week I was home for Thanksgiving. I cooked a lot. It was nice. I sat next to Ty Law on the flight.